Ilisidi was moving as fast as she possibly could to get ahead of this train of events. She had not threatened war. She had not called in the Guild, unwelcome in the East. She went directly after her great-grandson, and went after him in the dead of night, in a snowstorm, and maybe that was the best choice, and maybe it was not.
Get through the gates, and hope to God they were the first to do so.
Once Murini got his hands on Cajeiri, there was no question of Murini leaving the boy in Caiti’s hands, no hope of that, as he figured it, not unless Caiti was a damned sight cleverer than any of them thought he was. And what Caiti had tried, never mind he had succeeded this far, did not encourage them to believe that he was all that clever.
Bren found dinner sitting very uncomfortably as the bus lurched and tilted on the narrow road, rocketing downhill, all but out of control on an unfamiliar road. Everyone swayed. A few had heads down, against hands braced on the seats. If he were at all sensible, Bren told himself, he would try his damnedest to sleep while they traveled. It was going to be a long night, a long way around. The Guild with them knew it. The Guild took its rest where it could.
But he doubted he was going to be able to.
He heard certain of Ilisidi’s young men debating the wisdom of trying to get through to Malguri, whether their satellite phones were help or liability in this situation—he heard frank discussion of other Guild being sent in, if Tabini-aiji got the straight word on what was happening, and about the likelihood of Eastern disaffection, and the plain fact they were just that far from help.
This, as the bus hit the lowland road. It assumed a roaring fast pace for about an hour, and then slowed and pulled in—the fuel depot, Bren thought, where the road passed through a finger of Lady Agilisi’s district of Catien—or he was thinking that, when Banichi and Jago flattened him to the seat.
The rest of the men scrambled out. Bren stayed down as Banichi and Jago followed. It was very quiet outside, and then came the distinctive sound of the fuel cap going off the bus and the hose going in.
There was such a thing as trust, that of his bodyguard toward him, a contract of obligations. He obediently stayed flat the while the refueling went on, not satisfying his curiosity, not even lifting his head from the seat. Banichi and Jago didn’t need his help on this mundane task, not in the least.
He heard voices, quiet ones, against the side of the bus. One mentioned something about the attendant being in the cellar.
That was informative.
The cap went back on. Everyone boarded again, Banichi and Jago among the first in, and wanted their seats, which he supposed gave him leave to sit up.
Jago set a hand on his shoulder as she eased in.
“Cenedi has called Malguri on the depot phone, Bren-ji. They are aware. They will get word to the aiji.”
“Good,” he said. Well that Tabini at least be warned what was happening. He had the most amazing disposition to shiver. “Are we all right?”
“A plane has landed in the north,” Banichi said. “At Cie.”
“From?” he asked.
“No one is sure of its origin,” Jago said. “It may be scheduled freight. It may not. It is worrisome. Planes are entering Eastern airspace again. Malguri Airport itself is back in operation. Guild may have come in. We did not inquire.”
They wouldn’t. They wouldn’t raise the question for fear of blowing cover. Malguri had seen fit to tell them that was going on, but there was no telling what else was.
Which meant they could be neck-deep in a shooting war by morning. It didn’t help the chills, as the bus started up and began to accelerate away from the fueling station.
“Did we kill anyone back there?” he asked. He didn’t know why he asked. He didn’t want to know, except that he wanted some sense of how far the dowager was holding off the people of Catien, whose lady was locked in Drien’s upstairs. He hoped there was still a modicum of civilization in this district, that there was still some sense of restraint governing the lords
“No,” Jago said. “They were very wise, and respected the sight of the lady of Catien’s ring.”
So they had that—by force or by gift: Agilisi’s seal on their use of her goods.
“They are locked in the storeroom,” Banichi added, as the bus reached its traveling gear, “where there is no telephone, nor radio. They believe someone will come along before noon tomorrow.”
13
Chip and chip and chip.
The outer halls were quiet now. The light was off out there. The light had gone off in here, too. One had no flashlight: that had gone, with the other cell. One could no longer see what one was doing. And Cajeiri’s fingers hurt. Probably they were bleeding, but one could ignore that when one was mad. And Cajeiri was mad by now. He was damned mad, and tired, and grew madder the more it hurt.
He was, however, well through the plaster coating. He had come up against a bare spot of what felt like thin boards, which he could just get the thin, flat end of the bucket handle into. He pulled. Repeatedly. He said bad words to himself, in ship-speak.
One thin board broke with a snap like thunder, and took plaster with it.
That was good. He got much of his hand in. He pulled another board. He began to grin, partly from the effort and partly from the success. He wriggled around and applied both hands, which broke more boards and brought more plaster onto the floor where the bed ordinarily rested. Beyond that was a gap. And rubble. He ripped out pieces, rocks, some fist sized. None of them were mortared in, or if they were, it was entirely haphazard.
He began to get the picture of a neat plaster facade and some sort of rubble fill between. Cheaply done, mani would say, and sniff at it. A quickly done wall in a building this old. Maybe dividing something off, on the cheap. That was interesting. It was not at all how they built on the ship. He could do something with this.
