“But there is no word from them?” Cajeiri was distressed. “There is no word at all, nadiin-ji?”
“Being wise, they will not chatter back and forth, young sir,” Banichi said. “They will move quickly, and they will move unpredictably, as if you were in their care. We cannot answer your questions.”
“They should not have gone at all,” Cajeiri muttered, head ducked, his mouth set in a grim line. “They should not have done it.”
Jago said sternly: “Jegari and Antaro are not your human associates, young sir. Never mistake it. They are not Gene and Artur.”
A scowl. And a young man left to sit on a jump seat, head bowed, not so much sulking, one hoped, as thinking about what she meant, in all its ramifications.
A human was totally out of place in that transaction: Man’chi pulled and pushed, and it was an emotion as extravagant and sharp and painful as anything humans felt—no reason he could offer could make it better for the boy, to be told, indeed, they were not Gene and Artur. What they did was exactly comprehensible to the boy’s instincts, if he would give way and listen to them. The paidhi had absolutely nothing to contribute in that understanding.
But in the next moment, while the engine gathered speed after the curve, Tabini crossed the claustrophobic aisle to lay a hand on his son’s shoulder and point out the ways one should exit the engine if they should crash inside the tunnels…how ladders led to traps in the ceiling, and how he should, if worst came to worst in the tunnels or before that, find a small dark place inside the tunnels and wait until dark to get back down the hill.
“Yes,” Cajeiri said, paying close attention, and Tabini found occasion to touch his son’s cheek, approving—
Push and pull of emotions, curious combination of harsh and soft treatment to Bren’s eyes, but the emotional tide in the boy at losing his companions had shifted back again, become a bright-eyed, active observation of his surroundings, his assets, the proper course to follow to gain his father’s approval—one could all but see the wheels turning.
And one knew this boy. He aspired to be a hero. If he got the chance he would do extravagantly brave things, if security or the paidhi didn’t quickly sit on him and keep him out of the line of fire…God, how did a human reason with the new spark in those gold eyes, that combination of empowering sacrifice for his own welfare and the heady draft of fatherly approval?
The train slowed for another curve in that moment, as the sun came between buildings. It cast their shadow against a grassy hummock beside the tracks, and showed the shadow of their train, the fluttering transparency of the banner spread above it, the low shapes of persons on the roofs of the cars. People all along could have no doubt who they were, and where they were going.
And still they turned out as the train passed the edge of residential districts with the tunnel looming ahead, men, women, children waving at them, one group with a stick with red and black streamers attached.
A short transit through a parkland. Then a tunnel appeared in the windows, a tunnel, a dual fortification, a gateway that could be closed.
It was not.
Here we go, Bren said to himself, as if preparing for a dive down a snowy mountainside. Here we go. They were remote yet from the Bu-javid: It was the entry to the underground, the common train system that ran through the heart of the city. It would not be the greatest point of danger, unless their opposition cared nothing for casualties.
The tunnel widened to embrace them. They were swallowed up in darkness with only a row of lights in the ceiling to show their way, and those widely spaced. The lights of the engine itself illumined rock and masonry, and the double ribbon of steel that carried them. The noise changed to an echoing thunder that obscured chance remarks inside the cab.
One hoped the people on the roof were safe. It was certainly not where he would have chosen to ride out this journey.
But if there was to be an obstacle, they and he would be among the first to see it: The engineers would have at least as much warning as the headlamps and radio contact provided…not that there was damned much they could do about it. They were moving much too fast now for his liking, fast enough, he feared, to compact the cab into tinfoil if they met another train on their track.
Whisk—through an urban station, with lights on either side and other tracks, a strangely deserted station, where only a scattered few stood on the platforms watching the train pass. Two other city trains were parked there, and those were dark and eerily empty of passengers.
Whisk—into the dark again. The engineer, underlit by the control panel under his hands, was talking to someone on his headset. One hoped it was good information and good news.
