Текст книги "Inheritor"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 26 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

Technicians scrambled in the silence of a broadcast area. Coughs were smothered. Switches were thrown off, others were thrown on, and a tower aimed at Mospheira punched out the next message at a power level reserved to announce impending war.

Jase got his next cue.

“Citizens of Mospheira, this is Jase-paidhi with news of the current situation—”

Atevi stood very still throughout the whole length of the message. Technicians jumped at one point, and made adjustments. Jase was speaking rapidly and it inevitably took Mospheiran technicians a moment to respond to an electronic provocation.

This version, however, was going up to the ship as well. And ifthey received the ship’s support and that message came back down from the sky, there would be receivers tuned to it, and if they jammed every broadcast on the island, someonein an island full of various-minded and argumentative humans was going to get that message recorded and passed out hand to hand on faxes and copy machines.

This time there was a consequence and a crisis George Barrulin couldn’t head off from the President’s door.

The President’s morning golf game might not take place tomorrow.

Jase finished. A technician cut off the microphone and shut down his console and spoke to him. Then everyone dared talk—and take a breath. Small coughs broke out, held until now.

“He did it exactly,” Bren said to Ilisidi. “And the University will knowhe damned Hanks’ numbers in what he said.”

“Hanks’ numbers andDireiso’s.” Ilisidi was very pleased.

Jase meanwhile had gotten up and left the console. He looked very solemn and pale as he came down the aisle between the long rows of consoles.

He looked very lonely.

Atevi might not understand two humans embracing in a crowded room. They did understand an offered hand.

Jase took it like a drowning man. Squeezed it hard.

“Just a little shaky,” Jase said. “Sorry. Did I do it?”

“You did it.”

Jase’s voice sank to near-nothing. “Codeword, for the ship: ask to speak to Constance.” And sadly, desperately, “Is there anyword, Bren?”

As if information might be forthcoming from them now that Jase had done what he could on their side—and made Mercheson-paidhi suddenly a very valuable piece in a very deadly game. Bren reluctantly shook his head. “I wish I could tell you yes.”

“We may not get her out,” Jase said quietly.

“If she comes ashore anywhere from Dur southward, the aiji’s people will bring her in, no question.”

Or, the unspoken possibility, Direiso’s people might try to lay hands on her if they had any inklingshe might be attempting a crossing. If Hanks’ people were holding her, a possibility he didn’t discount, he was sure they’d hear from them, maybe claimingto hold her, after they’d held their meetings and managed a decision about it.

“How long does it take to cross?” Jase asked.

“Varies. Depends on the weather. Freighters, about two days.”

“If she was out there during the storm—”

“You just point the bow at the waves and keep the engine running enough to let you steer. She didn’t come down here knowing, but she could find that out among the first things she’d learn. The wind would be constantly at the back of someone trying to cross. That would save fuel. A lot of it. The storm was out of the west—it would helpher, not run her out of fuel.”

“The captain’s gotten the word from me to apply pressure to get her over here. I didn’t get anything from him on what she might have told him about her situation and, most of all, the captain didn’t cue me at any time that he knew where she was or that she’s safe.—What’s going on? What’s happening?”

There was movement, suddenly, in the room: security headed for the stairs that led, they had all learned, to the roof.

Cenedi was looking not entirely displeased.

Jago came to him, and Banichi close behind. “Lord Tatiseigi,” Jago announced, “has moved forces to Saduri headland, nandiin. That was the movement Tano reported. Tano and Algini have agreed to let them pass. However, the dowager says we would be prudent to retire our force to Saduri Township down the road, and get the staff down to the town as well.”

Banichi said, “Either he’s approved the marriage or he’s tracked down the television set.”

The plain of Saduri was a smallish peninsula, shaped like a triangle, and the sea made a deep indentation in one of the legs with the old cannon fort and Mogari-nai on one side of the indentation and a flatter, more rolling land on the other, where rail ran. Onondisi Bay, with its resorts, was one face of the pyramid. Much larger Nain Bay, barriered by the isle of Dur, was to the north.

And the town of Saduri was below them, down at the bottom of a winding one lane road, out of sight from this position and in the dark, but Bren standing at the front entry to the station, with the mechieti moaning and spitting about the night-time summons to the herd, was very sure he had a good description of it.

“I’m glad it’s night,” Jase said. Jase had taken two of his motion sickness pills before he came out, and he fastened his jacket now with multiple tries at the buttons.

