Destroyer

  “Precocious boy!” Tatiseigi was annoyed, and would not have taken such a rebuke from an adult.

  “One has noted the arrangment,” Ilisidi said, and no, the paidhi could not have read that much of it, except that lilies were out of season, and that in this kabiu household nothing out of season would appear out of a hothouse.

  “Damned precocious. Is this disrespect your teaching, or the paidhi’s?”

  “I told you I would not neglect the graceful arts, Tati-ji.”

  “And courtesy? Where is respect of his elders?”

  “I am very respectful, nandi,” Cajeiri said. “And offer regret for the patio.”

  The mecheita incident, with the wet cement.

  “Precocious, I say!” It was not a compliment. Profile stared at profile across the table, that Atageini jaw set hard—on both sides of the equation.

  “Where are my mother and my father, nandi? If you know, we request you say.”

  It was the uncle who broke the stare and looked at Ilisidi, whose face was perfectly serene.

  “Have we an answer to give the child, nandi?”

  “No, we have not an answer. Your grandson offered me none. Likely he failed to tell my niece, either. They kited off into the night without warning or courtesy.”

  “Afoot, nandi? In a vehicle?”

  “On mecheiti, as they came.”

  “Ha.” Ilisidi nodded sagely.

  Mecheiti meant an overland route, off the roads, which made them hard to track by ordinary means.

  Aircraft, on the other hand . . .

  “For all I know,” Tatiseigi said, “they crossed the corner of Kadigidi land and headed for the high hills.”

  Not impossible. But dangerous. Deadly dangerous.

  “Excuse a question, nandi.” Bren felt he needed to ask. “Have there been planes up?”

  “Not over Atageini land, we assure you! Noisy contraptions. Not over our land.”

  So they could not track Tabini by that means, not close at hand, and that might have let him get into the hills—or even circle back into Taiben. He might have been there, and the people of Taiben would not have betrayed his presence, not until he had given personal consent, which their hasty passage might not have allowed.

  It might be wise for Ilisidi and Cajeiri to set up here and let Tabini come to them, if he could—if they could keep the peace with Uncle Tatiseigi in the meanwhile. But there might be lives already at risk on the coast. A counter-revolution would be a delicate thing, easily crushed, unless something busied the Kadigidi very quickly, and stirred up maximum trouble.

  The paidhi, in that regard, had a job to do. He had to overcome the Kadigidi arguments, had to prove that Tabini was not wrong to have relied on his advice. And if he could not convince this old man, who had accepted him under his roof, he had no chance at all in places where he might be less favorably regarded.

  “One wishes cautiously to advance a plan of action, nandiin.” Bren’s throat constricted unexpectedly, and his hands sweated. “I feel I should not impose my presence here overlong. That I should go to the capital, to the Guild, to present the case for our mission, to say what we have found, to justify my advice to the aiji, which it seems I must do.”

  “Suicide,” Ilisidi said sharply.

  “Is there a justification for bad advice?” Tatiseigi retorted. “Is there any justification for this overthrow of kabiu, this intrusion of belching machines and smoke into our skies? Is there any justification for this general corruption of our traditions, setting our young people grasping after human toys, is there any justification for television and rushing across the country in an afternoon, scaring the game and ruining perfectly good land with racketing airports?”

  There it was in a nutshell. Justifiable, considering all that atevi had already let slip, precariously close to forgetting certain imperatives. For a moment he saw no argument on his side at all. What had been done in the heavens, humans could have done.

  He could have done. If he ever could have gotten into space without atevi industry behind him, and could not have had that without Tabini’s strong backing, and that had been the beginning of all the changes, and the present trouble.

  There was a chain of justification. Difficult as it was, the reasons were unavoidable, if egocentric—because there was no one but a person skilled in cross-species logic who could have seen the problem.

  And it had taken a seven-year-old atevi prince to make the kyo believe their intentions.

  “With the aiji-dowager’s leave,” he began, “I do wish to justify it, sir, and beg your indulgence to begin under this roof.”

