But they were still in pursuit.
If our transmission holds up, Bren said to himself, bracing himself at an angle between the wall and the seat ahead of him. They were going to die in a bus wreck, never mind enemy fire, and it was his fault for suggesting they give chase…
But they could not let Ilisidi go commit suicide alone, could they? He knew the dowager’s ways, her absolutely outrageous ways, and in his mind, she was likely challenging the Kadagidi in that open car for a reason—her popularity—her absolute idolized status in the east. Let the aiji-dowager die in an outrageously heroic action against Murini and the whole east would blow up, that was what she was about. He could think of half a dozen eastern lords who would break from any western hold over them if Murini was remotely shown to have targeted her. He could think of a dozen more lords in the midcontinent that would become untrustworthy if the far east ever broke away from the aishidi’tat—
The whole aishidi’tat would break apart, was what—shatter into a hundred rival states. Kill Ilisidi, and it guaranteed Murini would not be in charge when the kyo finally showed up in orbit, even if not a single member of Tabini’s household survived.
And if it did happen, if they failed in this mad venture, someone else would make a power grab, to be sure, name himself or herself aiji and cut Murini’s throat in the process—give it two weeks, at maximum.
Meanwhile Mospheira would lose no time stabilizing the situation by appointing Yolanda Mercheson his replacement. There was an idea worth staying alive to prevent.
And they had visitors coming in from space who expected to deal with a stable, reasonable authority down here.
God, if only Ilisidi had consulted him. He would have flung himself bodily in the way of her getting in that car. He would have argued with her that they—he, the dowager, and the heir—should run for it if Tabini had the notion of going back for a frontal assault on Shejidan. Run for the hills, hell. They should just go back to the coast, go to Mospheira, get back into space and use technological means, like a meaningful near-earth-orbit satellite system and broadcasts and even weapons they controlled, to become an unassailable nuisance to any usurper—
But he hadn’t had a chance to pose that argument to her. Security staffs had separated their assets, and right now there was no way in hell this overloaded bus was going to overtake that touring car on rough ground—not until their refueling, presumably at the train station.
Then he had to dive off this bus, try to get hold of the dowager and talk sense into her in precisely those terms—appealing to technology which she and her household could understand, alone of atevi within his reach.
If he could reason with her at all at this point. If she hadn’t taken some damned public stand from which she couldn’t back down…
He would send Banichi to talk to Cenedi. That was the one agency that could persuade the dowager—get Cenedi to take his side. With reason. With logic. And a concrete plan.
First thing in the plan, they had to overtake that car.
The estate road joined the general provincial road at the southern estate gateway. The bus rolled through broad open gates, still not foremost among the buses that had set out—notably not the foremost, Bren thought, seeing how the lights went on up the curve their column made, and he would bet the dowager’s car was up in the lead by now. He heard the tinny radio advisements that someone near him, perhaps Dur’s security, picked up from other members of the column—it was, thank God, a verbal code that he could not penetrate; but then, blood-chilling, he heard a voice speaking clear Ragi:
“The aiji-dowager has returned in triumph over foreign connivance and calls on every village to rise and take back Shejidan from the usurper! The aiji-dowager is at this moment on the move, with all the true numbers of the heavens in her hands! Rise up, arm, and join her! This is the fortunate moment!”
My God, my God, he thought, feeling that chill run down his back. She’s challenging Murini head-on, no question. She’s using Tatiseigi’s communications system. If that doesn’t bring airplanes down on us with bombs, nothing will. Does she want that?
If Tabini starts dropping those illegal gas-bombs himself, all restraint goes on their side and ours…but he’s the liberal: he can conceivably do things like that, can’t he? Murini, with his conservative claims—he can’t. He daren’t. And it’s exactly the sort of thing the dowager wouldn’t stick at, not in this situation, even if all hell breaks loose.
