Текст книги "Pretender"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

“Yes,” Cajeiri said, paying close attention, and Tabini found occasion to touch his son’s cheek, approving– Push and pull of emotions, curious combination of harsh and soft treatment to Bren’s eyes, but the emotional tide in the boy at losing his companions had shifted back again, become a bright-eyed, active observation of his surroundings, his assets, the proper course to follow to gain his father’s approval—one could all but see the wheels turning.

And one knew this boy. He aspired to be a hero. If he got the chance he would do extravagantly brave things, if security or the paidhi didn’t quickly sit on him and keep him out of the line of firec God, how did a human reason with the new spark in those gold eyes, that combination of empowering sacrifice for his own welfare and the heady draft of fatherly approval?

The train slowed for another curve in that moment, as the sun came between buildings. It cast their shadow against a grassy hummock beside the tracks, and showed the shadow of their train, the fluttering transparency of the banner spread above it, the low shapes of persons on the roofs of the cars. People all along could have no doubt who they were, and where they were going.

And still they turned out as the train passed the edge of residential districts with the tunnel looming ahead, men, women, children waving at them, one group with a stick with red and black streamers attached.

A short transit through a parkland. Then a tunnel appeared in the windows, a tunnel, a dual fortification, a gateway that could be closed.

It was not.

Here we go, Bren said to himself, as if preparing for a dive down a snowy mountainside. Here we go. They were remote yet from the Bu-javid: It was the entry to the underground, the common train system that ran through the heart of the city. It would not be the greatest point of danger, unless their opposition cared nothing for casualties.

The tunnel widened to embrace them. They were swallowed up in darkness with only a row of lights in the ceiling to show their way, and those widely spaced. The lights of the engine itself illumined rock and masonry, and the double ribbon of steel that carried them.

The noise changed to an echoing thunder that obscured chance remarks inside the cab.

One hoped the people on the roof were safe. It was certainly not where he would have chosen to ride out this journey.

But if there was to be an obstacle, they and he would be among the first to see it: The engineers would have at least as much warning as the headlamps and radio contact providedc not that there was damned much they could do about it. They were moving much too fast now for his liking, fast enough, he feared, to compact the cab into tinfoil if they met another train on their track.

Whisk—through an urban station, with lights on either side and other tracks, a strangely deserted station, where only a scattered few stood on the platforms watching the train pass. Two other city trains were parked there, and those were dark and eerily empty of passengers.

Whisk—into the dark again. The engineer, underlit by the control panel under his hands, was talking to someone on his headset. One hoped it was good information and good news.

Whisk—through another station, likewise deserted, only this one held a freight train, and a handful of shadows, one of whom waved a lantern, and the train slowed.

Back into the dark, then, more slowly still, swerving—if memory served—exactly where the airport train always swerved, where it switched to the Bu-javid track. In a moment they hit the switch-point, a noisy crash.

Faster and faster, then. They were headed for the Bu-javid depot, now, right up into the restricted track.

Ought we not to proceed with more circumspection? He wanted to ask Jago that, but he had dissuaded Cajeiri from such questions, and found himself biting his lower lip as they began, yes, definitely to climb and then to turn.

“How is the track ahead, nadi?” He finally couldn’t help himself.

“Clear, as far as our report runs, Bren-ji.” Because she knew him, because she knew he was trying to think ahead, she added: “The floors above are at present another matter.”

Murini hadn’t pulled out all his supporters. Perhaps Murini had gone, and left them to take the heat—but it would not be easy.

Granted one could believe the reports of where Murini was any more than one could rely on those about Tabini.

Whisk. Another lighted space, with no trains at all, only deserted platforms, amber-lit in the gloom, empty rails gleaming. He remembered it as the station that carried government employees to the foot of the hill.

And still the train climbed, its speed necessarily reduced by the bends in the track. It was inside the hill.

“The paidhi and the young gentleman should go to the aisle aft now,” Banichi came to them to say. Bren perfectly understood: They were getting close to the main station, that station which served the higher levels of the Bu-javid. If anywhere, this was the place that would be defended. Nobody had thrown a train at them yet, but he would lay no bets now.

“Come, young sir,” Bren said, collecting the boy with an arm about his back. “Let our security do its job.”

