Текст книги "Inheritor"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

He came back happier. Embarrassed, but happier. They rejoined the dowager and Jago, the mechieti having waited quite happily without a boy chasing them. Babsidi came to the dowager’s whistle, and riders sorted the rest out.

The boy from Dur and Jase were the last up, but they managed on their own.

Definitely better, Bren said to himself, safe and lord of all he saw, from Nokhada’s lofty back; and Babsidi started moving, which meant Nokhada had to try to catch him.

He let Nokhada win for a while. Jase was doing well enough back there, and was not slowing them down.

At no time yet had they hit an all-out run: they had mechieti carrying the packs, and that, he began to realize, was the primary reason. But the pace they did strike ate up the ground.

They were going west. And they reached a point that the sun burned into their eyes, and still the mechieti kept that steady gait.

He had shut his eyes to save them pain from the light when a hitch in Nokhada’s rhythm warned him of change ahead, and his eyes flashed open as they topped a low roll of the land.

The horizon had shortened. The land fell away here into golden haze.

The sea stretched out in front of them hardly closer than they’d seen from the plane. Rocky hills across a wide bay were only haze. An island in blued grays rose from the golden sheet of water.

The mechieti stopped as Babsidi stopped, on the rim of the land.

“That’s Dur!” the boy said, and added meekly, in courtesy, “nand’ dowager.”

“That it is,” Ilisidi said, and signaled Babsidi to go down. She was quicker to dismount than Cenedi, snatching her cane from the loop in which she had kept it, and with a hand on Babsidi instead of the cane, waved the stick at the immediate area. “Make camp.”

“What direction are we facing?” Jase asked quietly.

“West. That’s the sun. Remember?”

Jase pointed more directly at the sun, which was slightly to their left, and near a knoll of rock and gravel that shadowed dark against the sun and broke the force of the wind. “That’s west.”

“North.” Bren signaled the direction. “We’re facing west northwest.”

“West north,” Jase said.

“West northwest.”

It wasn’t a concept Jase got easily. But Jase repeated it. “West northwest. Dur to the north and west. Mospheira west. Shejidan is tepid.”

“South. Actually southeast.”

“South,” Jase amended his pronunciation. “East. Can the mechieti go down to the sea?”

“On a road or a trail they can. Trail. Small road.” He didn’t see one at the rim, which looked sheer to his eyes. “But we’ve done enough traveling for the day. Supper. I hope.” In fact the order was going out now to make camp, and he heaved a sigh, feeling a definite soreness that was going to be hell tomorrow.

“She said sit down?” Jase had heard it too.

“Settle for the night, nadi. Camp is the word.” Talking with atevi was a constant battle to have the numbers felicitous. Talking to Jase was a continual questioning of one’s memory on what words Jase knew would carry a thought.

“We go down to the sea in the morning.”

“Nadi, remember manners. Don’t bring up the matter at supper. The dowager gives. She won’t have things demanded of her or she’ll say no. Face.”

Jase was disturbed. But he mended his manners, made his face void of thoughts, and bowed slightly. “Nadi. I shall remember. North. Northwest. South. Southeast. Is there a northeast, nadi?”

“There.” He pointed. “Taiben is in the northeast. Southwest is Onondisi Bay. This water is Nain Bay.”

“I know. It was on the map.”

Nain Bay was on the map. The sun wasn’t. And Shejidan was tepid.

One hoped, Bren said to himself, that this whole adventure would express itself only in Jase’s striking vocabulary. He hoped the night to come would be quiet, that the vans had been the caterers’, that Tano and Algini had stayed to manage the details of a welcome-home banquet—all possible—and that none of the things added up the way they might.

“Also,” he said, trying to think of everything with a man for the first time loose among the hazards of the outdoors, “nadi, be very careful of the cliff edge. Weather weakens the edge, do you understand? The earth could crumble and you could fall a long way if the edge is weak.”

“Then how do we get down?” Jase asked.

