Текст книги "Pretender"

The room had suffered, not from the attackers, but from the defenders of the house, who had taken no pains at all about recovering ejected shells—the detritus of combat was scattered about the floor, a few items lying on the rumpled coverlet of the bed, on the table. One, an apparent ricochet, having landed on the floor around the corner, in the large bath. Damage from the attempted intrusion of the enemy, numerous holes pocked the walls and woodwork. At some point during the battle for the house, someone among the room’s defenders had shot an exit hole through the door, complementing the several inbound rounds that had taken out the door lock and lodged in an opposing wallc without, one hoped, catching any of the house’s defenders along the way. The door had been kicked open after that, evident by the scuff marks on the paint near the shattered lock, as the invaders rushed the room. But the foremost intruder from the hall had hit a chest-high wire at that point, and Bren was very glad the staff had cleared away the evidence.

He was, considering all the other scars of war, overwhelmingly glad to find his computer where he had left it, hidden behind a stack of spare towels on the bottom shelf of the linen pressc neither defenders nor invaders having had an inclination to open the storage cupboard of spare towels and bed-sheets. No stray shot had hit it, nothing had damaged it, and, on his knees, having extricated the precious machine and its accompanying security modem from their hiding spot, Bren sat on the floor in front of the cabinet with both on his lap, too exhausted, mentally and morally, to struggle up again.

“Is something wrong, Bren-ji?” Jago appeared by him, and he tucked the computer case under his arm, clenched the modem in his hand, and made the effort to get up. Jago helped with a hand under his elbow, lifting him to his full height—which, for a tall human, was about equal to her black-clad shoulder. Even Jago appeared the worse for wear at this hour, her Guild leathers and her ebony skin alike streaked with pale dust from the road and the shattering of plaster, her usually immaculate pigtail a little wind-frayed from a wild ride and a wilder night. Bren’s own pale hands showed bloody scrapes. He had dirt under his nails, which would have been a scandal to his domestic staff if they had been here and not up on the station. They were all of them, himself and his atevi bodyguard, candidates for a good long soaking bath. He smelled of human sweat, Jago of that slightly petroleum scent, but a bath seemed out of the question at the moment. There seemed too much to do to contemplate such a luxury this afternoon, there was no domestic staff at hand to take care of the cleanup: It was all up to them,– and he was sure that once he sank into warm water, he would be completely lost.

“Tired, Jago-ji,” he murmured, inserting the modem into a case pocket. “Simply tired.” He heaved the precious computer’s carrying-strap up to his shoulder, not sure what else to do with the computer, wondering whether he should go on using the same hiding place and being too exhausted to be confident in his logical choices at this point. He hadn’t so much as taken his coat off since their arrival in the room, and his clothing bore mud, soot, and the scrapes of hedge branches, not to mention mecheita-spit and bloody rips in cloth he had taken riding through a gap in the estate’s wire fence. “But one dares not lie down yet.”

“Let us check the bed,” Jago said, and left him in order to do that check, electronically, with one of the little handhelds her Guild used.

Checking for bugs. For booby traps. Her partner, Banichi, was over by the windows, likewise engaged, and Tano and Algini, the other pair of his bodyguards, were in the bath, also looking for bugs and explosives, one surmised. All of them were gathering up shell casings.

“Is the chair safe?” he asked, meaning the fragile green-and-white-striped and doubtless pricelessly historical item in the corner.

Fragile from the atevi viewpoint: For a human, child-sized on an atevi scale, the chair was more substantial, even well-padded, and he was glad when Jago came back, surveyed it, and pronounced it safe for him to sit in.

Lord Tatiseigi, lord of the estate, had had his domestic and security staff make the first sweep of the premises, and they had cleaned up the bodies, blood, and broken items before they declared the room fit for occupancy. In any event, these rooms had fared better than the suite next door, where Kadagidi clan Assassins had made their actual entry into the house, and possibly left gifts that made one just a little anxious at the moment about standing near the north wall. Bren had less confidence in his host’s staff than in his own—Tatiseigi’s staff were competent at their work—competent, if woefully under-equipped in communications and electronics—but he felt much safer knowing his own staff was giving it their own close inspection, with more skill, recent practice, and far better equipment.

