Destroyer

by C. J. Cherryh

  “Don’t even say it, don’t think about running a diversion, Toby. Leave that to the military. Don’t give me one more thing to worry about. Promise me.”

  “I promise,” Toby said, but Toby would lie, in extremity. So would he. It was, he thought, a damned nasty habit in their family.

  “Wouldn’t help us anyway,” he said to Toby. “We’ll be away from this coast fast as we can find transport, that’s the one thing I can say.”

  “Just don’t take chances, Bren.”

  “Mutual.”

  This trip it was Cenedi and the dowager. “You will go with Lord Bren,” Ilisidi said to Cajeiri, buckling on a life preserver. “And you will do exactly what he says.”

  “Yes, mani-ma,” Cajeiri said.

  After the dowager left there was no restraining the boy. It was a thousand questions, most of them, in some form, Where are we, and Where are we going, nandi? It seemed forever while the boat clawed its way back through the surf. Forever, and far too short a time to talk to Toby, once Cajeiri was in his care. He had things he wanted to say, none of them quite finding words, none of them that he managed to say, except, when Barb came back and took on her last spare fuel can, “I want to see you on the holidays.”

  “Think you can settle things by then?”

  “I’ve got, what, four months? Sure. Time enough.” It was a jibe in the face of fate. He resisted superstition. “Just when you get out of here, go.”

  “I’m going to marry her, Bren.”

  He swallowed every objection. Every thought of objection. “Good,” he said. “Good. If you’re happy—that’s what I care about. Go home and do that.”

  The little boat bumped the hull. He had to take Cajeiri down the ladder. He stopped to hug his brother long and hard, and to try to fill up all the missed chances in one long breath. “Luck,” Toby said.

  Then it was down the ladder, Cajeiri last, and unsteady when he hit the cockleshell of a boat, rocking as it was in the chop. Bren yanked Cajeiri down onto a seat and sat down, himself.

  “Can you swim, young sir?” Bren asked him, checking the fastening of the life preserver, that at least fit Cajeiri’s young body.

  “A little,” Cajeiri said.

  Which meant not at all in this rough sea. “Then stay still in center of the boat. Precisely in the center. Neither of us wants to fall in.”

  “We’re off,” Barb said cheerfully. “They’re kind of disappearing into the rocks, out there, but they’re waiting for you.”

  “Good,” he said. He didn’t know how to make conversation with Barb, let alone now, when everything in the world was riding on their getting inshore and Toby getting out again. He did as he’d told Cajeiri to do, centered himself in the boat and held on for the ride. Barb had her hands full, and the bow smacked down with fierce jolts as they went, white water boiling past the sides. Spray drenched them.

  “May one turn around?” Cajeiri asked, wanting a better view.

  “Keep your weight centered, young gentleman, and you may turn.”

  Cajeiri did, quickly, as they rode the waves in, with ominous dark rocks on one hand and the other.

  The engine throttled back, then Barb shoved the throttle hard, and they knifed through the boiling white.

  A single dark figure waited for them as their keel hissed up onto the shingle—Cenedi, by the silver in his hair. Cenedi gave his hand to Cajeiri and pulled him out. Tossed the life preserver back aboard.

  “Bren?” Barb said. “Be careful.”

  He shed his own life preserver, Toby’s gear. “Make him happy,” he said to her while she was switching fuel tanks, last thing before he cleared the boat and ran up the shingle to the rocks.

  He didn’t look back until he was in shadow, with Cenedi and Cajeiri and the rest of them, with all their gear. Then he looked over the top of a rounded boulder and saw the runabout fighting the surf. He watched, wet and freezing in the wind, until he saw the boat meet up with the Brighter Days—he couldn’t see Barb get out or Toby help her, but that was what he figured was happening.

  He watched, chilled through, aware Jago had thrown a thermal sheet around him, watched as they began to move. Watched as she turned for the open sea.

  “Good luck,” he mouthed, and, feeling a hand on his shoulder and a presence behind him, looked back at Banichi, who was urging him to get up and move.