“Carefully,” Bren said. “And on a road if one exists. That’s what one does with roads.”

The packs began to come off the mechieti. Canvas bundles came down.

And sprang up rapidly as tents—spring-framed, modern tents, arising with blinding quickness.

For a woman who favored the ancient, Ilisidi certainly didn’t disdain the latest in camping gear. He knewthose atevi-scale tents. Northstar, the same brand of Mospheiran-made tenting that had served Mospheiran campers for generations, was a big export item to the mainland in atevi scale, a very, very popular export that helped Mospheira secure aluminum. The paidhi’s mind was full of such helpful eclectic data.

But a tent like this modern thing of aluminum and nylon certainly wasn’t what he expected the dowager to be using. And in hunting camouflage, not the house colors. They sprang up, arched, immediate, ground-sheeted, and pegged down with toothed lightweight pegs that went into soft ground like this like daggers into crusted bread.

“What are we going to do?” Jase asked, he thought somewhat obtusely, and he answered with a little impatience: “I suppose we’re going to have supper, nadi-ji.”

The packs gave up not only tents, but well-packed modern thermal storage, so there was no need of fire, and the mechieti, grazing, wandered off to join the mechiet’-aiji and to have Ilisidi’s men take off their harnesses.

Jason sat himself down on a hummock of grass and was examining a stem of bristle-weed as if it were of significance—and of course it was a curiosity, to him. The boy from Dur, Rejiri, had appeared to settle on Jase as a person of great interest and minimal threat and, having nothing else to do, had settled down opposite Jase, the boy talking to him rapidfire in a way that looked to have Jase engaged but confused. There was no knowing what Jase said, but Jase looked embarrassed, and the boy laughed.

But, Bren said to himself, Jase could handle himself. The boy who’d nearly bashed a plane into him wasn’t one to talk about taking offense at the paidhiin.

He could draw breath, at least, and allot concern about Jase to someone else as the sunset, beyond the picturesque spire of rock, drowned in a bank of leaden cloud.

He walked about at peace and off duty, stretching out muscle—doing nothing for bruises near the bone, but it did seem to prevent the worst stiffness. Banichi and Jago were talking with Cenedi; Ilisidi was talking to three of her young men who were about to set out the thermal containers. As a rough camp, it was a lot more grand than the night they’d spent dodging bombs in Maidingi’s hills.

And there was still nothing ominous on the horizon behind them. One could hope, maybe.

They were up here, notably, with the establishment at Mogari-nai, which had not made Tabini happy. And if they were up here to rattle the foundations of Mogari-nai and the Messengers’ Guild, that Guild was not a warlike crew. Their hostilities mostly expressed themselves in the paidhiin’s fouled-up mail.

There was also the matter of the tower up by Wiigin, and the pilots and the communications regulations. That as well as the communications fallouts he was sure was on the agenda, if they were paying an official call on Mogari-nai, and he certainly didn’t rule it out.

And if he got all that straightened out, he might possibly get another chance to make a phone call, this one with the weight of the aiji and the aiji-dowager behind him, to crack the phone system.

He wondered what had happened with his family now. No calls, he was reasonably sure, at least nothing that had gotten past Mogari-nai, through which the incoming calls from Mospheira were all routed. By the luck that dogged him in that department, there was a good chance any incoming call that Toby sent was hung up in politics. Ilisidi, if she was planning a housecleaning at Mogari-nai, couldn’t head the agenda of the aiji of Shejidan with a query from the paidhi-aiji. It just wouldn’t look right. But he might get that call through after other business was finished.

So he walked and he stretched his legs. He walked closer to the sea than he would have liked Jase to come, and he shouldn’t have done it. Jase followed him, with the boy from Dur trotting along with him, pointing out the sights, telling them there was, approximately, Wiigin, in that haze across the bay, and there was Dur, one could just see the lights in the gathering gloom, and that was the fishing port, but his father’s house at Dur-wajran, thatwas on the height of the island, which had been a fortress in the days of the first sailing ships, but the inhabitants of Saduri on the body of the mainland, with their deeply inland harbor, had attempted to take the trade, even if they’d had to dredge the bay, because of the deeper draft of modern ships.

