Pretender

by C. J. Cherryh

  “The dowager’s orders, young sir,” Nawari said. By now the train was perceptibly slowing, the wheels squealing on the iron tracks.

  “Move quickly, nandiin,” Jago said, and hurried them out the door and into the wind, the ties moving below their feet, under the iron grid that was the platform between the cars. A ladder led off this open-air platform. The coupling that tied them to the car ahead flexed and banged under their feet as the train squealed to a halt.

  “Now,” Banichi said, seizing young Antaro by the arm, “change your coat, nadi, and your ribbon. Change with the young gentleman and be down those steps—stay low, be wise, and keep your gun out of sight. Trust to the staff with you. They are all Guild, and one is the dowager’s.”

  “But,” Cajeiri said, as Jago whisked the ribbon first off his pigtail and then off Antaro’s, exchanging red for green.

  “Stand still, young sir.” As the wheels were still squealing, she tied the red ribbon onto Antaro’s pigtail, straightened the too-tight coat, which would not button, and spun the girl about for a few quick words. “Straighten your shoulders, keep your head up. Be the young lord.”

  “Yes,” came the teenager’s staunch answer.

  “By this you both protect him,” Jago said, “as any Guildsman would do, and better than any of us. Go, nadiin!”

  The train had scarcely stopped, but the two youngsters took off down the steps as quickly as possible, hit the gravel with Nawari behind them, rushing them along.

  “I should be with them!” Cajeiri protested.

  “Hush and take the ribbon,” Banichi said. “You will need it. And put on Antaro’s coat, young sir. This is the dowager’s order. Move!”

  “But,” Cajeiri said, to no avail, struggling with the slightly oversized jacket.

  “Come,” Jago said, “and you will ride in the engine.”

  The engine, was it? Bren hitched up his computer strap, negotiated the passage between cars, and opened the door from the platform into the next car.

  They entered with a gust of wind into a car the windows of which were defended by Guild of various houses, Atageini, mostly, Taibeni and Dur, not to mention Cenedi and the dowager’s young men, plus a few more whose faces Bren did not see. Their passage through the car drew only cursory looks, a nod or two toward Cajeiri, but these people had their attention fixed on the passing landscape, the open fields and occasional hedgerows.

  They were drawing close enough to the capital to pass through more towns such as Leposti at any moment, where they might meet help—or opposition. Jago kept a fast pace through the car, Banichi bringing up the rear, but pausing a moment for a word with Cenedi, who nodded to something. Banichi cast a look back, as if in thought of the dowager.

  So much Bren saw in his passing the door. In the next moment the wind hit him, the racket and rush of the unprotected platform, next to the thunder of the engine, an area where watching one’s step was life-and-death. A ladder confronted them, a straight-up ladder, atevi-scale, and the whole platform vibrated with the joints in the tracks, with the deafening noise of the locomotive over all and under all.

  “Nandi,” Jago shouted into his ear. She took the computer strap from his shoulder, indicated he should climb first, and he did, hauling himself up the widely-spaced rungs as fast as he could, aware by the vibration in the rungs that someone was on the ladder behind him, likeliest Cajeiri…he heard the boy shout something to someone, but he didn’t stop or look down. He came up at nose-level with a catwalk, exposed to the raw wind, and hauled himself up onto that gridwork, kneeling on the metal surface and holding to the railing—thank God there was a railing. The train was passing through empty countryside at the moment, with a town in the distance.

  And a swing of his head forward, into the wind, brought him the unexpected sight of a banner aloft, streaming flat out in the wind, atevi figures atop the train, sitting or lying, weapons braced. That banner was the red and black of the Ragi, of Tabini’s house.

  That was how the towns and villages turned out to mark their progress. That was the declaration they flew, unmistakable defiance of the authority claiming Shejidan.

  Wind battered him as the train began a long curve. He felt Cajeiri’s presence behind him. He summoned strength to wind-chilled muscles, hauled himself up off his knees, holding to the catwalk rail, and moved as briskly as he could along the outside of the generator and engine. The engine gave off the breath of hell itself, heat and fumes stinging and making his eyes run. Above all was the racket, and the rumble and the power of the machine, shaking his fingers to numbness on the railing.

