That particular feature could still operate, with guns instead of arrows. But it was undignified to look up in fear. They came to a halt in front of the shadowed front door.
The dowager, helped down by her young men, straightened herself, took a firm, gloved grip on her cane, then walked, on Cenedi’s arm, up the icy steps. Bren slid down, finding his weary legs like stumps underneath him. Banichi and Jago alit, and Banichi shouldered a heavy bag from their gear.
Well, Bren said to himself, with a slight glance at Banichi and Jago, whose faces were impassive. Well, here we go. He walked the icy steps after the dowager, all the while conscious of the gun in his right pocket. He had no intention of giving that up. His bodyguard would let no one lay hands on him.
The doors at the top of the steps slowly opened. Inside, there was firelight—live flame, in lamps from a century before electricity, illumined the hallway. Brighter firelight from an open inner doorway cast a live sheen over the irregularities of slate flooring in the hall, and the austerity and appropriateness of the single hanging and the single, horizontally-mounted spear above it were downright chilling in their lack of mitigation or welcome.
One. A Unity of One was the declaration here. Kabiu at its simplest.
Arrogance. Solitude. Again, isolation from the world.
And absolute power at least within these walls. Malguri made a far, far different statement in its foyer, with stone and winter branches, a porcelain vase and a scatter of river stones: diversity, balance, harmony.
Bren read the arrangement, treading deliberately at the dowager’s back, and had the very clear realization that no human foot had ever sullied this floor.
Did the lady know by now that he was with the dowager?
If she knew there were visitors at her gate, and knew they were not the egg delivery from the lowland farms—which doubtless did not rate an armed escort—she indeed knew that detail. He did not expect a welcome.
But then this lady was not only scantly disposed to accept humans, as he recalled. She had been scantly disposed to recognize the fact that Ilisidi had married a westerner, more than half a century ago. This lady was still scantly disposed to recognize the existence of the aishidi’tat and the aiji in Shejidan, let alone welcome a stray human.
A maidservant met them inside that further door, and bowed.
“The lady wishes me to show you to your rooms.”
“We are not here to tour or dither about,” Ilisidi snapped, and the cane tip struck the floor with the sound of a rifle shot. “Where is my cousin?”
The maid looked as if she had rather be almost anywhere else. “If the dowager would be so good as to take cognizance of the offered rooms…”
“We are not good!” Ilisidi said. A second time the cane hit the ground. “We are impatient and out of sorts! Our great-grandson is in the hands of idiots! We assume our esteemed cousin is more intelligent than to abet this nonsense by delaying us in our search, and we assume she is not ignorant of the proceedings and the perpetrators! Shall we draw other conclusions?”
The maid opened her mouth, hardly looking up, then shut it, bowing deeply. “One will relay this sentiment to a superior immediately, nandi. Please wait.”
The maid fled at, for a decorous household servant, a very fast pace. They stood in silence, melting small puddles onto the slate floor.
A second servant, an old woman, came from the lighted room, and bowed. This was likely the major domo, who should have been the one sent to greet a guest of high status. Mark that down in the score.
A deep bow. “The house is distressed to report, nandi, that the lady is indisposed. She will see her guests at breakfast.”
Wham! went the cane. The old woman flinched, not raising her eyes.
“Cenedi,” Ilisidi said, and quietly, smoothly, Cenedi moved forward, oh, about half a step.
“We are at the dowager’s orders,” Cenedi said, and lifted a hand. His men moved in the indicated direction, right toward the open door. Three set themselves in place to guard that door. Two more moved down the hall to take possession of that.
My God, Bren thought, and did not stare about to see what Banichi and Jago were doing. He had the nape-of-the-neck sense they were paying attention round about, not looking at him or at Cenedi at the moment.
The major domo, give her credit, stood her ground, though deferentially.
Ilisidi hardly paused to notice. She headed, with Cenedi, right past the woman, right toward a further lighted doorway, and Bren found nothing to do but follow her, with Banichi and Jago one on a side and very much on the alert.