Water started running in the bath, a thunderous flood in that huge, atevi-scale bathtub. It was a seductive sound, and more than a testing of the plumbing, since it went on. Tano and Algini had made an executive decision and started drawing hot water for the household.

And Bren looked at his hands, at the grime, the cuts, the stray mecheita-hair and mecheita-sweat that had gotten all over his sleeves and trousers, reconsidering the bath question and the question of letting the adrenaline run down.

The unpleasant fact was the day was well advanced and they still weren’t assured the Kadagidi weren’t coming back tonight.

Or, worst of all thoughts, and one that had been at least a passing topic of discussion downstairs, their victory—and the knowledge Tabini was on the premises—might drive the Kadagidi to more desperate measures, even before dark: They might be desperate enough to attempt an air strike, in which case there was no safety and no time to settle in here as if there were. True, the Assassins’ Guild had passed a formal resolution condemning attack by air as anathema in clan warfare, and in that resolution declared that the Guild would exercise severe and automatic sanctions against violators. But the Guild as a whole had not turned a hand to prevent the overthrow of Tabini-aiji, had it? It had not bestirred itself to condemn the Kadagidi lord, Murini, for setting himself up as aiji in Tabini’s place, had it, then? The Guild had not leapt in to protect Tabini’s grandmother and his heir when they, innocent parties in any dispute between the two clans, returned from space.

The Guild had not intervened last night to prevent the Kadagidi from attacking them here in a neutral clan’s province. So there was a little justifiable suspicion downstairs that the Guild had not supported Tabini-aiji as whole-heartedly as they ought before his downfall, and that their lack of response in preventing a third clan being attacked had allowed some already questionable moves, all on one side of the equation.

Still, a man in the position of Lord Murini of the Kadagidi, who had gotten the Guild to take this dubious position of neutrality, letting him stage a bloody coup in the capital and declare himself ruler of the Western Association—which was to say, the whole continent—still had to worry about one potent force in atevi politics, and that force was public opinion. The various clans only recently united, had a long history of independent thought and independent and regional action. There associations within the Association which were historically much stronger than any modern ties, and Murini was already risking his neck by proclaiming himself aiji before the blood of household staff was dry on the carpet.

More, granted he had gotten the Assassins’ Guild to stay out of action, he was beholden to someone for that favor. He dared not go violating publicized Guild resolutions, creating a scandal for Guild leadership, and worse, contravening the Guild’s established principles of politics in his new-minted claim to power.

So there were three powers, all teetering out of equilibrium: the people, the Guild, and the man who called himself (with his clan) the new authority. And if any one of the former two tipped away from him, Lord Murini, so-named Murini-aiji, stood to lose all his advantage. It would be calamitous for his authority if the Assassins’ Guild decided suddenly to take the side of Tabini-aiji, who was not dead, and who was, in fact, currently lodged four rooms down, his staff going through much the same precautionary cleanup of premises. It was very clear that Tabini would accept Guild neutrality, but hold a grudge for its inaction in preventing his overthrow, and might forgive that grudge if the Guild now budged toward his side.

So the last twenty-odd hours had brought a very delicate time for both claimants to the aijinate: Murini, the upstart would-be aiji, with ancient ambitions of an ethnically different clan, had relied on popular discontent under Tabini-aiji’s authority to seize power; Tabini, overthrown, but now with allies– themselves—newly returned from space, now had records and testimony that might change public opinion. In a few days, Murini’s unchallenged supremacy had slid a few degrees, and now the whole thing had headed downhill gathering calamity like a snowball provoking avalanche. Step one: the dowager’s party, including Tabini’s young son, had arrived from deep space and landed onworld, in spite of Murini’s plan to keep the shuttle fleet entirely out of action. They had immediately presented themselves on the doorstep of Lord Tatiseigi of the Atageini, the young heir’s great-uncle, and by that action, had put Lord Tatiseigi to the choice of sheltering them or turning his young relative away.