  He did that—looked back again, but now the boat was only a wedge of white behind the surf, headed home.

  7

  They gathered in a small rocky slot well up on the headland, the dowager struggling considerably at the last of the climb up a rugged slope. She sat down on a rock under the overhang of a branch, and leaned both hands against her cane. One was not supposed to notice this fact, but Cenedi quietly proffered a small cup of water from his flask, and she took it gladly enough.

  It was the darkest part of the night. The cloud that had filmed the west at sunset swept on across the sky and blotted out the stars above them. That made it more difficult to see, but it also made it harder for them to be seen, and that gave them a little time to catch their breath and to reconnoiter.

  “We must get transport to come to us,” Cenedi said to them. “We are moving too slowly. If we can find a place for a few of us to wait—” Cenedi would never say that the dowager and the boy and likely the paidhi-aiji were the few of us in question, but Bren had no difficulty understanding there might be theft, mayhem, even casualties in the process of acquiring that transport, actions in which the few might be an inconvenience. They were at a crossroads of their plans, either to find a secure place where they might leave their weaker members in fortified safety, with allies, while the rest of them attempted to raise support—or go all together. Bren was not unhappy when Banichi supported the principle of stealth and rapid movement, which was their Guild’s general preference, and all of them going together into the interior.

  “We have several names,” Cenedi said, “for this area. Dur remains one possibility, nadiin, but our adversaries will watch that.”

  There were staunch allies in that particular district, for certain, somewhat to the north of them, and they might have gone there if they had run into opposition. Dur was an isolated place, the sort of place in which one could hide, but from which they could not maneuver with any aggressive rapidity at all—not unless they wanted to try an escape by air, in a small plane, and Bren sincerely hoped not to have to do that.

  “Desari is our choice, then,” Banichi said, and others seemed to agree this name represented a good idea. “Two of us will go. We should.” That was in the dual, as Banichi put it, meaning himself and Jago.

  Bren was less happy with that, but to this council—all of them were out of the Assassins’ Guild—he was necessarily a spectator, not a useful contributor of suggestions. They had spent their voyage down memorizing and arguing resources, and likewise used their voyage across the straits, laying these plans. When Toby had suggested this coast, and Cobo village, they had immediately known where he was proposing to land them and what resources they might have here, before they had approved the idea.

  Now they were the ones with the information and the plan, which turned out not to be Cobo, evidently, but another village in the area and the paidhi could only wait, wait sometimes sitting on an uncompromising and chilly rock, sometimes sitting against it, resolved not to move about or stand up, for fear of attracting attention. Silence was all he could contribute to the situation. Ilisidi had lain down to nap on the lumpy, but less chill, bulk of their personal baggage. Cajeiri had completely flagged and gone to sleep on the icy damp ground, buffered by baggage. Cenedi and his men rested, catnapping by turns, cleaning weapons, speaking only in necessity.

  But, damn it, he never could nap under such situations, even if he knew it was the sane thing to do. He sat there in one position or the other and fretted, and had a candy bar he’d stowed in his pocket, and listened to the sea, that vast, powerful sound that in principle seemed so quiet, and wasn’t.
It could mask their small sounds. It could mask ambush. He felt deaf.

  Tano and Algini came and sat by him, his protection, still. They went to sleep for maybe half an hour, taking turns with Cenedi’s men.

  Bren just stared at the horizon, as a faint, faint glow began in the east, and grew, and grew, casting the lumpy horizon into relief, and slowly bringing reality to the landscape around them, rounded rocks and clumps of sea grass, small shrubs and a fairly precipitate slope behind their little camp.

  Daylight. And the mainland. It seemed surreal.

  Light grew. And with it, all at once, every ateva but Ilisidi and the boy suddenly stirred, opened eyes, looked in the same direction, an eerie simultaneity, a warning. They sat up, reached for weapons. Bren reconsidered his position, whether he had enough cover. He didn’t ask what was happening, or what their senses had perceived. He didn’t make a sound. Didn’t twitch a muscle, not risking even a scuff of dead grass.