It was all done with scarcely a breath. And Jase looked a little desperate.

“Supper,” Jago came to say, “nadiin-ji.”

They had set the tents in a semicircle, the back of each to the wind that escaped the knoll. The company settled down to a lightless supper as the dusk settled about them, and there was good hot food from the insulated containers.

There was also a wind getting up that, in Bren’s estimation, was going to make two humans glad of their jackets and the insulated tents before morning. The synthetic canvas fluttered and rippled in the wind, and the clouds flew in rags above their heads, gray in an apricot sky.

The mechieti grazed in apparent contentment. Jago had stowed the computer, little good that it was besides mental comfort, and had put it in his tent. They passed out sandwiches and had tea from instant heat containers in insulated cups.

When the dowager wantedmodernity, it attended her. Clearly so.

“So, Ja-son-paidhi,” Ilisidi said. “How do you fare?”

“Well, nand’ dowager, thank you.” Jase was on his very best behavior, and bowed with courtly grace.

“And you, son of Dur-wajran?”

“I am well, nand’ dowager. Very well.”

“And you, nand’ paidhi?”

“Curious, nand’ dowager, about your purpose here.”

“Ah.” Dark was coming down on them. “Curious. I thought you might be. What do you thinkwe’re doing out here besides pasturing the mechieti and enjoying the sea air?”

“Annoying Mogari-nai.”

He took a chance. He was relatively certain of that much.

And he amused the dowager, whose shoulders rose and fell as she leaned upon her silver-headed cane. “The earth station, they call it. This unsightly great bowl. An offense, I say.”

“A shame they put it on such a lovely view. But how else could it also watch Mospheira?”

They sat crosslegged. On ground still cold and damp with spring. And ate fish sandwiches.

“Do you think so?” Ilisidi asked, and he had the feeling that it was no casual, habitual challenge, but a question very much to the point of the hour. “Let me tell you, nadiin, before the aijiin sat in Shejidan, before humans were a suspicion in the skies, before foolish atevi had made stupid smoking machines to run on rails across the country and frighten the creatures that lived there, and before that eyesore of an earth station existed or a petal sail had dropped down to annoy us, there was war in this place. Where we sit, there was death and bloodshed.” Ilisidi held out her hand for a refill of her cup, and a young man ducked close and low to refill it. “Bones probably underlie this very hilltop. And do you know why, heir of Dur?”

“The island of Dur,” the young voice said, “was held by the heresy of the Gan, and they used to send ships up and down the coast to collect gold and grain, and they killed anybody that opposed them. They held the whole coast and they raided on Mospheira. But aijiin from several townships began to follow the aiji of Wiigin, and they raided the island and set up—set up our line.”

“Wiigin it was,” the dowager mused. And pointed a dark forefinger. “Source of this traitorous tower, this hotbed of conspiracy.”

“But now,” the young man said, “nand’ dowager, we follow the Barjidi.”

“Since the War of the Landing. That now. Two hundred years of now.”

“Since the War, nand’ dowager.” The boy had become very quiet, very wary, sensing that he was being stalked, Bren was sure, and asked himself to what end Ilisidi was proceeding.

“The petal sails came down on Mospheira,” Ilisidi recalled, “the wandering machines tore up the land and the stones of the Gan, and for a time that was convenient for Barjida-aiji, that the last stronghold of the Gan should fall to such an unforeseen threat. The grandmother stones were downed not by fleshly hands, but by these reeking machines. Machines struck down the heresy.”

“Yes,” the boy said. “And all the atevi on Mospheira left and settled on this coast.”

