Conspirator

by C. J. Cherryh

  “Aiji-ma,” he said quietly, took the hint and went back to his seat.

  She had advised Tabini. Tabini was taking care of Dalaigi—one hoped—if there was anything he could lay hands on. They were on the same wavelength, at least.

  From here on until disaster, Bren thought, here was their only job. They were going to prick what was here, and see what came out.

  He wanted Banichi and Jago back unscathed.He wanted the boy back and both the Taibeni kids unharmed.

  He just hoped to hell the boy, in his dive into the bushes by the front door, had found a hole and stayed there, waiting for exactly this development—they were canny kids.

  But asking an eight-year-old with the power to give orders to a couple of sixteen-year-olds to stay put and not move at all for hours and hours and hours—that was asking more than most eight-year-olds or even sixteen-year-olds could bear. It was worse, even, that Antaro and Jegari had had a little Guild training. They’d tried to protect Cajeiri and gotten in Banichi’s way, or they might not be out here now. They had training—and might think they were called on to use it, and that could be disastrous. Guild that the Tasaigin Marid had sent to keep Baiji under control was one thing. Guild that they might move into a higher-stakes and messed-up operation weren’t going to be house guards. They would bring in serious, serious opposition, and the time that would take might be measured in days—or, if they had something down in Dalaigi Township—it might be here by now.

  It was totally dark now, at least to human vision. It was deep twilight for everyone else. A kid, even one who’d eluded capture, might now think it approaching time to do something. And one hoped the Taibeni youngsters’ Guild training had included night scopes, listening devices, and wires.

  Banichi had tried to hammer basic principles of selfdefense into Cajeiri himself. Cenedi had had a go at it. They all had tried—Remember you are not adult, young gentleman. You cannot take on Guild. Nor should your companions ever try it.

  Young aiji. Born leader. Literally. Whether it was genetic or subtly trained or God knew what, he’d gone his own way.

  And he, if he were ateva, might have felt an atevi urge and followed the kid into the bushes, which at least would have kept them together. If not for their man’chi to him, Banichi and Jago would have followed the boy, and everything would have been all right.

  Machimi plays had an expression for it. Katiena ba’aijiin notai’i. A situation with two leaders. A real screwed-up mess. And this one was that.

  It also meant, right now, that if the enemy had expected the boy to do what the average atevi boy would do, they’d been taken by surprise, too, when Cajeiri headed sideways. If only, if only they’d assumed he’d gotten on the bus. The portico might have shielded them from view. The attackers had been on the roof. The rest of the staff had been in the hall. They hadn’t been in a position to see, either.

  Maybe they weren’t even looking for the youngsters. Most unlikely of all—maybe the people running the operation—not the ones in the immediate area, who had heard everything—were already planning their next move.

  Maybe Tabini-aiji, who was very certainly involved, could take out their communications.

  But they were moving closer and closer to widespread action, and civil war.

  And he wished he could have persuaded Ilisidi to stay put and let the Guild sort it out—before they had worse trouble.

  If the youngsters were now hostages, they would stay alive: the enemy would be outright idiots to waste that advantage. But damned sure the enemy would want to get them to some more secure place than a flat and open villa. Considering who the enemy likely was, that would mean getting any hostages southward as fast as they could—

  For their part, he supposed they would leave any possible escape routes to the aiji’s men.

  But getting in there . . .

  That boiled down to four people. Banichi and Jago, backed by Nawari and Kasari.

  Sorrowfully, Lord Geigi’s yacht might go to the bottom of the harbor. Banichi and Jago would not leave the sea as an escape route, and that boat had to be taken care of, among first targets.

  God, he should have told Toby to get down the coast, block any boat coming out if he had to call in the whole Mospheiran navy to help him.

  Thinking too much.

  Banichi and Jago knew what they were doing. They knew their list of priorities, and they were very much the same as his . . . except . . .

  Except they themselves were his priority, and they wouldn’t see things that way. Not when it came to a mission of this importance.