“I have a gun,” Cajeiri announced, this boy scantly eight.

“Keep it in your pocket,” Bren said, “as I do mine. If you draw it, you will immediately strike an enemy eye as a threat, and you will attract bullets to both of us, vastly annoying our bodyguards.”

“I want to fight!”

“Not even your father wants to fight, young sir, nor do I. Let us stand here at the start of the hallway, and not be in the way of those whose business it is to protect us. That is our best service.”

“My father is up there!”

That he was, right up near the windows, which security would not like, but there was damned little arguing with Tabini at this moment. The headlights of the train picked out rough-hewn rock in their distant view of the windshield.

Then smooth concrete, and always that row of lights along the top of the tunnel—lights dimmed to insignificance in the blaze of fire that burst ahead of them. The whole train shook, and kept going through a sheet of fire, right on to the white flare of artificial light that dawned in the windshield.

Multiple tracks, the broad platforms for freight and passengers, cars on the siding and another train engine apparently moving, but on another track, headed out.

Home, the station from which he’d left on every journeyc and seen now through the windshield of an engine cab bristling with firearms, a vantage on the place he’d never in his life imagined to have. The whole Bu-javid was above their heads now, the hill, the capital, the center of Sheijidan and the aishidi’tat.

The train slowed, hissed, squealed to a halt, and suddenly a fracture appeared in the windshield glass, silent, compared to the scream of the brakes. No one even ducked—only one of Tabini’s guard stepped between him and the window, and at Bren’s elbow, Cajeiri moved forward.

“Do not have the gun out, young sir,” Bren said, grabbing a coat sleeve and wishing he could confiscate that deadly item from immature hands. “Keep your head down.”

“But—” from Cajeiri, and at that moment Jago stepped near and seized Bren’s arm. He seized Cajeiri’s in turn, and took him where Jago led, which was back into the short corridor, and, bending low under the window, toward the door and the ladder down to the outside.

Out the door then, into the echoing cavern of the terminal and the reek of smoke and explosives in the station.

Jago stopped them half a breath—they were not the first out on that short steel platform: Banichi was. Banichi went down the ladder to the track itself.

“I shall follow you very closely, Jago-ji,” Bren said at her back.

“Use both hands for yourself, if you please.”

“Yes,” Jago said shortly, and dived down after Banichi.

It was relatively quiet, given the noise from the idling engine right at their backs, given, Bren thought, the pounding of his own heart, which he swore was keeping time with the train and just as loud. Two deep breaths on that little nook of a platform. Banichi’s whistled signal pierced the ambient noise.

“We shall go down and to the right,” Jago said, “along by the wheels, then up onto the platform. Follow.”

She moved, instantly, and Banichi was out of sight. “Stay with me,” he said to Cajeiri, and scrambled after Jago, down the atevi-scale ladder, down beside the massive driving wheels. Jago moved ahead of them, staying low, below the concrete lip of the platform, and Bren saw Banichi was up ahead, where a straight steel maintenance ladder led up to the main level. Banichi set a foot on it, reversed his rifle, and put the butt up above his head.

Fire spattered back, missing entirely.

“They are not Guild,” was Jago’s acid comment.

Not Guild. Banichi had ducked down and moved down the trackside, evidently on the hunt. Fire was echoing out from the top of the train.

“Stay here,” Jago said, about to backtrack, and about that time fire broke out from behind them, from up on car level, about where Ilisidi’s car was. Fire came from the windows as well as the top of the cars, directed at what, Bren had no idea. His mind supplied the broad panorama of the Bu-javid terminal, where a loading dock and broad passenger platform ran side by side in the large artificial cavern, with its pillars and buttresses. About fifty meters from the passenger terminal, a handful of freight and business offices, their very walls part of a massive pillar that went up several stories, and about twenty meters beyond that, a rock wall and the inset of a bank of lifts that went straight up into the offices and residences of the Bu-javid itself, doors tastefully enameled in muted tones, themselves an artwork—not to mention the several tapestries and the vases, designed to provide passengers tranquility and pleasant views, before the bustle and hurry of the trains.