“Foolish politics,” Ilisidi said. “The Gan lords attempted to deal with what they thought were men descended from the moon. And it killed them. Did it not, nand’ paidhi?”

He did not want part of any quarrel, ancestral or otherwise. The atevi of the coast held just reasons for dislike of humans: many of them had moved off Mospheira to escape human contact, human ways; more had moved off when the War of the Landing had ravaged the island; the last had left when the Treaty of Mospheira had given the land to humans, the whole of a vast and once prosperous island.

“We did each other great harm, nand’ dowager.” A gust battered them.

“A good night to be under canvas,” Ilisidi said. “And a strong wind rising. But what would you tell our guest from Dur, regarding humans? Should he fear them?”

Loaded question. Very.

“Yes, nand’ dowager. At least one should remain prudent.”

“Are all humans on the island reasonable people?”

“Some are, nand’ dowager. Some are very well disposed to the peace. And I have discovered some are not.”

It was an infelicity of two, unbalanced, positive and negative. It could not be allowed to stand. It was, in its way, a question. But by inviting the posing of two, the dowager had encouraged it. Thiswas the difference between competency and fluency: thiswas the line he’d begun to cross in his off-the-cuff negotiations, the line across which humans who’d dared it had frequently blundered. Hefelt a kind of elation, aware of what he was doing as Wilson-paidhi never had figured it, aware the dowager was getting responses with which shecould know she was understood.

And with a twist of her mouth, as at some sour taste, the dowager added,

“The Kadigidi are fools.”

“I agree.”

“It lastingly troubles me that I did not shoot that woman.”

Direiso was a possibility. But he knew that womanhad one meaning to Ilisidi. “Hanks-paidhi, aiji-ma?”

“Hanks.” Definitely a sour taste. “Melon-headed, my ally, did I tell you?”

Jase had to wonder about his vocabulary.

“Lord Geigi?” Bren asked.

“One had an excellent chance to shoot Hanks-paidhi,” Cenedi interposed. “And Geigi protected her.”

“Melon-head,” Ilisidi said.

“So what didhappen, aiji-ma?” It was a point of his extreme curiosity. “One hears that there was breakage of small objects.”

“Nothing of taste,” Ilisidi said. “Oh, it was easy for Geigi to gain admittance to Direiso’s estate. Direiso had offered Geigi money to pay off a certain”—a waggle of Ilisidi’s fingers—“oil investment gone bad. Saigimi had the extreme impatience to call it due immediately. Saigimi’s wife is, you may have heard, Geigi’s cousin. And sheheld the financial note on the house at Dalaigi. She had no idea that Geigi dared come to me with the matter.” By now a smile was tugging at Ilisidi’s lips. “Silly mistake. And of course Direiso had involved herself with that detestable human woman who had embarrassed them all. Saigimi had taken her from the capital, so my sources say, and brought her to Direiso’s estate somewhat against his will.”

One hadto be aware of the lord of Dur’s son, who was sitting still as a stone. And themselves, Tabini’s for certain, when Tabini himself had not been able to discover the things Ilisidi was saying.

Ilisidi held out her cup, and more tea arrived in it.

“Well, well, and having taken her from the capital before she spoke any more such foolishness and proposed death rays coming from the station,” Ilisidi said, “he was of a notion to take her to his house in the Marid, from which she would only speak at his permission. Covering his embarrassment over the faster-than-light notion, as happened. When you were able to explain the paradox, it was clear that houses would topple, and notGeigi’s. Meanwhile Direiso had gained Hanks as her guest. She called Geigi’s cousin, Saigimi’s wife, up to her house in the Padi Hills, and things were moving very rapidly. Murini, Direiso’s heir, had gone to the Atageini– hisnerve was weakening when it came to such an outrageous provocation of the aiji; but Tatiseigi locked him in a storeroom and refused to deal with him. Tatiseigi phoned mesaying he had apprehended vermin in his cellar, meaning that he had some prisoner, of course, and was notifying me, and thatwas when that fool Saigimi shot up the lilies.”