  “No,” Ilisidi said sharply. “You will never convince him. He is set against it. He is convinced I have lost my senses and soared off to the heavens with my great-grandson, intending to corrupt him and turn him human.”

  “Well?” Tatiseigi asked, with a jut of that Atageini jaw. “And you bring him back here with two ragamuffins from Taiben, no less—Taiben! No doubt they have poached in our woods, and now eye the household silver.”

  “I am Ragi,” Cajeiri’s higher voice said, “and you are my great-great-uncle, and great-grandmother is Malguri! And you should not speak badly of my father and my mother!”

  There was a small, shocked silence.

  “The world is changing,” Ilisidi said. “Living things do change, Tati-ji. Even the hills change. Kabiu itself moves slowly, but it does move, as the very earth moves. Baji-naji. There is always room to flex, or a thing breaks, Tati-ji.”

  Around the flank and uncomfortably up from behind. Tatiseigi looked disquieted, and very much out of sorts.

  “Look at this boy,” Ilisidi said, “half Atageini, and tell me there is no connection. He has your jaw, Tati-ji.”

  “Clearly!”

  Ilisidi took up her napkin. “We shall discuss this without the boy.”

  “To be sure.” Tatiseigi was still irate, but the thunder and the fury sank, a temporary lull, like a pause in a storm that had only had its initial run. “To be sure. Take the paidhi with you.”

  Tatiseigi laid aside his own napkin. Breakfast was over. There were courtesies, bows, as they rose. Bren had the notion he had just been in a war, and wished only to clear the area without complete disaster.

  “Nand’ Bren,” Cajeiri said, and fixed him with an eye-level stare. That was all he said, just an acknowledgement of his presence, and the boy’s disquiet, perhaps, at certain transactions.

  “Nandi,” he said, and let everyone including Tatiseigi precede him off the balcony, back into the hall. He was cold, chilled through. He was always cold at these open-air breakfasts. He walked out to collect his bodyguard and retraced his steps with them through the halls, with every confidence that they had heard everything that passed out there . . . staff on the next floor might have heard a good part of it.

  Upstairs, then, and behind their own doors, where Tano and Algini had kept things safe and secure.

  “It did not go well, nadiin-ji,” he said, “but it was not disastrous. No one was assassinated.”

  Banichi thought it funny. He was less sure. His efforts to persuade Tatiseigi had gotten him nowhere, Ilisidi had some agenda of her own, or Tatiseigi had, and the boy, defending him, had annoyed the old man . . . all of which was predictible, now that he thought about it. He should not be glum about the situation—raw fear might be appropriate, but glumness was hardly warranted, when his companions had behaved exactly as they might be expected to behave.

  Which argued, perhaps, that going into a critical debate with Cajeiri at hand was not the best choice.

  Wind blew through open windows, wind stirring the gauzy inner draperies, and carrying all the scents of the earth.

  He had had a night’s sleep, even a decent night’s sleep. But when he tried to think about what to say to Lord Tatiseigi, if he could get a quiet meeting, it completely refused to take shape in his brain, as if that was not what he ought to be thinking about, as if the whole world was pulling at his sleeve,
wanting his attention, refusing to deal logically, or at least, refusing to deal in human logic. He wanted to throw himself into bed, pull the covers up around his ears and lie there getting warm and digesting a too-large breakfast—desire for the tastes had led him to overindulge, and he had eaten to appear uninvolved while the barbs flew—but the desire for sleep was not a desire for sleep. He knew himself, that the instant his head hit the pillows he would start processing the things he had heard, sifting them for every nuance, regretting things not said, and things said. It was his job to parse such things: something in what the dowager and Tatiseigi had said, or something he had picked up elsewhere this morning or last night, had begun to make a nest in his subconscious. If he went to bed, he would have to undress, to save the clothes; if he delayed to undress, he might lose the thought. And right now the safest place for him was a large, well-padded chair in the sitting area, and not letting those subconscious thoughts surface and distract him from what he, dammit, needed to think about. It could be as foreign to the problem as a remembrance of something Barb had said. He began to wonder if it was something he had eaten or drunk, the somnolence was so urgent, so absolutely pressing.

