“Is there,” he asked, in the lull eating made, “possibly any word on my mail? I know you’ve had your hands full, but—”
“I have, as you quaintly express it, had my hands full. Perhaps Jago will remember to check the post.”
“You could call her.” Temper flared up. Or a sense of muddled desperation. “Has anyone explained to my office where I am, or why?”
“I frankly don’t know that, paidhi-ji.”
“I want you to convey a message to them. I want you to patch me through on your communications. I know you can do that, from the security station.”
“Not without clearance. It’s a public move, if the paidhi takes to our security channels. You understand the policy statement that would make, absolute encouragement to your detractors and Tabini’s.”
“What happened to security?”
“Courier is still far better. Far better, nadi. Prepare your statement. I’ll send it the next time one of us carries a report.”
Banichi didn’t refuse him. Banichi didn’t say no. But it kept coming out to procrastination, I forgot, and, There’s a reason.
He ate the rest of the meat course in silence, favoring his sore mouth.
And questions still nagged him.
“Was it an accident, the power outage?”
“Most probably. To put a quarter of the homes in Maidingi township in the dark? Hardly the Guild’s style.”
“But you knew it last night. You knew someone was loose on the grounds.”
“I didn’t know. I suspected it. We had a perimeter alarm.”
Did we? he thought bitterly. And asked, instead: “Where is Algini?”
“He’ll return with Jago.”
“Did he leave with Jago?”
“He took the commercial flight. Yesterday.”
“Carrying a report?”
“Yes.”
“For what? Forgive my frankness, Banichi-ji, but I don’t believe there’s any possible investigation to be done—to find the precise agency at work here, yes, but I don’t for a moment believe Tabini doesn’t know exactly what’s wrong and who’s behind it. I don’t believe you don’t know. I don’t believe you didn’t know where I was this morning.”
“Behind the ridge, mostly, for quite a while. I noticed your limping.”
Soreness didn’t help his mood. “You might have warned me.”
“Regarding what? That Ilisidi would go riding? She often does.”
“Dammit, if you’d told me there was the chance of a sniper, if you’d told me we’d be leaving the house, I might have come up with a reasonable objection.”
“You had a reasonable objection. You might have pleaded your recent indisposition. I doubt they would have carried you to the stables.”
“You didn’t tell me there was a danger!”
“There’s a constant danger, nadi.”
“Don’t shove me off, dammit. You let me go out there. It’s harder to find an excuse for tomorrow, when I’m also committed to go. And am I safe then? I don’t always understand your sense of priorities, Banichi, and in this, I truly confess I don’t.”
“The tea was Ilisidi’s personal opportunity. And Cenedi was with us last night, during the search. Cenedi would have taken me if he’d intended to. I made that test.”
It took a moment for that to sink in. “You mean you gave Cenedi a chance to kill you?”
“When you will make promises to strangers without consulting me, paidhi-ji, you do make my job more difficult. Jago was advised of the situation. Possibly Cenedi knew it, and knew that he had Jago yet to deal with, but Cenedi is not contracted against you, I made amply certain of that. And I was between you and the estate at all times this morning.”
“Banichi, I apologize. Profoundly.”
Banichi shrugged. “Ilisidi is an old and clever woman. What did you talk about? The weather? Tabini?”
“Breakfast. Not breaking my neck. A mecheita called Babs—”
“Babsidi.” It meant ‘lethal.’ “And nothing else?”
He desperately tried to remember. “How it was her land. What plants grow here. Dragonettes.”
“And?”
“Nothing. Nothing of consequence. Cenedi talked about the ruin up there, and the cannon on the front lawn.—She ran me up a hill, I cut my lip … after that they were polite to me. And the tourists were polite to me. I gave them ribbons and signed their cards and we talked about families and where they came from. —Was either one a disaster, Banichi-ji—before some fool tried to cross the lawn? Advise me. I am asking for advice.”
