Текст книги "Peacemaker"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

Or movements within the offices.

Were they expected? Was the place in lockdown? What was behind all those office doors?

Banichi and the others stood absolutely still, and Bren refused to twitch—as still as his own bodyguard. He could do it. He’d prepared himself to do it, and lean on their reflexes, not his own. The click of the door lock in front of them echoed like a rifle shot.

And that door, that single, massive wooden door, opened on brighter light, with four more guards the other side of it, at an identical intersection of hallways—again, a blank wall on the right, an ornate carved door, however, closing off the hall of offices on the left. A short jog over, and a short hallway, beyond these guards, led to barely visible closed doors, also guarded by a unit of four.

That was the Council Chamber, down that stub of a hall. The left-hand hall—that was Guild Administration. And at the other end of it sat the Office of Assignments.

Exactly as arranged, Bren stopped . . . not quite inside, as Banichi and Jago encountered the guards. He was in the doorway. So were Tano and Algini, just behind him, beside that thick outward-opening single door. The guards in front of them posed an obstacle, wanting to look them over. There were still the six guards in the outer hall, at their backs—and four automatic rifles, not just sidearms, to judge by the two men visible, guarded the Council doors ahead.

He was causing a small problem. The outer four guards could not shut the door, and were mildly unhappy about it, the inside guards were trying to move them on without a fuss—

Fuss—was a lord’s job.

He shot up his fist, with the ring in clear evidence. “This, nadiin, is the aiji’s presence, and my case contains his explicit orders. Tabini-aiji sends to the Guildmaster, demanding urgent attention, and he will not be pleased to be stalled or given excuses about agendas. Advise the Guildmaster! There is no delay about this!”

“The Guildmaster is in Council, paidhi-aiji,” the senior nearest said in a quiet, urgent voice, “and the Council is in session. We will send word into the chamber and we will take you to his office to wait. He will see you and receive the orders there.”

Double or nothing. Bren pitched his voice low, where only the immediate four might hear him—for what good it did, if electronics was sending voices elsewhere. “I, speaking for the aiji, ask you now, nadiin, where is your man’chi? Is it to the Guildmaster, or to the aishidi’tat? They are not one and the same. Is it to the Guildmaster, or to the Guild? They are not one and the same.”

“Paidhi, this is neither here nor there. We are not refusing the aiji’s request. Even the aiji—”

He kept his voice down. “You are betrayed by the Guild leadership, nadiin. Stand down now! This is the aiji’s order! Obey it!”

Faces were no longer disciplined or impassive. Eyes darted in alarm, one to the other, and, to the side, Banichi had just deftly bumped the door frame, and inserted a little wad of expanding plastic in the latch-hole.

“Close the doors!” the inside senior said, and suddenly they were facing four rifles, from the Council doorway.

“Retired Guild is returning,” Banichi said. “The Missing and the Dead are returning, at the aiji’s order and in his service. Will you shoot, and then face them? Assist us. Or stand down.”

“Banichi,” one said to the senior in a low voice. “That is Banichi.” And the unit senior inside said, “Nadi, we are under orders. Retreat. Retreat now. Quickly.”

Bren didn’t turn his head to see. The four behind them were Tano’s and Algini’s problem. The four immediately in front of them were trying to persuade them to retreat.

“He will not retreat,” Bren said. “Nor will this!” He held the ring in view.

“The aiji’s orders,” Banichi said quietly. “If your man’chi is not to the Shadow Guild, separate yourself from the Guildmaster, or stand in opposition. The Council leadership has committed treason.”

A bell began to ring. Hall overhead lights began to flash. The offices, Bren was thinking. If those offices back there were occupied . . . but the back accesses down that hall were in Cenedi’s territory.

“Shut down your equipment,” Banichi said to the units confronting them. “All of you. Now. Take the aiji’s orders, Daimano’s, Cenedi’s . . . and mine.” It wasn’t working. Not in the four in the background. “Paidhi!” Banichi said.

His job. He was ready for it, on Banichi’s wounded side—he spun around Banichi as Jago did the same with Algini. A flashbang sailed past him into the inner hall and blew as Tano hurled the massive door shut. It rebounded under rifle fire from the Council door guards—and opened again, splinters flying, everything in terrible slow motion.