“They give you bonuses for this, I’m sure,” Bren said; and Jase, who didn’t get paid any more than he did nowadays, gave a nervous laugh, even a grin.

Jase wasn’t in any wise as anxious as the Messengers’ Guild, whose local assistant director, nand’ Brosimi, and two junior staffers, came to the dowager and wished to stay on to protect the equipment. But Brosimi, who did not at all relish the notion of resistance to an armed lord’s political intentions or simple misuse of the equipment, obeyed Ilisidi’s instruction to send the junior personnel down to safety and to obey all orders lord Tatiseigi gave.

“So long as they aren’t damaging to the equipment,” Ilisidi added, while her men were out calling in the mechieti and the staff that were going to walk down the road were shutting down their consoles.

All nonessential communications ceased when those switches flipped. Phone service was going to be limited in the region. The local province was going on the Emergency Network for such things as fire and ambulance, which one hoped didn’t prove necessary.

But other things were happening. Among the last messages to come in over the news service, there was a train stopped on the tracks near Aisinandi, effectively blocking the northern rail from reaching the area. By amazing coincidence, a switching error derailed another car in Aidin. Somethinghad started moving, and that event wasn’t on Cenedi’s list or Banichi’s.

There was beach on the northern face of the peninsula, running all the way around, broad and flat and such that motorized transport could operate, but it couldn’t get to the beach the boy named, on the Saduri headland, because the stretch where the point of the jut of headland met the waves of the strait was sheer jagged rock. If a ship grounded there, it was very bad news.

It was good news for them, however, because if the small force they now knew was safely on Dur could keep either of the two ferries from operating and also keep boats from landing on Dur’s sandy north shore, they’d assure that Deana went south right into the aiji’s hands.

Motorized transport had moved inSaduri, earlier, and Ilisidi hadn’t stopped it, fearing, Bren judged, that a fight would break out inside town limits with innocent citizens at risk.

That much made tactical sense. But he didn’t figure even yet that he knew all of what was proceeding. Humans in the War had had the advantage of their high tech neutralized by the assumptions they made about whatatevi might do and when they would do it.

Studying atevi campaigns, as he’d done, didn’t tell him why, for instance, they left some of this station active instead of shutting it all down, no matter Tatiseigi’s annoyance. It might be technical, the need to keep personnel at hand to keep certain functions going and to be sure a lord didn’t go ordering things turned on and off that one of the least technologically minded lords in the Association didn’t understand.

The reason might also lie in the insult it might accord that powerful and influential lord if one didn’t accept his gesture of help in the spirit in which, if they were lucky, it was truly offered.

One wondered where Direiso’s heir was at the moment, whether he was again under Tatiseigi’s roof, or whether Saigimi’s daughter, claimant to Saigimi’s lordship, was with the force almost certainly coming at them.

One wondered exactly where Ajresi, Saigimi’s brother and that daughter’s bitterest rival, happened to be at the moment, and whether Badissuni’s indigestion had swayed his opinions.

If Ajresi wanted to stay neutral, he probably could, with Tabini’s tolerance. If he saw Tabini fall, however, and Direiso rise, the first debts Direiso would have to pay off would be awarding the Tasigin Marid to Saigimi’s wife and daughter, and that meant dispossessing Ajresi, who was too young for peaceful retirement and whose quarrel with Saigimi’s Sarini-province wife was too bitter for him to survive her daughter’s lordship in the Marid.

Add to that tangle of relationships lord Geigi, who had a grudge against the wife for her attempt to dispossess him from his seaside estate at Dalaigi.

There was one thing a great deal different than the last time, at the start of the War of the Landing, when the northern provinces had gone against Mospheira. In that long-ago day the south, the Peninsular lords, had joined the north and the dispossessed Mospheirans in their assault against the island.

This time most of the former atevi inhabitants of Mospheira were running resorts at Onondisi, fishing on the Dur coast, or scattered up and down the Aidin headland, a Gan minority that had not fared as well under the lord of Wiigin as those had fared who had settled near the old fortress at Nain, on the Barjidi grant of that vacated lordship that had made the Treaty possible. Tabini’s ancestor had deserved well of the Gan.

And Tabini’s sudden removal of Saigimi, he began to understand, had made the south less, not more likely, to join Direiso.

The coastal ethnic minority around old Nain wasn’t fond of the northern provinces and theywouldn’t side with Direiso, who couldn’t shake her long-time association with Wiigin.