Step two: Murini’s Kadagidi clan, neighbor to Tatiseigi– who had thought they were going to chastise the elderly and habitually neutral Tatiseigi for receiving Tabini’s grandmother and son under their roof—had not only failed in two nights of trying to breach the house and assassinate them all, but last night had found the Atageini’s neighbor to the west, Taiben, supporters of the old regime and relatives of Tabini-aiji’s clan, coming to the Atageini’s defense. It was an unthinkable combination of clans: Taiben and the Atageini had been at loggerheads for hundreds of years, and now they found common cause against the Kadagidi, for the boy’s sake.

Then, third step, Tabini-aiji himself, unheard from for the better part of a year, had shown up to defend his grandmother and his heir, risking life and reign on this one dice-throw: rescue Tatiseigi, drive off the Kadagidi, and support a new compact between Taibeni and Atageini lords.

Suddenly the Kadagidi control of their local Padi Valley neighborhood wasn’t looking as secure as it had three days ago, and centuries of Atageini neutrality in the region began sliding more and more toward commitment to a cause, namely restoration of Tabini-aiji to rule in Shejidanc because that would set a half-Atageini great-nephew up as heir.

So the sun was up. The ancient Atageini house at Tirnamardi still stood, if battered, in the middle of a province now annoyed with the Kadagidi and feeling massively insulted. The historic premises were pocked with bullets, Atageini house stables were burned and its venerable hedges were in tatters, not to mention the damage in the foyer and upstairs, while its lawn held an encampment of neighboring Taibeni and their large and numerous—and now hungry—mounts. The province took these affronts personally and supported their offended lord.

Who overall had fared surprisingly well under such heavy assault, the old premises proving their ancient, blunt-force construction methods had produced very solid walls. The Atageini house stood, and stood well. By the sound of the flood in the bathroom, its plumbing evidently worked and its boilers must be up, producing hot water for the sore and weary household, to judge by comments that wafted out of the bath.

So the aiji-dowager and the aiji had won the first several rounds of the fight, if not the war that was surely preparing. Murini sat in the capital claiming to be the popularly-supported aiji while Tabini-aiji sat in a Padi Valley lord’s house maintaining that he still was. Meanwhile Lord Tatiseigi, their host, was still muttering about the Guild’s general ban on no-holds-barred attacks and its rules about historic properties and premises, as if this was sufficient to preserve the Atageini province and its towns from a repetition of last night. Most of Lord Tatiseigi’s security, who were members of that Guild, held far less optimistic opinions on that score, and senior members of Tabini’s security and the dowager’s were down on the lower floor, laying plans for coping with what they were sure would come with nightfall.

As for one Bren Cameron, paidhi-aiji, interpreter of foreign affairs, Lord of the Heavens and so on and so forth, he sat in the one safe chair in an unsafe world, wondering whether he should open up his computer and look up his notes on the finer print of Guild regulations, searching for loopholes for further attack and simultaneously wondering whether, if he took his boots off to go take advantage of that wonderful hot water in the bathroom, he could possibly get them back on.

He had blisters, he was sure, in places he would rather not describe to his staff. Numerous wood splinters were lodged in his palms. He was amazingly sore.

But he had recovered his computer. And because he had it, he had all his records from space and from the voyage. And because he had those, he possessed detailed evidence which could argue that Tabini-aiji’s unpopular actions had produced results well worth the sacrifices. It was a precious record, and there was a backup for what was stored here—but one copy was in orbit over their heads, and another in his brother’s hands—he hoped safely back on Mospheira by now. On the mainland, on atevi soil, where it was most needed, this was the only copy he could hope to lay hands on, and he wasn’t eager to let the precious computer leave his hands until he had gotten that report to Tabini.

All things considered finally, that was the highest priority, to get a printout or a disk where Tabini could read it and understand what he had. It was the highest priority, even when Tano came out of the bath and reported that the tub was well on its way to being filled, assuming the hot water held out that long.

It was true that in his present state, he was unfit for an audience: even while the world tottered, conventions and custom prevailed, and a man, even the Lord of the Heavens, had to be respectfully presentable to authorityc especially an authority shaken by events.