Whisk—through another station, likewise deserted, only this one held a freight train, and a handful of shadows, one of whom waved a lantern, and the train slowed.
Back into the dark, then, more slowly still, swerving—if memory served—exactly where the airport train always swerved, where it switched to the Bu-javid track. In a moment they hit the switch-point, a noisy crash.
Faster and faster, then. They were headed for the Bu-javid depot, now, right up into the restricted track.
Ought we not to proceed with more circumspection? He wanted to ask Jago that, but he had dissuaded Cajeiri from such questions, and found himself biting his lower lip as they began, yes, definitely to climb and then to turn.
“How is the track ahead, nadi?” He finally couldn’t help himself.
“Clear, as far as our report runs, Bren-ji.” Because she knew him, because she knew he was trying to think ahead, she added: “The floors above are at present another matter.”
Murini hadn’t pulled out all his supporters. Perhaps Murini had gone, and left them to take the heat—but it would not be easy. Granted one could believe the reports of where Murini was any more than one could rely on those about Tabini.
Whisk. Another lighted space, with no trains at all, only deserted platforms, amber-lit in the gloom, empty rails gleaming. He remembered it as the station that carried government employees to the foot of the hill.
And still the train climbed, its speed necessarily reduced by the bends in the track. It was inside the hill.
“The paidhi and the young gentleman should go to the aisle aft now,” Banichi came to them to say. Bren perfectly understood: They were getting close to the main station, that station which served the higher levels of the Bu-javid. If anywhere, this was the place that would be defended. Nobody had thrown a train at them yet, but he would lay no bets now.
“Come, young sir,” Bren said, collecting the boy with an arm about his back. “Let our security do its job.”
“I have a gun,” Cajeiri announced, this boy scantly eight.
“Keep it in your pocket,” Bren said, “as I do mine. If you draw it, you will immediately strike an enemy eye as a threat, and you will attract bullets to both of us, vastly annoying our bodyguards.”
“I want to fight!”
“Not even your father wants to fight, young sir, nor do I. Let us stand here at the start of the hallway, and not be in the way of those whose business it is to protect us. That is our best service.”
“My father is up there!”
That he was, right up near the windows, which security would not like, but there was damned little arguing with Tabini at this moment. The headlights of the train picked out rough-hewn rock in their distant view of the windshield.
Then smooth concrete, and always that row of lights along the top of the tunnel—lights dimmed to insignificance in the blaze of fire that burst ahead of them. The whole train shook, and kept going through a sheet of fire, right on to the white flare of artificial light that dawned in the windshield.
Multiple tracks, the broad platforms for freight and passengers, cars on the siding and another train engine apparently moving, but on another track, headed out.
Home, the station from which he’d left on every journey…and seen now through the windshield of an engine cab bristling with firea
rms, a vantage on the place he’d never in his life imagined to have. The whole Bu-javid was above their heads now, the hill, the capital, the center of Sheijidan and the aishidi’tat.
The train slowed, hissed, squealed to a halt, and suddenly a fracture appeared in the windshield glass, silent, compared to the scream of the brakes. No one even ducked—only one of Tabini’s guard stepped between him and the window, and at Bren’s elbow, Cajeiri moved forward.
“Do not have the gun out, young sir,” Bren said, grabbing a coat sleeve and wishing he could confiscate that deadly item from immature hands. “Keep your head down.”
“But—” from Cajeiri, and at that moment Jago stepped near and seized Bren’s arm. He seized Cajeiri’s in turn, and took him where Jago led, which was back into the short corridor, and, bending low under the window, toward the door and the ladder down to the outside.
Out the door then, into the echoing cavern of the terminal and the reek of smoke and explosives in the station.
Jago stopped them half a breath—they were not the first out on that short steel platform: Banichi was. Banichi went down the ladder to the track itself.
“I shall follow you very closely, Jago-ji,” Bren said at her back. “Use both hands for yourself, if you please.”
“Yes,” Jago said shortly, and dived down after Banichi.