And Dur? Dur, famous mostly for a ferry connection and for smuggling? Dur through its teenaged heir swore itself consistently loyal to Tabini’s house.

Ilisidi, in the light from the foyer door, got up on Babs, and men searched out their various mounts. Haduni had lost one of his charges, who had flown down to Dur, but he was there to take charge of Jase; and Bren whistled for Nokhada who was notdelighted to see her rider at this hour when she was full of grass and roused from sleep. He hoped the handlers had gotten the girth tight.

He got up in Nokhada’s surly sketch of a bow. There were complaints of mechieti all around them, and Banichi and Jago glided close to him, shadows in the single-source light from the door, as the Messengers’ Guild staff that was going down the road with them afoot moved nervously into a knot by the door.

He had the gun in his coat pocket. The paidhiin were supposed to be unarmed and innocuous. Neither of them fit the latter description.

But defend the third of them? He didn’t know how they were going to find a woman from space who’d possibly launched out from Jackson with no skill and no chart and no knowledge of a sea that overmatched even the occasional smuggler.

He knew the dangers andthe numbers of people who drowned in that crossing. Whenever some enterprising fool of a human or atevi thought he’d circumvent the import restrictions, and failed in the crossing, the fact if not the grim details reached the paidhi’s desk as a complaint from one authority or the other. Fishermen and, very rarely, pleasure boaters got caught by a squall and if they were very, very lucky, the paidhi got to straighten out the international paperwork and get them escorted to the middle of the strait, aimed at the appropriate harbor.

There were the sad inquiries to which the paidhi had had to say, no, no one had been picked up, no boat had reached shore.

He didn’t want to think about Yolanda trying it alone in some harbor runabout she’d found the key left in.

Deana Hanks, on the other hand, could easily get expert help, either some 20 meter yacht with a crew hired from her rich father’s friends or, more useful and far more likely to reach the port she aimed at, some Mospheiran smuggler who supplied mainland antiques and jewelry, two items no one could identify as smuggled, to the parlors of that crowd who otherwise disdained atevi culture.

God, he wanted his hands on Hanks!

Preferably before Hanks ended up in Direiso’s camp.

Without warning Ilisidi started out, and they were moving. One of Ilisidi’s men told the communications staffers who were walking down to stay to the inside of the road so a mechieta didn’t shoulder them off a cliff.

Better to hit the rocks on the inside of the curve than the ones at the bottom of the cliff, was the way the man put it, to a collection of people, mostly young, already scared by their situation; but they fell in, keeping in a group as they walked and trying to stay clear of the mechieti.

“The staff will have to tag after us as best they can,” Banichi said. “I have a feeling we’ll out-pace them considerably; and that may be best for their sakes.”

“What’s waiting for us down there?” Bren asked as they moved into the dark and the starlight of the road.

“Tabini’s men, nadi, and some of Ilisidi’s who came in by train from Shejidan, if, baji-naji, we have fortune on our side for a few more hours and they’ve met up without shooting each other.”

They passed the split in the road, that which led around the rim to the cannon fort, the route the tourists used. Another mechieta shouldered in, with Jase aboard and Haduni leading it by the rein. “Nadiin,” Haduni said, “the dowager has lent Jase-paidhi Nawari’s mechieta for the trip down.”

Nawari had left in the plane. Nawari was one of those who ordinarily rode close to Ilisidi.

“Jasi-ji,” Jago said out of the dark by Bren’s left, “he means when we run, you take the rein from him, stay low and hang on. He’s holding the rein now because if he lets go you’ll be up there with the dowager very fast.”

“Yes.” Jase acknowledged an order with atevi brevity. And to Bren. “I’ll certainly hang on, nadi.”

The head of the party had reached the fork of the road that slanted sharply down in the starlight, down and down into dark. As yet they kept a moderate pace, but the first hairpin turn came a good deal sooner than Bren expected, the mechieti still moving briskly, but not so the staff walking down couldn’t stay with them.

The next hairpin and the next tier of the road brought the town lights into view, not as many lights as one saw looking down, say, from a plane on a Mospheirancity by night.

But those lights might be fewer than ordinary tonight, since one could well suppose the townsfolk were not unaware of the crisis, and were probably listening to radio and television in hopes of news or public safety announcements.

