Deliverer

by C. J. Cherryh

  “We should advise the neighbors we are in residence,” was all the dowager said on the matter of business. And when the tea pot was empty: “Join us for supper, nand’ paidhi.”

  “One would be extremely honored, nand’ dowager.” He took it for a signal to depart for the while, and picked up his computer, rose and bowed—no question of when supper would be, but he clearly was not dressed for the occasion, and needed to remedy that. He bowed a second time, received the dowager’s gracious nod, and took himself out, across the foyer and up the stairs, attended from the outer door, not by Banichi or Jago, who were conspicuously absent, but by the trusted staff that he had known before at Malguri—Djinana and his partner Maigi, both welcome faces, somber in the grim news that doubtless had already run through the household, and concerned about the business that had brought them here, but clearly glad to see him.

  He had not, he noted, heard the bus start up outside.

  The assigned rooms upstairs were, he was glad to see, his old ones—the cozy little sitting area, the historic bedroom with its snarling hunting trophy, and the bed in which historic murder had been done. He longed for that bed. Oh, he longed for it. He had left his own somewhere in the small hours before dawn.

  But he had to dress for dinner instead.

  His was a string of rooms, all in traditional order, the short hall beyond leading to the bath and the ancient accommodation, as the word was. He did reasonably hope for a bath before dinner. He settled on that as his ambition, and set his computer safely against the wall, next to his modest luggage that sat in the bedroom, already emptied—staff would be fussing his abused and meager wardrobe into respectability. He had both Djinana and Maigi attending him personally on a tour of the remembered premises.

  “One has never forgotten, nadiin-ji,” he said earnestly. “One recalls your excellent care with great gratitude. The consolation of this unhappy circumstance is the chance to see you and these premises again.”

  There were deep bows, several times repeated, and Djinana took the lead, indeed offering him the chance to bathe after his journey—he was very glad to agree, and shed his travel-worn clothes in favor of a bathrobe.

  “How is the young man who came with us, nadiin-ji?” he asked, and Maigi assured him Jegari was abed, warm, and sound asleep after his ordeal…a good report, a reassuring report. The boy was a hunter, a woodsman from birth—he would bounce back with more vigor than a slightly worn diplomat and translator might do under like circumstances.

  Said diplomat and translator sank into the stone bath. Staff had remembered exactly the way he liked it; and he rested his head on the rim, soaking away, and wishing Banichi and Jago were able to enjoy the same.

  They were not. They likely would not even stop for supper, whatever reconnaissance they were about, which might even entail leaving the grounds: he earnestly hoped not.

  But to his surprise Banichi and Jago were waiting for him when, wrapped in a warm robe, he exited the bath to prepare for supper.

  “Is there news, nadiin-ji?”

  “None firm, Bren-ji,” Banichi said. “Cenedi is still talking to the driver.”

  “Regarding the dowager’s neighbors,” Jago said, deliberately cryptic, and he pressed no further. He was at least advised where the minefield lay—what topic might be bad taste in a civilized dinner. Hence the warning. The dowager owned the house, the dowager had the neighbors: the dowager would receive a report while it was still rumor and make the estimation—it was not his business, nor his security’s business. He only had his advisement.

  Meanwhile his dinner attire, pressed and pristine and rescued from his luggage, was laid out neatly on the dressing bench, and Djinana and Maigi stood by to assist. He dressed as far as his shirt, his trousers and his boots, and Jago came and offered him his coat. The pockets of that coat, when he put it on, were heavy on both sides, and very fortunately, it was stiff brocade, which did not collapse under the weight.

  One burden was his gun, he expected: he hated carrying it, but it had been useful before; the other thing, a small unit like a pocket-com—he felt of it, not recognizing what it was.

  “Keep it with you, one begs, Bren-ji,” Jago said, regarding the contents of that pocket.

  “What does it do?”

  “It locates,” Banichi said.

