He switched off the light to save the battery. He could feel the spot without it, and he started chipping away, getting rid of the last bit of mortar, chip by little chip. The Count had spent years trying to get out. He was willing to, if that was what it took, so long as they went on feeding him.
If there was dirt on the other side, he could sweep it into his blanket and dump it into the hole in the corner of the room. He could dig and dig under whatever building he was in until he could hope he was outside.
Surely it would go a lot faster once he got one stone out.
If it was another room it let him into, that other room might not have its door locked.
At very least, it was a plan, and it was something to do, rather than sit in the bed and be scared.
And when he got out, oh, some people were going to be in trouble.
11
It had been a long, long time, Bren was well aware, since he had been in Malguri’s stableyard. His own mecheita, Nokhada, had nearly forgotten him.
Or she conveniently pretended to have forgotten. She towered aloft, a winter-coated, snaky-necked, and supercilious creature with jaw-tusks the length of a man’s hand. Her clawed feet ripped the straw of the stable-aisle, and she threw her head up, pulling at the restraint of two handlers.
The dowager was already safely aboard a younger creature, Babsidi son of Babsidi, a handsome mecheita of high breeding and elegant line, new to the dowager’s service.
Bren had the crop. He was in no patient mood himself, on a short breakfast and in frigid morning air, and, as it happened, he had refreshed his riding skills between their landing back in the world and their taking up residency in the Bu-javid. He took the rein, he targeted the stirrup he had to reach, whacked Nokhada wickedly on the shoulder, and gave the command while he was in motion.
A good thing two of Ilisidi’s young men were holding on: she squalled and tried to disembowel the foremost of the two, who was fast enough and strong enough to keep that head out of play. Bren popped the shoulder again with the crop, and a third time, hard—he could make a move for the saddle, and even get aboard while the young men held her, but if he let her get half of her way now, she would try for it with him for the rest on the ride.
And the shoulder dutifully dropped. The head shook, rattled the harness, lowered. Bren got a foot in the mounting loop and hit the saddle, rein in hand.
Nokhada gathered herself up then, a powerful surge, a deep sigh once she stood, and then she obeyed the rein, after he touched the offending side lightly. He was not fooled: he kept her under close governance. Nokhada had gotten the better of him on their very first ride, and forever hoped, after any hiatus, that she could do it again to a person of his size, never seeming to recall that he had since learned to ride.
Banichi and Jago were up on two of the same herd. They had four of the dowager’s young men, the dowager, besides Cenedi, nine in all, but the herd numbered twenty, and would go with them, four of them under packs, with portable shelter, considering the weather and the length of the trip and the rest just because splitting a mecheiti herd was more trouble than any handler wanted. They were prepared against a cold night in the open—or for a formal dinner and an overnight stay, if their intended host, who did not acknowledge having a telephone, proved reasonable after all.
They were bound, so the dowager said, to pay a social call…on Drien, the lady who hadn’t come to dinner in Shejidan. And after flying all day yesterday, they were up before the crack of dawn, kitted out and equipped for a minor expedition.
One gathered the lady in question had no desire to be contacted. One gathered Ilisidi had a point to make and intended to make it unmistakably.
Why? he might have asked his staff once upon a time. Now he had a very solid notion that it was a good idea—just serving notice: letting the nerves that reacted to man’chi feel that the aiji-dowager was no longer light-years removed from the East. Getting up in people’s faces, as the saying went. A demonstration of who feared whom…and who needed to fear whom.
And sometimes such a meeting meant the judicious removal of an obstacle or shifting an association: earthquake, in the interlinking pattern of associations.
The paidhi didn’t need to ask, not after years of experience with the aiji-dowager. The paidhi didn’t say a thing, or provoke conversation, not with the dowager in her present mood. She was not reacting: she was thinking all the way, he was well sure of it. She was thinking, and whatever she was thinking, the best the paidhi and his staff could do was exactly what Tabini had sent them to do—keep the Eastern Association intact. Keep war, that least likely of atevi interactions, from breaking out between districts.