  The Ragi banner—outrageous and uncompromising: Know us, know this is the moment, if Ragi will stand up and be counted. This is the moment, if man’chi will draw you.

  Why send off Antaro in the heir’s coat? Why send Cajeiri up to the engine? Diversion, to be sure…but should anyone think the young lord would leave this train, this banner?

  Except if security feared a traitor in their midst, in contact, somehow, with Murini’s forces.

  One of Tatiseigi’s men such a traitor might be, or one they had no way to know among their other allies.

  But would the heir desert his father’s cause, under such circumstances? Would he leave his great-grandmother?

  Murini would, in a heartbeat. It was the recipient of the information that counted: Murini might believe the boy would go. Murini always had, changing sides with every breeze…a long, long history of fast footwork.

  Quivering iron railing slid constantly under his hands. Wind battered him as the train’s turn smoothed out, gathered speed, and carried the exhaust away in favor of cold, rushing air. His catwalk ended in another ladder. This one brought him down to a small, sheltered platform with a door into the cab, while another ladder offered steps downward. The driving wheels thundered under the small gridwork platform where he stood, making it impossible to hear.

  Light footsteps shook the ladder above him. Cajeiri came down, and the gridwork platform was too small to gather company, with Jago and Banichi coming after. He reached high for the latch of the metal door and with his utmost one-handed effort, wrenched it open and shoved it wide. Guild in black leather met him as he shouldered his way past the metal edge, men holding heavy weapons angled up in the narrow corridor. Hands reached down, helped him climb up the last high steps, pulled him safely up into the short cab corridor.

  Detail overwhelmed him, doors, guns, banks of switches, levers, gauges whose purpose he understood but had no idea how to read. He had to trust the armed men at his back. He was concerned with the whereabouts of his staff, seeing Cajeiri had climbed in after him.

  Then Jago arrived up the short steps, exchanged a few words with the Guildsmen on duty, and indicated with a shove at Bren’s shoulder that he should keep on moving down the short corridor into the cab itself.

  He cast a second look back, unsatisfied until he saw that Banichi had gotten inside and the door was shut.

  Switches, gauges, and levers. He made the passage along beside the power plant itself. Ahead of him, around a slight dogleg for the engine bank, a white light glared through the engine’s broad windshield, offering a hazy view of the sky. It silhouetted a handful of armed personnel and others who must be the engineer and his crew. He walked forward, seeing too little detail in the unexpected light.

  One man in that crew turned his head, and he recognized a familiar, light-edged face.

  “Aiji-ma,” he exclaimed, utterly confounded.

  “Paidhi-ji.” Tabini seized his arm and pulled him forward, into a nook between operators’ seats, moving him into a safe, warm place. And made a second reach. “Son.”

  “Tai-ji,” Cajeiri said, completely amazed at being likewise hauled into Bren’s nook. The heir presented an unlikely figure, overwhelmed in a Taiben ranger’s green jacket, small hands exiting the sleeves to grasp hold of the seat nearest. The driving mechanism under their feet thumped like an overexcited heart as Tabini reached and took his son by the shoulder
.

  And in that moment, in the forward windows at Tabini’s back, the city itself appeared, a sprawl of red-tiled roofs serpentining this way and that. High above it all rose the hill of the Bu-javid, where they were going, if any information still held true.

  “How is your great-grandmother?” Tabini shouted at his son.

  “She is very well, tai-ji, but Uncle Tatiseigi has a bullet in his arm and they sent my bodyguard away disguised as me, which I did not want! Where is ami?”

  Mama, that was.

  “She is with the buses, with her father and the Ajuri,” Tabini said, and spared a hand for Bren’s shoulder, on a level with his son’s. “And you, paidhi-aiji. Are you well?”

  “Perfectly,” Bren answered, finding his breath short and his whole grasp of the situation tottering. “Perfectly well, aiji-ma.”

