“Western nonsense.”
“Like nand’ Bren, you are not stupid, Cousin. You are far from stupid. One would even suspect you are better equipped in this household than rumor has it, though not with a secure line. Every call your household makes is doubtless overheard. Yet these conspirators still fear you. They have not coerced you into their company despite my absence. They made a particular effort to slander you at my table. In very fact, you want Malguri to succeed. You have every reason to wish that, and you know it.”
Drien’s nostrils flared. “Give us our independence, nandi, signed, sealed, and sworn to. That is my ambition. Freedom from your man’chi.”
“What, we should cede all claim to Ardija?”
“What is better, Cousin? Man’chi held by force or man’chi won by performance? Promises will by no means suffice with me. Malguri must win this challenge, and free us from all claims. This duality of man’chiin has always been unfortunate, in more than numbers. Now you think we should help you recover this son of the western aiji.”
Ilisidi stared at their hostess a moment, a flat, uncommunicative stare. “Your cousin, Dri-daja.”
“None of mine!”
“We have spent two years aboard the ship educating my great-grandson in finesse and tradition—”
“In a spaceship run by humans! And contacting more foreigners beyond the horizon!”
“In finesse and tradition, I say! That boy can parse the tribes and the rights of the East, yours among them! He knows the heraldry and the machimi—I taught him! He knows the law of rights and the law of succession, the law of land and the law of usage. He knows the worth of bringing these principles into the west, and he is his father’s heir, undisputed, blood of mine, blood of yours, Dri-daja, blood of the Ragi and the North. And any rumors of our disaffection toward the East are utter fiction!”
A small silence followed. Drien folded her hands in her lap, and Drien’s nostrils flared, a deep, long intake of breath. “Ardija. I will have Ardija, and this estate, and I will not bargain for it.”
“You wish justice, Drien-daja,” Bren said, entirely out of turn, and in the next instant not knowing what had possessed him—it was one of those downhill moments, when for a flash of a second he saw the course through the rocks, and in the next blink it would be lost, irrevocable. He spoke out of turn, and saw in slow motion the dowager’s glance and the lady’s astonished stare.
The lady said nothing for a moment. The dowager said nothing. The silence went on, over the crackling of the fire in the hearth.
Bren cleared his throat—anything to fill that deadly, downward-sliding silence. “Nand’ dowager, one begs to say, there is kinship here. But an unfortunate number exists, an Infelicity of Two. If that were adjusted…” The dowager was no more superstitious than she was gullible. But the language of numbers conveyed the situation. Two. Divided. Never one.
“Independence, Cousin,” the dowager said then, and Bren’s heart quietly resumed its beats.
“At his behest?” the lady cried, indignant. “When we have sued for centuries?”
“No,” the dowager said. “Not at all at his behest. At his reasonable explanation.”
“Explanation! What was never clear? What, fortunate gods, was never clear?”
“He rarely objects. He does so with careful thought. Clearly, we make an Unfortunate Two in this situation. We would need a third to complete us, and one has no notion where to find that third, in the East as it is now.”
“Apparent! But why should I join you?”
“We are survivors of our age, you and I. We are old, old adversaries. And if anything of the gracious old way is to continue, the tradition will not lie in the south. It will lie with us. Ardija is yours, by my grant…while I live.”
“Damn you,” Drien cried.
An actual smile spread on the dowager’s thin lips. “But nevertheless, I stand by my word. You are free. Take your own course. And we shall go on to the Haidamar and free my great-grandson.”
“You need help,” Drien said, “you stubborn fool. By no means should you go! Stay and let my staff make inquires. No good will come of your killing yourself!”
“You will make yourself trouble, Dri-ji.”
“You are the trouble in my life!” Drien reached beside her and picked up a small brass bell, which she rang vigorously. Doors at either end of the room flew open, and the one from the hall, where their own staff waited: Cenedi and Nawari were there; so were Banichi and Jago, on the alert.
“Beds for our guests, nadiin-ji!” Drien ordered, and waved a hand. “Kasi, ride up to Malguri and advise them our guests are staying.”