  God, he wanted them back in one piece.

  13

  It wasn’t, unfortunately, a large or deep woods . . . except in the seaward direction.

  And that, Cajeiri thought, might still have been the best way to go, staying under cover the whole way to reach Edi fishermen or farmers.

  But associations among the neighbors, given the goings-on here at nand’ Geigi’s estate were not clear to him; and Antaro had done what she had done, and Jegari had led off in this direction . . . which could be smarter. Nand’ Bren himself had gotten surprised, so that was a big indication that ordinarily reliable people in this place were lying.

  Especially nand’ Baiji had been somewhere involved and guilty of something, whatever it was. And that meant there was no knowing which of the neighbors down toward the coast or anywhere, for that matter, was reliable. He knew that; but his side hurt from running, and it was a long, long way to Najida, and they were going to run out of trees before long.

  “Maybe we should stop running,” he gasped, the faintest of whispers, far softer than their running through the woods. “Very likely nand’ Bren will have gotten to his estate, and mani and all her people are going to be out, and so will nand’ Bren and before long my father will have people here, so all we need to do is get out of the way, find a hole and get in it until they settle this.”

  “You should, nandi,” Jegari whispered back, likewise bending, hands on knees. “And Antaro and I can go find help.”

  “We all should!”

  “Then Antaro can stay with you, nandi, and I shall go.”

  He shut his eyes. Opened them again, trying to imagine the maps he had studied, among the many things he had studied. “No,” he said. “No. We shall just walk a while. We shall walk. If we find a good place, we can hide. But if we can get to nand’ Bren’s estate first—that would be safest.”

  “They may attack there, nandi. This whole coast may be in rebellion.”

  “Lord Geigi is Maschi. Baiji is Maschi. The coast is Edi. The Tasaigi are in this.” He was out of breath. He bent over again and gasped for air. “Southerners. They do not belong here. There cannot be that many of them. We shall go—we shall go until we reach nand’ Bren’s estate, and then—then we shall just sit there and watch. And, by morning, people will be out and about and if it looks all right—we can go in. It is far better than sitting here hiding on Kajiminda land.”

  “We have to be careful, nandi,” Jegari said. “We have to be very careful if we go out in the open.”

  “When shall we do it? By sunlight?” He held his side, where it ached. “Now is the time, nadiin-ji. Let us just walk a while. Let us walk quietly.”

  They began, then, to do that. And he thought they were going in the right direction: he hoped they were. The sea, he thought, all the peninsulas and the woods that did not grow up and down, but tilted, made him unsure of direction. This whole coastline tilted, in his estimation. It wandered: at ground level it was nothing like it was on the big map in the library, and the coast was very irregular.

  And that was stupid. It was an entirely infelicitous and careless approximation. The librarian should be thoroughly ashamed of such records.

  Jegari stopped, frozen. Antaro seized Cajeiri’s arm, and pulled him to the side, signaling he should be quiet.

  She backed him into a shelter of thorny undergrowth, crouching there as Jegari likewise edged into that cover. He he
ard nothing. Nothing, as they made themselves as inconspicuous as possible.

  He shivered, and tried not to. It seemed a long time.

  Then his ears told him someone was out there, somebody not as shining bright as he knew he was in his pale coat. Somebody maybe in Assassins’ black.

  But in stalking and being stalked he told himself he was in very good company. In a forest, if not a sailboat, his Taibeni companions were very much at home.

  He held his breath while something like the wind moved through the woods. For a scary moment he saw their shadowy shapes, and there were two or more of them.

  The enemy was going toward nand’ Bren’s estate. Where mani was.

  The night grew chill. Bren rubbed knees gone half-numb and watched out the bus window in the only directions he could watch, westward and south. Cenedi had gone outside a little time ago, and delayed about matters, whatever he was doing, likely talking to men posted outside. The dowager simply waited, with the rest of her guard. Those who did speak, spoke together quietly—a whisper too low for Bren’s ears to pick up.