He felt his heart beating faster and faster.

“To be rid of me?” he asked in the silence the dowager left for a sip of tea.

“The action would at one stroke have embarrassed the Atageini, whom Saigimi saw as dangerous, and if it had eliminated you, who were seen as in my grandson’s man’chi, it would have elevated the value of the human woman. They were planning an attack on nand’ Jase at the landing site, and would thus have all the paidhiin, a situation which looked quite impressive.

“At this point I approached them to contest with Direiso—as Direiso privately thought—to try to take leadership of her movement, and sent Geigi as my emissary, having myself paid his debts not an hour before.

“But the transfer of funds had not reached Saigimi, who was, of course, out of his district, being involved with the lily matter. So he didn’t know, need I say, that Geigi was free, and in mydebt, and gave no warning when Geigi showed up to see whether the way was clear for me. Silly man, he thought Geigi had come to see his cousin, who was there for, well, safe-keepingin Direiso’s care.

“It was quite a little conference. And, not wholly relying on Geigi’s inexperienced judgment, why, I showed up at the door and asked admittance before Geigi had even made his report to me. The foolish woman was distracted from the back entry. I always saidDireiso had no qualifications for high office. And shesaid she was electable as I am not. Well, well, she probably was electable, being ofthe Padi Valley and a westerner. If she didn’t look a fool.”

Now he knew why Ilisidi had spoken freely in front of the boy from Dur, who was probably terrified of hearing so much detail of conspiracy against the aiji.

Twice the national legislature had voted against Ilisidi becoming aiji in Shejidan, the story was, because she was believed apt to take bloody revenge on enemies inthe legislature; twice that he knewof, now, Ilisidi had been involved in conspiracy that might have led to Tabini’s overthrow, and this time had made a thorough fool of Direiso. If she had ever admitted what she had said in others’ hearing, his security hadn’t reported it and Tabini had professed to him not to know.

As Tabini might notknow. Ilisidi would delight in putting Tabini in a place where he had to rely on her simply because maneuvering the aiji of Shejidan into such a position exercised muscles and gave the dowager pleasure, damned if not. The plague of my life, Tabini called her; and never, that he knew, nevermade a move against his grandmother.

“Dowager-ji,” he said softly, “you areamazing.”

“Ah, but I should have shot that woman.”

“As seems now,” Cenedi said, “but then—who knew what would come from the sky?”

Hedging her bets against the ship keeping its word. Cenedi hadn’t revealed that, either, without the dowager’s implied permission, but far fewer in this company would understand it in all its meaning.

“One needs ultimately,” Ilisidi said, “to draw all these elements together. But this distasteful human woman, one takes it, withthe help of the Presidentof Mospheira, is continuing her meddling. She knew contacts. She knew where to send such messages to have them fall on willing ears. She evidently gathered such information quite freely while she was dealing with Saigimi—whose demise was timely. I dare say, timely.”

What does thatmean? he wondered in some distress, but consciously didn’t frown.

The rags of cloud had flown over them. There was thunder, definitely, in the distance. The sky flickered over their heads, reminding one of metal tent frames and their situation at the crest of the promontory—save the knoll behind the tents.

“It was well done,” Ilisidi said, and chuckled softly. “So was Badissuni’s indigestion.”

“Nand’ dowager,” Jago said as if she had received a compliment.

He at least had suspected. He wasat least keeping up with situations. Badissuni might have joined Direiso in her adventurism in the north. Badissuni was in the hospital—but alive—and Ajresi still had Badissuni to worry about, so hewas out of the game.

“Time for bed,” Ilisidi said, and the woman who used a cane to get about and who had complained for years that she was dying used it now to lever herself up with smoother grace than a much younger human whose muscles had stiffened from sitting on the ground. “Early to rise,” the dowager proclaimed, looked up, and smiled at the lightning. “Lovely weather. A new year. Springon the coast.”

