Inheritor

  "Yes? I'm here."

  "Jase, are you keeping your hours regular?"

  Jase ducked his face and wiped a hand over his mouth as if that last was some unexpected and embarrassing item. "Fine, mom. I'm doing fine. You just take care. All right? I'll call you maybe in three or four days. Tell the captain solid fix and green lights on the report and please look out for Yolanda. Whatever you hear from this side, rely on the people I've been dealing with to tell you the truth. Good night."

  "Good night, Jase," was the signoff, and Bren stood there, the most fluent listener to the exchange, on whom all the others most relied.

  And he couldn't tell. There wasn't a way to crack a verbal code, no way but fluency and a specific knowledge of the situation.

  "So?" Ilisidi asked.

  "I take no alarm, aiji-ma. Codewords were certainly all through it, which I expected. There'd have to be to make assurances valid. He seemed to want his captain to pressure Mospheira to get his partner out. He also asked his captain to listen to his associates down here as reliable people."

  "A very good thing," Ilisidi said, leaning on her cane. "A very wise thing."

  And they waited, while technicians revised settings and threw switches and consulted checklists.

  Jase took out a folded sheet of paper that had already seen a great deal of crumpling, and spread it out on the console in front of him — Jase's own writing, but two paidhiin had collaborated on it to eliminate infelicitous remarks; and Banichi and Cenedi had read it, with one good suggestion, but Ilisidi by her own choice had not.

  The director cued Jase, and Jase, smoothing his piece of paper flat on the counter, perhaps because his momentary attempt to hold it in his hands did not produce a steady view of it, began:

  "Nadiin of the aishi'ditat, this is Jase-paidhi with news of the current situation —" Risky word. Jase pronounced it with only a slight stammer. "I have spoken with the ship and have learned that Mercheson-paidhi on Mospheira has concluded that the unsteadiness of the Mospheiran government and haphazard management make it impossible to continue there. She has appealed to the ship to leave Mospheira and to come to the mainland. The Mospheiran government is attempting to prevent her from doing so and has attempted to stir up political rivalries among atevi of the aishi'ditat to cover their own failures. The ship however, on the advice of Mercheson-paidhi and of myself, has concurred: the ship is withdrawing Mercheson-paidhi from Mospheira and calls on the Mospheiran government to allow her to join me on the mainland. The ship is continuing its association with Tabini-aiji and will deal solely with Shejidan. It sends good will to the aishi'ditat, and to the aiji, and to the aiji-dowager, who has stated she will take Mercheson-paidhi under her protection, to preserve the felicity and the wisdom of the arrangement that has established three paidhiin, myself, Bren-paidhi, and Mercheson-paidhi, as representatives. Thank you for your kind attention. I shall now repeat this message in Mosphei' for the information of Mospheiran listeners on the other side of the strait."

  Technicians scrambled in the silence of a broadcast area. Coughs were smothered. Switches were thrown off, others were thrown on, and a tower aimed at Mospheira punched out the next message at a power level reserved to announce impending war.

  Jase got his next cue.

  "Citizens of Mospheira, this is Jase-paidhi with news of the current situation —"

  Atevi stood very still throughout the whole length of the message. Technicians jumped at one point, and made adjustments. Jase was speaking rapidly and it inevitably took Mospheiran technicians a moment to respond to an electronic provocation.

  This version, however, was going up to the ship as well. And if they received the ship's support and that message came back down from the sky, there would be receivers tuned to it, and if they jammed every broadcast on the island, someone in an island full of various-minded and argumentative humans was going to get that message recorded and passed out hand to hand on faxes and copy machines.

  This time there was a consequence and a crisis George Barrulin couldn't head off from the President's door.

  The President's morning golf game might not take place tomorrow.

  Jase finished. A technician cut off the microphone and shut down his console and spoke to him. Then everyone dared talk — and take a breath. Small coughs broke out, held until now.

  "He did it exactly," Bren said to Ilisidi. "And the University will know he damned Hanks' numbers in what he said."