  Well, damn. One of the mysterious units. And for dinner in Malguri. Cajeiri had been snatched out of his bed, and if he guessed correctly what this was, it was a means of location. If Cajeiri had had this about him—but what the hell did they expect inside Malguri’s fortress?

  “How does it work?” he asked. “What am I to do?”

  Jago held out her hand, and he brought it out of his pocket. It had a small, glowing screen.

  With a dot.

  “Like the one on the ship,” Jago said. “You are here.”

  “The satellite reaches it,” Banichi said, the man who once upon a time had not cared whether the earth went around the sun or quite the opposite. “Keep it with you.”

  Ship-tech, let loose on the planet, when the planet had swallowed all it could take, as was, a choking lot, enough to have overthrown Tabini and plunged the whole world into chaos.

  He didn’t like it. He didn’t like the other little gift, either, the one with the bullets. He didn’t at all like machinery plummeting out of the heavens and landing in atevi orchards he was responsible for protecting from such intrusions.

  But that was the situation they had to work with—that or see chaos and overthrow in the aishidi’tat far ahead of any disturbance modern tech might make in the atevi culture. The aishidi’tat was still suffering aftershocks—

  And the boy’s welfare—Cajeiri’s—outright overrode ordinary precautions, workaday rules, even major ones. The paidhi was supposed to mediate and rule on the introduction of tech, not have it in the hands of his staff before he had a chance to study the question. He ought to forbid it. He ought to tell them shut it down, let it alone, let them solve the problem without it.

  Things were too precarious, advantage too important.

  He took the gear. He didn’t order any curtailment of its use. Any advantage they could get: that was his thinking, now, right or wrong. Speed in settling this business. News. News would do.

  “There was that baggage delay at Cadienein-ori,” Banichi said darkly. “It may have involved the young gentleman.”

  Shocking notion. They had the boy in a trunk? “Guild has gotten there?”

  In force, he meant. And that was a truly stupid question and Banichi failed to answer it. Guild never mentioned where allied Guild was, not on a mission.

  “We should go back downstairs,” Jago said. “Are you comfortable with that situation, Bren-ji?”

  “Absolutely,” he said. Into the matter with the driver, and the source of their information—he did not inquire, having asked his one stupid question for the hour. They might tell him, but he decided his mental energy was better spent on the dowager, and on readying himself for dinner. If there was information to be had, it would properly come to the dowager before it came to him—and the dowager’s staff was not resting at all at the moment.

  He looked forward to supper…and not at all in anticipation of the food.

  10

  There were appetizers and preserves, there was a presentation of game of the season, with triangular heaps of vegetables of varied colors—not to mention the sauces, the breads, the crackers and soups—there were three of the latter, each in small cups, the whole dinner service at a modest portable table set near the fire, just the dowager for company.

  It was, Ilisidi remarked, snowing heavily out. The bus was still parked in the drive, and the driver was still in interview with the dowager’s young men.

  And, exhausted by the mere sight of the pile of food, one had to sit waiting and hoping for what else the dowager might have learned, or guessed, or understood, besides the weather report. It was absolutely impossible to breach etiquette with a superior even at such an
intimate supper.

  But Ilisidi could do so, if she chose. After the formal compliment to the cook, and well before the after-dinner brandy, a message came, which was simply, in the words of the young man who delivered it: “It is Caiti’s summer house, nandi, in the Haidamar.”

  “Well, well, well,” Ilisidi said, seeming to taste the words when she said them. She looked up at Bren, then, and gave a decidedly unpleasant smile. “My great-grandson is indeed with them, nand’ paidhi, and the name of the villain is indeed Caiti.”

  That—however grim—was the best news of the day. They had guessed right. They had followed the right movement. “Whatever the dowager wishes to do,” Bren said, “the paidhiaiji supports.”

  “A visit, one thinks,” Ilisidi said.

  To Caiti’s domain? Bren wondered in alarm, but the dowager took a serving of sweet berries, seeming unruffled.