20

What was she saying?” Jase asked in a whisper as they went toward the tent. Jase caught his arm. “What was going on?”

“A little information,” Bren said. Thunder rumbled above them, and he could feel Jase flinch. He saw Banichi and Jago in converse a little distance away, and guessed that they had heard detail they had never heard, the same as he had. “Banichi and Jago killed lord Saigimi,” he said to Jase, “at Tabini’s order. But the dowager said she took Deana Hanks away from Direiso when Direiso kidnapped her last year. That dispute was what you parachuted into.”

“Factions.” Jase knew that word.

“Factions. She’s saying that Saigimi’s wife was trying to get lord Geigi’s land and title, and she prevented it. So Geigi helped herget Deana away from lady Direiso. Tabini let Deana go. Now Deana’s behind some radio broadcasts to Direiso’s followers, talking against Tabini. And I wouldn’t be surprised if, sometime during our trip, we don’t go up to Mogari-nai and express the aiji’s andthe dowager’s discontent with them losing our mail and not acting aggressively to prevent those broadcasts. That’s a huge electronics installation. If it’s letting some little handheld radio communicate with the mainland—” Thunder cracked and Jase jumped, his face stark and scared in the lightning flash. “—it’s not doing its job very well.”

“Will they shoot?”

“Mogari-nai? No. That’s not their job. The Messengers’ Guild holds Mogari-nai. The Assassins’ Guild is with Tabini. Open conflict isn’t going to benefit the Messengers’ Guild, I can tell you that. Better get inside.” He’d seen Banichi leave the brief conversation and go out into the dark, possibly for nothing more than call of nature; but he wasn’t sure. “I’ll be there in a minute. Don’t worry about the thunder. Lightning’s the threat. But it hits the tallest thing around. Keep lower than the tent roof and you’re fine.”

It wasn’t true. But the mechieti were in more danger.

“Where are you going?”

“To talk to our security, nadi. Go inside. Don’t worry about it.” Wind was battering them, ruffling and snapping the canvas. A fat, cold drop splashed down on him as he went to that endmost tent.

Jago had seen him coming. She waited for him in the pelting early drops of rain.

“Is everything all right?” he asked, fearful, despite the assurances he’d given Jase, that there might be more going on than he knew about.

“Yes,” Jago said, and caught his arm, pulling him toward the inside of the tent. “Come in out of the rain, Bren-ji.”

It was their tent. Hers and Banichi’s, compact for atevi, affording her no room to stand. It was warmer, instantly. Softer than the ground, insulated by an inflated bottom fabric. Black as night. He couldn’t see a thing. Possibly she could.

“You did very well,” Jago said in a hushed tone. “You did verywell, Bren-ji.”

“One hoped,” he said.

“She wished to say such things in the boy’s hearing, and you afforded her the audience she needed. You asked about Deana’s kidnapping. Did it occur to you to ask about your own?”

The thought had crossed the depths of his mind, while Ilisidi was confessing to things Tabini’s security had worked hard to learn. “I feared it might divert us. I take it that it isa second matter.”

Lightning showed her shadow against the dim fabric of the tent. Something hard and dangerous and metal met his hand. His hand closed on a pistol grip. “This is yours, Bren-ji. I took it from your luggage. Keep it inside your coat.”

His heart was beating fast enough to get his attention now. “Are we in such danger?”

“Do you remember the getting of this gun?”

“Tabini gave it to me.”

“No. Banichigave it to you.”

It was true. He couldn’t tell one from the other. On holiday at Taiben, he and Tabini had shot at melons and broken Treaty law—before he’d ever met Ilisidi.

Tabini had given him a gun he shouldn’t have, by Treaty law; and he’d been anxious when he returned to Shejidan. He’d not known what to do with it in his little garden apartment, with two servants who were not—he understood such things far better now—reliably within his man’chi. He’d tucked it beneath his mattress.