Another of Banichi’s long, sober stares. Banichi’s eyes were the clearest, incredible yellow. Like glass. Just as expressive. “We’re both professionals, paidhi-ji. You are quite good.”
“You think I’m lying?”
“I mean that you’re no more off duty than I am.” Banichi lifted the flask and poured moderately for them both. “I have confidence in your professional instincts. Have confidence in mine.”
It came down to the fruit, and a creme and liqueur sauce. A man could be seduced by that, if his stomach weren’t uncertain from dinner conversation.
“If you’re running courier,” Bren said, when the atmosphere felt easier, “you can handle a written dispatch from me to my office on Mospheira.”
“We might,” Banichi said. “If Tabini approves.”
“Any word about that solar unit I wanted?”
“I’m afraid they’re prioritied, if they can find one. We’ve donated the generator we have. We have homes in the valley without power, elderly and ill persons—”
“Of course.” He couldn’t fault that answer. It was entirely reasonable. Everything was.
Confidence, Bren said to the creatures on the wall. Patience. Glass eyes stared back at him, some angry, some placidly stupid, having awaited their hunters with equanimity, one supposed.
Banichi said he had business to attend—reports to write. In longhand, one supposed.
Or not. Djinana came and took the dishes away, and lit the oil lamps, having blown out the candelabra in the dining room.
“Will you need anything more?” Djinana asked; and, “No,” Bren said, thinking to himself that of individuals who didn’t get regular hours or a fair explanation around this place, Djinana was chief. One wondered where Tano was—Tano, who was supposed to be his personal staff. While Algini was off in Shejidan. “I’m sure I won’t. I’ll read until bedtime.”
“I’ll lay out your night things,” Djinana said.
“Thank you,” he murmured, and picked up his book and took the chair by the fire, where, if he-sat at an angle, with the lamps on the table beside him, the two light sources made reading at least moderately possible. Live flame flickered. He had discovered that primary good reason for light bulbs.
Djinana whisked the cart away with the dishes—the man never so much as rattled a glass when he worked. The candles were out in the dining room, leaving it a dark cavern. Elsewhere the fire cast horned and large-eared shadows about the room, and danced in the glass eyes of the beasts.
He heard Djinana open the armoire in the bedroom, and heard him go away again.
After that was a curious quiet about the place. No rain, no thunder, nothing but the crackle of the fire. He read, he turned pages—which sounded amazingly loud, on a rare romance in the histories, no one bent on feud, no inter-clan struggles, no dramatic leaps from Malguri tower, and not a drowning to be had, just a romantic couple who met and courted at Malguri, who happened to be the aijiin of two neighboring provinces, and who had a plethora of talented children.
Pleasant thought, that someone who slept in these rooms hadn’t come to a bad end; interesting, to have a notion of romantic goings-on, the gifts of flowers, the long and tender relationship of two people who, being heads of state, never quite had a domicile except Malguri, in the fall. It was a side of themselves atevi didn’t show to the paidhi—unless one counted flirtations he never knew whether he should take seriously. But t
hat was how it went, a number of small gifts, tied to each other’s gates, or sent by third parties. Atevi marriages didn’t always mean cohabitation. Often enough they didn’t, except when there were minor children in question—and sometimes then cohabitation lasted and sometimes it didn’t. What atevi thought or what atevi felt still eluded him through the atevi language.
But he liked the aijiin of Malguri the way he’d liked the old couple with the grandchildren, touring together, he supposed, looking for adventures … maybe not cohabiting: nothing guaranteed that.
And long as paidhiin had been on the continent, they had discovered no graceful way to ask, through atevi reticence to discuss their living arrangements, their addresses, their routines or their habits—it all fell under ‘private business,’ and no one else’s.
He thought he might ask Jago. Jago at least found amusement in his rude questions. And Jago was amazingly well read. She might even know the historic couple.
