Текст книги "Inheritor"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Tano’s note went on to a second item of the business he’d laid on his staff last night: I forwarded your note to nand’ Eidi. The aiji asks we advise his staff as soon as you’ve finished breakfast. He said he cannot be precise as to the time the aiji will have available to meet, nor should you be kept from your business(it was the lordly you;Tano never seemed to know what to do with their familiarity on paper.) One may have to wait and that will be arranged.

Also, do you recall that there is a live television interview scheduled today at noon? I asked nand’ Eidi yesterday should it be postponed or taken on tape, and nand’ Eidi says the aiji believes any deviation in your schedule would be interpreted by the public at large not as your legitimate wish for rest but as the Bu-javid security staff’s reaction to the general security alert, an intimation of concern the aiji does not wish to convey.

It is therefore the aiji’s wish that you conduct the interview on schedule. I state the aiji’s words. If we may be of service, we will carry another message.

“Thank you, nadiin-ji,” he said, in the plural, figuring that both Tano and Algini had shared duty last night and lost sleep over the Jase matter; the message to the aiji had been much the simpler case, but pursued before he had even thought of it, thank God for Tano’s keeping his schedule straight.

Then there was the second message cylinder, which staff, presumably, had already opened: the seal was cracked. The scarred gold case had a seal he didn’t recognize, but evidently it was a message the clerical staff as well as his household thought he should see, on a priority evidently equal to the Jase matter.

The message he unrolled, as Saidin was serving the muffins and another servant was pouring tea, bore the written heading of the lord of Dur-wajran. That was the unknown seal.

Thatmatter, he said to himself: the pilot who’d nearly collided with their jet.

Nand’ paidhi, it read in a less than elegant hand, one wishes most earnestly for your good will. The unfortunate circumstance(misspelled) of the encounter was unwished by me because of error and I wish to take all responsibility personally. Please do not take offense at my household. I did not mean to hit your plane. I am solely(misspelled) to blame and offer profoundest regrets at my stupidity.

It was signed by one Rejiri, with a clan heraldry he took for the seal of Dur-wajran.

“This was the pilot? How old is he?”

“Young,” Tano said. “I’d be surprised if he’s twenty. He brought the message to the residential security post with flowers. On policy, they declined the flowers and sent them to the public display area but accepted the message.” Tano added, then, in the manner of a thoroughly ridiculous proposition. “He wanted to come upstairs.”

“What are we talking about?” Banichi asked.

“A pilot brought his plane very close to ours yesterday,” Bren said. “I take it he’s not still downstairs.”

“I wouldn’t think so,” Tano said. “They say, however, he was insistent.”

“Young,” Algini said. “One thinks some of his distress may be the impoundment of the aircraft, which may bring his parents to Shejidan. He may wish to ask you to clear the record. I would notadvise you meet with him or to grant that request.”

“He,” Tano added, “has a record of small aerial incidents around the coast near his home. He had no business bringing the plane to the largest airport in the world.”

“True.” He had campaigned for stricter enforcement of the ATC rales. He passed the note to Jago, as the most forgiving member of his security. “I hope they won’t deal too harshly with him.” One could get into a great deal of trouble coming too close to the aiji’s residence during a security alert. “Please have someone advise him I take no personal offense and that the Bu-javid staff has more urgent business.”

“The staff has tried to impress the gravity of matters on him,” Tano said, “and to make clear to him that he should pay closer attention to public events.—One does take the impression that this young man lacks seriousness of purpose.”

“Why is the paidhi involved with this person, nadi?” Banichi wanted to know, and the potential rebuke to junior security was implied in that ‘nadi.’ “And what, in full, happened?”

“An ATC violation,” Tano said. The note went from Jago on to Banichi. “We aretreating it seriously, nandi, at least to be sure there was nothing more than seems. It seems to be a young island pilot—the lord of Dur’s son.”

“Ah,” Banichi said, as if that explained any folly in the world. Banichi reached for more toast and, so supplied, perused the note and looked at the seal.

“A minor thing,” Algini said. “The authorities will advise the parents.—I would advise, nadi Bren, against accepting the boy’s apology. Apology to a person of your rank should come from the lord of Dur first, then the boy.”

“I understand,” Bren said as nand’ Saidin offered him curdled eggs and pastry. Considering the necessity of meeting with Tabini, it might be one of those days mostly marked by waiting. Tabini’s day looked to be one of those unpredictable ones, with various emergencies coming in. “Thank you, nadi. The paidhi would have offended half the world by now, and all the noble houses would have filed on him, if he didn’t have staff to keep him in order.”

