Текст книги "Pretender"
Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh
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Научная фантастика
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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 20 страниц)
Down, then, down the public stairway as fast as he could manage it, which was far less fast than Jago could have done it, but he was only a little to the rear as they hit the main floor and met a gaggle of alarmed staff, all asking what it had been and whether a boiler had blown up.
Jago grabbed his arm and hauled him away from Tatiseigi’s people, ignoring their questions, pulling him toward the lower stairs. They went down again, down to a pale stucco hall, plainly lit, punctuated by a long series of doors, some open– servants’ territory, the underbelly of the stately home. He thought they would go to one of those rooms and find Banichi, but Jago jogged right past all such choices, down the whole length of the hall.
“Outside,” she said, not even out of breath, as they reached a short stairway. It led up again, to an exterior security door, the sort that was usually alarmed.
It was ajar at the moment, with a rock holding it open. A sliver of night showed at its edge before Jago elbowed that door open, and they exited into the dark, the two of them, emerging right by the end of the hedge and the newly restored stable fence.
Jago turned right, along the side of the house by the hedge-rimmed path, and onto the floodlit drive, where the buses had cleared back a little and rendered themselves a wall of defense.
Beyond that next hedge, across the drive, was the Taibeni camp and their mecheiti—that was where he thought they were going, but Jago drew him left, along the row of buses, passing one after the other.
Off to the distant left, an engine coughed to life, down toward the meadow. The plane, he thought. Rejiri.
His breath came hard now, and the light and shadow jolted and jagged in his blurring vision. They ran along the drive, weaving through the crowd that had gathered, and dodging more questions: “What happened at the house? Was it the Kadagidi?”
It had not been the Kadagidi attacking, he was sure of that. It was most likely the Guild they were fighting, and God and Jago only knew what they were running from or to. Blood had been spilled, possibly to get them out of the house—and to get Tabini out, he hoped above all else, all their lives depending on that one life. He was sure whatever was going on, staff was communicating, Jago doing exactly what she and Banichi had agreed had to be donec She dived among the trees, then drew him past the tail ends of two buses and a truck, and into full shadow and brush, then past a thorn thicket. He hoped to stop just there and catch his breath.
No such luck. Jago kept going at a steady jog, seizing him by the arm as the going got rough. She kept him moving and directed him deep among the trees of the little decorative copse.
“I can follow you,” he gasped, out of breath. “Go, Jago-ji.”
No question, no protest from her. She trusted him to run, and kept going.
Meanwhile the plane buzzed over their heads, headed south.
South. Toward the heart of the country.
That would be Tabini, he hoped, Tabini, and maybe it was the prevailing wind that indicated south rather than east. Maybe the plane would turn, veering off to the mountains, to safety. Rejiri would do anything in his power to keep the symbol of their resistance safe, but that plane only held three people at most, and that meant if Damiri was in that third seat, no bodyguard was going with them—safest, maybe.
Or a decoy? Was Tabini somewhere out in these woods, running the way they were running?
His legs ached. His side ached, breath a knife in his ribs, and still Jago kept jogging on in near silence, repositioning both of them to some refuge, it might be—someplace to wait for the rest of the team. He could hardly hear past his own breathing, and beyond them rose a tumult of shouted questions in the driveway, compounded with the bawling of mecheiti across the hedges. He was all but blind in the dark. Atevi hearing and atevi eyesight guided them, and he kept in Jago’s tracks, trusting her utterly.
After that one explosion there had not been one intimation of hostile action in return. What proceeded, proceeded stealthily beneath the confusion of the general assemblage, stealthy as his and Jago’s exit from the building, their dive aside into this grove of ancient trees.
She stopped near the edge of the copse, the farther meadow and part of the line of buses visible through the trees, and there she stood listening. Bren found himself a tree to lean against, fought to quiet his breathing, and not to cough or move at all, rustling about the leaf litter. The least sound might mask any untoward approach she was listening for. There might be any number of Guild Assassins loose out here. And here he stood in a pale, easily-seen court coat, trying to blend in with the trees. The shirt he wore underneath the coat was no better. He wished he’d at least stolen the bedspread. A curtain. Anything to wrap in, to mask the pallor of his skin and his dress.
A soft chirr sounded, off in the brush. Jago answered it. A moment later, a shadow slipped like a soft breeze through the woods and joined them. Tano, then another shadow: Algini, Bren was sure—he was vastly relieved to find them safe, but he was greatly concerned when another moment failed to produce Banichi.