  "Hanks' numbers and Direiso's." Ilisidi was very pleased.

  Jase meanwhile had gotten up and left the console. He looked very solemn and pale as he came down the aisle between the long rows of consoles.

  He looked very lonely.

  Atevi might not understand two humans embracing in a crowded room. They did understand an offered hand.

  Jase took it like a drowning man. Squeezed it hard.

  "Just a little shaky," Jase said. "Sorry. Did I do it?"

  "You did it."

  Jase's voice sank to near-nothing. "Codeword, for the ship: ask to speak to Constance." And sadly, desperately, "Is there any word, Bren?"

  As if information might be forthcoming from them now that Jase had done what he could on their side — and made Mercheson-paidhi suddenly a very valuable piece in a very deadly game. Bren reluctantly shook his head. "I wish I could tell you yes."

  "We may not get her out," Jase said quietly.

  "If she comes ashore anywhere from Dur southward, the aiji's people will bring her in, no question."

  Or, the unspoken possibility, Direiso's people might try to lay hands on her if they had any inkling she might be attempting a crossing. If Hanks' people were holding her, a possibility he didn't discount, he was sure they'd hear from them, maybe claiming to hold her, after they'd held their meetings and managed a decision about it.

  "How long does it take to cross?" Jase asked.

  "Varies. Depends on the weather. Freighters, about two days."

  "If she was out there during the storm —"

  "You just point the bow at the waves and keep the engine running enough to let you steer. She didn't come down here knowing, but she could find that out among the first things she'd learn. The wind would be constantly at the back of someone trying to cross. That would save fuel. A lot of it. The storm was out of the west — it would help her, not run her out of fuel."

  "The captain's gotten the word from me to apply pressure to get her over here. I didn't get anything from him on what she might have told him about her situation and, most of all, the captain didn't cue me at any time that he knew where she was or that she's safe. — What's going on? What's happening?"

  There was movement, suddenly, in the room: security headed for the stairs that led, they had all learned, to the roof.

  Cenedi was looking not entirely displeased.

  Jago came to him, and Banichi close behind. "Lord Tatiseigi," Jago announced, "has moved forces to Saduri headland, nandiin. That was the movement Tano reported. Tano and Algini have agreed to let them pass. However, the dowager says we would be prudent to retire our force to Saduri Township down the road, and get the staff down to the town as well."

  Banichi said, "Either he's approved the marriage or he's tracked down the television set."

  The plain of Saduri was a smallish peninsula, shaped like a triangle, and the sea made a deep indentation in one of the legs with the old cannon fort and Mogari-nai on one side of the indentation and a flatter, more rolling land on the other, where rail ran. Onondisi Bay, with its resorts, was one face of the pyramid. Much larger Nain Bay, barriered by the isle of Dur, was to the north.

  And the town of Saduri was below them, down at the bottom of a winding one lane road, out of sight from this position and in the dark, but Bren standing at the front entry to the station, with the mechieti moaning and spitting about the night-time summons to the herd, was very sure he had a good description of it.

  "I'm glad it's night," Jase said. Jase had taken two of his motion sickness pills
before he came out, and he fastened his jacket now with multiple tries at the buttons.

  "They give you bonuses for this, I'm sure," Bren said; and Jase, who didn't get paid any more than he did nowadays, gave a nervous laugh, even a grin.

  Jase wasn't in any wise as anxious as the Messengers' Guild, whose local assistant director, nand' Brosimi, and two junior staffers, came to the dowager and wished to stay on to protect the equipment. But Brosimi, who did not at all relish the notion of resistance to an armed lord's political intentions or simple misuse of the equipment, obeyed Ilisidi's instruction to send the junior personnel down to safety and to obey all orders lord Tatiseigi gave.

  "So long as they aren't damaging to the equipment," Ilisidi added, while her men were out calling in the mechieti and the staff that were going to walk down the road were shutting down their consoles.

  All nonessential communications ceased when those switches flipped. Phone service was going to be limited in the region. The local province was going on the Emergency Network for such things as fire and ambulance, which one hoped didn't prove necessary.

