Destroyer (31 page)

Their guides tried to suggest Ilisidi sit and rest, but Ilisidi had her cane in hand and walked—walked in wide, aimless patterns, as far as the clear space allowed.

Not unwise, Bren thought. He walked a bit himself, trying to keep his legs under him, trying to get circulation back to his nether regions, and not to let the ankle give. Careless of dignity at this point, he swung his arms and bent and stretched, feeling the pain already, and knowing it would be worse before it was better. He owned, he very much recalled, a saddle more to his proportions. Unfortunately that saddle was, like the mecheita he owned, off in Malguri, at the other end of the continent, and for now, and in public, the only cure he could apply was three tablets of mild painkiller, which he carried in his baggage.

He swallowed the dose, washed it down with spring water, then sank down gingerly on a decaying log near the baggage, in the general area where the rest of them were gathering, to wait for it to take effect. The rangers had set up a small stove, and were heating water, for tea, one ever so earnestly hoped. He watched as other utensils appeared from various baggage. Food appeared.

His appetite began to override the pain. Food, hot food, and not concentrate bars. The fire seemed reckless, if they were being followed. The smell of smoke carried. But a hot meal was oh, so welcome. He resisted second-guessing the rangers’ judgement.

There were other whistles in the woods, some near, some far. Their guides fell utterly silent and listened for a bit.

“There has been no investigation of the bus, nandiin,” Keimi said, standing by the edge of the clearing. “The Sidonin authority evidently is not particularly zealous. We shall likely receive a message by hand, from another direction. We shall let them retrieve the bus, eventually.”

A whistle sounded startlingly close to them. One of Keimi’s people answered it, and meanwhile business around the stove went on as if nothing alarming had happened. Tea was served, soup was on to boil, water supplied from the spring, in a pot that otherwise served as a packing container. And someone out in the woods was watching, guarding them.

“Mind, we have a human guest,” Ilisidi had said, when they were putting together the meal, and she had her staff watch, personally, every item and spice that went into the stew, for which Bren was entirely grateful. It smelled better and better. Anything would have appealed to him, laden with alkaloids or not, and he would, he thought, have died mostly happy if he could only get a bowlful of what was preparing.

Some little noise attracted their own bodyguards’ attention. “We have others arriving, nandiin,” Keimi said, and Assassins relaxed. Hands left weapons.

In a while more, indeed, while they were ladling out the contents of the pot, which turned out to be a thick stew presented as a sauce on hardtack, other riders turned up, three of them, a woman, two men, these all in mottled dark green not unlike the leaves, on dark, well-kept mecheiti.

There were introductions, and the dowager stayed seated, but she inclined her head courteously to each—whose names, it turned out, she already knew.

“Nand’ dowager,” they addressed Ilisidi, with great respect. It appeared, by what conversation flowed, and by the exchange of bows with the two youngsters that had settled by Cajeiri, that these were the parents of the two teenagers, and now they were on much more formal behavior. The elders recalled that they had known Cajeiri as a babe in arms, not the sort of thing a young lad of any species liked to hear recalled in front of his new friends.

But there they were, in the heart of Taiben, where Cajeiri had spent much of his babyhood. And the two teenagers recalled they had met Cajeiri then, if one could meet a toddler in any social sense.

So it was old acquaintance. The chatter went on, in a tumble of particulars for a second or two, entirely displacing adult business, until Ilisidi meaningfully cleared her throat. “There is a better sitting place over near the spring, great-grandson.”

“Mani-ma.” Cajeiri gratefully took the hint and took his two teenaged conversants with him, out of the stream of adult conversation.

“His father’s son,” the older man of the arriving party said. His name was Jeiniri—Bren had noted it; and the woman was his partner in service, Deiso. Those two were the parents. The other man, Cori, was Deiso’s brother.

“In very many ways,” Ilisidi said, “he is his father’s son.” Some quiet current ran in that exchange that Bren could not quite gather, but there was a little tension in the air, and eyes were quickly downcast.