  In a moment more she remarked: “We shall call on my neighbor. We have so seldom spoken in recent years.” After yet another bite she added: “Your presence is requested, paidhi-ji.”

  The neighbor?

  Which neighbor, of several?

  That was the likeliest cause of the driver’s apprehension—trouble in Malguri’s own district. At least two pieces of information began to come together.

  “Tonight, aiji-ma?”

  “Tomorrow at first light,” the dowager said, and added: “Overland.”

  Cajeiri had a bad, bad headache.

  In the dark. Smelly, musty dark.

  It was somehow and very surely not Great-grandmother’s apartment. That much was clear in all the overset of things that had been true when he went to bed. It was none of the confused sequence of places he had dreamed. Somewhere, he knew he had heard Jegari tell him he was going to leave him and would try to bring help, and the whole world had been roaring and moving, but a slit-eyed attempt to see where he was now produced no Jegari, no information but a cold, black space, the hard-padded surface he was lying on, and a thin wool blanket without a sheet or a pillow.

  That was not Great-grandmother’s apartment.

  He felt further, opened his eyes more than a slit, and felt an attack of nausea, not to mention the widening of the splitting headache, right behind the eyes. It was utterly dark. There were no sounds. This place was cold as the ship could be cold, but it smelled of age. Age—and what mani would call very bad housekeeping.

  The silence around him was as curious. He had never been in a place this quiet. No Jegari, no Antaro, no staff. Just a drip of water. Plink. Plink. Plink.

  Well, it was scary. But it took more than dark to put him in a panic. He had been in the deep passageways of the ship, in a section with no lights, where it was colder than this. He had found his way through, had he not?

  He heaved himself up to sit, hugging the blanket about him. He was as naked as he had gone to bed, and the blanket was scratchy, nothing of quality at all, besides smelling musty. His stomach felt more than empty: it felt as if it would like to turn inside out and his head was going to implode if it did. He had to concentrate for the next few moments on breathing and settling that feeling.

  He was, he decided, about to be mad instead of scared. But being mad was going to hurt his head. So he tried not to be that, either. He tried to think instead. That by no means helped his headache, but he needed to know where he was.

  It was certainly no place he knew, that was foremost. Ship air was filtered and had its own smells of plastics and heat and humans, besides that the ship had no way to reach down and snatch him up. Great-grandmother’s apartment smelled throughout of fragrant woods and spices and dried herbs. This place smelled of cold damp stone and things decaying and dusty. And dripping, cold dripping.

  It was a place few people cared to fix up. It was where they put things they did not care much about, either, that stood to reason; and they put him here. Unless it was the best they had, nobody he trusted would possibly bring him here for any reason. It was a dungeon, that was what. A real dungeon. Like in nand’ Bren’s movies.

  Had not Jegari talked about getting help? But when had Jegari been here, and where had he gone?

  He just could not remember. He thought he remembered a vehicle, but that was getting away from his memory the longer he stayed awake. And there were legs, dark legs, several pair, and more steps, and there had been a place that moved, and one that roared, and right now his mouth told him he was thirsty and his stomach told him he still wanted to be sick if he moved too fast.

  But sitting still was no good. Just waiting for somebody bad to show up was no good.

  A foot off the edge reached stone floor and knocked into what proved to be a wooden stool. Something fell off it. Feeling on the stool and beside it he found a metal bottle and a heavy hand-sized cylinder with a switch. He moved that switch, and light stabbed out at bare stone walls and a growth of something dark and nasty on the rock.

  The room was cube-shaped stone, top to bottom, and there was a wooden door—a door that looked very solid. The little stool held one other item: a sandwich, and the metal bottle was a can of fruit drink. He might trust the can. He by no means trusted the sandwich, the thought of which turned his stomach anyway. Fruit juice—he might get that down.

  Where were Antaro and Jegari?

  Where had Jegari gone? For help. But he could not remember when.

  They had been three, safe, comfortable, Fortunate Three, and now, wherever this was, wherever he was, he was One.