It was relatively quiet, given the noise from the idling engine right at their backs, given, Bren thought, the pounding of his own heart, which he swore was keeping time with the train and just as loud. Two deep breaths on that little nook of a platform. Banichi’s whistled signal pierced the ambient noise.
“We shall go down and to the right,” Jago said, “along by the wheels, then up onto the platform. Follow.”
She moved, instantly, and Banichi was out of sight. “Stay with me,” he said to Cajeiri, and scrambled after Jago, down the atevi-scale ladder, down beside the massive driving wheels. Jago moved ahead of them, staying low, below the concrete lip of the platform, and Bren saw Banichi was up ahead, where a straight steel maintenance ladder led up to the main level. Banichi set a foot on it, reversed his rifle, and put the butt up above his head.
Fire spattered back, missing entirely.
“They are not Guild,” was Jago’s acid comment.
Not Guild. Banichi had ducked down and moved down the trackside, evidently on the hunt. Fire was echoing out from the top of the train.
“Stay here,” Jago said, about to backtrack, and about that time fire broke out from behind them, from up on car level, about where Ilisidi’s car was. Fire came from the windows as well as the top of the cars, directed at what, Bren had no idea. His mind supplied the broad panorama of the Bu-javid terminal, where a loading dock and broad passenger platform ran side by side in the large artificial cavern, with its pillars and buttresses. About fifty meters from the passenger terminal, a handful of freight and business offices, their very walls part of a massive pillar that went up several stories; and about twenty meters beyond that, a rock wall and the inset of a bank of lifts that went straight up into the offices and residences of the Bu-javid itself, doors tastefully enameled in muted tones, themselves an artwork—not to mention the several tapestries and the vases, designed to provide passengers tranquility and pleasant views, before the bustle and hurry of the trains.
Fire rattled out and richocheted off the train engine over their heads. More fire came from right above them, out the windows of the cab, and presumably their people on the roofs of the train had not stayed any longer to be targets—were likely either down within the train or had gotten off onto the platform immediately as they came in and moved out. The whole cavern resounded with gunfire, first in one direction and then another, and he had lost sight of Banichi in one direction and suddenly missed Jago in the other. They had left him—left him altogether, which they rarely did. She was off down the trackside.
His job was to stay low and stay out of trouble, and this he was resolved to do. “Come,” he said to Cajeiri, spotting a nook beside the massive drive wheels, a nook that led right down under the engine itself, a place grimy and black with grease, but a veritable fortress against most anything that might come.
“What if the train should move, nandi?” Cajeiri asked.
“Then lie flat,” he said. But the train had gotten itself into a position at the end of the line; only the roundtable could face it about, and that only after the cars were detached. Their train was not moving, and could not be moved, no matter a deafening explosion that filled the track area with stinging smoke.
Cajeiri moved to get out. Bren grabbed the coat and hauled him back.
“Great-grandmother,” the boy said.
“The aiji-dowager can take care of herself, young sir. Stay with me. Guild is positioning itself out there, and that thick smoke is part of it. This is not the time for us to be wandering loose.”
He could not read the boy’s face in a dark now compounded by thick smoke. Next, Bren thought, the lights might go. But he heard distant shouts, people calling out for someone to move south.
They were certainly not Guild, he said to himself. He maintained one arm about the boy, the other snugging his computer close. The only flaw in his plan that he could see was that his own staff might not realize he had gone to cover, but he had no means to tell them except to use a pocket com, and that might not be prudent—even if they had time to answer a phone call. He heard little short whistles, low and varied in tone—difficult to get a fix where they were, but those were Guild, likely their own Assassins moving and advising one another of their movements in a code that seemed to shift by agreement…much as he had heard it, he recognized only those signals his staff made with the intent he understand.
Boom. And rattle. The ground itself shook. The lights dimmed significantly, not that there was a thing to see from their vantage between the wheels, and meanwhile the smoke had sunk even to low places, stinging the eyes and making his nose run. He blotted at it, and found his calves cramping as he squatted there, not a good thing if they had to run for it.