Turn and duck when I call you, Banichi had told him, forewarning him about splinters, and something still caught him in the back of the head, so brain-jarring he was unaware of completing his turn to the door: he went down beside Banichi, leaning on him for an instant. Tano bumped into him and Banichi, getting into cover, as the door edge passed them on its next rebound—Tano had drawn his sidearm, covering the left-hand hall. The outer four door guards were down—lying over against the wall beside Jago and Algini as automatic fire over their heads continued to hammer the splintering door. The outbound volley and Jago and Algini’s move had likely thrown the outside guards to their present position a little down the corridor wall, pressed tight to avoid the fire that had the door swinging insanely open and shut under the shots and the rebound. Fire inside lagged—and Jago flung another flashbang skittering in on the polished floor. God, Bren thought—hope the guards inside weren’t equipped with worse to throw back.

The guards down by the front door were Banichi’s to watch, those two men, and all those office doors. But those guards were gone, vanished, likely into the offices. Bren moved over against the wall in the side hall and stayed quiet—while from the Council hallway bursts of automatic fire shredded the door and made retreat back down the outside hall impossible. One of the door guards had been hit. His comrades worked to stop the blood and treat the wound, under Jago’s implacable aim.

They were in possession of the doorway and the outer halls—and trapped there, with Tano aiming a pistol down the length of the short hall, Banichi watching the long hall, Jago with three problems and a wounded man at extremely close range, and Algini covering the door from an angle, to be sure nobody came at them from inside. The guards inside the Council hallway weren’t coming out—the four they had talked to close at hand had disappeared, somewhere out of the line of fire—and the four Council Chamber guards had progressively shredded the door, which, thanks to Banichi’s small plastic plug, hadn’t closed or locked, and made it a very bad idea for anybody to exit into the hallway. Right now there was a lull in fire. There was just the bell making an insane racket, and glass from ricochets into office doors and overhead lights lying all down the hall.

“Young fools,” Banichi remarked in a low voice. “They have finally come to their senses, waiting for orders, waiting for us to move. They are over-excited. Seniors will use gas, if they can reach the stores. That will be a problem.”

The service corridor communicating with all those offices was the weakness in their position. Defenders were bound to come at them via the offices, and when that happened, they were in trouble, be it gas or grenades. It was a cold stone floor, a cold wait—good company, Bren said to himself. He just had to do what his aishid needed him to do, keep quiet, keep out of the way, and not distract them.

Suddenly the wall at Bren’s back thumped, strongly—it made his heart jump; made his ears react. But then he thought: Cenedi. That intersecting administrative hallway, the other side of the wall. Something had just blown up. Cenedi might be giving the opposition worries from the other direction.

He snatched a glance at Banichi’s locator bracelet. Dead black. No signals at the moment. And nobody had moved, only shifted position a little, tense, waiting. The alarm bell kept up its deafening monotone ringing and the lights kept flashing.

Then the floor thumped under them, and a shock rolled in from the doors down the hall. The massive outside doors flew back, counter to their mountings, one upright, one of them askew and hanging, then falling in an echoing crash.

That wasn’t defense. It was inbound. Bren flattened himself to the wall with Banichi and Tano, as far from the inner door frame as they could get. Smoke obscured the street end of the hall, smoke and sunset-colored daylight, and two, three, five moving shadows in that smoky light. Three solid figures appeared out of it, flinging open office doors, and more shadows arrived up those three steps from the foyer, pouring into the hall from outside, opening office doors one after another, treading broken glass underfoot.

Secondary passages, secondary passages all over the place, in every office, in the Council chamber. It was the Assassins’ Guild. Of course there were secondary passages. Every building in the aishidi’tat had back passages. . . .

A burst of fire came out the ruined Council-area door, and a concentrated volley came back, right past the door frame. No more fire came out.

A flood of bodies occupied the hall, shadows moving fast in the smoke. Bren put his hand down on the stone floor, thinking if that was their side inbound, it might be time to get up and have it clear who they were—and his hand slipped.

He wrenched halfway about to get a look at Banichi, saw his face in the flashing lights of the alarm system. Banichi was sitting upright, but not doing so well, and it was blood slicking the floor. A lot of it.

“Damn it.” Bren got to his knees, ignoring the rush of bodies past them as he tried to get Banichi’s coat open. “Tano-ji! He’s bleeding!”

“Likely a broken stitch,” Banichi said faintly, above the continuing din of the bell. “One is just a little light-headed. Stay down, Bren-ji. Tano, turn on the bracelet.”

Tano did that. Banichi’s locator started flashing, communicating who they were, where they were.