He’d fired it at an intruder that had appeared at his curtained door, in lightning flashes, on such a night as this.

Banichi and Jago had replaced his security that night. Banichi had replaced the gun—in case, Banichi had said, an investigation should link it to Tabini.

Banichi and Jago had taken over his apartment, wired his door, replaced his servants, and brought in Tano and Algini, whom at that time he hadn’t trusted.

From that hour forward he’d been in Jago’s and Banichi’s care.

And immediately Tabini had sent him, with Banichi and Jago, to Malguri, to Ilisidi’s venue.

He’d been in danger of his life. He believed that then. He believed it now, sitting in this tent with Banichi’s gun tucked into his jacket.

And he went back to the simplest, most ground-level question he had used to ask them: he, the paidhi, the expert. “What should I know, Jago-ji?”

“That in the matter of Deana Hanks, Ilisidi did very well, and has only credit. But the night the intruder came to your bedroom, one of her faction had exceeded orders and attempted to remove you. We did find out not the name but the man’chi. And that you, yourself, bloodied this reckless person; that was a profound embarrassment to the dowager. She had refused Tabini’s offer to negotiate until that happened and until, against her expectations, Tabini declined to expose the author of the attack and asked again for her to accept you in trust. But before he sent you to Malguri, he filed Intent against persons unnamed, which was a gesture toward the Guild, which caused the Guild to take official notice and regularize the paidhi’s rank within Guild regulations. And thatmade illegal any second move against the paidhiin. It was coincidentally a situation which complicated his dealing with Deana Hanks when she arrived in the capital while you were absent at Malguri.

“Meanwhile Ilisidi was trying to determine whether she would believe Tabini’s urgings that neither he nor humans had betrayed the association—or whether she could agree to lead an attempt to remove Tabini from office. Some eastern conspirators believed her assessment that you were honest—and some were convinced by questioning you.”

“Was thatwhat that was?”

“The matter in the cellars? Yes. We could notprevent it. The rebellion was going forward. A certain lord moved without the dowager, attempting to overthrow her, and she brought down Tabini’s forces on their heads. Here, in the west, however, the situation was exactly as you apprehend: there was a fear ofhumans, and once that was allayed—Tabini was more popular than before with the commons, as was the prospect of even closer cooperation between humans and Shejidan, a deluge of technology from the heavens, and more centralized power to Shejidan. Direiso and others who want to sit in Tabini’s place, and the peninsular lords who don’t want a centralized government, all saw that if they didn’t move soon, they’d never dare. So they approached Ilisidi in the theory she might have been coerced into returning you. And Ilisidi acted to rescue the paidhiin and keep them out of Direiso’s hands. That much was clear. Ilisidi does not want Direiso as aiji. But where does Ilisidi herself stand? The answer, nadi-ji, was out there tonight. I suspect Saigimi, from the peninsula, attempted to get Ilisidi to overthrow Direiso—who isfrom the Padi Valley, as Ilisidi is from the remote east.”

“Can we rely on her? It pains me even to ask, Jago-ji, but dare we rely on her? Or is there some thirdchoice?”

There was silence out of the dark. Lighting showed him Jago, elbow on knee, fist on chin. And a break of that pose in that flicker of an instant.

“The aiji tested herby sending you to her at Malguri. Now she tests himby demanding both paidhiin in her hands. Thatis where we sit tonight, Bren-ji. And we don’t knowthe answer.”

“I asked her to bring us here.”

“Not as Cenedi told me the story.”

It was not, he recalled now, accurate. “I asked her to go with us to Geigi’s house.”

“And she then suggested Saduri.”

“She did.”

“And Geigi had invited you to his house.”

“He did. He had.”

“Geigi is within her man’chi, Bren-ji. Tabini’s maneuvering helped him pay his debt to Ilisidi. But she had already rescued him financially. However—you—whom the dowager favors—and who have man’chi to Tabini, as you have stated, saved his reputation. Geigi is in an interesting three-way position.”