Someone moved near them. He saw legs, out between the wheels, but the smoke and the shadow obscured identity.
“Bren-ji.”
Jago’s voice.
“Here,” he said, and let go of Cajeiri’s coat. The boy crawled out ahead of him, and he exited on eye level with Jago, who leaned on a rifle, kneeling on the end of a wooden tie beside the rail.
“We are making progress,” Jago said. “We have secured the platform. Forces are moving up inside the Bu-javid itself, level by level. The Guild has concentrated its efforts.”
“On which side?” he was constrained to ask.
“Tabini-aiji has taken possession of the Bu-javid,” was Jago’s answer, wrapped in the obscurity the Guild favored. “And Murini is confirmed to have left the airport, by air.”
No damned specific information about the Guild, not even from Jago, not so the human mind could gather it.
“We are winning,” he paraphrased her.
“Baji-naji,” she answered him, that atevi shrug, and said then, “we have to move.”
Something else blew up, shaking the concrete walls of the trackside. Jago pushed him into motion, and Bren grabbed Cajeiri’s sleeve and shoved him ahead in the stinging smoke.
Where are we going? it occurred to him to ask. But they reached the short upward ladder, and Jago shoved them aside to go first, taking it in three moves, a rifle swinging from her shoulder.
Bren shoved Cajeiri up next, and followed right up against him, pushing the boy over the rim as Jago seized first Cajeiri and then him, dragging them into motion. Smoke was thicker above, stinging their eyes. Shapes—support columns, pieces of equipment, baggage trucks, moving figures—appeared like shadows and vanished again in haze. They crossed the broad platform, running toward the central lifts, from which the whole space of the station fanned out. There were shouts, whistles, and they dodged around a column.
Are we going upstairs? Going up in
to the heart of the Bu-javid seemed to Bren a dangerous proposition, to put themselves into the fragile mechanism of the lift system, the towering shafts an easy target for sabotage. He was not anxious to do that, but he was not about to protest anything Jago thought necessary.
The wall and the bank of lifts came up at them, a darker gray in the smoke, and several shadows by it—these were surely allies: Jago had her rifle in hand, and did not raise it. Whistles sounded. Jago answered in kind, short and sharp, and they reached the carpeted vicinity of the lifts themselves.
“Nandi.” Tano was there. So, for that matter, was Tabini-aiji, with his guard. Tabini snatched his son into his care, welcome event. Bren bent over, catching his breath, wiping his eyes. Lights were at half. Such lights as there were lit blazed in the high overhead like multiple suns in fog, contributing a milky glow aloft, but no distinction to the shadowy figures out across the terminal platform.
“We are going up,” he heard. It was Tabini’s voice, leaving no doubt that was exactly what they would be doing.
No one protested, not even the aiji’s security. A door opened in the wall, a clearer light shining within, where there was no smoke—and it was not the lifts Tabini proposed to take, but the emergency stairs, Bren saw…emergency stairs, atevi-scale, and the highest climb in all of Shejidan.
Guildsmen pressed their way into the stairwell slightly ahead of Tabini, and the rest of them were clearly going with Tabini, affording no time for questions, no time, either, to ask where Banichi was, or Tano or Algini, none of whom were immediately in sight. Jago pushed Bren and the boy up metal stairs that resounded with the thunder of climbers above them.
Up and up the steps, three landings that had no exit, a space occupied only by the height of the station roof, a fourth landing, where several Assassins stood waiting to wave them on up and up. Bren found his legs burning, his heart pounding—Jago had the weight of the rifle, a sidearm, and ammunition, and he could only manage the computer and his pistol, himself, with the atevi-scale steps and a body that had spent the last couple of years sitting far, far too much. The rest of their force climbed behind them—he dared not slow them down, so he sweated and climbed, while his vision went hazy and his breath tore through his throat.
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