Bren had a handkerchief—a gentleman carried such things. He put it, still folded, inside Banichi’s jacket, under Banichi’s arm, and felt heat and soaked cloth. “Press on that, Nichi-ji. Do not move the arm. Just keep pressure on it.”

“One hesitates to remark,” Banichi said, as another flashbang went off somewhere behind the wall and gunfire broke out, “one hesitates to remark that you are contributing no little blood, Bren-ji.”

His scalp stung when he thought about it. Adrenaline had been holding off an ill-timed headache, and he felt dizzy when he shifted about, which seemed likely from too much desk-sitting.

“That arm must not move,” Tano said to Banichi. “Must not, Nichi-ji, do you hear? Do not try to get up yet.” Tano was securing his own communications earpiece, which had fallen out, and voices were coming through it, fainter than the bell and the firing and shouting going on in the adjacent hall. There was more than the smell of gunpowder. There was smoke in the air—smoke the source of which they couldn’t see, as yet, but this had the smell of woodsmoke. Something was afire.

Tano didn’t move from where he was. Algini and Jago were on their feet, but not crossing that open doorway, just watching, with guns in hand, Jago still keeping the guard unit with the wounded partner quiet and out of the way. Bren knelt there with his body-armor between Banichi and whatever traffic passed them . . . not of much use, but at least he could keep an eye on Banichi, be sure he was conscious, and be ready to get up and invoke Tabini’s name if any problems rebounded in their direction.

Gunfire, acute for a moment, had tapered off. And the bell stopped ringing and the lights that had survived the barrage stopped flashing. In that sudden, absolute silence, Bren felt the world quite distant and himself gone shaky, whether from contributing to the bloody puddle on the floor or from a sustained expectation of dying—he was not sure.

Tano got to his feet and spoke to someone on com. Bren stayed tucked low, one knee under him, the briefcase right by him, one hand on Banichi’s arm. He wished he had a medical kit with him . . . but that briefcase could have no illicit weapons, offer no signs to anyone who would examine it that it was anything other than a paidhi’s proper business. That briefcase was their justification and their protection—that briefcase, and himself, bearing the aiji’s ring, the legal equivalent of Tabini’s presence.

For some few minutes that eerie semi-silence in the halls went on. Across the perilous gap of the shattered doorway, Jago and Algini maintained their watch in two directions. Tano remained standing, watching that side hall, but things were much quieter. The trapped guard unit had stayed very still, concentrating on their own wounded, and now and again exchanging quiet words with Jago. Then quietly she got up, and under her armed watch, that unit laid their weapons on the floor, got up, lifted their wounded partner to his feet, and went on through that shattered doorway, apparently to seek medical help inside.

Dare we move? Bren wondered. But he noted flashes from Jago’s bracelet, across the hall; and from Tano’s and Banichi’s, near at hand, and Algini and Tano were listening to something.

“We have secured the Council chamber,” Tano said.

“Up,” Banichi murmured then. “We are not done here. Bren-ji. The papers. The Council.”

That was the plan. The papers—ultimately—had to be proven for what they were. The justification for their action had to be laid down in official record.

“Can you?” he asked. “Banichi? You could stay here with Tano and Jago. Algini and I can go.”

“Half this blood is yours,” Banichi said, and drew a knee up and put his other hand down. “I can walk.”

“Stubborn,” Jago said. “Stubborn, unit-senior.”

“Let us have this done,” Banichi said. “Let us see this happen. Up, Bren-ji. Tano. Lend a hand.”

Bren stood up, watched uneasily as Tano gently assisted Banichi to his feet, providing most of the effort. For a moment Bren thought, He can’t do it, and Banichi leaned against the wall, light-headed. But Banichi shook them off then, obstinate and setting his own two feet. Algini joined them. Lights sparked on bracelets.

“Briefcase, Bren-ji,” Banichi said, leaning against the wall, and Bren bent quickly and picked it up—feeling a little dizziness in that move; and the knee and shin of his trousers were dark and soaked. Banichi was right. Between himself and Banichi, they were a bloody mess.

They were in sole possession of the outer hall, except a guard the incoming forces had set at the ruined front door. Shouted orders reverberated from inner halls.

The splintered door beside them had long since stopped swinging, jammed in a way that had provided protection for Jago and Algini. Jago stood in that doorway now, pistol in both hands, got a look in one direction, nodded to somebody unseen, and a man walked into their hallway: Nawari, who frowned in concern at the sight of them.