“You may have the water first, nandi,” Tano began, as Algini also came out of the bath—but at that moment a racket broke out in the hall outside their suite, a stream of angry shouting. He could not make out words. He looked in that direction, down the short entry hall, in some alarm, and Tano went as far as the outer door and listened, while Banichi and Jago waited with Algini, hands on sidearms.

“Cenedi is out in the hall, explaining certain things to the household staff,” Tano said wryly, which drew a little amusement out of them all. One was ever so glad to find Cenedi alive today, and clearly indignant: None of them doubted that Lord Tatiseigi’s household staff needed certain key points laid out before them and the head of the dowager’s bodyguard was the man to do it—not least bringing home the fact that most of Lord Tatiseigi’s security equipment belonged in a museum, not active service. Even the paidhi understood certain facts without explanation, notably that there was a very good chance that the intruders who had gotten into the house last night, not to mention spies predating them, might well have installed bugs, and wise servants would not discuss household business in any area until security with proper equipment had cleared itc Proper equipment. That was a sore spot. Security with proper equipment necessarily involved outsiders poking about in Lord Tatiseigi’s household security, even bringing in some outsiders, namely Taiben clan, with whom the Atageini maintained a centuries-old feud, while the bodyguard that Tabini had brought in had its own opinions, and certainly Banichi had voiced his.

Outside security having access to house equipment had been one major sticking point of discussions downstairs. In the paidhi’s staff’s case, certain things they had were unique on the planet, a matter they had not entirely explained to the Atageini; anything that had come in from outside was better than what existed here. The Atageini lord was upset with the implications, his servants were all indignant, and the Guild security employed by the Atageini were in a particularly glum mood, having lost members of their staff due to deficiencies they themselves had doubtless pointed out to their old-fashioned lord long since. No, no, no, their lord would say: he bought quality to defend his house and his province. Quality items once purchased ought to be good for decades if not the next generation—Lord Tatiseigi had no understanding at all of how radically the advent of electronics and computers had changed that basic precept of atevi economy. Quality things lasted for generations, did they not? One bought the most expensive and it was clearly going to last for decades.

And, oh, emphatically, one could never trust security outside one’s own man’chi, one’s own loyalty. That was a principle to which the Atageini had adhered for centuries. It had preserved their power, their autonomy, even within the aishidi’tat. It had guaranteed the aiji had a refuge when things came to crisis. Lord Tatiseigi would very tactfully suggest so. Did it not prove his case?

Never mind that a little support from Tatiseigi would have meant joining the detested Taibeni in passing certain bills in the legislature, and made the whole Kadagidi defection more difficult.

Things had gotten damned hot downstairs, once history came under discussion, and that had diverted the discussion into details unrelated to Lord Tatiseigi’s antique defenses.

But Tabini-aiji had, aside from the argument, insisted, guest that he was under this roof, and Lord Tatiseigi had quietly and very reluctantly agreed to supplement his own leaky surveillance equipment. Or at least most of it. So the scene downstairs had ended, an hour ago, discussion having gotten around to old pieces of failed legislation, and the Taibeni-Atageini feud, which the aiji outright insisted had to be buried.

The particular source of the near-disaster in the last two days, the item that had cost staff lives, had been Lord Tatiseigi’s communications units. It had turned out they might just as well have phoned the neighboring Kadagidi province outright and advised them that the paidhi and his staff had gone out chasing Tabini’s eight-year-old heir halfway to Taiben, who were being asked in to aid their old enemies. The Kadagidi could have no doubt now that Taiben had responded, and that they were all, including the heir, the aiji-dowager, and the aiji himself with his Atageini-born consort, reinstalled in Lord Tatiseigi’s house, a growing nucleus of the old adminstration reconstituting itself apace, a threat to the Kadagidi’s theft of authority.

The latter details had doubtless leaked far and wide among the Padi Valley clans before Tabini’s staff had gotten the last die-hard user of the compromised system to shut down transmissions and quit gossiping on the network. The fact of the dowager’s and Tabini’s presence in Lord Tatiseigi’s house was likely on the morning news in Shejidan, for that matter, because reports of the disaster, the attack, the resistence, and the advent of former administration into the Atageini province had all flowed back and forth on that compromised network.