  Came a distant thrum, then a motor, some sort of vehicle, something of size, by the pitch of it. And he stayed quite, quite still, knowing that whatever he heard, the atevi around him heard more than he did. It could be a chance traveler. It could be trouble.

  Cajeiri sat up suddenly, blinking and confused. Cenedi immediately signaled silence. Weapons were in evidence all around, and Cajeiri quietly touched his great-grandmother’s foot.

  She woke, and Cenedi assisted her to sit up, as he moved Ilisidi and Cajeiri ever so quietly to a sheltered place behind the rocks. The paidhi was supposed to see to his own welfare, and the paidhi had no idea except to keep low and not move.

  The noise kept on, a low gear, straining, and it was coming toward them.

  Are we that close to a road? Bren wondered, as the racket grew and grew. Is it coming overland? He dared not put his head up to see what was going on, but Algini edged up among the rocks and got a look.

  And stood up, as the racket and clatter crescendoed to a ridiculous level.

  If Algini stood up, everybody could have a look. It was a battered old market truck, and Banichi was driving, Jago occupying the other seat. The side of the truck said, in weathered blue and red paint, Desigien Association, and it had made a fairly long, laborious track across the grassy headland, leaving tracks in the grass.

  It came to a stop, and Banichi set the brake, and the two of them got out, beckoning them to come, hurry it up. Banichi and Jago were not in uniform—were in bulky country jackets and loose trousers, even their pig-tails tied up with leather cord.

  Bren gathered up his computer, his personal baggage, and Tano and Algini gathered up their own gear and Banichi’s and Jago’s, while Cajeiri and Cenedi assisted the dowager to rise and negotiate the rocky path toward the truck.

  Baggage went unceremoniously into the truck bed ahead of them, except the computer, which Bren kept close, except the guns and ammunition, which various other people kept close. And the truck was atevi-scale. Cenedi got up onto the bed and bent over to assist the dowager up, and Nawari made a step of his joined hands, so that she could manage it, Cajeiri hovering behind, in case he needed to administer an indelicate push.

  There was no need. The dowager, once aboard, went to the heap of baggage near the cab and sat down quite nicely. Cajeiri got up and wandered noisily around the truck bed, looking for a permissable spot, and Ilisidi beckoned sharply for him to join her sitting on the baggage.

  Bren hitched his computer higher onto his shoulder and tried to climb up the metal rungs. Algini extended a hand from above and Jago, appearing below him, shoved from behind.

  He turned and looked down over the tail of the bed. “Did we steal it?” he asked Jago.

  “Borrowed, nandi,” she said. “We shall leave it at the railhead for its owners.” She clambered up. “There is a tarp, nadiin-ji. Regretfully, we must use it. Heads down.”

  She hauled the oily, dirty thing from its position bunched against the rear of the cab, and and began spreading it out of its stiff folds, back along the slatted side-rails. Tano, from the other side, moved to help, and it spread like a tent over them. Bren sat down, as they all must, below the level of the side panels, their daylight cut out again in favor of oil-smelling dark and the vibration of the still-running truck engine.

  “Are you well, nandi?” Cenedi asked Ilisidi, off toward the cab end, and Ilisidi answered, practically: “It will be warmer under the tarp, at least, Nedi-ji.”

  There was some to-do, Cenedi and others evidently rearranging baggage to make Ilisidi a more comfortable place—she was not so tall that she had to bend her head, at least—and meanwhile the tarp was being tied down from above, lashed across with ropes, made into a snug container.

  The truck smelled unpleasantly like fish.

  Springs gave. Doors banged, forward. A moment later the truck lurched into gear and growled and lumbered into a turn.

  They were leaving tracks that would persist in the tall grass, evident from the air. But trucks such as this one came and went without benefit of roads all the time in the country, heavy-tired, following tracks to fishing traps and boats. They had no choice but some such transport, given that the dowager was not up to the kind of brisk hike Banichi and Jago had taken last night, at what toll on unaccustomed muscles Bren could only imagine, and at what risk to the village in question, which one assumed had lent the truck knowingly to help them.

  One assumed so, at least.