Get Cajeiri back. That was only the first step.
Stable doors opened. The young men quietly let the restraining loops slip through the bridle rings. Free, Nokhada threw her head and swayed, blowing steam in the frosty air, and they surged for the door, to the peril of timbers and posts
They rounded the corner for the outer pen gate: handlers swung it open, and in that very moment, in mid-stride, one short, brass-capped tusk gleamed in Nokhada’s lower jaw as she snaked that head around to stare at her rider from one dark, calculating eye.
Pop of the quirt and a retensioning of the rein: Bren didn’t even think about the choice.
Nokhada blew, threw her head and, raking and shoving Banichi’s mount, fell right in where she belonged, next to pale Babsidi and Cenedi’s black mechieta, and with Banichi and Jago riding right behind. Fighting for position in the herd. It was like atevi politics—it didn’t give a damn for anyone in the way.
God, he wished he’d tucked that last breakfast roll into his pocket, but he’d been afraid it would shed crumbs on the gun.
Snow came down on them, a sifting off the eaves three stories above. It was scarcely morning even so, a gray glimmer of dawn as they rounded the end of the building. Clawed feet gained scratchy traction on the occasional icy bits and sent the snow flying. Nokhada, always ambitious, but aging, nipped a too-forward unsaddled youngster at the turn around the ell of the building, and the interloper dropped back in the order as Banichi and Jago moved up.
The bus still sat in the front drive as they passed, its roof bearing a thick blanket of snow. Its driver was a guest of the estate, so he had learned over such morning tea as the servants had brought in—which meant that the bus sat here rather than at the airport, and that meant that their spare baggage, and his clothes, would not make it up when they arrived. The driver had reportedly feared for his safety last night—with some reason, had been Banichi’s word on it. But Ilisidi would surely make it clear to the district that the driver was detained and threatened, and that would keep him safe from reprisals—who knew?—reprisals possibly from the very lady they were on their way to visit.
Jegari, who had not been informed everyone else was leaving, was still abed, probably still asleep, and Maigi and Djinana vowed to be sure he stayed there if they had to sit on him. It was a dirty trick to play on the lad, who now was a virtual prisoner in the estate, but the boy had told them all he knew, and there was no good dragging him along in a rough, cold ride.
This is an investigative and diplomatic venture, Bren had written Jegari in a note, to be given him when he waked. The aiji-dowager and the young gentleman alike will be best served if you remain in the house to await or relay messages. There may well be such and they may well be of extreme urgency. As a member of the young gentleman’s staff, you have a certain authority to answer.
The outer gates opened by remote, and let them out onto the same road the bus had used. The snow made quick going at the mecheiti’s long, clawed stride, with the mecheiti fresh and full of energy. But they didn’t follow the road all the way to the bottom, where it had branched off from the township road. Not too far along the downward course, they took a small downward spur that led off under a rock wall of frozen springs.
The trail, if honest trail there was beneath the snow, then led them down past evergreen and scrub: at b
est it was a path not often used, not in any season, by the look of it. The mecheiti’s clawed feet broke down barren winter brush, gained a sometimes chancy purchase on the ice near streams that made frozen exit from the rocks, and went where, very clearly, no bus had ever been.
It was at least four cold hours on that trail, with several very chilly breaks for rest, before they hit a service road, and two more with no sign at all of any dwelling or estate boundary. But that was the way in the East: civilization had large gaps, and roads passed through long spaces of empty before they got anywhere at all, not necessarily with convenient interconnection. Roads were historically nonexistent where there had never been association; roads were poor where association was loose, broken, or in name only.
And the two estates in question, Malguri, which was Ilisidi’s ancestral holding, and Cobesthen, which was Lady Drien’s, had, as one could well see, no well-established roads between them—no ties, no polite connections socially, not for a century and a half. The lady of Malguri and the lady of Cobesthen were cousins, legatees of a historical breakup, from a time when the two estates had been one power, centered at Malguri. The association had fractured—the murder in the bedroom at Malguri was not unconnected with this event, though in exactly what particular Bren was a little hazy—and the cousins, the only living relatives of their generation within the district, did not routinely speak, though sharing a common boundary.