No phones at the station that will let me get through to Mospheira, no radio that won’t be monitored. Shawn can’t order an intervention without going to the legislature and the legislature won’t move in time. No way I can stop this, not once that call to the tashrid has gone public, and Mospheiran military intervention wouldn’t help Tabini’s cause, anyway.
We’re in it. We’re in it for sure.
He had his pistol in his pocket. Tano had told him he should take better care of it. Clean it more often. Truth was, he hated carrying it, hated thinking he had it, hated ever needing it, treasure it as he did because of the source from which it came. Now he thought he should follow Tano’s advice and clean the thing before he had to fire it, if he didn’t set it off by accident in all this bouncing about.
He didn’t have a cleaning kit. Needed a brush. He didn’t want to be handling it with the boy next to him.
He didn’t want it to fail him, either. He got up again, made his way as far as Algini’s seat, which he and Tano shared by turns, the bus having many more people than seats. “Gini-ji.” He passed Algini the weapon, holding on with his elbow around a pole. “This needs cleaning, if you would do me the kindness, Gini-ji.”
Algini took it, ejected the clip and the shell in chamber, not even thinking of the motion, one was sure. Natural as breathing. An occupation for his hands. And Bren took a less painful grip on the seat back railing, held on as the bus lurched and bounced.
“Is there a chance we may overtake the dowager at the refueling stop, Gini-ji? Is there a chance Banichi can reach Cenedi?”
“We shall see what we do there. We may lose certain vehicles, as this assemblage drinks the fuel up, nandi. It will be a difficult matter to get so many vehicles to the capital, all with fuel. And some will not withstand the trip, mechanically.”
Clearly they could go stringing dead vehicles and stranded people from here to Shejidan, and it was no good fate awaiting those thus stranded, if their advance failed or stalled. “One has had an unpleasant thought. What if they figure out our path, and start blowing the fueling stations in front of us, Gini-ji?”
“This is our gravest concern, nandi,” Algini said, and blew through the open barrel before he added. “Certain fast-moving private cars are going ahead of the column. We hope to take fuel stations in advance. We hope, too, that certain local folk in favor of us will think of our needs and guard their own premises from destruction, such as they can.”
“Against Guild?” Ordinary folk contesting the Assassins’ Guild seemed the weakest link in their whole plan, even ahead of the vulnerability of the fuel supply, and the sheer mass of all these hungry vehicles. It seemed uncharacteristically fragile, this threat they mounted, even with the support of lords and professional Guild: Most of their supporters were farmers and shopkeepers, completely untrained except in hunting. “They can stall us out, Gini-ji, can they not? They can strand us in the middle of the countryside.”
Algini rarely met a direct question, or returned a direct gaze from anyone. In the dark, fitfully lit by bouncing headlamps from other vehicles, he not only gazed back, but did so with uncommon earnestness. “That they can do, Bren-ji.”
“What, then, shall we do? Are we to fight, wherever we run out and stop? Or have we a plan to get to cover?”
“The vehicles of high priority will refuel more often than absolute need, and if we are stopped—indeed we may have to fight, nandi, but one trusts a number of measures are being taken in advance of us.”
Algini lapsed into the passive voice p
recisely where the critical who would logically be other Guild, as clearly as if he had shouted it. Guild or operatives of the aiji, which would still be Guild—were implied to be taking those measures, out in front of the column.
That answered his query as to whether the aiji and his supporters had taken leave of their senses.
“We killed the Guild officers, Gini-ji.” Implying that the rest of the Guild might not be favorable to such action, and fishing for information.
“We did,” Algini said, clearly unwilling to disburse too much information to anyone. And then he added: “But do not by any means take Gegini-nadi as the Guild, Bren-ji. He elected himself.”
Not Gegini-nandi, then, no title so high accorded to the Guildmaster who had walked into Tatiseigi’s sitting room and started laying down the law. The late Gegini-nadi, then, and his associates were no longer an issue in this action, or not an active one. Algini hinted there was no majority behind him, and did not think that the Guild as a whole would be too disturbed.