It was a steep road at the next turn. Very steep for the tourist buses that were the summer traffic up this road; but one paved lane was very broad for mechieti; and the front rank at the fourth hairpin turn struck a faster downhill pace that would leave the group afoot behind very quickly. Nokhada was in a far better mood, pricking her ears forward and hitting a stride that advanced her just marginally through the pack.

Her rider didn’t stop her. That made her happier still; and Jase’s mechieta stayed with her.

Next switchback. “Nadiin,” Jago said, riding near Bren, as Banichi came on Jase’s far side. “If we come under fire, stay on. Our security is holding the road into town, and it will not be Guild opposing us, but all the same, present as low a profile as possible. There is a chance of Kadigidi partisans.”

It was never hard to pick out the leaders in an old-fashioned atevi cavalry charge. It never had been. It was part of the ethic—and maybe, Bren thought, among other fearful thoughts, that risk kept wars to a minimum, in a species where the leaders went first, not hindmost. The gun knocked hard against his ribs as the dowager let Babsidi gather speed. Nokhada was right on the front rank with Babsidi. Cenedi’s mechieta was; and Jase’s; and Banichi’s and Jago’s. As they reached the lowest part of the road they were running nearly all-out, security maneuvering only to put their bodies between their charges and the likelihood of snipers as the road let out onto a town highway.

A human might not be wired to know what passions it could touch off in the hearts of atevi instinct-driven to follow such a leader as Ilisidi was. He’d seen the maneuver in the machimi plays, he recalled that, the mad dash of riders across a landscape, a move he’dunderstood for a dramatic convention, but which often preceded a sort-out, a realization of atevi loyalties.

But as they came into the streets of the township of Saduri, he felt real emotion gathering in him. Hadn’t the waving of a flag, the call of a trumpet meant something to humans once? They couldn’t but follow. No matter whether Ilisidi or the atevi she led rationally knewwhat she was invoking– thishuman felt it.

A shot from somewhere blasted white chips of plaster from a building onto what was now black, starlit pavement ahead of them; and fire racketed back at that source from riders all around him. From another answering source more fire broke out somewhere ahead on the road. He was aware every smallish rider in their group was a target. He knew he was supposed to keep his head down and he knew that using the gun he carried and putting his head up to do it was a stupid risk—but in his heart-pounding excitement Jago’s warning at the start was all that held him from such foolishness.

Do what Jago said. Listen to his security. Get through this alive and take down the ones who’d threatened him and his the way hecould deal with them, not with a gun, but by getting to what they wanted before they did, and interdicting them from everything they intended tonight.

A flare went off behind them, a brilliant burst of light that threw them all into silhouette. Then he hoped the Guild workers, caught on the road above this fire-fight, had the sense to take cover. They’d stirred no random fools but an ambush. Tabini’s men were notin possession of this area. They passed side streets that would lead to the harbor, each one of which could become a shooting gallery.

Then a single small light blinked ahead of them and a second red one, twice, to the right.

That might surely be signals of their own allies. Abruptly, Ilisidi took Babsidi around a corner, down a ghostly deserted street, and rode hellbent through the heart of a not-quite-sleeping town toward the harbor.

“Aiji-ma!” someone cried from a window above the street and others yelled it. But the street was dark.

“Go!” shadows yelled at them from an intersection, in utter darkness. “ ’Sidi-ji! Go! Go! Go!”

The darkness of the streets gave way to open night sky and hills and the sheen of water, and they went toward that gap. A light flashed in a window above the street, near the end of the block, and when they reached that open harborside, other atevi shadows appeared with that same flashing of lights, some white, some red, in a pattern that must silently tell Ilisidi and the Guild with them what was critical for them to know.

Ilisidi stopped on harborside against a weather-shelter. A sign by the water and another on the railing said Ferry, and gave a departure schedule, but there was no ferry there for them.

A boat was coming, however. Not a ferry, if one could judge who’d only seen them on television, but a fair-sized boat, just the same.

“Is that someone we want?” Jase asked faintly, having seen it too, as mechieti all around them breathed and blew and harness creaked. One could just make out the spreading disturbance of the boat’s wake, as, against a shadow of low hills well across the water, it made its way on a diagonal toward them.

“ Late,” Ilisidi breathed. “After all these years, every damned appointment, Geigi is still late, damn him!” She signaled Babsidi to extend a leg, and got down—a glistening dark trail was on her hand, and Cenedi wanted immediately to see to it, but: “It’s a damned plaster-chip,” she said. “The man’s revised his arrival time three times—half an hour more, he says, and he’s stilllate!”