He missed Jago. He wouldn’t have had a near-fight with Banichi if Jago had been here. He didn’t know why Banichi had insisted on inviting himself to supper, if he had to spend it in a surly mood.
Something hadn’t gone well, perhaps.
In a day which had included Cenedi shooting a man and that man turning out to be one Banichi knew—damned right something hadn’t gone right today, and Banichi had every reason to be in a rotten state of mind. That atevi didn’t show it and habitually understated the case didn’t mean Banichi wasn’t upset—and didn’t mean Banichi might not himself wish Jago were here. He supposed Banichi hadn’t had a good time himself, having a surly human displaying an emotional load an atevi twelve-year-old wouldn’t own to.
He supposed he even owed Banichi an apology.
Not that he wanted to give one. Because he understood didn’t mean he was reconciled, and he wished twice over that Jago hadn’t gone to Shejidan today, Jago being just slightly the younger, a little more reticent, as he read her now, even shy, but just slightly more forthcoming than Banichi once she decided to talk, whether Jago was more so by nature or because Tabini’s man’chi didn’t lie lightly on anyone’s shoulders, least of all Banichi’s.
His eyes stung with reading in the flickering light; keeping the fire lively enough to cast light to the chair made the fireside uncomfortably warm, and the oil lamps made the air thick. He found himself with a mild headache, and got up and walked, quietly, so as not to disturb the staff, into the cooler part of the room—too restless to sleep, yet.
He missed his late-night news. He missed being able to call Barb, or even, God help him, Hanks, and say the things he dared say over lines he knew were bugged. He was all but down to talking to himself, just to hear the sound of human language in the silence, to get away, however briefly, from immersion in atevi thoughts and atevi reasoning.
A motor started, somewhere. He stopped still and listened, decided someone was leaving the courtyard and going down to the town, or somewhere in between, and who that was, he had a fair notion.
Damn, he thought, and went to the window, but one couldn’t see the courtyard from there because of the sideways jut of the front hall. A pin held the latch of the side window panels, and he pulled that to see if he could tell whether the car was going down the main road or off into the hills, or whether he was about to trigger a nonhistorical security alarm by opening the latch.
Only the airline transport van, hell. Malguri had a van of its own. Food and passengers came up the road. They could have gotten him from the airport.
But Banichi had thought otherwise, perhaps. Perhaps he wanted to sound things out before relying on Cenedi.
Perhaps he still had his doubts.
The sound of the motor went up and around the walls. He couldn’t tell. But the night air coming in was crisp and cold after the stuffiness of the room. He drew in a great breath and a second one.
First night he had been here that it hadn’t been raining, the first hour of full dark, and the sky above the lake and the mountains to the east were so clear and black and cold one could see Maudette aloft, faintly red, and Gabriel’s almost invisible companion, a real test of eyesight, on Mospheira.
The night air smelled wonderful, loaded with wildflowers, he supposed; and he hadn’t realized how he’d missed the garden outside his room, or how pent up he’d felt.
He’d been able, on clear nights on Mt. Allan Thomas, to see the station just around sunset or sunrise. He didn’t keep up with its schedule the way he had in his youth, when Toby and he had used to go hiking in the hills, when they’d used to tell stories about the Landing, and imagine—it was embarrassing, nowadays—that there were atevi guerrillas hiding in the high hills. They had used to have imaginary wars up there, shooting atevi by the hundreds, being shot at by fictitious atevi villains, about as good as the atevi machimi about secret human guerrillas supported by egomaniacs secretly concealing their base aboard the station … the Foreign Star, as atevi had called it in those long past and warlike days.
At least they’d achieved a common mythology, a common past, a common set of heroes and villains—and which was which only depending on point of view.
He never had mentioned to Tabini that his father was Polanski’s descendant several illegitimate generations down the line, the Polanski who’d generated the standoff on Half Moon Beach, the one that had kept atevi reinforcements off Mospheira.