“No need for your staff to trouble itself for such a journey, cousin,” Ilisidi murmured. “Proprieties aside—”
“You have your cursed radios,” Drien said in disgust, and in that moment, in that fire-crackling stillness, every ateva clearly heard something. Motion stopped. People listened. Then Bren heard it, in such a deep quiet, remote from all hum of electrics, the faint, faint sound of a laboring engine.
Drien’s face held utter disapproval. “Is that yours, Cousin?”
“Mine?” Ilisidi asked. “Malguri has no such.”
The room and the house waited, hushed, and the sound was clearer, as if the source had passed the cliffs and come onto the road.
“That infernal machine,” Drien muttered.
“The airport?” Ilisidi inquired, logically enough: airports and train terminals were the usual source of transport connections. “Are you expecting anyone to arrive tonight?”
“By no means. That is a bus. That is a miserable bus,” Drien said. “One knows that motor. That wretched vehicle! What delivery has civilized business arriving at this hour!” She addressed her staff. “What does it require for our privacy, nadiin? That we shoot the driver?”
“One would hardly counsel that, on this night in particular,” Ilisidi said with a grim look. “In our present circumstances, one wishes information, of whatever source. And the Malguri bus sits at our doors at present. It may be some visitor from the airport or from Malguri itself.”
“Go,” Drien ordered one of her staff, “and discover what this intrusion wants, nadi.”
It was a cause for anxiety. Bren looked at Ilisidi, and Ilisidi remarked, “Perhaps Banichi might investigate, as well.”
Bren nodded, and Banichi left. Jago did not. There was no way that any bus could negotiate the final part of the road: whoever it had brought would have to walk up to the gates.
“Well, well, well,” Drien said comfortably, “we sit, and we wait. A brandy to pass the time?”
12
Banichi was gone a lengthy period of time. Possibly he reported in the interim to Jago, who had resumed her watch at the door. For his own part, Bren had far rather be in on the Guild’s information flow, but that was not the available choice. He fretted, keeping his ear tuned meanwhile to the conversational tidbits that fell during the wait—Lady Drien discussed her neighbors, discussed the doings of Ilisidi’s staff during her absence. It seemed that Djinana had at some point personally ejected a member of Drien’s staff from the gates of Malguri, in a memorable confrontation over a rowboat that had come unmoored in a storm…the boat had been, one gathered, eventually repatriated to the Cobesthen shore through a neutral party down in Malguri Township.
“Perhaps,” the dowager said, regarding the complaint, “we may, nandi, improve feelings between our staffs. We would never doubt your claim of ownership of such a boat if we were in residence. It would not have happened.”
“Who but the rightful owner would ever know a boat had drifted?” Drien had a gift for pursuing a quarrel far past any useful boundaries. “Are they fools, that they think we would claim some other person’s boat?”
“We do assure you to the contrary, nandi.” Ilisidi’s tone grew just a little icier. “And one will assume my capable staff might have responded differently to your visitation had there been any communication in advance of a part
y intruding onto Malguri grounds.”
“The common lakeshore!”
“We do not concur! That is Malguri land!”
“The common lakeshore, I say!”
“Nandiin,” Bren said, desperately seeking to head off renewed warfare. “Ought not Banichi to be—”
Back by now, he had meant to say, when there was, indeed, the sound of movement on the snow, that crunching of crusted ice that heralded multiple people arriving on the outside steps.
“Well,” Drien said, still ruffled, but she dispatched servants to the outer hall.
There was some little to-do outside, by the sound of it.
Then came the sound of the outer door opening, a cold draft that sucked at the fire in the grate, attended by a stamping of feet and Banichi’s deep voice overlain by servant voices.
Banichi was giving orders out there, regarding something. It was a peaceful arrival, or there would have been more noise than that, Bren told himself.
And a moment later the lady’s servants returned to the doorway. “Lady Agilisi has arrived, nandi,” the servant reported.
“Indeed?” Drien looked rightfully surprised. Bren was, himself. Ilisidi, however, had that formal face on, and no emotion at all escaped, beyond an arched eyebrow—which was to say…the dowager was on the alert.