“This isa young fool,” Banichi said, laying the note aside. “Don’t concern yourself with him, Bren-ji. This is for other agencies to pursue. Meanwhile we will be trying to solve the other questions you posed.”

The other questions, meaning the situation among the lords, post-Saigimi: atevi politics.

Meanwhile he had a computer and a briefcase full of plain, unadorned work he had to do for the space program.

And he had to deal with Jase personally. His staff said there was no impediment they could locate at Mogari-nai with messages to which they could gain access, which ought to be everything; and they did indicate that Jase hadn’t pushed Manasi to carry his request through channels. The request stillmight not have been granted.

But primarily he had to unravel what in bloody hell was going on inside the ship and why Jase had gotten a message that personal from a source who had apparently been notified by the ship in preference to Jase.

That just damn well wouldn’t do, he thought, not in that personal matter, not, by any stretch of that policy, in other matters regarding the business on which Yolanda and Jason had come down to earth. Therewas the center of the matter, not Jase’s father, however tragic it was on a personal level.

Meanwhile Banichi and Tano and Algini had fallen to discussing the state of building security and whether they were going to need to establish a service alert on the third floor (a decision which rested in the hands of Tabini’s staff, and not their own) regarding the scaffold, which rumor on the staff held was going to be dismantled tomorrow.

Tomorrow, Bren thought, pricking up his ears. What a glorious piece of news. The workmen finished. No more scaffolding.

“No more barrier to the breakfast room?” he asked. “They’re going to take that ugly door down?”

“One hopes, paidhi-ji,” Tano said.

“But,” Jago said, “there’s a Marid lord arriving today to press a claim with the aiji.”

“Or,” Banichi said, “he wishes to escape the politics of his district. Note he hasn’tapplied for an audience.”

“Who is this?” Bren asked.

“Badissuni, by name,” Algini interjected. “And one wonders, nand’ paidhi, whether it’s an honest request.”

“One hardly thinks so,” Jago said. “I vastly distrust it. I would protest that door being removed.”

Banichi had a very sober expression. So, Bren trusted, did he.

“The press says,” Tano said, “that lord Badissuni is escaping the politics of his district. I think the press was handed that information.”

“A fair guess,” Banichi said, and tapped the table with a sharp egg-knife balanced delicately over his thumb. “My bet? He wants the press to say so. But he wants them following the story so if Tabini-aiji tosses him out of his ancestral apartments in the Bu-javid he can make politics at home.”

“So will Tabini do it?” Bren asked. “Pitch him out, I mean?”

“The Hagrani of the Marid have an apartment on the floor below, at the corner,” Algini said. “Quite close, nand’ paidhi. One hopes he doesn’t ask to take up residence. But we fear he will. The balcony is standing open for the paint to dry and the room to air. This is not a good security condition. If they take down the security panel we have the same condition as before, glass doors, a balcony, no difficulty if all residents of this wing are reliable. But it’s not alone these glass doors. It’s the aiji’sapartment next door. This is a serious exposure. Saigimi did not use the apartment. He let it to lord Geigi, who is notin residence, nor will be.”

“The aiji shouldforbid his opening that apartment,” Jago said under her breath. “This man is dangerous. He should be sent home unheard. We’ll have official functions here in the building, we’ll doubtless have windows open. This is an invitation perhaps the aiji is consciously extending. But I protest it when it comes near you, Bren-ji.”

It was sensitively close to this apartment, and close to the aiji, was what Jago was saying. And the glass doors of the breakfast room had already proved a flimsy shield against bullets. That was why they were repairing the lily frieze.

“I’m here to rest,” was Banichi’s pronouncement on the situation, meaning, Bren supposed, and agreed, that they could leave that to others to decide, and enjoy their time in safety.

So Banichi had another helping. And with Banichi, Tano, and Algini at the table, all of them in their uniform black, all in shirt-sleeves so as not to scar the delicate chairs with the silver-studded coats, the paidhi had his favorite breakfast, thought over hisunavoidable problems, and, while the very large bowl of curdled eggs vanished, along with half jars of marmalade and various muffins, listened to his staff discuss in their cryptic way. He pricked up his ears again as the conversation made him absolutely certainthe Saigimi business had come as a complete shock to Tano and Algini and that the orders which had caused it had not come at all unexpected to Banichi or Jago. Banichi wouldn’t have let that much slip, he well knew, if Banichi didn’t trust the entire company, and that had to include madam Saidin.