  He sat, finding warmth in the well-padded chair, attempted to distract himself with a view of the land and sky outside, all veiled in blowing gauze, but he kept seeing the metal and plastics of the ship. He kept thinking of Jase, who had a food-short population on his hands, and tanks to get into operation, and who would have loved half of the breakfast he had just had. Of Barb. Of Toby, at the wheel of his boat. Crack of sails in a stiff breeze.

  Shuttle runway. Wheels down.

  He had done precious little good down there, except to serve as a lightning rod for Tatiseigi’s irritations. Or possibly to provoke them. He had no idea whether Tatiseigi had included him in the breakfast of his own volition, or whether Ilisidi had insisted on it to annoy the old man.

  Or to have a lightning-rod handy, to prevent topics being raised which she had no wish to discuss at the moment.

  Should he send a message to the old man, request an audience independent of Ilisidi? He had not the least idea what to do now. He heard his staff talking quietly in the bedroom. He supposed that was a debrief and a strategy session. He ought to participate. He ought to have a brilliant idea what to do from here, and whether he ought to stay here, and urge the dowager to stay here, where there was at least reasonable protection—or whether he should go to Shejidan and present the untried arguments before Banichi’s Guild.

  He knew what he had rather not do—which was to go to Shejidan. But it was fear that held that opinion. Logic might dictate otherwise, if he could summon the will to think straight.

  Too much breakfast, too much comfort here.

  He had to talk to his staff, once they’d had a chance to talk to everyone else, once Ilisidi had a chance, canny as she was, to figure what Tatiseigi knew or didn’t know. He was dimbrained because he had an adrenaline charge shoving his brain into all-out effort, he had a critical lack of information, and every instinct was telling him not to press Tatiseigi too hard, that there was a current flowing between Tatiseigi and Ilisidi that was critical, that he should not interrupt.

  Waiting. Waiting was the very devil.

  10

  He must have dozed, sitting there in the armchair, tucked up against the slight cool breeze from the open window. He came awake with the passage of a shadow between him and the light, and saw Banichi standing between him and the windows. Jago was with him. Tano and Algini were behind them.

  “Nadiin-ji?” He sorted his wits for relevant recent information and remembered breakfast, and a post-breakfast conference in progress among his staff.

  “We have a plan, Bren-ji.”

  Wonderful. A plan. He so much wanted a plan. He had failed to come up with one, and he was sure Banichi’s was going to involve his staff doing something that would risk their lives.

  He mustered the wit and fortitude to say no to those gathered, earnest faces.

  “Sit down, please, nadiin.” He wanted a quiet conference, one in which they did not cut out his sunlight, or loom over him with superior force. “One hopes it by no means involves your going to Sheijidan without me.”

  Not a twitch. “No, Bren-ji.” From Banichi. “It involves Lord Tatiseigi’s men going there.”

  “One would hardly count on his assisting us.”

  “For the dowager’s sake,” Jago said. “One believes he would order it for her. Not for us, never for us, but possibly for her.”

  “In Shejidan,” Tano said, “his messengers can enter the Guild Hall reasonably unremarked, under far less threat of hostile measures from the Kadigidi. And they can present the facts of the heir’s claim.”

  “But to claim the succession—that would seem as if the Atageini think Tabini is dead, nadiin-ji.” He was far from sure that turning their support from Tabini to Cajeiri was a good idea. “And would it not look as if we support that theory?”

  “Much as if,” Banichi allowed. “But if Atageini representatives can get the debate in the Guild centered on that topic, bypassing all the suspended question of their support for Tabini-aiji, and if, through that debate, we can inject evidence backing Tabini-aiji’s policies, there is some hope of presenting the report. By that means, the Atageini might prepare Guild support for the aiji’s position should he appear.”

  His mind hared off in twenty different directions at once, Tabini’s safety, Tabini’s reaction, even Tabini’s sense of betrayal if he should appear to support Cajeiri’s claim.