“Nand’ paidhi,” Nawari said with a little nod.

“The office,” Banichi asked immediately. “The problem.”

“Settled,” Nawari said. “There was some burning. An incendiary. He is dead, apparently a suicide, considerably burned, but recognizable. The records—suffered, but were not destroyed. And we intercepted one man with several notebooks from that office.”

So Shishogi was dead, unable to be questioned. But notebooks, removed under such circumstances . . . that might be a very fortunate find.

“One expected such a device,” Banichi said. “The bill?”

“Two of ours out of action,” Nawari said, “counting yourself. Two of the resistance dead, three, counting the target. Fourteen in the building wounded, one hundred forty-seven voluntarily standing down pending a resolution. Sixteen under arrest, undergoing sorting now, testimony to be taken: they are suspect. A new Council is about to meet to declare a quorum, record the change, and close the meeting. Yourself, nadi-ji, and especially the paidhi-aiji . . . are needed there as soon as possible.”

Banichi said, “Bren-ji.”

The aiji’s documents. The justification. The legalities. “One is ready,” Bren said. “Banichi, if you can do this—then you are to have that seen to. Immediately.”

“Agreed,” Banichi said. Bren found his aishid around him—his head was beginning to throb with his heartbeat now, the buzz in his ears seeming louder than some voices, and he was beginning to feel a little sick at his stomach—the stress of the moment, he said to himself. He had to get through this, just a few more minutes, to get Banichi the help he needed, to get the whole business settled.

They walked with Nawari into the foyer on the other side of that splintered door, an area overhung with gray smoke, splinters from the door, dust-filmed puddles of water, and an amazing number of brass casings lying about—not to mention the leaking skein of gray fire hoses deployed through the open door of the left-hand hall. That one door, amid all the chaos, was relatively untouched.

The Office of Assignments—Cenedi’s target—lay in that direction. But their own business was straight ahead, down the blood-spattered stub of a corridor to the open Council chamber. They just had to get to the heart of that chamber, just had to stand up that long.

Bar the paidhi-aiji, carrying no weapon but the aiji’s ring and bringing a briefcase with nothing but the aiji’s and the aiji-dowager’s legitimate demands for an investigation? That was actionable.

Shoot at him? Wound his aishid? That was a shot fired at Tabini-aiji.

They had the bastards. They had them, legally. He just had to drive the last nail in. Had to stay on his feet. They all five had to hope there wasn’t some holdout, somewhere—but self-protection wasn’t their business any longer. Nawari opened the doors, gave orders to those guarding them. They entered the chamber, walked down the descending aisle, past tiers of desks, where a gathering of Guild, some with wounds, all heavily armed, filled the space around the long desk that dominated the speaker’s well.

Their entry held universal attention from below—eyes tracking him and his aishid, and their progress down the steps and levels that split the chamber’s seating.

The long desk at the bottom belonged, one understood, to the Guildmaster and his two aides. The less conspicuous desk to the side, obscured by the crowd, belonged to the recording secretary.

Thirty-three seats in the chamber, all counted—twenty-nine councillors if all the seats were filled. Three at the long desk. And the recorder.

He and his aishid reached the bottom of the aisle, and as they did, the armed gathering at the bottom of the well began to flow upward into the tiers of desks, spreading out to fill those places. A senior woman slipped her rifle from her shoulder and laid it on the long desk, at the right-hand seat of the three. A man, completely gray-haired, sat down in the central seat, and laid a pistol in front of him, and leaned another, a rifle, against the desk, sat in the leftmost seat, at which point the woman—likely Daimano—sat down.

Which of these was taking the office of Guildmaster was uncertain. The leadership changed seating at whim, Jago had forewarned him, when outsiders were present; and under the circumstances, one was not sure that even all the Guildsmen taking the Council seats were themselves sure who was setting himself in charge.

But the retired and the Missing and the Dead, as Jago called them, were claiming their places in the chamber, some resuming old seats—more of them taking seats to which they had elected themselves, a complete change of the Council as it had been constituted this last year. The recorder’s seat was still vacant as the man at center declared for silence in the room, and a last few took their places.

An old man, completely gray-haired, took the seat of the recording secretary, a last scrape of wood on stone as that chair moved into place, a thump and a riffle of pages as he opened the massive book that had apparently rested there safely shut during the tumult outside.