He dared not say a thing or ask a question, least of all to Jago.
Suddenly he felt a heavy leather jacket whipped between him and the tree, enveloping his shoulders in its protective darkness. A push at his arm, a signal to move, and he hitched the strap of the computer high on his shoulder, hooked his free arm into the black coat, and struggled not to lose it in the brush as he ducked and followed Jago, Tano, and Algini behind him. The coat was warm, hot, even, in the general chill of night air. It weighed like lead, which it all but was—body armor against a stray shot, and his having it around his shoulders meant one of his team was working without protection at the moment.
Their course through the edge of the trees veered more and more toward the right, until they paralleled the end of the cobbled drive, where it became the unpaved road from the west gate.
Questions welled up, all but choking him, life and death questions about Tabini’s welfare, about Banichi, about Ilisidi and Cajeiri, and others’ whereabouts, after that groundshaking explosion—and he dared not distract his bodyguard with chatter. Were there other Assassins actively on their trail? Was Banichi coming? He hoped Tabini had been in that plane, that it had eventually banked toward the east, toward the long meadows near the mountains, where a plane could land.
Or maybe Rejiri would fly his passenger all the way west to Dur, which had hiding places aplenty, not to mention boats– or with that plane, he could even fly Tabini to Mospheira, where a shuttle crew was prepping for a return flight to the station: He had never proposed that course of action to Tabini– he had never had the chance to pose it as a choice. But Tabini surely knew that he would be safe to go to Mospheira, that he would have a welcome there from President Tyers, and he had surely gathered from the dowager that the shuttle was waiting there on an airstrip. If Tabini got up to the station, he had Lord Geigi and all the atevi aloft to rally around him, and the radio to make contact with his supporters on the ground, with Mospheiran help. If Tabini got up there and took power, there was no way in all the world for his enemies to reach him, ever, and he would be there to meet any trouble that camec But it seemed to him now that the noise of that plane had tailed off into the distance, still on a southward course.
South, toward Shejidan.
Chilling. Blood-chilling.
And he knew Tabini’s disposition, that running from a fight was the last thing Tabini would ordinarily choose. Tabini had run from Taiben coastward only when he’d been hit by surprise and had no choice. He’d had his chance then to cross the straits to Mospheira and gain help from the heavens.
Clear enough that he wouldn’t do it this time, either.
6
They waited in the woods, in a small parcel of dark—himself, Jago, Tano, and Algini, who breathed or moved gently, nothing more.
They stayed isolated from the larger, noisier dark out on the road, where voices disputed in high passion, vehicle doors slammed, and mecheiti groaned and protested. The noise of the plane had long vanished, and still the commotion out on the driveway persisted.
A shiver started up again. Bren pressed his hands against his legs, trying to still the tremors—he was cold by now, at least his legs were, while his upper body sweltered under the borrowed bulletproof jacket. He didn’t ask where Banichi was, or where Tabini was. He was resolved not to interfere with his bodyguard, no matter what.
But he saw Jago check her watch. That was the most hopeful thing. He saw the shadows that were Algini and Tano do the same, all of them privy to some forthcoming event that the paidhi didn’t know, and desperately wished he did.
A soft movement stirred the brush, not the gusting wind, he thought, and he eased his hand past the jacket, into his own coat pocket, where he had the gun and the clip. Clearly his bodyguard had heard that noise, their hearing being far more acute than his.
Bus engines had started up and another near them now coughed to life, momentarily deafening the night. More voices rose from that direction, some sort of excitement or confusion.
He couldn’t make out the shouted words above the engine noise.
He wondered if people were having second thoughts about their gesture of support, if they were going to desert Lord Tatiseigi, or if Tatiseigi himself had had second thoughts about holding out here at Tirnamardi.
No. Hell would freeze over before Tatiseigi abandoned the historic premises to Kadagidi looters.
More and more vehicle engines started, until the racket on the drive drowned their hearing and the lights blinded them to the deeper dark.
A whistle sounded near them then, low and perfectly audible above the noise. Bren’s heart leaped up. Jago whistled back, and a shadow joined them.
Banichi was back—Banichi and several other accompanying shadows whose identity Bren didn’t guess and didn’t venture to ask.