Or they were setting something up.

Since—he realized at that instant—Saidin herself was doing all the serving.

He was sitting in a room totally occupied by the Assassins’ Guild, including madam Saidin, as shop talk went on about this and that, involving Guild policy on the recent assassination, the configuration of the apartments, and the aiji’s schedule, on the security of which the paidhi’s as well as the aiji’s life and safety depended.

Tiburi, the wife of Saigimi, andher daughter Cosadi, one also learned, had bolted for Direiso’s estate as Saigimi’s brother Ajresi seized power in the Tasigin Marid.

“Don’t count that as the final skirmish,” was Jago’s observation.

“Badissuni,” Banichi said, “may be a messenger from Ajresi to Tabini.”

Queasy thought to have with the breakfast eggs—uncommon discussion to have flowing around him, but he took his own internal temperature and decided he wasn’t nearly as shocked as he ought to be about the recent assassination.

And he’d just thought—maybe it would be a lot better if an accident befell several more people associated with Saigimi.

He wasslipping toward a certain callous view of these things; and did he losesomething by that change in himself, or gainsomething, when he envisioned the fear Tabini could strike ifhe decided to kill the first messenger of peace and by that action to signal (as in the machimi) his wish for Saigimi’s Hagrani clan to remove its own new leadership in order to have peace with the aiji? Clans apparently had done it in the past.

But Tabini wouldn’t make that demand. At least the paidhi didn’t think so. Tabini continually asked the filers of Intent to choose recourse to the courts instead. It would say something very unusual for the aiji who backed judicial resort as policy to choose a second assassination.

Possibly Tabini’s own moderate position on this issue had placed him in a bind and threatened more bloodshed.

And Tabini was dealing with an Edi lord. That was another consideration: the ethnic division. The fact that Tabini wasRagi, and the majority of the peninsula, the most industrialized section of the nation, wasEdi.

There were reasons for moderation, then, rather than touching off ethnic jealousies; and Tabini knew what he was doing first in taking out Saigimi and then in leaving alive a man Jago in her own judgment called dangerous.

Jago clearly wanted the assignment in Badissuni’s case, should Tabini decide to take the harder line.

Don’t count that as the final skirmish, Jago had just said, regarding Ajresi’s seizure of power. Meaning Badissuni was going to take out Ajresi? Banichi said Badissuni was here as Ajresi’s messenger—while the other heir to the Edi lordship of the Marid, Cosadi, the daughter, was currently sheltering in Direiso’shousehold.

Ajresi might not like Tabini, but he’d definitely take alarm at Cosadi running to Direiso. He’d be watching his doors and windows for certain, since Direiso could give Cosadi a springboard to try to take the Marid andthe peninsula from Ajresi.

So damn right Ajresi might send someone to hold talks with Tabini. Jago believed Badissuni was unreliable and didn’t want him near; but Banichi said a) the heirship wasn’t settled yet and b) Badissuni was a messenger.

If Ajresi claimed the clan by force of arms and sat as lord in the Hagrani household, he had nopercentage at all in dealing with Direiso so long as she was sheltering the other Hagrani heir from Ajresi’s assassins, bet on it. Ajresi had, at least for public consumption, detested Saigimi’s previous adventurous dealings with Direiso—the attempt against the paidhiin, which had cost the clan so dearly.

And as a result of Damiri’s association with Tabini, which had gone public in that attack, now Direiso’s association—the Kadigidi, the Atageini, the Tasigin Marid and the lords of Wingin in the peninsula and Wiigin in the northern reach—was threatened. Damiriwas the Atageini heir as well as Direiso’s neighbor, and the day Damiri succeeded her uncle as head of the Atageini clan, Direiso’s days were numbered.

Tabini’s removing Saigimi, whose heir, if it was Ajresi, would take the Marid and Wingin outof her association, meant Direiso was twice threatened. If Ajresi once secured an understanding with Tabini, the two holdings, the Marid and Wingin, wouldn’t become independent from Tabini—they’d never get that—but possibly they’d be held with a far lighter grip. They’d win rights, even economic consideration. Ajresi could win an immense advantage by talking to Tabini early and very politely in his rise to power.

Ajresi might well be talking to Geigi politely, too, and mending fences with another Edi lord increasingly important in the peninsula and high in Tabini’s favor.