There was a distinct smell of smoke in the air here, too. There was still shouting back and forth outside the chamber, until the outer door definitively shut and muffled what was going on up on the main floor.

“Nand’ paidhi,” the man centermost said.

“Nadi.” Bren bowed deeply to him, and to the two flanking him, no formality omitted. He shifted the briefcase to the other hand. “I speak as paidhi-aiji, for Tabini-aiji, with his ring.” His voice was undependable, hoarse from the smoke and the dryness. He held out the bloodied ring as steadily as he could, tried quietly to clear his throat, resisting the impulse to wipe the gold clean. Dignity, he said to himself. Calm. As if he did rule the aishidi’tat.

Happy with humans? They were not. His aishid had warned him they were bringing back a cadre of old leadership that opposed humans and all they brought with them—a leadership that might wish that he had been a casualty, leaving them to settle things without him.

“In the aiji’s name, bearing his orders, with his seal—his request for an investigation of orders given in the Dojisigin Marid; bearing also, in the aiji’s name, corroborating documents from the aiji-dowager.”

“Enter the documents, paidhi-aiji!”

“Nadi!” he said, the proper response, and with another bow, and leaving his aishid standing, he went aside to the recorder’s table, set his briefcase on that desk—and found his fingers stuck together about the bloody handle, his cuff-lace on that wrist absolutely matted, both his hands too filthy to do more than open the two latches to show the ornately ribboned and sealed documents inside. “Recorder,” he said, “if you will kindly assist me.”

The recorder rose, carefully took the documents in clean hands, entirely emptying the case, and set them, unstained, on the desk. Using an old-fashioned glass pen and inkwell from a recess within the desk, the recorder wrote in his book, and carefully printed a number on the first corner of each document and signed beneath each.

Then he rose and bowed. “Paidhi-aiji,” he said, with an unexpected fervor. “The Guild is in receipt of the aiji’s orders.”

“Nadi,” Bren said with gratitude. The shakes wanted to attack him now and he called up reserves, determined not to delay attention to Banichi by falling on his face. He walked back to his aishid and faced the Guildmaster’s desk for a statement of a sort he had done often enough in the aiji’s court.

“The nature of the aiji’s business,” the Guildmaster said, “paidhi-aiji, a summation.”

“Tabini-aiji requests, with these documents, under his seal, an investigation into orders given in the Dojisigin Marid—regarding a situation in which local Guild were disarmed, their units separated, and put into the field without equipment.” Deep breath. “The second document, for the Guild’s attention, from the aiji-dowager, under her seal: the deposition of two Dojisigin Guild whose village was threatened with destruction if they refused to carry out an unFiled assassination of a northern lord.”

“To which these documents pertain, nandi.”

“To which these documents pertain, nadi.”

“The Council will recess for three hours. We will reconvene to hear the documents read. Is there dissent?”

There was silence in the chamber.

“Done!” the Guildmaster said. “The Council enters recess.”

Finished.

Bren bowed slightly, the Guildmaster nodded, and Bren wanted only to get himself and his aishid back to safe ground. But suddenly Tano was supporting all of Banichi’s weight.

He immediately added his own help, for what help it was. Algini did. Banichi was out, dead weight, his skin gone an unhealthy color in the dim lighting of the chamber; and it took Algini and Tano both to hold him up.

“Help him!” Bren said, turning to the Guildmaster, to the chamber at large. “Help him!”

People moved. The Guildmaster called for a medic in a voice that carried, and doors at the side of the well banged open on a lower hallway.

“He thought he’d broken a stitch,” Bren said. “Get a compression on that.”

They let Banichi down on the edge of the first riser. Tano worked to get the jacket off. The handkerchief he’d lent was soaked. Tano put his hand on the wound, pressed hard, maintaining pressure. A call for a medic rang out down the inner hall.

The world was out of balance, sounds going surreal. It couldn’t happen. They couldn’t lose him. Tano and Algini both were doing their best to stop the bleeding, needing room. Shoved aside, Bren could find nothing to do with his hands, nothing to do at all that was not already being done. It seemed forever, a time measured only in the pounding of his own heart; but then a racket at the door on their level brought a new group into the chamber, one of them a gray-haired woman and two men with a bloodstained gurney.

That team moved in, taking over, talking rapid-fire to Tano, Jago standing uncertainly near. Algini shifted next to Bren and said in a low voice, “There is a medical facility. Surgeons are already there. He will get the best they can manage, on a priority.”