Bren slid down and Haduni got down, but in the meanwhile Ilisidi was back among the mechieti, looking for more injuries.

One mechieta had taken a fairly extensive injury on the flank. Two riders had been hit, one a trivial matter, one man with a serious amount of bleeding and a broken arm, which by no means improved her mood.

“I want this woman,” Ilisidi said. “ Damnthis fool! Damn, damn, damn!—Can someone get this man to hospital?”

“Help is coming,” Jago said. They had risked the pocket coms, she and Banichi, so it seemed.

And indeed dark figures were moving on the street, figures that shouted to each other and brought timid ventures from the buildings along the way. More supporters joined them, townsfolk or maybe Guild. But by this time the victim was swearing that he could very well walk to the hospital, which was just down the street. They could see the lighted sign from here. People who called themselves local residents were offering respects to the aiji-dowager in an outpouring of support, loudly wishing to carry the wounded man and to take the injured mechieta to the doctors, too.

Haduni provided them answers and directions.

Cenedi and Banichi were giving orders to the ferry personnel, who had shown up uncertain whether their services could be of use, and very willing to support the woman they recklessly called ’Sidi-ji.

In the meanwhile Jase was safely down and on two feet, and Ilisidi was muttering about the modern age and modern leaders sitting safely in estates and offices looking at computer screens, as lord Geigi’s boat cruised up to the ferry landing with a powerful slow thump of engines and a boil and wash of water.

For a fishing boat, Bren thought, it was pretty damned impressive.

Security came ashore first. Lord Geigi followed with an amazingly agile leap, as the ramp manned by the ferry personnel attempted to adjust to the height of his moving gangway.

“Late!” Ilisidi cried.

“The wind isup, nandi-ji! A hard west wind beyond the breakwater, which does make a difference! Was I to forecast intent to join you? The aijiwas late, so I was late, the whole countrysideis late, so the Kadigidi will be late, too!”

“You were to take the train and borrow the boats here!”

“Well, and the village of Kinsara has a carload of spring vegetables derailed on the grade on this side, so we had to take the boats all the way, and I’ve come to order boats out from Saduri, if I can get some of the good fisherfolk to give us a hand.—And good evening, paidhi-ji. Good evening to your associate. Come aboard! We’ve a cold supper if you’ve been in a hurry. It’s a good half hour back to the breakwater against the wind, ’Siri’s going to call in debts up and down the harborside. We’ll get boats out there tonight, as many as you like.”

Bren recognized Gesirimu among the handful who had come ashore, as shouts went out to get boats away and get the coastal road blocked.

“We have three boats out there holding off shore, but it’s a dark, wide sea,” Geigi said, “and I’ll not say we can keep the Kadigidi from getting a boat past us. If we can intercept the rascals on the water we’ll take fewer casualties.”

“Some Kadigidi arehere,” Banichi said, “in the township. If we’re unlucky we’ll just have chased them to positions up the shore to warn their allies.”

“Nothing for it,” Cenedi said. “Sitting here gains us nothing. With a west wind blowing, lord Geigi, where would a Mospheiran craft come in, between here and Aidin?”

“Is it only Hanks-paidhi, all this mysterious goings-on?”

“ OnlyHanks indeed,” Ilisidi said in disgust and, with Geigi, led the way to the heaving plank. The wind blew cold off the harbor, and the buffers squealed and groaned as the boat heaved against the shore.

“We’re going looking for Hanks,” Jase said faintly, at Bren’s side. It was a question. It was despair. “What about any other boat? Can you ask him—”

“Take your pills,” Bren said. “I’d take a double dose.”

“You don’t think she’d have survived the storm,” Jase said. “Do you?”

“I don’t know.” He had resolved not to lie to Jase, but Jase had a way of going head-on to questions with bad answers. “She might not have gone out with the weather threatening. There’ve been planes out, and boats, all up and down the middle of the strait. Somebody could have picked her up if she did try. I don’t give her up.”

“Neither do I,” Jase said resolutely. And added, with a desperate grip on the gangway rail. “But, Bren, the pills are gone.”

“You can’t have taken all of them!”

“I didn’t. The bottle fell out of my pocket.”