Shadow-signals passed, in too dim a light for human eyes, but enough, clearly, for his bodyguard to communicate, possibly even to recognize faces.
And Banichi was safe and had brought reinforcements with him.
Thank God.
Might one be Tabini, and the airplane a diversion? None were tall enough.
“Come,” Jago said, and a grip on his arm rescued him immediately as he foolishly caught his foot in a root and nearly fell flat on his face. Jago settled the jacket back onto his shoulder. He forged ahead, trying to keep an atevi pace, blind in the dark. Jago, who could see, cued him with pressure on his arm where to dodge an obstacle, steered him through a gap in the hedge where headlamps blazed and trucks and buses loomed up like strange lumpish beasts. Fumes from their engines stung the ordinarily pristine air, hazing the light like fog.
Banichi took the lead of their group, and slipped through the gap between two buses. Headlamps threw him into distinction for a moment. Those few newcomers with him—illumined for the instant in the lights—proved to be Taibeni, and one other who looked like one of Tatiseigi’s security staff. Bren sucked in his breath and kept with Jago, moving quickly in the lights and feeling like a pale-skinned prime target as she directed him on Banichi’s track, around into the second lane of vehicles.
Banichi had stopped by a bus door, holding the mounting rail and, the moment Jago brought him up, Banichi seized Bren’s arm and propelled him up the three towering, atevi-sized steps onto the deck.
Bren stumbled onto the last step, used a push of his hand on the flooring and a snatch at the passenger rail to haul himself aboard.
Another hand seized his shoulder and hauled him into the aisle as the rest of his team clambered up after him, their strength and weight rocking the bus, which, unlike others, sat dark and quiet, its aisle and its occupants all in shadow.
“Nand’ Bren!” a young voice exclaimed—a voice he knew as well as he knew the dowager’s. Cajeiri was aboard. And the bus seats—headlamps of other vehicles provided a glow through the windows, enough, at least, for outlines and shadows—filled with passengers, might contain the Taibeni youngsters, at least, if not the dowager herself—he expected her, and Cenedi, and the men he knew.
“Here,” that high young voice said, and a hand reached across the back of an empty seat, patting it—a whole vacant bench seat in an otherwise crowded bus. Doubtless the young folk had preserved it for him. He set a knee in the seat and strained his eyes forward, searching among those standing in the aisle, concerned to make sure all his own bodyguard had made it aboard—whatever this hurry meant, wherever they were about to go.
To the mountains, maybe. To safety—masked by all this to-do, this shifting of pieces on the board.
A shadow loomed above him. A heavy hand rested on his shoulder. He sensed rather than saw Banichi’s presence shutting out the light from that direction.
“Are you all right?” he asked Banichi as he heard the bus door shut.“Where are we going, Banichi-ji?”
“To Shejidan,” Banichi said.
“The Guild officers,” he began.
“They and theirs are no longer a concern,” Banichi reported.
Not a concern. Just that. There had surely been fatalities in that explosion—fatalities that encompassed the self-proclaimed highest leadership of Banichi’s own Guild—not men they supported, but not easy men to take down, all the same.
And the Assassins who might have come onto the grounds with that pair? Disposed of, just like that?
One noted that they still weren’t turning lights on inside this particular bus. A handful of other vehicles were lit up inside, interior lights recklessly blazing out into the night, while ordinary folk, townsmen and others, got to their seats in what one could only take as a general departure of the massed vehicles.
“Sit down, Bren-ji,” Banichi advised him. “We shall be moving in a moment.”
Shejidan, Banichi had said. All of them, evidently, were headed straight into confrontation.
Banichi left him. He subsided into the seat next to the window.
He had not seen Tano and Algini board, but he was convinced by now that his entire contingent had made it onto the bus, though there were only shadows and occasional profiles to tell him soc seated as he was, and with the backs of heads to look past, he saw one profile that looked very much like Tano talking to one he was sure was Jago.
The red and blue taillights of the bus in front of theirs flared to life, and white light stabbed rear to front of their bus, the headlamps of the bus behind. It was indeed Tano, without his jacket. Algini was with him. Thank God.
In that moment a human-sized form slipped around the end of the seat and scrambled in beside him, breathless and excited, a young hand catching at his arm. “Nand’ Bren! Did you hear how someone blew up the Guild officers?”
“One understands that to be the case, young sir.” He schooled his voice to evenness and dignity, appalled, even so, by the enthusiasm in that young voice. “Is your great-grandmother aboard?”