Fire rattled out and richocheted off the train engine over their heads. More fire came from right above them, out the windows of the cab, and presumably their people on the roofs of the train had not stayed any longer to be targets—were likely either down within the train or had gotten off onto the platform immediately as they came in and moved out. The whole cavern resounded with gunfire, first in one direction and then another, and he had lost sight of Banichi in one direction and suddenly missed Jago in the other.

They had left him—left him altogether, which they rarely did. She was off down the trackside.

His job was to stay low and stay out of trouble, and this he was resolved to do. “Come,” he said to Cajeiri, spotting a nook beside the massive drive wheels, a nook that led right down under the engine itself, a place grimy and black with grease, but a veritable fortress against most anything that might come.

“What if the train should move, nandi?” Cajeiri asked.

“Then lie flat,” he said. But the train had gotten itself into a position at the end of the line, only the roundtable could face it about, and that only after the cars were detached. Their train was not moving, and could not be moved, no matter a deafening explosion that filled the track area with stinging smoke.

Cajeiri moved to get out. Bren grabbed the coat and hauled him back.

“Great-grandmother,” the boy said.

“The aiji-dowager can take care of herself, young sir. Stay with me. Guild is positioning itself out there, and that thick smoke is part of it. This is not the time for us to be wandering loose.”

He could not read the boy’s face in a dark now compounded by thick smoke. Next, Bren thought, the lights might go. But he heard distant shouts, people calling out for someone to move south.

They were certainly not Guild, he said to himself. He maintained one arm about the boy, the other snugging his computer close. The only flaw in his plan that he could see was that his own staff might not realize he had gone to cover, but he had no means to tell them except to use a pocket com, and that might not be prudent—even if they had time to answer a phone call. He heard little short whistles, low and varied in tone—difficult to get a fix where they were, but those were Guild, likely their own Assassins moving and advising one another of their movements in a code that seemed to shift by agreementc much as he had heard it, he recognized only those signals his staff made with the intent he understand.

Boom. And rattle. The ground itself shook. The lights dimmed significantly, not that there was a thing to see from their vantage between the wheels, and meanwhile the smoke had sunk even to low places, stinging the eyes and making his nose run. He blotted at it, and found his calves cramping as he squatted there, not a good thing if they had to run for it.

Someone moved near them. He saw legs, out between the wheels, but the smoke and the shadow obscured identity.

“Bren-ji.”

Jago’s voice.

“Here,” he said, and let go of Cajeiri’s coat. The boy crawled out ahead of him, and he exited on eye level with Jago, who leaned on a rifle, kneeling on the end of a wooden tie beside the rail.

“We are making progress,” Jago said. “We have secured the platform. Forces are moving up inside the Bu-javid itself, level by level. The Guild has concentrated its efforts.”

“On which side?” he was constrained to ask.

“Tabini-aiji has taken possession of the Bu-javid,” was Jago’s answer, wrapped in the obscurity the Guild favored. “And Murini is confirmed to have left the airport, by air.”

No damned specific information about the Guild, not even from Jago, not so the human mind could gather it.

“We are winning,” he paraphrased her.

“Baji-naji,” she answered him, that atevi shrug, and said then, “we have to move.”

Something else blew up, shaking the concrete walls of the trackside. Jago pushed him into motion, and Bren grabbed Cajeiri’s sleeve and shoved him ahead in the stinging smoke.

Where are we going? it occurred to him to ask. But they reached the short upward ladder, and Jago shoved them aside to go first, taking it in three moves, a rifle swinging from her shoulder.

Bren shoved Cajeiri up next, and followed right up against him, pushing the boy over the rim as Jago seized first Cajeiri and then him, dragging them into motion. Smoke was thicker above, stinging their eyes. Shapes—support columns, pieces of equipment, baggage trucks, moving figures—appeared like shadows and vanished again in haze. They crossed the broad platform, running toward the central lifts, from which the whole space of the station fanned out.

There were shouts, whistles, and they dodged around a column.

Are we going upstairs? Going up into the heart of the Bu-javid seemed to Bren a dangerous proposition, to put themselves into the fragile mechanism of the lift system, the towering shafts an easy target for sabotage. He was not anxious to do that, but he was not about to protest anything Jago thought necessary.

The wall and the bank of lifts came up at them, a darker gray in the smoke, and several shadows by it—these were surely allies: Jago had her rifle in hand, and did not raise it. Whistles sounded.