They passed Ilisidi’s guard. They met another, inside the room, two women not in Guild black, but wearing firearms.
In an ornate chair by a fireside, the chair one of a set of three, sat a thin, aristocratic woman enjoying a cup of tea. A book lay face down in her lap. Her hair was liberally streaked with white. She wore half-moon glasses, slid well down on her nose, and looked up with a flash of golden eyes.
“Well,” the lady said, “one is hardly surprised at such behavior.”
“Where is my great-grandson?” Ilisidi asked, the cane in both hands.
“How should I know?”
“By various sources!” Bang! went the cane, end-on. “Neither of us is a fool.”
“What is that?” The lady took off her glasses and waved that object generally at, Bren feared, him. He decided it behooved him to bow courteously at this point, and look as civilized as possible in a slightly damp padded coat and outdoor boots.
“This gentleman,” Ilisidi shot back, “honors this house, as do we.”
“Guild guards and a human,” the lady scoffed, looking down her nose. “You dare dispose your hireling guards under my roof!”
“Your roof by tolerance, cousin. Your grandfather—”
“Leave my grandfather out of this, nadi!”
Ilisidi marched over to the other chair and sat down, damp traveling coat and all, cane braced between her knees. “Tea,” she said to the servants.
There was a lengthy pause. Lady Drien sat still, and sat, and finally lifted the slim, jeweled fingers of the hand that rested on her chair. A maidservant bowed, turned and walked to the large standing tea urn, an impossibly ornate thing that looked like a silver dragon with brass belly-scales. Bren followed the motion only with his eyes, watching hands as the maid prepared and filled two cups, and brought them back on a cinnabar and blackwood tray.
Ilisidi accepted. Drien accepted. There was a space of decorous silence while the two sipped and thought.
Drien set her cup down first, click. Ilisidi’s followed, click. There was another moment of silence.
“Remarkably early snow,” Drien said.
“It makes searching inconvenient.”
“Gods unfortunate! Impatient even at your own disadvantage!”
“There is a boy, your own cousin, badly handled by the likes of Caiti and other fools, and you are prepared to be tolerant of this circumstance! We are appalled, Cousin!”
“I had no part in your decision to bed down with western barbarians! Anything you got of that error is not my concern!”
A small pause and a dark stare. “My great-grandson remains your cousin, Drien-daja. Blood is blood.”
“Unwillingly!”
A longer pause. “Your neighbors came under my roof presenting compliments,” Ilisidi said. “They entered under our residence. They sat at our table. They complimented our cook. They spoke disparagingly of you, in particular.”
Drien’s nostils flared. “So cheap a ploy.”
“But true, nandi. They said nothing specific against you—certainly nothing quite accusatory. But one is certain they were perfectly willing to do so, had we indicated we were at all willing to hear it. They later suborned a maid of our staff, a woman with ties to the lowlands. Perhaps they threatened the woman or her relations to gain her cooperation. She breached the doors. She admitted them by way of the servant accesses.”
“Pe
rhaps she was a lowland scoundrel.”
“Ah. Indeed. Perhaps she was. Or perhaps she harbored an honest grudge against us. We only fed and housed her for four years, for very little work. During the last two, with Murini sitting in authority in the Bu-javid, perhaps she began to form other man’chi.”
“Then back you come, like an old bone, several times buried.”
Ilisidi laughed silently. “We are extremely hard to bury, cousin. You know that. You declined to come visiting with them. Why?”
Drien seemed, reluctantly, in better humor. She snapped her fingers, and the maid collected the cups for another round of tea.
The whole room stood still while the two indulged in yet another cup, and the cups went, click and click, down on the side tables.
“My great-grandson,” Ilisidi said, “is faultless in this dispute, Drien-aba. I have ridden a snowy road to enlist your understanding in this matter.”
“And you bring this under my roof.” Drien made a flick of the finger in Bren’s direction, almost without a glance, as if she were disposing of lint on her sleeve. “To sleep here! How dare you?”