“Up there,” Cajeiri said, pointing, one thought, to the bus ahead of them “Papa said we should not all be together in the same vehicle, in case of bombs.”
“A very good idea, one is sure.” But not a good idea in public relations, dammit, to put the heir so publicly into the paidhi’s care.
A shiver ran through him. Bren worked his fingers, trying to drive out the night chill that had his hands like ice, trying at the same time to render his breaths even and composed and, thinking that the boy knew far more than he did: “Do you know if we are going to the train station, or just where, young sir?”
“We think we shall go all the way to Shejidan.”
“Do roads even go there?”
“Except a very short bit in the south, which Cenedi thinks we can cross with no trouble. Uncle Tatiseigi has a whole book of maps!”
Thinks we can cross, echoed in Bren’s head, as he numbly braced his computer next to him in the seat, an armrest on the left, against the wall. A book of maps, probably the very finest, most expensive, fifty years ago.
No trouble, is it? He was more than dubious about the information. Shejidan? Not likely, he said to himself.
Cajeiri got up on his knees on the seat and turned around to exclaim to his young bodyguard, “Have you the packets with our breakfast, Gari-ji? The paidhi will be very hungry.”
The paidhi’s stomach was upset. Breakfast was very far from his mind, but a packet came forward, and Cajeiri handed him a fruit bar, taking another for himself.
And no sooner had the boy gotten up on his knees again to lean on the seat back than the bus ahead of them started to move, slowly lumbering forward.
That seemed to indicate that other buses in line ahead of it were moving, but how they advanced any distance at all in that direction, considering the complete fender-to-fender jam-up in the hedged driveway, Bren was far from sure. Cajeiri twisted back forward and plumped down in his appropriated seat.
The bus ahead of them turned where Bren was sure there was no turn, right into the hedge, as happened, a parting insult to the manicured planting that had separated the drive from the Taibeni camp.
Their own turn followed, broken hedge branches scraping the sides and bottom of their bus as they ground, lurched, and bumped their way over the roots.
Then it was soft lawn. The Taibeni must be on the move, camp struck, mecheiti all moved out. Their bus gathered speed, following a line of taillights that snaked ahead in the dark, a line of about two dozen or so buses and trucks.
“Where is your father at the moment, young sir?” Bren asked Cajeiri. It was one of those things which ordinarily they might not be supposed to know, but if the boy did know, the knowledge was on this bus already.
“He flew!” Cajeiri said, and did one imagine within that awe a profound indignation that he had been left behind? “Cenedi made up nine gasoline bombs out of wine bottles!– and papa went with nand’ Rejiri, and they are going to drop them on the Kadagidi if they come at us while we move.”
My God, he thought, bombs from airplanes were illegal as hell—and he could no longer restrain himself, no matter the bus was bouncing over the turf in a general advance back toward the hedge and the road. He got to his feet, holding to the seat in front of him, eased his way past Cajeiri, and holding to other seat backs as the bus bucked and jolted over the turf, he searched faces and forms in the dim, diffused light of headlamps behind and taillights ahead. They were passing the estate boundary, crossing past the open gate, and turning off south, he was sure it was south. Toward the train station.
“Jago-ji.” He identified her standing in the aisle with Banichi, and she obligingly moved a few steps back to him, bracing herself against the seat on the other side of the aisle.
“Is the aiji indeed flying with Rejiri, Jago-ji?” he asked. “Are they planning to bomb the Kadagidi?”
“Only if they need to, nandi. Only if we come under attack. Such an action is hardly kabiu.”
To say the least. “Do they hope that they can actually land in the capital?”
“By no means, at this moment, nandi. But the young man seems quite skilled at finding landing places in open territory.”
The young man in question had a notorious history of seat-of-the-pants flying. One could only envision some pasturage, some meadow which would set Tabini and the boy alone, with nine—fortunate nine!—damned wine bottles full of petrol, somewhere far removed from help, after making enough noise to alert enemies from half a dozen townships.
“What are we doing, meanwhile?” he asked. “What do we hope to do?”
“We shall go to the capital ourselves,” Jago said. “The paidhi must go.They are calling the legislature, Bren-ji.”
The legislature, in whom there had been, within the day, an outbreak of acute sore throat. A body which had defied a summons from Murini. But Tabini believed it would answer him and come in.