Is there some problem in this meeting? he asked himself, and cast a worried glance at his own staff, who were busy with their supper. Is there some news passed, some particular difficulty, that brought this pair in?

Or have they come in to retrieve their teenaged youngsters from our vicinity? It was a dangerous vicinity, he had no question of that, and it made sense they would feel some awkwardness in saying so. The aiji-dowager and her great-grandson being the gravitational center of that danger, sensible parents would want those two and all the rest of the young children and elderly away from them. It would be a relief, to have the vulnerable part of their band withdraw to safety.

So here went another set of youngsters out of Cajeiri’s reach, he thought, if they did that, and he was sorry, immensely sorry they could not send Cajeiri to safety too.

They finished eating. They took tea, a solemn, quiet time.

Community was established. Food and tea had gone the rounds. Then it was permissible to get down to bare-faced questions.

“How many of the staff survive, nadiin?” Cenedi asked their hosts directly. “One apprehends they are fairly well scattered.”

“The lodge is mostly intact, nadi,” Keimi said. “And the Kadigidi have attempted to base there, but to no good, not for them.”

That covered bloody actions, Bren thought.

And still that strange reserve.

“You wonder, do you not,” Ilisidi said sharply, “who claims the succession.” Her mouth made a hard line, and she leaned on her cane, which rested at a steep angle before her. All around the fire, eyes fixed mostly on the ground. And the cane lifted, pointing.
“There
is the succession, nadiin, should it come to that.” The cane angled toward the spring, and Cajeiri.

A scarcely perceptible tension breathed out of the newcomers as they followed that indication.
Not
an eastern claimant, then, but an heir of the central provinces, a Ragi like themselves; and no proclamation in the solemn halls of government provoked more tension or more relief than this. Bren himself found his breath stopped, and when they looked back to Ilisidi, Taibeni heads bowed in deep, deep respect.

“Nand’ dowager,” Keimi said solemnly.

That old, old divide between east and west, that had once, in the previous aiji’s death, voted Tabini into office, passing over Ilisidi: too eastern, too much a foreigner to manage the Western Association. It had been a bitter dose.

And Ilisidi knew these people, knew where their man’chi lay, and gained everything in one stroke. The whole atmosphere had changed.

“So what happened here, nadiin?” Ilisidi asked, leaning on that cane again. “And where is he?”

A small silence.

“The aiji,” Keimi said, “had come to the lodge for safety. He had intended to send Mercheson-paidhi to Mogari-nai, and he intended to follow, when news came that Murini of the Kadigidi had conducted assassinations in the legislature itself, and lords had scattered for immediate safety. Sabotage was aimed at the shuttles, and Tabini-aiji dispatched staff immediately to prevent that. He intended, himself, to go to Mogari-nai and communicate directly with Ogun-aiji up on the station. The shuttles could not launch: they were in preparation, as best we understand, but we have never heard that they launched.”

Bad news. Terrible news.

And Tabini had made a critical choice, to neglect all other matters and protect the shuttle fleet, as an irreplaceable connection to the space station, to his mission, to the ship and its business. Some atevi might not understand that, might not forgive it, in an aiji who had already committed so ruinously much effort into the space program, to join with humans.

“It was suggested by the staff,” Deiso said further, “that he be on one shuttle, and that some of us would go with him. He refused, nand’ dowager, and said it was impossible, anyway. He said that he belonged to the earth, and that he would never expect us to die for him while he sat safe in the heavens. By all we know, the spaceport is still in provincial hands, the shuttle grounded, but intact, and the crews in hiding. The Kadigidi have taken the shuttle facility at Shejidan, however, and maintain a guard there.”

A profound relief. The investment, the unique materials, the irreplaceable staff . . . protected, thus far. But now that the ship was back at the station, the Kadigidi and their supporters would know that the shuttle there and the one on Mospheira represented a dire threat to them. Destroying it, or taking control of it, would become a priority.

“And where is my grandson?” Ilisidi asked.

“No one knows, aiji-ma, but he left eastward—whether skirting through Atageini lands, or more directly inward, we do not know.”