When or how he had no inkling. “Yes,” he said. He watched them, with Tano never releasing his hold, lift Banichi up onto the sheeted conveyance, saw them—thank God—hoist a drip bag and clean an area for a transfusion, no waiting about it, even while they were taking him away through the doors. Tano went with Banichi. Algini stayed. Jago did.

And just as that group passed the back-passage doors, Cenedi turned up at the chamber doors, and came hurrying down the steps to reach them.

“One heard the call,” Cenedi said. “Nand’ paidhi, nand’ Siegi started from the Merchants’ Guild before the call went out. He should be here by now.”

Siegi. The dowager’s own physician had attached himself to Cenedi’s mission, and the Merchants’ Guild was right next door. Thank God, Bren thought. Siegi had done the first surgery. He would instantly have an idea what he was dealing with.

“Are you injured, nand’ paidhi?”

“No,” Bren said. He had a damnable headache. He remembered why, but it was nowhere near as serious. He didn’t want to touch it to find out differently. “I shall not put myself in the way, nadiin-ji, but I am not going back to the Bujavid until Banichi goes with us. One is very grateful—very grateful—to the Guild and to nand’ Siegi. Express that for us.”

Cenedi listened solemnly, nodded, and went and spoke to the Guild authorities.

“You speak as the aiji,” Algini cautioned him in a low voice. “They will obey your orders absolutely.”

That shook his confidence. He cast a look at Algini, and at Jago, and felt the warm weight of that gold ring on his hand, a trust and a burden. “I should not,” he said. “I should not become an inconvenience in this business, nor offend the Council. But I want to go down where Banichi is.”

“It is a small room, Bren-ji,” Algini said. “A very small room. Let the surgeons work.”

There was so much blood. It was caked on his hands, sticking his fingers together, beginning to powder as a fine red dust.

And all around the halls outside were sounds of movement, of things happening he no longer understood. The Guild was taking account, dealing with its own wounded, of whom Banichi was only one . . .

But Banichi was his. His team. If anybody deserved to survive this, Banichi, who’d done everything to avoid bloodletting in the halls . . . to open the doors and hold position, distracting the whole Guild for a few critical minutes while the heavy-armed Guild of which they were the vanguard, arrived outside and got through the front doors the hard way . . .

Banichi had held the security doors open all the way to the heart of the Guild with nothing but a little wad of plastic—and a junior guard unit had panicked and damaged that door seconds before Cenedi started another action in the administrative wing.

He drew a deep, shuddering breath as Cenedi came back to them. “The objective,” he said to Cenedi. “How did we fare?”

“Shishogi is dead. The office was firebombed. We are sure we lost some records. But the fire suppression system functioned, incidentally preserving his body, and particularly certain books across which he had fallen. The shelves fell, preserving others. We have sealed that office. Experts will go through the records.”

“One heard of other notebooks . . .”

“. . . which we intercepted. Yes. Perhaps it was intended we intercept it. Or it may be real. We shall look into that item very carefully.” Cenedi acknowledged Algini’s presence with a nod. “Gini-ji, we have secured the entire hall, and we are mapping the last hours of function of that office, going back to yesterday dawn.”

Algini gave a single nod. Yesterday. When they had taken out Haikuti and come back to Shejidan. The hours between had been one long chain of movement and planning.

And now—

Now it had succeeded—

But it wasn’t over. They were far, far from done with the mop-up.

“Where were they?” he asked Jago, when Cenedi had gone. “The returning Guild. Where were they? Over in the Merchants’ Guild?”

“A few were,” Jago said. “We brought the heavy-armed contingent, those that could not move inconspicuously.”

We brought them.

Damn. The baggage cars that always attended the Red Train. They’d not come alone. The moment they’d cleared the doors, that group, observing from the train, had started their own countdown.

He let go a long breath. Two baggage cars. And a wad of plastic. And a team he desperately wanted to get back in one piece. He wanted everything finished, wrapped up, a success—but it wasn’t, yet. It wouldn’t be, until he could take Banichi with him. Banichi himself, he had no doubt, would tell him go, get everybody back to the Bujavid—do not be a fool, Bren-ji—but Banichi wasn’t in charge right now.

That ring, that heavy, heavy ring, said that he could do as he pleased. And he was being human, and probably his obstinacy was upsetting his bodyguard, even obstructing the Council—but they’d said, hadn’t they, a three hour recess?