26

Geigi had been communicating delays since the derailment of vegetables, which had happened, Geigi said, while he was at the train station at the Elijiri ferry dock waiting to take the train over the hills to Saduri to keep his appointment. At that point, realizing the train connection would not work, he’d made a call to his private boat, which was on its way back to Dalaigi, and advised them to come back to get him. The three neighbors who were stranded with him had called for theirboats to fill the tanks for a long haul, and to come across to pick them up at Elijiri. Having crossed the Bay, their small fleet (consisting of two retired gentlemen, the lord of Dalaigi, and a middle-aged lady who had made her fortune in the jewelry business) had fueled again at the resort marina at Onondisi, so they were going to be capable of staying out.

Now, seated on soft cushioned chairs and couches, the dusty and sweaty company watched the lights of Saduri Township retreat from the stern windows. A strange way to go into a fight, Bren thought, as Geigi himself poured Ilisidi a small glass of cordial: the arm was, Ilisidi confessed, uncomfortable.

“I also have,” Geigi said, “the name of the resort manager of Mist Island Tours, who says if there is a need that serves the man’chi of Sarini Province, he will publish a need for boats. The seas are rough and I would hesitate to encourage small craft tonight, but there are the harbor tour boats and their crews would willingly bring them out. They lack onboard radar, but they do have radio. I have only to give the orders.”

“Do so,” Ilisidi said. “I don’t think we are operating in overmuch secrecy now. What the wind brings us, the wind will bring.”

“May one—” Bren said quietly, “may one also request we call Dur at this point? There ismore than Hanks. There’s some chance that Mercheson-paidhi has fled the island, and if she’s done so, it would be a very light craft. With the storm, as I remember the map—she’d be blown straight west.”

“Southeast, nadi.”

“I’ve heard how strong the current is,” Bren said. “But the wind—”

“Out of the northwest. The storm andthe current, nand’ paidhi, one assures you.”

“The storm was out of the west. It was in our faces when we were camped. Was it not, nadiin-ji?”

“Northwest, Bren-ji,” Jago said. “The Mogari-nai headland doesn’t lie parallel to that of the south. It faces northwest.”

His whole land-sense had been wrong. He’d looked at the map and believedwest.

“The cliff is weathered, nand’ paidhi,” lord Geigi said, “by uncounted storms that wear away the headland. By waves that dash against those rocks. It’s a dangerous place in a heavy sea. But since centuries ago, when atevi made the breakwater to protect the harbor from silting, the sand has come in all along that stretch and stopped against the stones. What flotsam comes in there is washed out by the next storm, but with that blow night before this, I’d look at Saduri Beach above all else. And I’d say every other sailor on this coast would make the same conclusion.”

“It’s a government reserve,” Ilisidi said. “Does noone on this shore respect the signs?”

“Certainly the wrecks don’t,” lord Geigi said. “Baji-naji, they come there, ’Sidi-ji. And so will anyone who needs to find them.”

“Direiso’s lot had a freighter in here two days ago,” Cenedi said. “A shipment of four heavy trucks. They moved out tonight and headed up the road to the breakwater. So they are thinking in the same direction.”

Lights were showing in the windows. Boats were standing away from the shore. Gesirimu had rallied the fishermen. Lord Geigi had ties to Saduri as well as to his neighbors in Onondisi Bay.

The Peninsula’s north shore had joined Shejidan, this time, in opposingthe dissolution of the northern provinces.

“Well, well,” Geigi said, looking back over the cushion, “we shall have help.” He turned and picked up his glass. “In the meanwhile, if anyone would care to wash away the dust of travel, there is a lavatory just forward and to the left.”

Jase got up and went forward. Quickly.

“Excuse me,” Bren said, and Banichi came with him, across a deck he didn’t think too unsteady; but he feared Jase’s stomach did. The door was shut.

Bren gave a weary sigh. And leaned against the wall as they waited.

“At least,” Banichi said, “he’s not as sick as you were with the tea.”

He’d forgotten that.

Mercifully.

“Have we,” he asked Banichi, because it was the first chance he’d had since they’d made contact with Geigi, “any difficulty at Patinandi?”

“No, no, no,” Banichi said softly, “Geigi could hardly put on tight security, as if he had any reason to fear his good neighbors. But certainly if the dowager has requested lord Geigi’s assistance here, with smugglers, Tabini hasto provide support and security.” Banichi flashed a grin. “How didyou and Jago get along?”

Banichi caught him utterly by surprise, and speechless.

The door opened. Jase was there, water soaking his face and the front of his hair, which strung mostly loose.