  Then Cenedi came back, and Tano and Algini, who had been busy with some sort of electronic equipment to the rear of the bus, got up and conferred with Cenedi, also very quietly, in the front of the bus.

  Bren folded his arms for comfort and waited, Ilisidi not saying a thing, but then the formidable cane reached across the aisle and thumped his seat. He looked. Her face was utterly lost in the darkness, just a glimmer of silver about her hair.

  “Aiji-ma,” he said in the lowest of voices.

  “You are very quiet and contemplative tonight, Bren-paidhi.”

  “One apologizes, aiji-ma. One is extremely concerned for the situation.”

  Silence. Lengthy silence in the dark.Then the cane went softly thump! on the bus deck.

  “If they harm him,” Ilisidi said, “they are dead. And there will be retaliation.”

  “Aiji-ma,” he said. That was all. He was the peacemaker, the bridge, and in all his career, he had never been able to make headway with the South.

  He had damned sure not read the boy accurately. God, where had an eight-year-old suddenly got the notion to grow up on them and take his own way?

  Even atevi hadn’t seen this coming—maybe because they’d attributed the unorthodox behavior to a human influence they were trying to diminish in the boy. Aijiborn: Cajeiri was apt to do any damned thing, was what, and neither species was going to predict him. A brilliant, if erratic prospect.

  If he lived to grow up.

  The conference forward broke up. Cenedi came back solo, a looming shadow in the dark, and said, to Ilisidi, “We consider that Banichi and Jago have likely moved all the way to the house by now, nandi. There has been no sound of fire. We have gotten the regular signal from them.”

  They would use a simple blip on a given frequency, nothing that could be easily read by the opposition, who probably were using their own signals . . . which their security would be simultaneously trying to pick up. Tano and Algini had broken out gear of their own, and he would about lay a bet it was involved in trying to do exactly that.

  Himself, he took Cenedi’s information for comfort, and kept his own observations quiet: it was Ilisidi’s call, if orders were to follow. Guild operations were not the paidhi’s domain.

  “If we were to move closer to the house,” Ilisidi said, “we might more likely draw out persons of interest.”

  “No, ’Sidi-ji,” Cenedi said with no doubt at all, and added: “Besides, we cannot leave this road open. This is our task: we have simply to sit here.”

  Thump! went the dowager’s cane, a quiet and very dissatisfied thump. But she did not countermand her bodyguard.

  So they sat some more.

  Two, and now four shadows moved silently through the woods. Cajeiri hunkered down with his companions and held his breath. They had been lucky so far, having made as much noise as they had, and having rushed through the woods headlong getting away. When the Guild had investigated why that sensor-thing had jammed in the orchard tower, the rusty claw was as good as a written note to say, “Someone was here.”

  But then, the people occupying the house had just had a man slide down the roof, whether or not the man had actually gone off the edge, and if that man was able to say he had been hit by something before he lost his balance, that was a reasonable and very noisy indication in itself that someone had been spying on the house, someone who did not much mind a man falling off the roof. It was possible that man would not talk, and would never talk, and one had the luxury to somewhat hope he had not killed the man; but he had shot someone before this, so it would not be the first, and if this was the man who had tried to assassinate them he was not going to have bad dreams about this one. He was determined on that. He would not be sorry in the least, if this was the man who had tried to kill nand’ Bren. He had been desperate. And he had had to do something fast . . . had he not? He had had to.

  They moved now, the three of them, without saying a thing to each other. They did their best to sound only like the wind moving, and to avoid breaking branches—a very un-windlike sound.

  Here was where the Taibeni were expert, and he tried to learn from them, never letting a branch snap back, bending every opposing twig gently and passing it to the next behind, to release very, very softly. He copied their way of setting the feet down very surely, and with as little disturbance as possible; and sometimes stopping—just suddenly stopping cold, frozen, so they could hear, Jegari informed him, touching his own ear—clearly meaning he should listen, too. They had seen four men pass them. They had no way of knowing if there were more coming behind them.