“How has he called them, Jago-ji? Are we public, on the air?” To do anything involving general broadcast would set the whole country in an upheaval—and he had no idea how they would do that.
“We have our means,” Jago said, that we almost certainly encompassed immediate company, her partner, her hijacked Guild, and electronics to which outsiders had no access. They were matters into which prudent outsiders were not supposed to inquire, and into which he had by no means meant to trespass, God help them all. It meant they were not broadcasting for general hearing, and it meant there was far less chance Mospheira knew what was happening right now. It was, as far as a roaring great column of buses could be, a clandestine advance.
“But the Guild officers,” he began, still aching for information, any small bit she could give him. “Have they gotten out a message?”
“These persons were so imprudent as to lodge in an upstairs room in an ancient and hostile building. These historic houses are barrel vault upon barrel vault and massively built—precision in such matters is quite possible.”
“Were we in an upstairs room, nadi!”
A tone of amused shock. “But, Bren-ji, we never allowed enemies to occupy the room beneath us!”
Tatiseigi would have an apoplexy about his missing floor, was all he could think for the moment. The enormity of what his staff had done, in terms of assassinating Guild representatives—perhaps Guild leadership—he could hardly grasp. But no message to Shejidan had gone, it seemed; clandestine hardly described them, and certain forces were likely scrambling to meet their challenge.
And the Guild officers were dead. If the two had imagined that they had actually installed any proper precautions in the room below them, if they had had confidence in the man’chi of someone within the house, in the Atageini staff or otherwise to aid and abet their movements– Clearly someone had prevented those particular precautions from moving into position in the room below. His staff seemed extraordinarily well-briefed on what had happened, even smug, if he could read Jago’s tone.
And he knew their ways. He knew that Banichi had no inclination to be the second man into an action he could much better direct, or to take a purely defensive position when someone aimed at their lives. Neither was Cenedi so inclined, nor was the dowager he served—Tatiseigi might have hesitated, even Tabini might have paused to consider. But the only likely argument between Cenedi and Banichi after two years of running operations together would have been which of them moved first.
The Guild officers, the biggest threat to come at them directly from Murini’s side, hadn’t even made it to supper.
And what did Banichi do next? Now what did one possibly do, when one had blown up one’s own officers, and was running buses full of farmers into the capital?
At the moment he felt inclined to sink down into the nearest seat and let his stomach settle, but his own seat was a few rows back, and the nearest was occupied, like most of the seats, by an ordinary provincial, a man in a rough canvas jacket, with a hunting rifle in callused hands. The type was everywhere. In all those buses. Tabini was in the airplane, and Banichi and Cenedi were calling the shots, never mind Tabini’s personal bodyguard.
He was suddenly overwhelmed by the scale of it. By the force of what they had launched.
“You should sit down, Bren-ji,” Jago said.
“This is a war we bring, Jago-ji.” Atevi society had known no open warfare since the War of the Landing—skirmishes, yes; civil unrest, yes; sniping between bodyguards of lords in conflict, constantly—but not a conflict that swept up every clan on the continent, flagrantly involving bystanders. Not involving middle-aged men with hunting rifles.
And assassinating Guild officers, the Guild being supposedly the keepers of the law and the peace, the impartial, every-sided court of appealc impartiality and fairness had clearly gone by the board; so had legally mandated support for the sitting aiji. But his staff had delivered an answer for it.
“Bren-ji?”
“Do we hope simply to drive all the way into Shejidan, Jago-ji?”
“Perhaps.” Far too lightly.
“Or are we going to the train station?”
“We refuel there, nandi, at the station pump.”
“And the Guild? Are they moving against us?”
“We have moved to convince certain forces within the Guild, persons of certain man’chi, nandi—that Gegini was no fit leader.”
Not from the grave, he wasn’t, that was quite clear.
Cenedi and Banichi. Extravagant action, high and wide action, of a sort subordinates didn’t undertake on their own.
It was not just to protect him, he thought. It was much beyond that. Banichi and Jago had been Tabini’s staffers before they were his. In the nature of things, there always was one higher man’chi that overrode what they owed to him.
So had Tabini appropriated them? Given them such an order? Or had the dowager herself?
And coordinated it, dammit all. The echoes of that explosion had hardly died before Tabini was airborne, headed into trouble ahead of them, precipitating this flood of buses and trucks.