The first result of the gossip had turned up this morning, as ordinary Atageini provincials, shopkeepers, farmers, and town laborers en masse, all linked into that network, had rolled onto the estate grounds to join their threatened lord’s defense against what they perceived as an assault against their sovereign rights. An untidy host of town buses and farm-to-market trucks had pulled up on the formal cobbled drive in front of the house, and no few armed farmers had turned up with tractors and small earthmovers, very truculent and martial arrivals in the lower hall. Hearing that someone wanted to shut down their lord’s communication system, they had involved themselves and their outraged civil liberties in the dispute about the safety of the system, a matter of local pride.

They had backed down only because they had finally gotten it through their heads that the apparent Guildsman in black was not an Atageini security officer, but Tabini-aiji himself, arguing with their lord, and proposing to improve local communications, if they could only shut down the core of it for a certain number of hours.

The whole matter of the civil protest had started because Taibeni rangers, of that hated neighboring clan, had set up some sort of competing communications installation in their camp on the manicured front lawn, a much more state-of-the-art system about which the Taibeni were as secretive and defensive as the Atageini were about their own network. Lord Tatiseigi had demanded that rival network be shut down, claiming the Taibeni were spying on his defenses—the Taibeni being older enemies than the Kadagidi themselves. That ancient feud had boiled on under the whole debate, and the presence of the farmers and heavy equipment operators had provoked a haughty delegation from the Taibeni leadership, arriving to support Tabini-aiji against Tatiseigi’s provincials. That had been the point at which the paidhi-aiji had decided to retire quietly.

But argumentative as all sides were, and no matter the simmering feuds between Taiben and the Atageini, the presence of those lowland farmers and those high forest rangers alike guaranteed that the Kadagidi would meet more opposition today than had already sent them packing back to their own province last night. The line of buses and trucks out there might give the Kadagidi pause, politically as well as tactically. At least for the daylight hours.

“One has no idea how long it may be, nadiin, before anyone downstairs has time to consider domestic requests,” Bren said. “But at the earliest, I should be very obliged if I can persuade our host to let me connect to a printerc granted we can disconnect from the network.”

The household computers had become an object of extreme contention in the communications issue too. But all he wanted was a computer with available backup, a printer, and a considerable lot of paper to put information out that, in his own opinion, someone needed to hear. It was a report, a document which itself might not be prudent to produce in a house likely to be assaulted tonight; but he was down here to make that report, and if it got out, even into the hands of the opposition, it would create gossip and questions—but it was far more useful to get it into Tabini’s hands, ammunition against such arguments as proceeded downstairs, if only he could persuade Tabini to hear him on the topic.

“One is reliably informed the aiji has come upstairs, insisting on a bath,” Banichi said, pausing in his careful examination of bullet holes in the walls. “We should all be safe for a few hours, Bren-ji, and the aiji has retired, perhaps for the rest of the day. The debate has doubtless exhausted everyone.”

Banichi knew his frustration. And knew the importance of what he wanted to print.

“If one might hand the report to his staffc if one could gain access to one isolated machinec”

“The aiji’s staff indicates to us that he will rest after his bath,”

Jago said, and the subterranean text was that his own staff had tried to get the audience he had asked for—tried, and gotten nothing. The aiji had rebuffed that approach as he had deflected all other attempts. The paidhi’s influence had been a major grievance behind the coup. He knew it. He had not gotten his own audience, his staff met opposition: It was a standoff. But even if it made Tabini angrier than he was, he still had to get that document into Tabini’s hands and get him to read it.

“Go,” Jago said. “Have your own bath, Bren-ji. We have told the aiji’s staff the gist of things. More than that, Cenedi will brief them, if they will not hear us.”

Cenedi, the dowager’s chief of security, was clearly their best hope: whatever Tabini’s feelings toward the paidhi-aiji, the aiji-dowager would get through, and Cenedi, in her name, could grab staff by the lapels and talk urgent sense to themc all sorts of urgent sense. But one also had to worry whether Tabini, with new staff around him, the others having perished, might not be subject to a new filter of information. They were Taibeni, but not all; and Bren had never known them.