A border where there was only uneasy peace, an old, old feud within the Ragi Association—not often a bloody one—that had been patched within the larger Western Association, the aishidi’tat, first by pragmatic diplomacy, then by the marriage of Tabini-aiji to an Atageini consort . . . Cajeiri’s mother.

And Cajeiri, with his two companions, had quietly gotten up and moved back to stand nearby, listening, lip bit between his teeth.

“The dowager proposes to go ask Lord Tatiseigi where his man’chi lies,” Cenedi said, and Bren’s heart did two little thuds.

But of course. Of course that question had to be posed, and posed face to face, if it was to have the best chance of a favorable response. Man’chi worked that way. Ilsidi could ask that question by phone, supposing they found a phone, and that would indeed shock her former lover to a certain degree, perhaps jolt him enough to get the truth out of him. But he might equally as well puff himself up and take personal meaning out of the fact that she had used the phone, not confronting him—and then the shock would diminish into recalcitrance at best. Nothing on earth would match the emotional impact of personal appearance, on Atageini land, and very little could match Ilisidi’s force if she got inside his guard. If there was anything calculated to catch the old gentleman at a disadvantage, if there was any appearance of the old regime capable of shaking him to his emotional core—Ilisidi could.

And Ilisidi with the advantage of guardianship over Cajeiri, half Atageini, himself, and destined to rule, by what Ilisidi had just declared—canny politician that she was . . . oh, damned right she had a hand to play.

If they lived long enough. If the Atageini had stayed free of Kadigidi forces. If, if, and if.

Granted they had set something in motion back in Adaran, and stirred things up at Sidonin. They were about to do something far, far more dangerous.

He decided on another cup of tea and kept quiet. This was an atevi matter, and not one where the paidhi-aiji owned a particularly valid theory of how to proceed.
This
choice depended on emotional hard-wiring, the psychology of the business—it was ninety percent psychology, where it involved convincing people to risk their lives to support an eight-year-old successor. The same way the mecheiti stayed, unrestrained, where their leader stayed, this group just sitting round the fire was doing something, arguing things, exerting persuasions and enlisting arguments that human nerves might perceive, but couldn’t quite feel.

Excitement was in the air, resolution in the direction of glances, the attitude of heads, the expression in golden eyes, shimmering the other side of the small gas flame. Dusk had settled deep as they heated more water for another, easier round of tea.

The fate of the
aishidi’tat
was potentially being decided, right here, between one great player and a handful of lesser ones. Tabini’s choice under threat had been to come to them, and even absent, he had for months been a nebulous presence, whether dead or alive, sustaining them in their fight. With Ilisidi and the boy came an emotional pressure that Ilisidi, canny as she was, seized, directed, bent to her own purpose.

One saw how she had survived coups and assassinations—why she was alive and many of her enemies were dust.

“Tea?” one of Keimi’s people asked, and poured for him. He sipped it, feeling, despite the painkiller, the early twinges of what was going to be a truly excruciating day in the saddle tomorrow. Cajeiri had dropped down to sit with the two teens, all of them listening, questions in abeyance, feeling—God knew what.

Sometimes the paidhi’s job was best done by keeping his mouth firmly shut.

The folk of Taiben seemed at least not to forget him, in his silence. He had to refuse another serving of hardtack, but he sopped up several cups of tea before he reached capacity. And the discussion went not that much longer before Ilisidi declared she was tired and wished to sleep.

Bren was glad enough to lie down. He was unwilling for Jago to lie beside him and make their relationship that apparent to strangers—it was her dignity he was thinking of, in settling in a narrow spot, between two tree roots. But she sat with Banichi and Cenedi and the rest in a second conference with the three latest-come rangers—perhaps asking particulars of trails, quasi-boundaries, and affiliations, not to mention rumors from outside . . . all that sort of thing their Guild would be interested to know, on which they did their job.

Trust at least when his staff slept, they would sleep, under ranger guard, far more soundly than he would, with half-formed speculations and useless plans swarming through his head.

“But they will come here now, nadiin,” he heard Banichi point out. “They will not ignore our landing. They must suspect our route.”