  But other things were happening. Among the last messages to come in over the news service, there was a train stopped on the tracks near Aisinandi, effectively blocking the northern rail from reaching the area. By amazing coincidence, a switching error derailed another car in Aidin. Something had started moving, and that event wasn't on Cenedi's list or Banichi's.

  There was beach on the northern face of the peninsula, running all the way around, broad and flat and such that motorized transport could operate, but it couldn't get to the beach the boy named, on the Saduri headland, because the stretch where the point of the jut of headland met the waves of the strait was sheer jagged rock. If a ship grounded there, it was very bad news.

  It was good news for them, however, because if the small force they now knew was safely on Dur could keep either of the two ferries from operating and also keep boats from landing on Dur's sandy north shore, they'd assure that Deana went south right into the aiji's hands.

  Motorized transport had moved in Saduri, earlier, and Ilisidi hadn't stopped it, fearing, Bren judged, that a fight would break out inside town limits with innocent citizens at risk.

  That much made tactical sense. But he didn't figure even yet that he knew all of what was proceeding. Humans in the War had had the advantage of their high tech neutralized by the assumptions they made about what atevi might do and when they would do it.

  Studying atevi campaigns, as he'd done, didn't tell him why, for instance, they left some of this station active instead of shutting it all down, no matter Tatiseigi's annoyance. It might be technical, the need to keep personnel at hand to keep certain functions going and to be sure a lord didn't go ordering things turned on and off that one of the least technologically minded lords in the Association didn't understand.

  The reason might also lie in the insult it might accord that powerful and influential lord if one didn't accept his gesture of help in the spirit in which, if they were lucky, it was truly offered.

  One wondered where Direiso's heir was at the moment, whether he was again under Tatiseigi's roof, or whether Saigimi's daughter, claimant to Saigimi's lordship, was with the force almost certainly coming at them.

  One wondered exactly where Ajresi, Saigimi's brother and that daughter's bitterest rival, happened to be at the moment, and whether Badissuni's indigestion had swayed his opinions.

  If Ajresi wanted to stay neutral, he probably could, with Tabini's tolerance. If he saw Tabini fall, however, and Direiso rise, the first debts Direiso would have to pay off would be awarding the Tasigin Marid to Saigimi's wife and daughter, and that meant dispossessing Ajresi, who was too young for peaceful retirement and whose quarrel with Saigimi's Sarini-province wife was too bitter for him to survive her daughter's lordship in the Marid.

  Add to that tangle of relationships lord Geigi, who had a grudge against the wife for her attempt to dispossess him from his seaside estate at Dalaigi.

  There was one thing a great deal different than the last time, at the start of the War of the Landing, when the northern provinces had gone against Mospheira. In that long-ago day the south, the Peninsular lords, had joined the north and the dispossessed Mospheirans in their assault against the island.

  This time most of the former atevi inhabitants of Mospheira were running resorts at Onondisi, fishing on the Dur coast, or scattered up and down the Aidin headland, a Gan minority that had not fared as well under the lord of Wiigin as those had fared who had settled near the old fortress at Nain, on the Barjidi grant of that vacated lordship that had made the Treaty possible. Tabini's ancestor had deserved well of the Gan.

  And Tabini's sudden removal of Saigimi, he began to understand, had made the south less, not more likely, to join Direiso.

  The coastal ethnic minority around old Nain wasn't fond of the northern provinces and they wouldn't side with Direiso, who couldn't shake her long-time association with Wiigin.

  And Dur? Dur, famous mostly for a ferry connection and for smuggling? Dur through its teenaged heir swore itself consistently loyal to Tabini's house.

  Ilisidi, in the light from the foyer door, got up on Babs, and men searched out their various mounts. Haduni had lost one of his charges, who had flown down to Dur, but he was there to take charge of Jase; and Bren whistled for Nokhada who was not delighted to see her rider at this hour when she was full of grass and roused from sleep. He hoped the handlers had gotten the girth tight.