And Algini, their demolitions man, Bren suddenly suspected, had been intimately involved in taking them out.
Never the most forward of his staff, Algini. Always quiet, always ready to slip into the background. In Algini’s Guild, the thought suddenly struck him, one never sought publicity, one never discussed Guild affairs, one never gave up one’s secrets, not even to one’s closest non-Guild associates.
Perhaps, dared one think, not even to other Guildsmen?
And that dark thought having struck him, he looked down at Algini’s light-limned features, so tranquil a face, and he wondered what Algini actually was within this most secretive of all Guilds.
Granted Banichi and Jago had come from Tabini’s staff—exactly what agency had lent him Tano and Algini? And why, after all these years, did he know so little of Algini’s opinions?
Curious thought to have occured to him, bouncing along in the dark, face to face with Algini over a piece of enigma Algini politely—and correctly—declined to discuss. It was an embarrassing position, having asked questions, having gotten another, deeper enigma back.
And why? Why did Algini tell him as much as he had, after years of no information? It seemed maybe a direct hint to a very dim-brained human, a human with non-atevi wiring, that there was something else going on—the sort of hint Algini had never been the one to give, because the dim-brained human had always been Jago’s and Banichi’s responsibility.
But one knew that the connections that wove the great houses into associations were not all lines of marriage. The passing of staff from one house to another, even the less social act of spying on one’s neighbors, was an important surety between houses. Verification meant honesty, behavior-as-advertised, creating trust between houses whose relationships spanned not just individual promises, but generations. Banichi and Jago had continually reported to Tabini, he was very sure, so long as they were neighbors within the Bu-javid. His cook Bindanda he knew reported constantly to Tatiseigi and his housekeeper likewise, making sure the paidhi pulled no humanish chicanery.
While Tatiseigi—being a key lord of the Padi Valley—
Had Tatiseigi’s checking up on the paidhi’s household also been Tatiseigi’s way of checking up on Tabini’s behavior—a Ragi lord with an unprecedented lot of power, and married to an Atageini woman?
Perhaps his welcome in Tatiseigi’s house would have been better this time had he brought Bindanda with him. He had never been asked about Bindanda’s absence. It was hardly the sort of thing the old man could have asked him…Welcome, nandi, and where is my chief spy? If his brain had had atevi wiring, he might have had the basic cleverness to drop the information unasked, gracefully, without quite making it a challenge…
But nothing answered the essential question of why his staff on such short notice had felt entitled to blow the hell out of the Atageini premises and take out the self-proclaimed Guild officers on their own. The aiji’s staff should have been the ones to move—and he had the most uneasy feeling that Ismini hadn’t been involved; that Ismini hadn’t been consulted in the operation at all.
Do not take Gegini-nadi as the Guild, Bren-ji.
In a tone downright proprietary and prideful, as if Algini had a personal ax to grind in the removal of their visitor, as if he had conceived a personal offense in the shift of his Guild onto Murini’s side.
The old Guildmaster might be alive or dead at the moment. One had no idea what was going on in the Guildhouse, and one never knew.
But, in the way of atevi politics, not all the old Guildmaster’s personal operatives would be dead—the same as when a lord went down by assassination, there was always the chance of one or two still in the field whose man’chi might lead them to act.
And one doubted any such operatives would feel any man’chi at all toward someone Algini called self-appointed, a usurper of the Guild’s highest authority—possibly even the murderer of the Guildmaster, if the man had met his end.
And if such agents were still in the field, still where the old Guildmaster had placed them, where were they?
Had, for instance, Guild operatives been inserted in his house, a means of the Guild checking up on Tabini as well as the human official who was that close to Tabini’s ear? It certainly made sense that if he had an assortment of agents on his staff from the Ragi, from the Atageini, and a dozen other lords all watching him, the Guild not sending someone of their own would be odd, would it not? They would move through channels that already had access. They would maneuver to get someone ideally not on domestic staff, who would not accompany the paidhi everywhere, at every moment, but into his security, which was only four people, two of whom he knew very closely…two of whom found it so, so difficult to call him by anything but his proper titles, until very, very lately…
God, what a string of chilly perhapses!