Follow, Tabini was saying to all who had ever followed him—irresistible as the mecheiti leader, dashing hellbent for whatever destination, in the echoes of that explosion. Atevi of the Ragi man’chi were feeling more than an emotional tug at their hearts. Their whole being plunged toward that leader, pell mell, an attraction not in his wiring. He might be immune for the hour, capable of a second, critical thought—deciding things on love, that slower, more anguished emotion. But his staff wasn’t wired that way. It was the aiji who’d called, and they’d moved. Ruthlessly, comprehensively, without consulting himc dammit.
“The aiji ordered you,” he said to Jago. “Did he? He didn’t rely on his own security.”
Jago’s hand closed on his wrist. “We may die in this effort, Bren-ji. And our Guild resists emotional decisions. But this time, yes, we are obliged to go.”
“The paidhi is likewise obliged,” he said, closing his hand atop hers, a contact atevi ordinarily did not invite or accept. “We humans have our own feelings. We understand.” He did. Tabini had called in a debt, drafted his staff, the dowager’s, his own. They could get killed. But if it was the time to do it, if his staff was going, then he damned sure was. “Are the Atageini going into this on the same grounds? Are they solidly with us?”
“They must,” Jago said, and it made sense. Tatiseigi’s historic premises now had suffered at least two rooms in utter wreckage, the upstairs premises and the room immediately below, not to mention the lily foyer, the stables, and the driveway hedge.
Ridiculous items on the surface—but a matter of Atageini sovereignty.
Add to the stack of circumstances, the self-claimed Guild-master was dead within an hour of his arrival under Tatiseigi’s roof—it could be argued it had been about an hour short of their own intention to assassinate Tabini—a first strike against Ragi power, but the Atageini had been the site of the response, and they had had to make a fast decision.
As Murini had been prepared to make. His own shaken wits informed him that if Guild had come in to assassinate Tabini, it was not going to be the final blow, and it was not going to stop any time soon. There was much, much more intended.
Tatiseigi had had no choice but become involved—the epicenter of the event, exposed to any outrage, beginning with that Guild intrusion, and expanding to every alliance the old man had. The old man had seen it come over the horizon when the dowager had showed up at his gates. Murini had sent in the Kadagidi, Tabini had moved in immediately after with his counterrevolution, the Guild had come in next to take Tabini out in a finessed strike, one that would leave the dowager alive, for her unique value to national stability, and no one had ever seemed to care about Tatiseigi in the process—but only one outcome of this whole affair possibly led to Tatiseigi’s grand-nephew being in supreme power over the aishidi’tat, and he wasn’t letting events pass him by this time.
An entire lifetime of evading conflict until the dust was already settling, a lifetime of being moderately obstructionist to Tabini’s modernization policy, and suddenly Tatiseigi was taking his whole province to war behind Tabini-aiji to put him back in power.
He found his way back to his seat, Cajeiri meanwhile kneeling and talking volubly to his two young escorts, who held the seat behind. Cajeiri turned around as Bren eased past that obstruction and sat down in his own place next to the window.
“The other buses are supposed to keep this bus on the inside,”
Cajeiri informed him. “So snipers will have no targets. But we should keep our heads down if shooting starts, nand’ paidhi, Nawari said so, because it will be very heavy guns and they could blow this bus to bits.”
Cheerful lad. “Whose bus is this, does one have any notion?
“It belongs to Dur,” Cajeiri said, which was Rejiri’s clan. “The lord of Dur and his bodyguard and the fishers’ association, too, nandi! They came in from the train station while the young lord took the plane! —I know where Dur is,” he added, apropos of nothing about the bus itself. Ilisidi had kept him at his lessons during their flight, and he did know his provinces. “Dur helped mani-ma in previous times.”
“That they did, young sir,” Bren murmured. He had an inner vision of a nightbound coast with fire and smoke on every hand, and an improbable ferryboat plowing in toward the beach at the most critical of moments. ”And so they help her again, for which we all shall remember them with great favor.”
If any of them lived long enough to remember this current madness. But it was what a proper nobleman said, regarding a favor. Favors lived long past the favor-doers. Favors bound the generations together. It was one of those givens, that a house never forgot an obligation. And his house must not—if he could have any progeny. The thought had dawned on him long before this, that this boy came as close as he himself could ask, the child of his teaching, the boy he was going to send into years beyond his reach.