Nothing Polanski’s remote descendant had anything to do with—nothing, in his present job, that he wanted to admit to.
One made progress as one could. He wished atevi children didn’t see humans as shadow-players and madmen; he wished human children didn’t play at shooting atevi in the woods. The idea came to him of making that a major theme in his winter speech to the assembly … but he didn’t know how one got at all the film and all the television on both sides which kept reinforcing it all.
But not totally smart, with realities as they were, to be standing with the fire at his back. Jago had pulled him away from this very window last night … a danger from the windows or the roof of the other wing seemed stupid.
But anybody could have a boat on the lake, he supposed, though not close enough to give an assassin a good target. Anybody could land on Malguri’s shore, give or take the walls and the cliffs below the walls, which were formidable.
He stepped back and began to close the window.
Lights flashed on all about him. An alarm began to ring as he blinked in the glare of electric light, and slammed the window shut and latched it, heart beating in utter startlement, with the sound of bare feet crossing the wooden floor of the next room.
Tano showed up, stark naked, gun in hand, Djinana close behind him, and Maigi after that, Maigi dripping wet and wrapped in a towel, with the thump of people running out in the halls, everywhere in Malguri, the alarm still sounding.
“Did you open a window?” Tano asked.
“Nadiin, I did, I’m sorry.”
His rescuers drew a collective breath as the latch rattled in the next room, and Tano dismissed Djinana in that direction with a wave of his hand.
“Nadi, they’ve brought us on-line again,” Tano said. “Your security had rather you not open the windows, for your own protection. Particularly at night.”
Djinana had let someone in from the outside hall. Cenedi showed up with Djinana and a couple of the dowager’s guard, to hear Tano say, “The paidhi opened the window, nadi.”
“Nand’ paidhi,” Cenedi said. “Please, hereafter, don’t.”
“I beg your pardons,” he said. The alarm was still going, jangling his nerves. “Can someone please turn off the alarm?”
Cenedi gave the orders. It still took time to sort out, and the oil lamps all had to be put out before he could get his rooms clear of staff.
He sank down on the side of his bed after the clatter and the commotion had died, after the doors and windows were shut, asking himself where Banichi had been and what black thoughts the dowager must be having about him at the moment.
It didn’t keep the paidhi from waking the house and looking like a fool.
It didn’t make Ilisidi happier with him. He could bet on that, too.
VIII
“A noisy night,” Ilisidi said, pouring her own tea—the smell of it drifted with the steam, across the table, and Bren’s stomach went queasy.
“I’m extremely sorry,” he said, “and embarrassed, aiji-mai.”
Ilisidi grinned, positively grinned, and added sugar.
It was little barbs all during breakfast. Ilisidi was in an excellent humor. She wolfed down four fish, a bowl of cereal and two cakes with sweet oil, while he stayed to the cereal and the breakfast rolls, thinking that, considering the pain he was in sitting on a hard chair this morning, he would almost rather drink Ilisidi’s tea than get onto Nokhada’s back again.
But it was downstairs, Ilisidi reveling in the stiff breeze blowing in off the lake, a breeze that tore at coat-skirts and knifed right through sweaters when one passed out of the sunlight and into the stable court.
Nokhada at least was willing to get down for him this morning, and this time, at least, he was ready for the snap of Nokhada’s rising before he was quite astride.
It hurt. God, it hurt. Not exactly the kind of pain a man could admit to, or beg off from. He only hoped for early numbness, and told himself his human ancestors had been riders, and somehow continued the species.
He brought a quick stop to Nokhada’s milling about, determined to have the final word on their course this morning—which lasted until Ilisidi moved Babs out and Nokhada jostled Cenedi’s mecheita for position at Babs’ tail in a sudden dash out onto the road.
Straight out. Ilisidi and Babs vanished over the cliff, a stride or two before Nokhada won out over Cenedi’s mount and took the same downward plunge.
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