“The lady wishes to present her respects to the house, nandi,” the servant said.
“Admit her,” Drien said. And a moment later the door opened its left half to let in a snowy lady in heavy boots and too much cloak, a graying lady who looked quite undone, her hair coming loose in wisps about a cold-stung face. That face showed dismay, distress, all manner of turmoil.
“Nand’ Agilisi.” Drien did not rise. “Come in.”
“Nandiin.” The lady bowed. That was the plural, acknowledging the second presence. And, thin-lipped, she bowed again to the dowager. “Nand’ dowager.”
There were reciprocal nods.
This was that lady from Ilisidi’s dinner party, the lady who had, during the dinner, seemed somewhat in charge. Right now she looked thoroughly done in and windblown.
“We come here,” Agilisi began, and could not get the rest out.
It was not the paidhi’s place to stay grandly seated while an elderly lady struggled for breath. Bren rose to stand behind his chair, at least, in respect to the lady’s age, rank and distress. It was the host’s prerogative to offer her a seat. Not his.
“Will you take a brandy, nandi?” Drien asked. “You do look very out of sorts this evening.”
“Nandi.” Agilisi cast about a heartbeat as if looking for a chair, any chair, and a servant quickly moved one into the circle, a stiff, straight antique. Another servant took the lady’s snow-caked cloak and gloves, and the thin figure that emerged, wearing a rose brocade coat, was far from the ramrod straight carriage of the banquet night. Agilisi reached the chair and sat down, heavily, as if her legs would no longer hold her. A servant brought the brandy service, and another poured, and offered the little glass to the lady, before making the rounds of the rest of them, a de rigeur gesture which all of them declined.
That left the lady with one glass of another house’s brandy, and the necessity to drink it—or not.
“One regrets,” Agilisi managed to say, the brandy as yet undrunk, and with a look at Ilisidi: “one regrets extremely, nand’ dowager…”
“Where is my great-grandson? What do you know? Out with it, woman!”
“Caiti,” Agilisi said, and took a largish sip of the hazardous brandy, dissolving into a coughing fit. She took a second sip and wiped her lips with a hand gray-edged with cold—or terror. “Caiti has gone entirely mad. One had no notion, no notion at all what he intended. One hardly knew—”
Thump! went the cane on the carpeted stones. “Where is my great-grandson?”
“In the Haidamar.” Agilisi said. “In the Haidamar Fortress, by all evidence.”
“Were you on that plane, nandi?”
Astute question, Bren thought, and held his breath. In the days before they left the world, there had been one passenger flight daily to and from the East, and unless Agilisi had miraculously hired a plane that had preceded the kidnapping and left the city before the airport shut, she had shared the plane with the kidnappers.
Agilisi was caught with her mouth open. And shut it to a thin line, knowing she was caught, clearly. “Yes, nandi,” she said faintly. “One did. And left. One hoped you would follow.”
“Nonsense!”
“One hoped, I say!”
“Liar.”
“You deserted us! You went to the west, you went to the heavens, you went on this human’s business, while our own affairs languished! One came to Shejidan in hope—one came to learn whether humans had had all their way, or whether there was still a power in Malguri!”
“And concluded?” Ilisidi asked dangerously.
“One saw too many things, too many changes. One had no idea what to think.”
That, Bren thought, might be the truth. And if ever a woman had better tell the truth, Agilisi was in that position. The lady was in a leaking boat, as the proverb had it. In a leaking boat and paddling hard for shore—any shore, and possibly without assurance that her own house was a safe refuge for her, given her recent moves. Her ties to Caiti had become life-threatening under this roof…granted Drien wasn’t in on it.
Which one did not automatically grant.
“Go on,” Ilisidi said quietly. “What did Caiti say, after leaving his neighbor’s table?”
“One can hardly say—I had no idea, nandi, no idea of the plan. I had no idea of traffic between Caiti and your house—I had no idea of the things afoot…”
“No idea at all. And now you come here, tonight, so opportunely.”
“To an ally.”