Jago answered in kind, short and sharp, and they reached the carpeted vicinity of the lifts themselves.

“Nandi.” Tano was there. So, for that matter, was Tabini-aiji, with his guard. Tabini snatched his son into his care, welcome event. Bren bent over, catching his breath, wiping his eyes. Lights were at half. Such lights as there were lit blazed in the high overhead like multiple suns in fog, contributing a milky glow aloft, but no distinction to the shadowy figures out across the terminal platform.

“We are going up,” he heard. It was Tabini’s voice, leaving no doubt that was exactly what they would be doing.

No one protested, not even the aiji’s security. A door opened in the wall, a clearer light shining within, where there was no smoke—and it was not the lifts Tabini proposed to take, but the emergency stairs, Bren sawc emergency stairs, atevi-scale, and the highest climb in all of Shejidan.

Guildsmen pressed their way into the stairwell slightly ahead of Tabini, and the rest of them were clearly going with Tabini, affording no time for questions, no time, either, to ask where Banichi was, or Tano or Algini, none of whom were immediately in sight. Jago pushed Bren and the boy up metal stairs that resounded with the thunder of climbers above them.

Up and up the steps, three landings that had no exit, a space occupied only by the height of the station roof, a fourth landing, where several Assassins stood waiting to wave them on up and up.

Bren found his legs burning, his heart pounding—Jago had the weight of the rifle, a sidearm, and ammunition, and he could only manage the computer and his pistol, himself, with the atevi-scale steps and a body that had spent the last couple of years sitting far, far too much. The rest of their force climbed behind them—he dared not slow them down, so he sweated and climbed, while his vision went hazy and his breath tore through his throat.

He bumped Jago hard when, at a landing, they reached an abrupt stop. He couldn’t see, couldn’t catch his breath, everything gone to tunnel vision. He heard Cajeiri ask him was he all right, and he couldn’t get breath enough to answer, only bent, leaning on a safety rail, the computer a leaden weight on his shoulder, but he had it, he had the heavy pistol in his pocket—that had not fallen out; and Cajeiri patted his back, exhorting him to breathe.

Then Jago’s free arm came around him, warm leather, great strength, absolute concern. He managed to straighten his back, then to get the edges of a real breath and center his haze of vision on an open door.

Tabini and his guard occupied that doorway. There were figured carpets in clear light. Paneled walls. He didn’t know precisely what floor it was, but maybe the first of the residential levels, above that of the courts and the legislature. He heard shots, somewhere down that hall, thought incongruously, hazily, of that fragile paneling.

“We are in, Bren-ji,” Jago said, heaving at him. “One is sure the aiji’s forces are ahead of us.”

Beat and beat and beat. The heart had survived it. Cajeiri was safe. Bren flung his other arm around Cajeiri’s shoulders, and Cajeiri’s came about his heaving ribcage, and there was nothing for it but to walk, Jago with her rifle at the ready.

They passed the door. And there, blessed sight, Banichi stood, rifle in hand, and Algini next to him, giving directions, waving them down what was, yes, the first level corridor, a place of priceless handwoven runners, carved plinths supporting ancient porcelains.

“We are clearing the upper floors, nandi,” Banichi said. “The adherents of the Kadagidi have not generally stayed to meet us.”

Bren wanted to sit down on the spot. His legs all but tried to do so on their own, but he locked his knees and kept his feet under him. “Very good,” he managed to say, the first thing he had gotten out of his throat. He had no sight of Tabini or his guard at the moment. Jago drew him on down the hall, with Cajeiri, until they reached a small conversational area, with an incongruous bouquet of flowers in a low vase on a table, everything kabiu, everything in meticulous order, as a rattle of shots went off somewhere down the hall.

He didn’t sit down. He thought if he should sit down, he wouldn’t get up. He stood leaning against the paneled wall, his eyes darting in the direction of the gunfire, which had ceased.

Jago watched that direction, too, and all others, until a Guild Assassin trotted down the corridor toward them, with no hostile intent evident.

“We have the lifts,” that woman said, and Jago made a move with her rifle, signaling they should go now.

They jogged back the way the woman had come, down past the door they had used, and on around the corner. The majority of their party was there, Tabini in the lead.