  They jounced and bounced downhill for a long, winding trek, before they came to more level ground, and gravel under the tires. Likely they had come down to a common market route. The mainland had far fewer roads than Mospheira. By the name on the door, this one truck likely belonged to the whole village of Desigien, which meant any one in the village might use it to haul net, wood, supplies, or, daily, fish, or ice—Bren dimly recalled that an ice plant existed, central between Desigien and several other coastal villages, an essential item for fishermen who hoped to get their catch to market. They would truck it daily to the railhead at—where was it?

  Adaran, Adaran was the name, whence it went to larger markets, even to Shejidan itself. If people in the district went visiting, they would walk generally, or take the local bus, which provided social connection for the little association, and that bus might run only twice a day, life proceeding at a slower pace out in the villages. And outside of such buses and one or two trucks such as this one for the whole village, that was the whole need for roads. Such interdistrict roads as existed would parallel the railroad right-of-way, village-to-market roads that were, generally, informally maintained, and persisting so far along the rail as frequent need kept wearing down the weeds.

  He knew. He’d once had the job of surveying the rail systems, advising the aiji where expansion would or would not better serve the area . . . in those ages-ago and innocent days, so it seemed, when rail and a nascent air service was the whole story of atevi and Mospheiran transport. The office of the paidhi had read the histories of waste and pollution, and wanted to avoid the excesses of old Earth, wisely so, considering how passionately atevi felt about spoiling the landscape. The paidhiin of a prior day had advised the aijiin in Shejidan to go on as they had been going before the Landing, to link their provinces by rail, not road, to make orderly, minimal corridors for village-to-town transport that very little disturbed the environment, that kept the little associations as inward-focused as they had begun, above all not sprawling along transportation lines in ways that would absolutely destroy the atevi pattern of life, and with it, atevi social structure. Wise, wise decisions that gave them this little truck, this little-used road.

  Circles. Interlocking circles. And no one went far by truck or bus. If they took their little truck out of district, it would look increasingly out of place, the farther it went from its origin. It could by no means serve them all the way to Shejidan. The train was where they were going. And how they were going to get aboard that without a fuss . . .

  “Will we ride the train?” Cajeiri asked, as they bounced painfully abo
ut in potholes and what might be ruts, or simply an abundance of rocks amid the gravel. “Are we going to drive all the way to Shejidan?”

  “We will take the train, young sir,” Cenedi’s voice said in the darkness. And because there was an obvious next question, for which Cajeiri could be heard drawing breath: “As far as Taiben.”

  Taiben, it was. The aiji’s estate. If there was one place they might find trouble, nearly as efficiently as at Shejidan, Taiben was a likely place.

  But it was a sprawling estate, almost a province unto itself, a maze of hunting paths and woods in which they might even lose this truck—if they could get fuel enough to get them there. He wished they could do without the train.

  “Listen to me,” Ilisidi said, sternly, “listen, great-grandson, and remember a name. Desari. Remember this name, and be in debt to this village. Lord Geigi once rescued this man Desari and his daughter at sea when their boat engine failed, and when they had drifted for days, likely to die. Geigi recommended Desari of Desigien as a name to rely on, since every year that he could, on the anniversary of the rescue, this Desari has sent Lord Geigi a gift, so I have it from Geigi. So the debt remains, until Geigi might call on him. This will discharge the debt to Geigi, and place it on us in his place.”

  “On the Ragi.”

  “On all the Ragi,” Ilisidi said. “And you must remember it, boy, for another generation, a debt to him, and his whole association. The risk we have asked of them is considerable.”

  “Our enemies could see the name on the truck.”

  “Exactly so, if we make a mistake, and they will be in grave danger. What is the name, boy?”

  “Desari,” Cajeiri said. “Desari. From this coast. From Desigien. But, mani-ma, will this Desari come with us on the train?”

  “No,” Cenedi said. “He would be little help.”

  “But,” said Cajeiri.

  “Give us rest, great-grandson. An honest truck does not jabber as it proceeds along the road. We should be an ordinary truck, full of fish. Who knows who might hear, along the road?”