“An associate, a remote associate, and by no means invited!” Drien said.
“Your independence in this matter,” Agilisi said. “Your historic independence, Dri-daja—but I had not expected the aiji-dowager to be here…one hoped for your help, Dri-daja, to know whether the aiji-dowager had come home…whether she would come home, or had the power to come home—”
“You doubt it?” Ilisidi asked ominously. “And, leaving Caiti, you came dashing here instead of to me at Tirnamardi, or even more convenient a trip, to my grandson in Shejidan, who was simply up the hill from your hotel!”
“What would one expect there but doubt and arrest? One came here, for one’s dignity, for the dignity of one’s own—”
“Dignity!” Down went the cane again. “Dignity! What of my great-grandson’s dignity, woman?”
“There was nothing one could do—I had come to Shejidan with half my staff. They said—limitations on the plane. Which in no wise proved true, nandi. The lie had started before we ever left the ground for the west. I was slighted. My house was slighted! One does not take that lightly!”
“You were at best a damned key, nandi, a piece of social stage dressing, all my lakeside neighbors save one, and their people are in your house, do you deny it?”
Agilisi’s mouth opened and shut. And opened again. “There are ties,” she confessed. “There are ties of marriage. As there are ties to your own household, nandi!”
A bit of cheek, that. A muscle jumped in Ilisidi’s jaw. “A tie that will not long survive,” Ilisidi said.
“Nor in mine, nandi. Caiti—Caiti has to be stopped.”
“Does he, now? And what sent you flying here, Agilisi-daja? What sudden burst of understanding informed you it was time to run here?—Or were you sent, woman?”
“Not sent. Not sent here. The convoy formed—by the plane—and we dropped behind—my guard and I. Saein stayed, my seniormost, he moved to lead them off. Toward Cie. They know—Caiti knows—” The brandy glass went over, dislodged by a motion of Agilisi’s hand, and she failed to catch it. It landed, intact, on the carpet, but no servant moved.
“What does Caiti know? And what does he intend with my great-grandson?”
“Caiti, nandi, Caiti has contacted the usurper. Murini.”
Bren’s heart skipped a beat. Likely several hearts present did.
But Ilisidi only resettled her fingers on the head of her cane and stared straight at Agilisi. “Remarkable.”
“One had no idea,” Agilisi cried. “One had no idea there was any such aim in this venture. He plans—he plans to have the heir of Malguri in his hands, and to fling the usurper into war with the west, to keep your grandson occupied in his own lands. And if you join them, nandi, they say they will deal, and if not, they will still have the west at war and the heir of Malguri in their hands.”
There was a heavy, heavy silence. “Is that his message?”
“No! No, nandi, that is not his message, that is his plan. He knew you were likely following. He wants you dead. He wants the heir in his hands. He wants Malguri. And we will not back him in this: there is no aiji over the East, and if there is ever one it will not be Lord Caiti! He has lied to us, he has misled, he has drawn us into a plot without consultation, and brought in the south without any authority—we do not consent to this, we do not bow the neck to this damned bully!”
“A pretty, pretty speech, nandi. And where is Murini?”
“Coming here, if Caiti told the truth—coming to ascertain Caiti does have your great-grandson.”
Ilisidi rolled her eyes up to the ceiling and down again, a gesture of exasperation.
“The truth, nandi, the truth this time!”
“Caiti is a fool!” Agilisi cried.
“So he will invite Murini under his roof, and demonstrate he has my great-grandson. And Murini, in awe of this astonishing fact, will obligingly leave my great-grandson in his hands while he goes off to become a target for my grandson’s forces. What do you think we are, Agi-daja? Equal fools?”
“Nandi, so he told Lord Rodi and me! And Lord Rodi went with him to the Haidamar, but I slipped back and my guard got me away—to come here, to consult with Lady Drien, to find some middle ground—some means to unite the independent neighbors in protest of this lunacy—Clearly, neither I nor my people were respected, to be brought there ignorant of all plans, to be confronted with this—we are innocent. I and my people are innocent!”
Deliverer Page 28