  Most of all, the volatile controversy of his own influence in the administration . . . because his influence was going to be the sticking-point in any presentation a third party made to the Guild regarding the mission that had cost the aishidi’tat so much. From the atevi end of the telescope, thinking what the Atageini might say, he saw the situation much more clearly. Very honest people viewed him as a long-standing and pernicious influence on Tabini-aiji, a human, an interloper whose advice was primarily responsible for all the difficulties the aishidi’tat was in now. Very honest people had reasons to support some other authority, no matter how objectionable on all other grounds.

  Small wonder he hadn’t been able to persuade his brain to come up with the right words: he was the problem, and nobody he intended to speak to was going to hear him except through a filter that said all his past advice had been wrong, no matter how well-intentioned. That was what his better sense was trying to tell him. It was why the Guild hadn’t backed Tabini against this insurgency—and why in hell would it then listen to the paidhi’s arguments?

  He drew a deep breath, facing these unpleasant truths. “But if all they hear, nadiin, is that I am here with the heir, what can they think? And if they cannot be made to understand that our judgement regarding the space program was correct and cannot be assured that their sacrifice was necessary—I am not sure Cajeiri will win any case with your Guild or with the legislature. If they cast Tabini aside because they detest my influence—where has Cajeiri been, but with me, for the last two years?”

  “The paidhi has many allies,” Tano said staunchly, “who hold a very different opinion of his actions. People will rise to support us, nandi. I have no doubt. They only want to choose the right moment.”

  Certainly he had faithful staff, in his apartment in the Bujavid—who were likely dispossessed, if not worse. He had a secretarial staff, an entire office in Shejidan, loyal, gentle people who might have lost their jobs and found it precious hard to find others—if not worse. And he could not imagine that band of dedicated individuals facing down Tasigin assassins with a stack of contradictory records and soft protestations about right and reason and cross-species logic.

  “I am not so sanguine about their chances of surviving the present troubles,” he said. “And if I cannot persuade Lord Tatiseigi—or even persuade him to listen to me—”

  About the mission to Reunion, no chance. Not as things now stood.

  But about th
e boy’s rights, and therefore Tatiseigi’s rights, and the need to advance them forcefully . . .

  “He would want the boy to make that claim, would he not, nadiin-ji?”

  “Exactly so,” Banichi said. “Exactly so, Bren-ji.”

  “Endangering him.”

  “He is already in danger, in danger, and without Guild protection, excepting those of us under this roof.”

  “And what is there to support him, Banichi-ji?”

  “The backing of Lord Tatiseigi, and a letter from the paidhi-aiji,” Banichi said, with an uncharacteristic leap of faith. Faith placed in him, God help them all.

  And if the plight of his long-suffering on-world staff was a burden on his heart, that earnest look from Banichi, of all people, lowered a crushing, overwhelming weight onto his shoulders.

  “What could one reasonably say in a letter to convince those who have been injured by my advice, Banichi-ji? I hoped to speak to Lord Tatiseigi after breakfast. I could not even secure that audience.”

  “The dowager had her own notions,” Jago said, “and did not permit it.”

  Did that mean as much as he thought it could mean?

  “Why not?”

  “She is the one Tatiseigi knows, and the one who should deal with him,” Jago said. “Which is probably prudent, nadi-ji.”

  “But if I cannot persuade him—”

  “Never, when the matter at issue is whether Ilisidi is on his side. That is personal, nandi, and your arguments can have no effect there.”

  An old liaison—one almost thought love affair, humanly speaking, but of course it wasn’t that. Man’chi was tangled in it, who could trust whom, who would tell the truth, and who might be lying, and Ilisidi outranked the paidhi—his opinion could not break ranks with hers. Not in the way atevi nerves were wired.

  “You mean I shall have no chance to convince him, nadiin-ji?”

  “She will,” Jago said. “She has done a great deal to convince him already. She is here, Bren-ji.”

  Blind human, that was to say. At times the ground he thought he knew developed deep chasms of atevi logic. Stay out of it, their nerves were telling them, don’t try to intervene in this mine field. And back the boy to be aiji, in his father’s place.