He very much hoped so. That could be immensely important to the space program.

As for why Banichi might have been selected for an assignment in the peninsula, Banichi wasfrom Talidi Province, right next to the Marid. His house, whatever it was (and Banichi had never said) was at least well-acquainted with the situation.

“What do you think?” he asked Banichi. “Are we under threat from the south now?”

“Not from the Marid,” Banichi said. “Ajresi isn’t that crazy.”

“If he relies on Badissuni he is,” Jago said.

“Make the man commit in public to serve Ajresi as lord?” Banichi returned. “Badissuni had as soon eat glass. But he hasno choice but represent Ajresi; and he’ll be dead by fall.”

“Do you know that?” Bren was so startled he forgot the softening nadiand spoke intimately and into Guild business at the same time.

Banichi didn’t give a flicker of offense. “Of course Ajresi might be dead by fall, instead, if hedoesn’t move first. So everything Badissuni negotiates with Tabini is also for himself, if he gets Ajresi before Ajresi gets him. I don’t think he will, though. I know who’s working for Ajresi.”

“Simpler for us to do it,” Jago said glumly. “And make Ajresi come in person and beg for himself.”

“I don’t think he’ll beg,” Banichi said. “But a message may already have come from Ajresi signaling Tabini that a public agreement would secure private alliance.”

“Do you know so?” Jago asked, echoing the former query.

“Say that messages have flown thick and fast between Ajresi and Tatiseigi of the Atageini, and I think that Badissuni is the topic.” Banichi finished off his tea. “Dead, I say. Before the snow falls, if Tatiseigi doesn’t join Direiso—and Tabini-aiji is too wise to provoke that.”

Saidinwas in the doorway, and Banichi said that. Bren’s heart gave a thump.

But it did tell him—Saidin was Damiri’s; and Damiri was Tabini’s; as Banichi and Jago were. Conspiracy was thick around them. Warfare was going on. One just didn’t see lines of cavalry and blazing buildings.

And hoped one wouldn’t.

The first order of business after breakfast was, Bren decided, to deal with Jase. The staff said Jase was sleeping; and sleeping through breakfast he accepted.

Jase waking after he’d left and receiving still more information through the staff was a different problem, very like the situation Jase had been presented by Yolanda Mercheson, in point of fact; and that could only add to his distress.

He knocked on Jase’s door. And had no answer.

He walked in, found Jase abed. “Jase,” he said, and stood there until Jase opened his eyes and frowned at him.

Then Jase looked both startled and upset to find him there.

“The phone lines are clear,” Bren said calmly, gently. “At your wish, at any time, call the ship. The staff will assist you, nadi.”

“With or without recordings made?” Jase asked.

“Everything we do is recorded,” Bren said. “I’ve told you that. Never expect differently. There are no exceptions, nadi.”

Jase flung off the covers, got out of bed and reached for his dressing-robe. “I need to talk in private!”

“For your own protection, nadi. If some unscrupulous person should accuse you of wrongdoing—and in this society it can happen—there’s proof of your honesty.”

“Damn this society!” The latter in his language. He shoved his arms into the robe and tied it.

They’d been down this path about the recordings before. And Jase challenged him on it one more time. But the manners were a step too far.

“In this culture—” Bren said patiently.

“Bren, just give me some room. I don’t want to talk about it. I just want privacy to talk to my mother, dammit.”

“I can’t guarantee that. If you’d use your head you’d know if I guaranteed it you couldn’t trust the people I can’t trust, and that’s a long list, none of them with your or my welfare at heart, so you wouldn’t know; they could edit it. So let’s be sure our own people are listening and making a record.”

“Heart, is it? Affection? Are we talking about hearts, here?”

He hadn’t meant to provoke Jase. But Jase was working hard to get a reaction, and it was one thing, with him; it was quite another with the Atageini staff, starting with Saidin, and he hoped to hell Jase hadn’t taken that pose with Saidin while he was gone.

“I can’t trust you,” he retorted. “Is that what you’re saying? Jase, just—for your information, for what it’s worth: no one had any idea, and if you’d told Manasi what was going on, the message might have reached me.”

There was dead silence. No response. No change of expression.

He tried again. Looking for reaction, a fracture, any way past that reserve and into the truth. “Not that I could have found a secure phone immediately. But if I knew there was an emergency here, I’d have found one.”