  A faint buzz penetrated the thunder of the locomotive and a shadow of wings spread over the windshield and diminished: A plane sped low overhead, streaking low along the track in front of them, then rose as it reached a hill, skimming like the wi’itikin in flight.

  Scouting the track ahead, Rejiri was, and in utter hubris, letting them know he was up there—up there, all along their way, watching the track, advising them, making their hazardous course possible, an airborne presence elusive as quicksilver, there when they needed him. The boy that had set the nation’s air traffic control in an uproar had redeemed himself today, no question, and they saw him rise, with a waggle of his wings, off on a course toward the distant heights of the city.

  An explosion puffed smoke beside the plane. Another. Rejiri waggled his wings as if to chide the agent of this reckless attack, and flew on undaunted.

  8

  The little plane made a brazen, lazy circle all about the heights of the Bu-javid, reconnoitering—and clearly challenging the opposition to take a shot at it. Bren watched it from a relatively armored position in the engine cab, sure that this time, after days of being shunted aside, deprived of vital information, and relegated to a marginal existence by the Atageini, he could no longer complain he lacked a firsthand view of events. He had his computer slung on his shoulder, resolved to protect the machine from all accidents. He had Banichi and Jago standing near him, which he would have chosen above all things. He also had Cajeiri marginally in his charge—someone had to have the boy in hand, since Tabini, who was near him, was conferring not with Ismini, his own head of staff, who was nowhere to be seen, but with Cenedi and Banichi, the three of them laying plans the rest of them would follow.

  This train was not only aimed at the center of the city, but about to force its way into the very heart of the hill on which the Bu-javid sat, that was increasingly clear: Tabini was determined to drive it as deeply as it could penetrate into the tunnels that led to the rail station inside the Bu-javid.

  And, Bren thought, if he were in charge of Murini’s defenses, and only pretending to have fled, the very first thing he would do was park a locomotive in those tunnels—the only obstacle available that could possibly stop this iron juggernaut. Stop it, and jam the tunnel with the resulting wreckage.

  It was not a comforting thought. Presumably Tabini had thought of it. Presumably Guild in Tabini’s man’chi were running ahead of them, making sure this did not happen. One had no way of knowing if Ismini and the team that had guarded Tabini during his exile were part of that effort, or were serving as decoy, or if there was some other reason for Tabini’s reliance on older, better-known Guild help.

  And where were the buses and the trucks at this point? Where was the majority of their strength? Gathering more supporters, they might be, but the buses were traveling a circuitous webwork of roads leading toward the city—still out in the country, news of their coming stirring others to join—or resist—the passage into the suburbs of Sheijidan, doubtless, but not making the kind of time they made.

  Tabini’s advance had met no great resistence, however—not yet. And Sheijidan itself was a strongly Ragi city, not strongly affiliated with their varied Padi Valley cousins, who were Ragi only in part, and in part not, and married into this and that other ethnicity—the hills, the coast, the south. The city itself would surely have borne Kadagidi rule very uneasily.

  The boy standing beside him, their young vessel of all key lineages, brought in the Padi Valley’s confused bloodties—and profited more from that heritage than Murini ever could or would, if the day went their way. It was demonstrable in that caravan of buses and trucks that the whole Padi Valley, Murini’s birthplace, had fallen in with Tabini’s advance on the capital. No question this boy’s return from space would ring the death knell of Murini’s hopes…unless this boy should die, or be proven to have fallen under unacceptable influences—

  The paidhi’s, notably, which state of affairs he himself had vehemently denied to all listeners, all the way from the coast.

  So why in hell did Tabini insisting on bringing him with the boy, in the engine cab, in this most public of gestures?

  Because Tabini, stubborn as they came, didn’t intend to fail in this attempt, that was what, and he intended to make Murini a dead issue, incapable of protest or politics. The paidhi-aiji, one could only think, was still part and parcel of all Tabini’s decisions, the adviser, the arbiter of his more outrageous opinions—and, though the paidhi himself had doubted it at times, it seemed demonstrable now that Tabini would not step back from that position. Some might see the paidhi as a liability. But others, diehard supporters of the aiji, might see the paidhi as the single binding-point of everything, every choice, every controversial step Tabini had made on the way to this upheaval: Take me back, accept me intact, accept my decisions, and keep your objections behind your teeth, his challenge seemed to be. Admit I am right, and then have my son after me, this ultimate uniter of all clans, or bring me down, and lose my son, and lose his promise, and let a feeble union of the south coast and the small clans rule over nothing but chaos—choose that instead, and be damned to you all.