He started scraping the opposing wood with the use-sharpened flat end of the bucket handle, scrape, scrape, scrape. His knuckles bled. That was no consequence. Temper kept him warm on the cold floor. Temper kept him going when they might expect him to be asleep.
He wished he had Gene’s help. Artur’s. He imagined that they worked beside him, Fortunate Three, and that made matters better. He ought properly, he knew, to think of his Taibeni associates. He belonged to them. He feared they might even be dead because of those people who had carried him away from his bed, a thought which roused a keen and proper pain in his heart; but when he really, seriously wanted help, he naturally thought of Gene, who was always ready for a scheme, who thought of things, really clever things, instead of looking at him for help.
Gene and Artur had no idea where he was now. They could never imagine the trouble he was in at the moment. If they did know, they would be trying everything to get to him—if they were not separated by space and authority and adults. And that, when he got out of here and if he got to grow up, that was going to get fixed.
They were his first associates, the first beings in all the world—or above it—who had ever come to him, as persons of his own age and rank—Well, at least they were all of them passengers, and so they were equals in that way; and they were still his, in a special way.
Gene and Artur. Their coconspirators, Bjorn and Irene, he let into their company for felicity’s sake and to please mani-ma, so they were at least a Completion of Five, which was very solid and respectable, like a social group. But increasingly he kept forgetting Bjorn, and now in desperate case he began thinking just of Gene and Artur and Irene, his Felicity of Three….
Because he was gone from them. He was gone from them and unless he could get back or get them down here, they would go their own way and be human, and he would be atevi—
Damn it.
Granted he lived through this.
Scrape and scrape and scrape. The spoon kept bending, but the bucket handle held out. It was slick with sweat or blood, he had no idea which, in the dark. It made a gritty paste with the mortar scrapings and the dust, and
one end had sharpened. It made it a better tool.
Damn them. Damn them, Bren-nandi would say. He was by no means sure what that meant, but Bren was careful about saying it, so he figured it was potent.
He did hope he still had Antaro and Jegari, if they were alive. And he knew beyond any doubt in his very core they would want to find him—if they were still alive. He really, desperately hoped they were. And in between imagining Gene and Artur, he imagined Jegari and Antaro going to his father, and telling his father what had happened.
Oh, then all hell would have broken loose, and they would call his great-grandmother, was what, and they would tell nand’ Bren. The whole world would be looking for him by now….
Granted his father and mother were still alive. Granted the Bu-javid was not back in the hands of Murini and his associates, which was the thought that scared him most and made him stay awake and keep digging.
He scraped a knuckle, gritted his teeth, and scraped away, which necessarily hit the knuckle over and over and over.
He wanted them all to be alive, and looking for him. He wanted his father and mother to be alive. He wanted mani to come and get him. He had complained about their discipline, and never thought he would miss it, but now he wanted them, he wanted their rules and their law around him. He had never been alone in his life, not alone like this, and if he stopped fighting long enough, he could be scared, which mani’s great-grandson never could be. So he kept at it.
Scrape and scrape.
Damn!
Something resisted. He got fingers into it, and found something like—
Wire. Two or three strands of it. He pulled, popping it past boards and plaster, and pulled, bracing his feet.
It might be part of the construction, some sort of reconstruction. But the more he pulled it, he began to think it was really wire, metal-centered wire, electrical wire. Somebody had made a very inelegant repair when they plastered up the wall, was what.
He was by no means sure he could get the mess loose, but he wanted it. He wanted it out of his hole, for one thing; for another—
For another, an idea was coming to him, even if the light switch was on the other side of the door.
There was a light socket in the ceiling.
He braced both feet and hauled, and hauled as the wire resisted. One end came out, and he tested it gingerly with the bucket handle.
No spark. Dead. Entirely dead.
But it was metal-centered. It was old and dusty and twisted, but he had a lot of it and it was metal. And if he could cut it off or bend and break it and get it into his hands…
He tried breaking it. Hauling on it. Got out from under the bed and hauled on it until it cut his fingers.
Plaster popped. He felt along it. More wire had come out of the wall. He had no way to see what he was doing, but he hauled hard, feet braced, the wire wrapped around his hands, and suddenly, as if it had been twisted around something, it just came loose and came out, pitching him backward.
He had his prize. A lot of it. But it was only a prize if it had no breaks in it. And he picked one wire and ran it through his fingers, sitting there in the total dark.
Intact, until one got to the bristly, prickly end. He tested the other pieces. And he began to put them all together, until he had one really long piece of somebody’s very sloppy work on an old wall.
All useless, however, unless he could get up to that light socket in the ceiling.
He got up. He found the chair in the dark and moved it over. The light, in the picture his memory gave him, had been a little off from dead center of the room, a little more toward the door. He put the chair there.
And he climbed atop it. The ceiling was out of reach. He was just that much too short to reach anything but the tip of the bulb.
Damn again.
He thought of things he had. And climbed down and hauled the mattress off the bed, wondering if he could do anything with the bed frame—close call, then. He nearly upset the metal water pitcher. He saved it, in the dark, down on one knee.