“Well. I’ll call her. Thanks for checking for me.”

“I’m sorry, Jase. I’m really sorry.”

Jase had his back turned. His bedroom had no exterior windows, just a decorated screen, gilt, beautiful work. In the center was a painting of a mountain, no specific mountain that he knew. Jase stared at that as if it offered escape.

“Yeah,” Jase said. “I know.”

“I have a meeting to go to. With Tabini. I’ll have to go when he calls. But we need to talk, Jase. We need to talk—personally.” He wished to hell he hadn’t come in here for this interview on a fast, in-and-gone-again basis. Assassins talked about a broken-legged contract, where the object wasn’t to kill someone, just to keep them out of action. And, God, such desperate measures did flash through his mind where it regarded Jase’s crisis and the one racketing through atevi affairs right now. “I don’t want you to have to track things secondhand again. I’m sorry. I really am. Please, just take it easy. The staff doesn’tentirely understand. They’re trying to, in all good will toward you.”

“I’ll manage. I’ll call. I’ll talk to you later.”

He couldn’t expect Jase to be cheerful orbalanced, considering the situation; and he tried to desensitize his own nerves to Jase’s jangled reactions with all the professional detachment he owned. Jase had some consideration coming.

Like time to talk, when he could spare it. If he could patch the gulf that had already grown between them. He hadn’t been able to talk. Now he wanted to, and didn’t dare open up the things he had to explain until Jase had weathered this crisis.

But he’d delivered his message. And there wasn’ttime right now. “See you, probably at noon,” he said, and left and shut the door, wishing there were something he could do, and trying to hang on to his own nerves.

Depression, he thought, was very easy from Jase’s present situation. Human psych was part of the course of study that led to his job; he knew all the warnings and all the ways one fought back against isolation, bad news, lack of intelligible information from one’s hosts or one’s surroundings.

Depression: general tendency to want to sleep, general tendency to believe the worst in a situation rather than the better possibilities, general tendency to believe one couldn’t rather than that one could.

And maybe his accepting being told that the phone lines were inaccessible to him without his even objecting to Manasi that it was a legitimate emergency wasn’t just some ship-culture unwillingness to question a rule. Maybe it was a growing depression.

But, dammit, he had problems, too, and didn’t, again, dammit, have time to worry about it right now.

Though he did note, now that he questioned his perceptions, that Jase hadn’t asked him the other critical and obvious question: hadn’t asked if he’d discovered why the ship hadn’t called him first with news of his father’s accident.

Jase hadn’t asked him, second, whether the ship couldhave reached him directly with the information he’d ended up hearing from Yolanda Mercheson via Mospheiran channels—or whether there’d been some communications crash around that critical time.

Jase hadn’t asked, and he realized as he walked away that he hadn’t exactly ended up volunteering the information he had from Tano, either, that Mogari-nai maintained there was nocall to Jase.

Maybe, Bren thought, he should go back and raise the issue. Or maybe the situation would find some rational explanation once Jase had had the chance to talk to his mother at some length and find out what had happened—and he did trust that Jase’s call would get through. It was reasonable that Jase’s mother herself might have asked that the news be withheld from Jase, perhaps wanting to get her own emotions under control before she broke the news to him, perhaps not wanting to distress Jase over something he couldn’t help at a time when she might just possibly know that Jase was alone with only atevi around him. He hoped that that would turn out to be the answer. Maybe that was what Jase was hoping.

“Nand’ paidhi,” he heard from a servant as he trekked back through the area of the dining room, “the aiji wishes you to come meet with him now, please.”

“Thank you, nadi,” he said, and shifted mental gears again, this time for Ragi in all the grand complexity of the court language: a session with Tabini was nothing to enter bemused or with the mind slightly occupied, and he would need to go straight over next door.

Tons of stuff to deliver next door, documents, various things for the aiji’s staff, but he’d sent those ahead. Unlike the situation in the past, when he’d resided still within the Bu-javid governmental complex, but far down the hill in his little garden apartment (and far down the list of Bu-javid officers responsible for anything critical.) He had nothing personally to carry when he spoke with Tabini nowadays. He didn’t appear in audience and wait his turn among other petitioners any longer. When the paidhi was scheduled to meet with the aiji in this last half year, he waited comfortably in his borrowed apartment, on a good day with his feet up and with a cup of tea in hand, while the aiji’s staff and the paidhi’s staff (another convenience he had not formerly had) worked out the schedule over the phone and found or created a hole in the aiji’s schedule.