The current lady of Cobesthen, Cenedi informed them, used a phone for outward communication, like ordering up vegetables or items of clothing from Malguri Township, but refused any message that came by way of such a device.
Drien did Tatiseigi of Tirnamardi one better in stubborn ecological conservatism, Bren thought glumly. One got the picture, one got it quite clearly…and one would have wished to ask the dowager why the human in the company was being asked along if they were facing an Easterner with a particularly strong loathing for modernity, humans, and all that came from them.
Because Banichi and Jago were damned good at what they did, was one answer, and they would not leave him behind in Malguri at any order. The dowager surely wanted all the help she could get in this venture, and would therefore risk her neck and his to get it. That was the conclusion he drew on the matter. He could not foresee any good he could do—his camping outside in the foyer for the duration of the interview might be a good move, once they got where they were going, except that Banichi and Jago would not leave him alone out there, either.
A highland lake lay off the eastern face of Malguri, down a gentle slope. That vast lake, remnant of some past glaciation and an eons-old fracture and uplift of the world’s crust, divided them from Cobesthen, which held the southern lake shore. They were short-cutting a jagged peninsula of the lake, as Bren remembered the geography, to get to Cobesthen, choosing the mecheiti rather than going by boat from the very beginning—from Malguri Fortress itself.
“Why ride?” he asked Banichi and Jago, during one of the rests. “Why not take the boat across? What is the plan, nadiin-ji?”
They stood near the mecheiti, an isolate knot of warm bodies in a cold winter woods. Banichi lowered his head and answered quietly, “A boat, Bren-ji, could be prevented from landing. And recall Lord Caiti holds land across the north shore of the lake. Almost certainly he expects intrusion. The land is wider and affords cover. The lake while wide—is very flat.”
That was a thought.
“Do you think he would continue to hold Cajeiri there, within the—”
—within the dowager’s reach, he had been going to say. But he said, instead. “Bait?”
“Very possibly, Bren-ji. Continued proximity would make it irresistible.”
And would offer the greatest possible embarrassment to Ilisidi. Caiti’s holding there was named Haidamar, the summer retreat on the northwest shore. Caiti’s lowland and more frequent residence was down in the lowlands to the west, the Saibai’tet. But the airport at Cadienein-ori served the northern territory, and, by extension, several mining concerns near the north end of the lake and downward—was there, in fact, even a road between Malguri and the Haidamar?
By his memory, there was not. Not on this side of the lake. But, God, he thought, looking out toward the snow-hazed lakeshore, dim through the trees—were they that close to the boy? Was holding him there meant to draw Ilisidi into a trap, to get her to attack across the lake?
She, in effect, had little choice but to move first, move fast, and try to do something; and that meant crossing another lord’s land, by a route that had no roads.
“Are we actually calling on Lady Drien, nadiin-ji?”
“If she will open her gates,” Jago said. “One believes we are, Bren-ji.”
They had, besides him and the dowager, Cenedi, Nawari, Banichi and Jago, and the dowager’s young men, having, one hoped, called in Guild to their assistance and relying on staff to protect the house back on the heights from a flank attack.
And were they going to pay a social call on their way around the lake’s far shore, possibly as a base to move against Haidamar?
Possibly.
And phone or no phone, he would lay a bet that Drien knew they were coming: a stubborn aristocrat who wouldn’t acknowledge messages that came by phone, wouldn’t respond, and hadn’t communicated with her cousin in the years when they had been close neighbors…would not be caught by surprise. The lady would know if something moved on her land, even in the dead of winter. Her guard might not be Guild, but they could not be that careless, or that lacking in modern abilities.