“Here, nandi.” Algini handed him back the pistol, cleaned and reloaded. “You should get a holster for it.”
“I shall,” he said, feeling the air he breathed had gone a little rare. He tucked the heavy object into his coat pocket. “As soon as I find the opportunity, Gini-ji. Your advice and Tano’s, both, and one does take it to heart. But one still hopes we shall get through this without my ever needing it.”
“Stay behind us,” Tano said, out of the dark above his head. “And stay down. You shine in the dark, Bren-ji, and we are not facing farmer-folk, not in this action.”
“Yes,” he said, the way one took an order. He had been glad of the darker coat: Guild opposition would not hesitate to target any lord on their side, with the human one a priority, no question. But Tano’s jacket crushed him with its weight. He found the occasion to shed the jacket, and hung it on the seat back, the night air welcome relief. “With gratitude, Tano-nadi. I shall stay out of view, one promises, most earnestly. Take it. Take it.”
“Do,” Algini said, just that, and quietly, efficiently, Tano shrugged it on, a more potent defense to him and his than the jacket itself posed.
With that thought, he took himself, his fair skin, his light coat, his newly-cleaned pistol, and his surmises back to his own seat, where Cajeiri was kneeling backward, talking with Jegari and Antaro.
“Is there news?” Cajeiri asked.
News.
There was plenty of guesswork, was what there was in the paidhi’s mind at the moment, a good many scary surmises, none of them fit for youngsters’ gossip.
“We shall stay close behind your great-grandmother’s car, is all.” The bus gave a violent lurch, scraped through brush, and then seemed to have gone onto a road. Bren caught a look outside the window, and suddenly they were blazing along a dedicated roadway, throwing gravel from the tires. “One understands we are going to the rail station,” he said to the young people. “That being the nearest fuel stop on our way. If your great-grandmother fails to stop there, one hopes we will have enough fuel to follow them to the next such place.”
“We shall find them. We shall persuade mani-ma to get onto the b
us,” Cajeiri said. “And Lord Tatiseigi and Cenedi, too, and Nawari and all of them. The car can go on and be a decoy.” The boy had learned that tactic on the ship, under circumstances in which no boy his age ought to have to learn his lessons. “But she will be very stubborn about it, nandi. You can persuade her.”
“She is likely to be that, young sir,” he said, as the bus swerved around a turn, top-heavy and slewing alarmingly. “And one greatly doubts she will listen to the paidhi, either. But I shall ask Banichi to talk to Cenedi.”
“And I shall!”
“You,” he said, “will stay on the bus, young sir!”
Arms folded. Cajeiri sulked, an eight-year-old again.
Up hills and down, and onto the flat again, as fast as they could go. They were not quite foremost in the column now, but they were close, only a handful of trucks and cars still kicking up a cloud of headlamp-lit dust in the sandy spots ahead of them. Tatiseigi’s car was in the lead of the whole column, one was quite sure, and it was beyond any doubt a far more modern car than the one in which Tatiseigi had first met them, a light and maneverable vehicle with good suspension.
One could hardly say the same for the bus they were riding. It slewed and rocked alarmingly, the driver taking wild turns to avoid major obstacles, and as they pitched wildly along the side of a drainage ditch, Bren braced a foot against the seat in front, of him against the chance they were going over at any moment.
Cajeiri imitated his stance, excited out of his mood, taking delight in the swerves. “The driver is going very fast, nandi!”
“Indeed,” Bren said, all the while hoping that if they did overset, it would not be on some steep hillside or into large rocks.
Up and over the hills, it was, and through woods that might mask Kadagidi ambush, branches raking the top of the bus. By now Bren had gathered half a dozen bruises on the side facing the window, and Cajeiri, laughing, caught him when his foot slipped and he all but dashed his face against the seat in front of him.
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