Today the aiji had passed orders, one suspected, to make a hole where none existed. Tabini was squeezing him into his schedule and he would have understood if Tabini had postponed their meeting a second time or a third or fourth, counting what else was going on. If the ship in Sarini Province hadn’t blown up, Tabini had to reckon him and it at a lower priority.

But that Tabini wanted to see him, of that he had no doubt. He and Tabini on good days made meetings long enough to accommodate their private as well as their official conversation. He and Tabini, two men who had come to office young and who shared young men’s interests, often ranged into casual converse about politics, women, philosophy, and the outdoors activities they both missed. Sometimes Tabini would choose simply to discuss the management of game, not the paidhi’s direct concern. Or the merits of a particular invention some ateva had sent up the appropriate channels—which wasthe paidhi’s concern, but it wasn’t the aiji’s, except by curiosity.

He had the feeling that sometimes they had meetings simply because Tabini wanted someone to talk to about something completely extraneous to his other problems.

But definitely not today. There was the interview at noon.

And meanwhile he had a distraught and grieving human roommate whose conversation with his mother might for all he could predict blow up into God knew what.

He went immediately to the foyer, stopped by the duty station to advise Tano they should go now, and was mildly disorganized in his expectations to find Banichi and Jago, both of whom he’d gotten out of the habit of expecting to see. They’d been very much who he expected to see there, once upon a time.

“I’ll escort the paidhi myself,” Banichi said cheerfully, like old times, and left Jago and Tano and Algini to do whatever had involved a group of Guild close together and voices lower than ordinary.

Curious, Bren thought of that little gathering, not curious that they were talking, but that it had fallen so uncharacteristically quickly silent. If their job was to protect him, it did seem appropriate for them to advise him what they were protecting him from.

But no one had volunteered anything. And it was probable that Banichi and Jago were relaying things pertinent to things the paidhi’s conscience truly didn’t want to know about, down in the peninsula.

Besides, once the aiji had found a hole in his schedule, other mortals moved and didn’t delay for questions.

9

The meeting was evidently set not for the little salon, but for the formal salon of Tabini-aiji’s apartments with, in the many wide windows, the Bergid Range floating hazily above the city’s tiled roofs. The morning overcast had burned off. The air had warmed. It was a pleasant and sensual breeze flowing through the apartment—untainted with the smell of paint, Bren noticed.

Banichi had dropped to the side as they passed the security station in the foyer of the aiji’s apartment, and as the paidhi acquired nand’ Eidi for a guide. Banichi had settled into the security station with Tabini’s security. The lot of them, Bren suspected, would trade information of a sensitive sort, so Banichi was about to spend a profitable few moments, maybe more informative on the real goings-on in the Western Alliance than his own meeting was about to be.

Elderly Eidi (undoubtedly of the Guild as the formerly naïve paidhi began to suspect allhigh lords’ close attendants were of the Guild) poured tea and handed it to him while he stood waiting. “The aiji will be here at any moment,” Eidi said. “He’s been on the telephone, nand’ paidhi, an unexpected call.”

One of those days, Bren thought, thinking of the Badissuni matter, wondering whether it would divert Tabini’s attention completely away from the report he had to give.

But he stood waiting, exercising due caution with the teacup and the priceless rugs underfoot—he had once managed to drop a cup, to his intense embarrassment—and gazing out at the mountains at a view very like the one from his apartment.

Out there, unseen from this range, forest swept up the mountain flanks. Forest reserves and hunting villages existed, an entire way of life remote from the city.

Closer in, the tiled roofs of Shejidan advanced along the hills in their significant geometries, neighborhood associations which defined atevi life. You could belong to several at once; you could belong to two that hated each other and hold man’chi, he had learned, to both in varying degrees. He was looking at associations economic, residential, political, and, he guessed, but could not prove, marital.

And there were those walls that separated a few houses off together in private unity. Those were associations by trade or by kinship within the other associations. The relationships were defined even in the orientation and the age-faded colors of the tiles.

Once the eye knew what it was looking for, it could find information laid out to simple observation in Shejidan. Atevi had never hidden those most intimate secrets from humans. One supposed they took for granted they hadn’t hidden them. But humans had looked right at this view for decades and never grasped what they were seeing. The paidhiin before him had failed precisely to explain the nuances of those faded colors and, no different than his predecessors, he made his own guesses and bet the peace on them.