And shots exploded off the wall in a shower of plaster and stone fragments. Bren began to reach for his gun, but a body hit him and Cajeiri at once, a black leather jacket up against his face, his back against the wall, Cajeiri next to him: Jago had covered them both, and he felt her body jolt hard, heard an intake of breath.

“Jago-ji!”

She spun about against them and let off a burst of fire, her muscles jumping to the recoil of the gun she held one-handed. Then the pressure of her weight let up. She stood rock-solid, facing back down the corridor, and now, Bren was able to see, other Guildsmen had taken off back the way they had come, to secure it against any advance.

“Jago, you were hit.”

“Bruised, nandi.” She swung about and herded them both into a position sheltered from the corners. Tabini had moved to cover them. The armor inside the jackets, Bren thought. Thank God.

Then Tano showed up in the hall from which they had come, waving an all-clear, and stances relaxed all around. Tabini came back to see to his son, to offer Jago a nod of appreciation which she received tight-lipped, with a bow.

“The Kadagidi staff has asked to remain in their premises, aiji-ma,” one of the Guild reported. “They will admit our personnel as far as the foyer, and plead they have had no contact with their authority and cannot withdraw.”

An unenviable position. Bren feared for his own people.

But there were conventions exempting domestic staff—if there was any staff in that establishment that wasn’t Guild.

“Granted,” Tabini said. “Set a guard on their door and outside their windows.”

And monitor all communications. That went without saying.

Even a human from the Island knew that would happen. He drew two relieved, shaky breaths in succession, knowing where Jago and Tano were, wishing he had a notion where Banichi and Algini had gotten to, or what was going on downstairs.

Then a report came in—he heard half of it—that the buses had reached the heart of the city, and that they were coming toward the hill.

“Mother is coming,” Cajeiri said confidently, in his higher voice.

Mother, and perhaps, if the business downstairs had gone well, great-grandmother and great-uncle would come upstairs and help Tabini restore order. The Guild around them was taking a more relaxed stance, as if what was flowing in electronic communications was reassuring. Bren took the leisure to cast a worried look at Jago, to be sure she had told him the truth: Her face showed a little pain, but she occupied herself entirely with reloading, her dark face utterly concentrating on that, and perhaps on what reached her by the communications unit she had in her ear.

The lift worked. The racket in the shafts near them reported the cars in motion, and Bren had thought they had shut that down.

Bren cast a worried glance in that direction, and at Tabini, who had spared no glance at all for the noise and the sporadic gunfire somewhere downstairs, as if he knew very well what was going on.

The lift passed them, stopped somewhere on the floors above.

“Secure the audience hall,” Tabini said, and that hall was on this floor, the main floor, which communicated with the outside via broad, public stairs, down to the U-shaped road—the road by which the arriving buses might most logically attempt to come in and discharge their passengers.

A pair of Guildsmen moved off in that direction, and vanished around the corner.

Silence then. For several whole breaths there was no racket, no sound of combat. Bren counted off his heartbeats, about the time it would take the Guildsmen—a man and a woman—to reach the public areas.

A door boomed open in a great vacancy, in the empty audience hall, a place ordinarily crowded with petitioners and favor-seekers, and noisy as a train station. It sounded lonely and hopeful now, the beginning of a new authority, the civil government opening its doors again for businessc And doubtless, in the prudent atevi way, any domestic staff or clericals still in the building had taken cover in their own areas, shut doors, locked them, and sat waiting for the Guild to sort out the business of statec sat waiting to be summoned by whoever won the contest and opened such doors.

Tabini gave a wave of his hand. Forward, that gesture said; and it was no time to lag behind. They moved on quickly around the next corner, into the broad public corridor.

The outer doors of the Bu-javid were still shut—the doors that at all hours and in every weather stood open for any citizen to visit the lower halls, to deliver petitions to the offices, to visit bureaus and secretaries, and most of all to deal face to face with their aiji in the public sessions.

“Open the doors,” Tabini said, first of all orders after the opening of the audience hall, and security moved at a run to go unlock those huge doors and shove them open wide—not without a certain readiness of weapons and a cautious look outside.

What came in was the dark of night, and a breeze came with it, a breeze that would clear away the stench of gunfire and smoke, a breeze that stirred the priceless hangings and ran away into the farthest reaches of the floor.