  Maybe it wasn’t quite that harsh an ultimatim in Tabini’s mind. Maybe he was sweeping the paidhi along out of some sense of policy he meant to maintain. But nothing in Tabini’s past had ever suggested completely idealistic reasons, nothing except the aiji’s absolute conviction that without him, and ultimately without his heir—there was no way to hold the aishidi’tat together, and without the aishidi’tat, there was no way for atevi to compete with humans and rule their own planet.

  The scariest matter was—adding it all up—Tabini happened to be right.

  Lurch. Jolt. The train passed by the airport, swung onto a familiar track, hitting a bump Bren remembered in his very bones, from his very first days on the mainland. Men in Guild black stood by the side of the track, lifted solemn hands as the train passed their position—hands empty of weapons, some, and others lifting rifles aloft in salute.

  Guild had left their official neutrality. Guild had moved. The airport was at their left.

  Was Murini still there, or might these Guildsmen have taken action to dislodge him? Had signals passed to Guild among them?

  “Is there any word,” he asked Jago, “nadi-ji, is there any word yet of conditions inside the hill itself?”

  “There is dispute in the train station,” Banichi said, clear understatement, “so the report is, nandi.”

  “And Murini? Has he been proven to have left the airport?”

  “There is no word,” Jago said. “Certain persons are looking for him.”

  Looking for him, was it? No one knew? Could the Guild itself have completely mislaid the self-proclaimed aiji of the aishidi’tat?

  He didn’t think so. The Guild knew where he was. There was a firefight or a standoff going on somewhere, that was his guess, and the side of the Guild they were communicating with had not been able to verify who was on the other side, so they had gotten no information they were willing to bet on.

  “Can you talk to my grandmother?” Cajeiri asked, pressing up beside him in the apparent hope that communicat
ions were active.

  “One is in communication with Cenedi, young sir,” Jago said, “who is in communication with her.”

  “Tell her I am with my father,” Cajeiri said plaintively. “Tell her and Uncle.”

  “She knows and approves this move, young sir,” Jago said. “Indeed she does.”

  A deep breath from the boy, who leaned on the metal console and peered out the bright windows ahead of them. “Good,” he said. They passed scattered buildings, the outliers of the airport. Streets were deserted, windows ominously shuttered along the way.

  So had the airport train ordinarily been, when they had traveled in Tabini’s personal car, that with the red velvet cushions, the thick, doubtless bulletproof blinds.

  The door opened, a rush of wind and noise, and shut: Tano arrived, went straight to the aiji’s conference, delivered a few words and left, acknowledging Bren’s glance only with a slight bow of his head.

  Another turn, and the train, at fair speed, rumbled through the commercial edge of the airport. Here, in this unlikely district, ordinary people had come alongside the track, near the road. People waved as they passed, and Cajeiri, leaning toward the side window of the cab, waved back.

  “Dangerous, young sir,” Jago said, setting herself between him and that window, and Bren put out his hand and moved her back as well, not disposed to let her make herself a living shield. She gave him one of those down-the-nose looks she could so easily achieve, touched his hand gently, then removed it.

  “Bren-ji,” she chided him. “You do not protect us. You do not protect us. Shall I say it, fortunate three?”

  He was obliged to say, however reluctantly: “I shall rely on you, Jago-ji.”

  “I wish Antaro and Jegari were here, now,” Cajeiri said. “I wish Antaro had not taken my coat.” And then an apparent thought: “Can you contact them, too, nadiin-ji?”

  A deep frown, on Jago’s light-touched face. “We do not attempt it, young sir, for their safety, in order for the ruse to work. They may contact Cenedi, if they can.”