“I shall, then,” he said.

“We have sent for clothes,” Jago said. “One still hopes.”

It was by no means his security’s job. But his clothing, adult but child-sized, posed a major problem: It was not as if they could run to a local shop, even for the most basic items, and Tatiseigi’s hospitality had provided no domestic services ordinary to such a house. Their host was extremely harried, one had to understand, his housekeeping staff already pressed to the limits, and as exhausted as the security staffc but the plain fact was Tatiseigi detested humans as much as he hated Taibeni, with as much history behind the feeling: he hated their look, hated their influence, their technology, and their continued presence on the planet, and having a human house-guest attendant on the general destruction of his lawn, his hedges, and the tranquility of his province had clearly not made him change his mind on the topic.

And if all that were not enough, Tatiseigi personally and as a close relative resented the paidhi’s former influence with Tabini-aiji and his current influence with the dowager. Most particularly Tatiseigi resented his relationship with the young lord, the aiji’s son—Tatiseigi’s own great-grandnephew, who had stood up for the paidhi in no uncertain terms.

Oh, the paidhi was under Lord Tatiseigi’s roof on tolerance, no question, no matter that he and his staff—and the aforementioned young lord, with the detested Taibeni—had helped rescue the house from destruction last night. Lord Tatiseigi’s view was that the house would never have been attacked and damaged in the first place if not for the paidhi’s past influence, his support of this radical new space technology, its economic disruption, and the upheaval it wrought among the provinces. Consequently, the paidhi and his atevi staff could quite nicely go to hell—so long as the aiji-dowager didn’t notice his departure. So, no, there were no domestic servants to help them, it was hardly graceful to protest it from his tenuous position, and he had no wish to provoke another argument downstairs.

But the sad truth was, he, born a nice democratic Mospheiran fellow, had grown pitifully dependent on clothes turning up miraculously arranged in his closet, the socially appropriate garments appearing in the hands of servants who would help him dress. Lace would be starched and hand pressed, every detail of his attire and his bodyguards’ black leather rendered immaculate without their much thinking about it or questioning what they were to wear on what occasion. Everything would be perfect—if his own staff were here. If he needed delicately hint at something, his staff would talk to house staff, or to any other lord’s staff, and miracles would happen, appointments would turn up, protocols would be settled, and he would never hear about the difficulties.

His staff being up on the station, he now had to think about such details, down to finding clean socks. And the paidhi’s odd-sized wardrobe, at the moment, consisted of a single change of clean formal clothes packed into a soft traveling bag that had been tossed onto fishy ice, thrown down into dirt, bounced around a bus, tied onto a mecheita, tossed into this room, and shoved against a baseboard during last night’s armed assault. What he had worn yesterday was a total loss. The pale trousers were brown with dirt about the seat and knees, black with soot, and stained with blood, not to mention ripped from fence wire and branches. His cold-weather coat, no cleaner than the trousers, was ripped by the selfsame wire the length of the lower arm. His white, lace-cuffed shirt, where the coat had not covered it, was stained with every substance possible to find in the landscape, not to mention human and atevi blood. His boots had a seam parting along the right toe, in addition to the scuffs and mud.

As it was, he decided if Tabini was not going to be available and if no printer was to be had, he should put his computer back into the hiding place that had protected it through the attack—they had no way of knowing at what time another alarm might sound—and see what he could do about the clothing situation on his own. Jago certainly wasn’t his valet, and his security staff had enough on their hands.

Hefting the light computer case back up into its safe place hurt.

Getting into his baggage on the floor and searching into the tangled mess of clothing inside discovered splinters in his palms he had not yet found. And the clean shirt he pulled out of the duffle was, as he had foreseen, by no means ready to wear. The lace had gone mostly limp. The body was more than rumpled: it had pressed-in wrinkles.

The remaining spare trousers likewise showed fold and crumple marks.

But they were at least clean. He found clean underwear. And socks. He got up and hung the clothes in the closet, which he should have thought to do yesterday, and began, stupidly, to strip off what he was wearing, right there in the bedroom, as he would have done on the ship.