The audience hall stood open and safe. Tabini sent Guildsmen in to join the others, and then walked in himself, the rest of them trailing after. The place was in decent order, give or take a stack of petition documents, heavy with seals and ribbons, that had scattered across the steps of the dais.

“Those will be collected,” Tabini declared, treading a path among them, up the few steps to his proper seat. He would by no means ask Guild staff to do that secretarial business. Petitions were the province of the clerks, who had not yet appeared.

Tabini took his accustomed place. Beckoned, then.

“Go, young sir,” Bren said, urging Cajeiri with a little push, and Cajeiri drew up his shoulders, straightened his rumpled, borrowed coat, and walked the same path as his father, to stand by his chair.

A second time Tabini beckoned, and Bren had the overwhelming urge to look behind him, to see if Tabini meant some other person of note—Tabini would not be so foolish or so downright defiant of criticism as to want him to mount those stairs. He should not. He had to find a way to advise Tabini against it, but could think of none.

Tabini said, definitively, “Nand’ paidhi. Join us.”

There was nothing for it. Bren walked forward, as far as the steps, and there sat down, as he had, oh, so many years ago, when he was only Bren-paidhi, and had represented Mospheira, not the aiji, in Sheijidan. A divorce case, Tabini had been hearing then; and he had been a different man, in that quiet perspective– A man who had had to defend his bedroom against assassins. Or rather, Banichi had had to, that night.

Banichi was not with him now. Jago hung back near the door. He had never felt so publicly exposed and entirely vulnerable.

And he hoped to have done the right thing—not to stand by Tabini on the dais, but to resume his former post. He hoped people reported that. He hoped Tabini would understand what he advised, a restoration of the paidhi’s former status—most of all that he would take that advice, and not shipwreck himself on old policy.

There was a little murmur in the hall. It fell away into a hush.

He could not see Tabini’s face, not at all; but he could see the faces of the crowd. He could see Jago and Tano, and saw that Algini had slipped in by the door to join Tano. He began to worry about Banichi—began to be desperately worried about him. Banichi had never left him so long, in such a moment of danger. He tried to catch a hint from Jago’s face, whether she knew where Banichi was, or whether she was in contact, and he couldn’t read a thing.

Her impassivity far from settled his sense of dread.

“Let them come,” Tabini said. Someone had just said that the bus caravan had passed onto the grand processional way, and that crowds were in the streets, welcoming them and joining them on their route. “The hall will be open, no exceptions.”

It was an incredibly dangerous gesture. It exposed the aiji and his son to potential attack, not necessarily from Guild Assassins, but from some mentally unbalanced person, some furiously angry person who had lost fortune or family. The Presidenta of Mospheira would never dare do such a thing, despite all the Mospheiran tradition of democracy and access to institutions. But that the aiji of Shejidan made that gesture– He was not on the ship, or the station. One thing overrode all questions of security, among atevi, and that was the sense of choice in man’chi. It was the absolute necessity for stable power, that rule not be imposed. There had to be that moment of equilibrium, that choice, baji-naji, life or death; and in that realization of how things must be, Bren felt a certain chill.

People began to trickle into the hall, lords of the aishidi’tat, heads of clan, officials, clericals who had kept the state running while Murini claimed to rule. In each case, they came and bowed and proclaimed their man’chi, and in each case Tabini nodded, asking a secretary, who had quietly appeared among the others, and another diffidently come forward to gather the scattered documents from the steps, to write down the names.

A paper of formal size and thickness was found, a desk was drawn up to its position near the dais, and the second young man, a junior clerical, placed there the petitions that he had gathered from the steps, a formidable stack of parchment, heavy with the ribbons and metal seals that proclaimed the house or district of origin.

There were too many for the single desk. A second table was found, sufficient to hold the rest of them; and in all of this, the first secretary, writing furiously to catch up, made records of the names and house of everyone who had come to the audience, the hour, the date, the vital numbers.

An old man presented himself, a senior servant of the Bu-javid itself, who offered his devotion to the aiji and wished to restore a sense of kabiu to the place, and wished to move the skewed carpet in the middle of the hall, of all things, its pattern again to run toward the steps, as it had tended.