  Alone. He never had been alone in his whole life.

  And upset. And hurting. And sick at his stomach. And mad. And scared.

  One was a Unity. One could not be divided. One could not be made into anything. It just was.

  He wrapped the blanket around him, hugged it close to his chin for warmth and swept the beam about. There was cloth in one corner. There was a kind of a pit in the opposite one. There was a bucket, a red bucket next to the pit. He was lying on a kind of a bed, with a thin, worn mattress.

  He got both feet on the icy floor, stood up, still dizzy, and investigated the door, the obvious way out. It was, no surprise, locked.

  The bucket against the other wall was cheap plastic, with a metal handle. The pit in the floor was dank and foul-smelling—very foul, like the recycling tanks aboard the ship. He guessed what that was for, in the absence of other accommodation. It was like—it was like The Three Musketeers. It was like The Count of Monte Cristo. Only he had not guessed how bad the Chateau d’If would smell in real life.

  The cloth pile he found was clothes, new and clean, and fairly well his size at least, and with them was a light coat and a pair of light, cheap boots, used ones. He dressed and put the coat on, warmer, and feeling a little safer, but it was cheap woolen clothing, and it was all a little too large—the long-sleeved shirt hung past his hips and the light coat covered his knuckles. The pants wanted all the tabs taken up as far as could be, and even then tended to drift downward. The cheap leather shoes—those were too large, too: the socks were at least heavy and warm. And all of it smelled musty, as if it had been stored somewhere and never washed.

  There was no light in the ceiling. There was no switch by the heavy door, which proved to be locked from the outside. There was no window, nothing but a beamed ceiling that had collected ages of dust.

  A dungeon, for sure.

  Maybe on the other side of the wall was some other prisoner. Maybe he could dig his way out.

  Or maybe he could find a way out through the pit in the floor. He leaned over it and considered it, and it was just too foul down there. More to the point, there was no updraft that would indicate it led anywhere but down into bottomless and unspeakable filth.

  There was, however, a little trap at the bottom of the sole door. But it wouldn’t lift. The opening was smaller than he was at his smallest. And he couldn’t come at any hinges on it: they were all on the other side.

  So were the door hinges, to his disappointment: the door opened outward. And he tried the pull-tab of t
he fruit juice can to see if he could reach through to lift, say, a latch on the outside. It was not long enough.

  Disconsolate, he sat down and had a quarter of the sandwich, deciding there was no need for poison, if they could just shoot him, and drugging him hardly made sense if he was stuck in here for hours and hours. But he kept it to a quarter, not knowing when they might feed him again, and he drank only enough of the room-temperature fruit drink to make the sandwich go down. He had been mad. Now he was, in fact, swinging a little back toward scared. He hoped Assassins had not killed his father and mother when they kidnapped him. He hoped Antaro and Jegari were still alive.

  They would never get away with killing his father, if they had done that. His great-grandmother would come back from Tirnamardi with Uncle Tatiseigi—they would take over, and anybody responsible would be very sorry for that.

  They would be very sorry, too, for putting him in this hole, once he got out.

  He had the drink can, which could be valuable. And he had the metal pull tab. And then he looked at the metal bucket handle, but he thought that if they were halfway smart, they would miss that when someone came to do something with the bucket. He dared not go on using the flashlight, running the batteries down, so he took a careful survey of the place, got up and ran the beam down into the hole (horrid) and along the door seam, and looked even under the bed.

  There was a shadow around a stone, gap in the mortar right in the middle of the wall, at the foot of the bed—a little stone, where it seemed there had never been any mortar, or maybe it had just eroded away, the place looked so old.

  He didn’t know what might lie behind that rock, or how big the little stone might prove to be, but it was something to start with. He took his blanket to sit on, and his can key, and started scraping away at it, hoping, as it wore out, that the people in charge would go on giving him fruit drink in cans.

  So what would the Count of Monte Cristo do?