Then he had a thought, dragged the mattress over to the chair, and laid it midway over the chair bottom, and climbed back atop it all. It made queasy footing, but the thickness of the mattress gave him another little bit, if he balanced very carefully.
He could reach the ceiling. He unscrewed the darkened bulb, got down and got the conjoined wire and his bucket handle and climbed up again, with the wire wrapped around his arm to hang onto it.
This was the anxious part. He felt the inside of the socket, identified the contact as best he could guess, then used the bucket handle to try to pull the whole socket apart and get at the wires that connected to the socket.
That proved harder than he thought. He peeled a corner of the socket, peeled more of it, but there were screws involved, and he could not get at the wires themselves. Instead, he folded metal over, punched it onto the contact, cutting his sore fingers, and rammed it down hard. Then he stripped the covering off his insulated wire, got down to paper lining, and stripped and spat, balanced precariously there the while, and hoping no one came.
Somewhere far off he could hear doors opening. He could hear the sound of a vehicle, a bus or a truck, somewhere outside. People were coming and going and that was not good, if somebody was leaving and might mean to take him with them, or maybe if they had gotten a doctor—that would not be good at all.
He spat paper, took the stripped part of the wire and just wrapped it into the wreckage he had made of the socket, finding no other way to secure it, and, worst of all, having no way at all to test his construction to see if it even worked. He got down, shivering from long effort, and from the cold, and carefully, gingerly, took his dangling wire past the chair back and over to the door.
Big metal door latch there, a lot of metal. He stripped more wire, starting it with his teeth, and stripped it way up and wrapped bare wire around the door latch.
So the light switch was on the outside of the door. If somebody flipped it on and then put his hand on the latch—
Then he thought of something else he knew about electricity. He found his water pitcher by the bed and he brought it to the door and made a puddle just right where someone had to step.
That was the first part of his plan. But he did not, as Bren would say, put all his eggs in that basket. Or try to eat dinner before he caught it, in mani-ma’s proverb. He got back onto his bruised knees, started to move the bedframe to cover his escape hole, and, on inspiration, and seeing how it rattled without the weight of the mattress on it, decided to see if the bedframe and the wire underpinnings came apart.
The frame readily unsocketed, no question. He took the thin, linked-wire frame that constituted the mattress springs over to the door and laid that metal framework down right over his puddle in front of the door.
But he had derived something better from the disassembly of the bed frame. He had the metal side rail, a pole longer than he was, with a flat end where it had hooked onto the other end. And when he applied that to the hole he had made in the wall he had started, he was able to lever out pieces of wood and chunks of plaster one after another.
Now if somebody tried to walk in on him and turned on that light, they would be busy with that watered metal gridwork.
There was a lot of racket outside. A lot of coming and going. He heard doors slam. He kept digging, hammering the interior of his hole in the plaster until the rail went all the way through the wall.
Free for an instant. Then it hit something on the other side. Thump.
Dammit!
14
Big bump. The bus bounced, swung, skidded. And clawed its way onto an uphill climb.
They’d made the time they could on the lower road. They were headed up again. Everyone in the bus had waked including Banichi and Jago, and now heads sank again, experienced security getting rest where they could.
Bren lowered his head back to Jago’s shoulder. She hugged him a little closer, maybe seeking relief from his weight, maybe ju
st for the warmth. As resting places went, he couldn’t complain of it.
And he tried his best not to think. Thinking did absolutely nothing for sleep. He just listened to the tires on the snow, tried to make himself believe they were just going up to Malguri, peaceful vacation…breakfast in the morning…
Damned lie. But he kept telling it to himself. Reason wasn’t working outstandingly well. He was so tired he was glitching in and out despite everything else.
Eyes shut. Another dark space, and a turn. Another dark space, and another turn, consistently upward, and at an uncomfortable grade, the winter tires grabbing for purchase.
God, don’t let us get stuck in a snowbank.
Lurch. Then the bus accelerated, on the level.
The lakeshore, he thought, which jarred him right back to the immediate moment, a desperate race, the bus now fueled for a long haul, for the north rim and the north shore.
Possibilites started crowding in. Contingencies. Resources. Calamities.
He gnawed his lip and started calculating. Again. And knew nobody up front was going to ask him anyway.
Through the wall. But blocked by something.
Cajeiri braced his toe against an irregularity of the slate floor behind him, shoved the long pole through the hole with all his strength and felt whatever-it-was scoot a little.
Furniture, maybe.
Then he thought if there was somebody next door it was certainly going to be suspicious-looking when plaster started cracking and the wall started going. He got down flat and curled around to get his eye up to the hole.
There was no glimmer, which only meant it was pitch-black if there was a crack in the other side at all, and there was no way to tell whether he was getting anywhere.
The hell with it. If he heard them coming, they would run into the boobytrap first.
So he swiveled about again and started thumping away at the plaster. He bent double, lying sideways, braced his feet and got hold of the thin boards that backed the plaster, where the wires had been.
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