The question was whether the lady had used that grocery-ordering phone to call the Haidamar and advise Lord Caiti she was being trespassed upon, by a certain number of persons intent on reaching Caiti’s land.
And had it been Drien who had set so-called bandits on the road to Malguri last night? Or might they have been instigated from Caiti’s side?
Ilisidi was uncharacteristically silent and cheerless as she rode, speaking only with Cenedi, and Bren let that situation be. Nokhada typically kept pressing to the fore, but he kept her back, out of the dowager’s way, figuring that if she wanted him, she would signal so. She didn’t, which said worlds.
The sun made a midafternoon appearance through the lowering gray cloud, a small patch of sky as they passed along the lake edge, where a snowy beach and a rime of ice afforded easier going than the woods. That was the warmth in the day, short-lived as it was. By the time they reached the end of that beach, the gray had wrapped the peaks behind them and erased half the lake, giving the false illusion of a low, endless plain under a misty sky.
That icy mist rolled in off the lake with a sifting of snow, and, leaving the shore, they rode in fog, among ghostly shapes of winter trees, down a local road blanketed in snow. No vehicles had crossed here. The mecheiti’s feet turned up no ruts of wheels beneath the new fall. Even Jago remarked on that fact: they might have stepped back centuries, when mecheiti were the only transport in this district.
It was a lonely, lonely place, Cobesthen. It was isolation, failed prosperity. Ancient anger.
Eventually, around a snowy rock outcrop, they came on an iron grillwork gate, between two lowering and massive towers. Cenedi leaned from the saddle to ring an icicled bell and announce their presence—and one could almost hope the notoriously contrary lady of Cobesthen would open those gates and let them in, unpleasant as the encounter was bound to be. They had been in the saddle all day. They had their gear to camp out here, but one gathered that the aiji-dowager did not intend to camp in tents outside the lady’s gate…not without taking some action for it.
Time passed. They waited, mecheiti shifting restlessly, nipping and shoving as they tended to do while, incredibly, finally, on the other side of the gate, a band of men rode mecheita-back toward them, a reciprocal force that might have ridden right out of the machimi plays.
Bren let go a long, long breath, facing these messengers, the East at its most obstinate. It was a wonder, in fact, that the lady had
not stationed guards out in the old tower, to freeze winter-long on a lonely, outmoded duty.
But the fact she hadn’t said there was more modernity out here than met the eye.
They sat, they waited. The mounted group arrived, the leader asked their identity, and, receiving the reply from Cenedi, “The lord of Malguri,” that leader signaled a man of his who quietly got down and unchained the gate. It ultimately took the help of two others, who dismounted, forced the snow-blocked gate open barely enough to let them through…no, Bren said to himself, that gate had not seen many comings and goings in recent days. The snow was up over the footing, and carved itself a deep arc when they moved it.
They passed that gate, with their pack train and their spare mounts, and the several locals afoot pulled the gate shut and noisily ran the chain back through, ominous sound in the foggy surrounds, before they got back to the saddle. They had wanted in. They were in. Who else the lady of Cobesthen thought she was keeping out was uncertain. One hardly liked the feel of it.
And if one disliked that, the silence of the guards and the general demeanor gave no better feeling.
The other side of the wall protected a small, youngish forest, well-kept, actually, though fog obscured the details and snow covered the ground. The lake should, perhaps, have been visible to the left, where the wall came up against a snowy rock outcrop, but fog had obscured everything into a dimmer and dimmer sameness as the sun sank and the snow came down with increasing vigor.
The house materialized out of that haze as they moved, a towered old mass of stone sitting on the lake shore, low-lying, with some sort of stone structure beyond it, on the shore itself. It was reputedly coequal with Malguri in age, or nearly so, older than that wall they had just passed. The only sign of warmth in all the scene was the glow of light in two windows on the upper floor: like Malguri, being built for seige, it had no lower windows, not a one. Its doors, when they approached, were deep-set within that nasty trick of mediaeval architecture, a shooting gallery on either hand, the only apertures in the lower floor being sniper-slits.
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