  He got up in Nokhada's surly sketch of a bow. There were complaints of mechieti all around them, and Banichi and Jago glided close to him, shadows in the single-source light from the door, as the Messengers' Guild staff that was going down the road with them afoot moved nervously into a knot by the door.

  He had the gun in his coat pocket. The paidhiin were supposed to be unarmed and innocuous. Neither of them fit the latter description.

  But defend the third of them? He didn't know how they were going to find a woman from space who'd possibly launched out from Jackson with no skill and no chart and no knowledge of a sea that overmatched even the occasional smuggler.

  He knew the dangers and the numbers of people who drowned in that crossing. Whenever some enterprising fool of a human or atevi thought he'd circumvent the import restrictions, and failed in the crossing, the fact if not the grim details reached the paidhi's desk as a complaint from one authority or the other. Fishermen and, very rarely, pleasure boaters got caught by a squall and if they were very, very lucky, the paidhi got to straighten out the international paperwork and get them escorted to the middle of the strait, aimed at the appropriate harbor.

  There were the sad inquiries to which the paidhi had had to say, no, no one had been picked up, no boat had reached shore.

  He didn't want to think about Yolanda trying it alone in some harbor runabout she'd found the key left in.

  Deana Hanks, on the other hand, could easily get expert help, either some 20 meter yacht with a crew hired from her rich father's friends or, more useful and far more likely to reach the port she aimed at, some Mospheiran smuggler who supplied mainland antiques and jewelry, two items no one could identify as smuggled, to the parlors of that crowd who otherwise disdained atevi culture.

  God, he wanted his hands on Hanks!

  Preferably before Hanks ended up in Direiso's camp.

  Without warning Ilisidi started out, and they were moving. One of Ilisidi's men told the communications staffers who were walking down to stay to the inside of the road so a mechieta didn't shoulder them off a cliff.

  Better to hit the rocks on the inside of the curve than the ones at the bottom of the cliff, was the way the man put it, to a collection of people, mostly young, already scared by their situation; but they fell in, keeping in a group as they walked and trying to stay clear of the mechieti.

  "The staff will have to tag after us as best they can," Banichi said. "I have a feeling we'll out-pace them considerably; and that may be
best for their sakes."

  "What's waiting for us down there?" Bren asked as they moved into the dark and the starlight of the road.

  "Tabini's men, nadi, and some of Ilisidi's who came in by train from Shejidan, if, baji-naji, we have fortune on our side for a few more hours and they've met up without shooting each other."

  They passed the split in the road, that which led around the rim to the cannon fort, the route the tourists used. Another mechieta shouldered in, with Jase aboard and Haduni leading it by the rein. "Nadiin," Haduni said, "the dowager has lent Jase-paidhi Nawari's mechieta for the trip down."

  Nawari had left in the plane. Nawari was one of those who ordinarily rode close to Ilisidi.

  "Jasi-ji," Jago said out of the dark by Bren's left, "he means when we run, you take the rein from him, stay low and hang on. He's holding the rein now because if he lets go you'll be up there with the dowager very fast."

  "Yes." Jase acknowledged an order with atevi brevity. And to Bren. "I'll certainly hang on, nadi."

  The head of the party had reached the fork of the road that slanted sharply down in the starlight, down and down into dark. As yet they kept a moderate pace, but the first hairpin turn came a good deal sooner than Bren expected, the mechieti still moving briskly, but not so the staff walking down couldn't stay with them.

  The next hairpin and the next tier of the road brought the town lights into view, not as many lights as one saw looking down, say, from a plane on a Mospheiran city by night.

  But those lights might be fewer than ordinary tonight, since one could well suppose the townsfolk were not unaware of the crisis, and were probably listening to radio and television in hopes of news or public safety announcements.

  It was a steep road at the next turn. Very steep for the tourist buses that were the summer traffic up this road; but one paved lane was very broad for mechieti; and the front rank at the fourth hairpin turn struck a faster downhill pace that would leave the group afoot behind very quickly. Nokhada was in a far better mood, pricking her ears forward and hitting a stride that advanced her just marginally through the pack.