“One relies on your adventurous nature,” Ilisidi said dryly. “Nothing affrights you, Drien-aba.”
“Nothing affrights me, nadi, but this abomination offends me.”
“Bren-paidhi.” Ilisidi moved her hand, and indicated his place beside her. He walked over to the side of her chair. He bowed to her, moreover, with perfect understanding of the degree of inclination requisite.
“Well-trained,” Drien said. It was the word one used of a mecheita.
“Drien-daja.” Bren offered a second bow, perfectly impassive. “One is honored to address the lady of Ardija.” That was the district name. “If my presence offends the lady, I shall lodge with the servants.”
Provocation. Deliberate, and he could all but feel Ilisidi gathering her moral force should Drien take him at his word. Ilisidi would have him in her own quarters before she sent him to Drien’s staff: he was sure of that.
“Sit,” Drien said sharply.
That was a thunderbolt of protocol. He bowed a third time in courteous deliberation and took the third chair. Ilisidi, in the tail of his eye, simply signaled to the servant herself for another round of tea.
It came. They all three drank.
“So,” Drien said. “Was it for amusement, cousin, that you brought this foreigner under our roof?”
“It was for your edification, cousin.”
“Indeed.” A brow lifted, rousing an architecture of wrinkles. “Mine? You go traipsing off to the heavens and associate with humans. You mingle in their affairs at their behest, and they reward us all by picking quarrels with still other foreigners—after which, my esteemed cousin returns to the world to cry alarm and take up habitation with—what is the lord’s name?”
The chairs were set in a triangle. Bren had a fair view of both ladies, and sat still and tense. But a hint of wicked still humor hovered about the dowager’s mouth. “Which one?”
Drien’s eyebrow lifted. “Oh, come now, nadi. There can be no such abundance of midland lords.”
“Your gathering of gossip seems at least adequate.” A sharp frown came down between Ilisidi’s brows. “Where is my great-grandson, Dri-daja?”
“Why apply to me?”
“Because there was a reason you did not join Caiti. What was it?”
“Recognition of fools in action.”
“So you knew what they were going to do.”
“One had not the least notion. Foolishness has every direction open to it. Wisdom is much more limited in choice.”
“Well? What direction does our wise cousin take now?”
The lady held out her cup for a refill. Her arm hardly reached full extension before tea was in the cup. She sipped it thoughtfully. “Perhaps not a direction. A position. Caiti was born a fool, lives a fool, will likely die a fool. And you let him to your table. But then you allow humans, too.” A small silence, in which Ilisidi said nothing. “Were you not aware, cousin, of Caiti’s ambitions? Perhaps if you visited your estate more often, you might become aware.”
“The thing of which we were not aware,” Ilisidi snapped, “was the corruption of my staff in my absence.”
“A child stolen right under your roof,” Drien said sweetly. “And whisked through the heart of the Bu-javid and the whole width of Shejidan. You are not yourself, cousin.”
“Where is he, Drien-ji?”
“One believes, with Caiti.”
“Where?”
“In the Haidamar.”
The lady, Bren thought, was extremely well informed—for a lady using live flame to light her front hall. And they had been detected at the front gate, quite readily: hell, they had been detected approaching the front gate—it took time to saddle a herd of mecheiti.
“One rather suspects,” Drien added, “that my neighbors fear Caiti.”
“Do you fear him?” Ilisidi shot back.
“That depends, ’Sidi-ji, on which side I take.”
“You call him a fool,” Ilisidi said.
Drien’s brow lifted. “He is. But there are more sides than two.”
“Consider mine,” Ilisidi said.
“I do,” Drien answered. “I choose to answer your questions. He was in the Saibai’tet, in his winter home, before he and his associates went to Shejidan. He takes residence in the Haidamar. He knows you will come. And look to your safety if you do.”
The Haidamar, the fortress of Caiti’s domain, held the other end of the considerable lake. It sat on one of the rivers that fed into the north of the lake, had historically suffered from its easy access to the flatlands just beyond and had proved a soft target many a time, where it regarded forces coming up from the plains, but that meant, in the modern age, fairly easy access to an airport—and communications.