  And the shadows were moving in the direction they needed to go, which said to him that they were going toward nand’ Bren’s estate. Nand’ Bren was meanwhile almost certainly coming here, to find him; and these people were going there, or maybe to the train station, which was also in that direction, up to no good at all. If all these men wanted to do was just to get away after they had been exposed for what they were, they could go the other way, south to the Township and the big airport, completely away from nand’ Bren’s estate. Or right where they could lay hands on it, there was Lord Geigi’s yacht, which, supposing they knew how to run it, could carry them out of the bay and down the coast or most anywhere. So it was clear these skulkers were on their way to work mischief, and he could warn nand’ Bren’s people and they could send somebody and call nand’ Bren home, fast, and protect Great-grandmother.

  They could phone his father, too. His father had probably sent people here as fast as planes could land them. And they would be moving in . . . maybe from the little airport near Najida, maybe from the much larger one near Dalaigi, to come in and cut off these scoundrels from one escape.

  That was what he would do, if he were aiji in Shejidan. He would cut them off in one direction and have nand’ Bren and mani cut them off from this side—with a little help from the local airport.

  And he and his companions meanwhile had to stay out of the hands of these people. So they had gathered ammunition more serious than fertilizer stakes. At one place where they had crouched down, which had happened to be at a rocky little streamside, there had been a nice supply of little water-smoothed stones, just the right size. He took a nice lot of them, never minding the gravel they brought into the pocket of an already hard-used coat. And Jegari had gotten himself a sturdy stick, while Antaro had just pocketed a fair number of rocks.

  And meanwhile they just kept moving and moving toward nand’ Bren’s estate.

  The scary thing now was that the woods were playing out on them: they reached the edge, and the woods gave way to brush, and the brush to tall grass, where the trail the men had made going through the grass was perfectly plain to see. Jegari bent some grass down himself and stood watching it a moment. It recovered a bit, but not much; and Jegari looked at Antaro, who looked as if she were absorbing things, too.

  So were they reading it, somehow? Could they
tell things? How fast they were going? How long?

  Jegari started walking exactly in one of the tracks the men had left . . . so, Cajeiri thought, following, there would be only one track, if anybody was behind them. That was clever. He began to think they were doing everything right.

  It was getting harder, however. He had been tired and sore all day from their adventure on the boat, and now hiding all day and creeping through the woods, and he had no idea where to go or what to do. Nand’ Bren and mani were in terrible danger, and he did not know how to reach them.

  They were out there somewhere, moving on the estate, now that it was dark.

  Maybe they had been fools to have left.

  But it still seemed safer to be out here. Out here they had some choices, and they had not gotten caught in the crossfire. Still—

  Jegari slowed to a stop, leaning on his hands, catching his breath, and then folded down into the tall grass. They all did, squatting low. “They seem to be avoiding the road, nandi. If we get onto the road and go beside it, we can move faster: we can run.”

  Run. He was hardly sure he could walk at the speed they were using.

  But they had to do better, not to get caught out here.

  “Yes,” he said. “Let us try it.”

  They got up. His stomach hurt. But it was going to get worse.

  They were going into the open. It was dangerous. But there was a reason these men were going the way they were—because it was safer for the enemy.

  “Nandi,” Jegari whispered. “Nandi, if they spot us, one begs you, duck, and stay with Antaro. I run fastest. I always beat her. I shall keep going.”

  And get shot, he thought, appalled. But it was what a bodyguard was supposed to do. He nodded. “Yes,” he said.

  “We are going to be leaving a trail,” Jegari said. “We should at least make speed, nandi.”

  With which, Jegari struck off at a run.

  He ran behind Jegari, and it hurt. His boots were not sturdy for out of doors. Rocks hurt his feet. His ankles faltered, and his knees hurt. His ribs began to ache. He stumbled, and Antaro caught his arm and kept him going.