A schemer with allies, Bren said to himself, needed communications, and dared not bottle himself into a dead end like the Saibai’tet, which nestled on flat land eastward, where the foothills gave way to wide plains…agriculture had been Caiti’s forte. Until now. Now it became something else.
“You think my great-grandson is with him in the Haidamar, nandi?”
“Possibly, cousin. One certainly might be very suspicious.”
“We have grounds for discussion, Dri-daja.”
“Do we? Perhaps we might manage a late snack. Will this join us?” With a wave at Bren.
“The Lord of the Heavens will join us,” Ilisidi said firmly.
He had had better invitations in his life.
The stone came free. It proved to be about hand-sized. Cajeiri turned on his light for just a moment to have a look at his progress, which had created a little spot of darkness in an otherwise unbroken wall under the bed, and he lay flat on his side to look into it.
Inside, to his probing fingers, was more rubble, more crumbling mortar. He saw how it was, set it in memory, and cut the light off to save the batteries.
He had hoped to meet dirt right off, but it was still a start. And there was no use tearing his hands up getting straight at the rough rock inside. He had traded the bit of aluminum from the can for the metal bucket handle—that had been a struggle, getting that off—and he dug away at the next stone over, to widen his gap. He tried wiggling it. Nothing yet. He kept digging, raked out rubble, and it gave.
His backside was cold, his hands—he alternated using them—were miserable and approaching open wounds. But work and hope kept him warm, and he had made progress. Where the hole was going, he had no idea. How long it would take, he had no idea, but he had learned—Great-grandmother had confined him to his room no few times—that it did no good at all to pitch a fit or wait for relief. What did count was to find a job and keep at it, and to be just blithe and cheerful when summoned out and try to better his situation—he doubted he would get such an offer from people who had lodged him with a scratchy blanket and a single sandwich.
He could do what he set his mind to:
Bren-paidhi was no bigger than he was, and Bren got along, and made people listen to him, and got through where bigger people failed. It was just technique, that was what Banichi would say. Just technique, and keeping one’s mind centered right on the job at hand.
So—putting Banichi’s lessons together with great-grandmother’s—he was making progress of some sort; he meant to get things on his terms. He was hungry by now. That hardly mattered.
And, much faster than the last, the next stone wiggled in its mortar jacket, ever so slightly.
He heard footsteps, the first sound of life he had heard in this place. They were coming. He shoved his rock back into place. He scrambled back out from under the bed, lay down under the blanket, kept his grimy hands under the covers and looked distressed and sleepy.
The lock rattled to a key, and opened. Someone came in with a potent flashlight.
He shielded his eyes with a blanketed elbow, squinted up pitifully at two men, one of whom had a tray. Servants, clearly, but he was going to remember those faces.
“Is he ill?” one wondered, and the other said, “Only sleepy.”
The man with the tray set it down. Cajeiri coughed and looked as pathetic as he could manage.
“My medicines,” he said. This was a ploy he had seen amply demonstrated in the human archive. “I need my medicines.”
“We should report it,” one said. And for just a moment Cajeiri thought of making a break for that open door, but he had no idea what lay outside. They were believing him. They felt of his face.
“He has no fever, nadi.”
That was a problem. Cajeiri thought of the biggest, most uncheckable lie he could fashion. “I was in the heavens, nadi.” A cough. “One has to have medicines, for years after. One will die without them.”
“What sort of medicines, boy?”
“One has no idea,” he mumbled. “The doctor gave them to me.” He doubled up, still under the blankets. “My stomach hurts. Oh, it hurts.”
They wrapped the blanket around him. The door was still open. And perhaps it had not been too smart—if they got a look at his hands. Or looked to see where he had gotten all that dust. He rubbed it off as he clutched the blankets, rolled over, and he could see a very barren, rock-walled corridor outside, uninformative except that this was not a very fancy hallway.
Deliverer Page 26
