PRETENDER
DAW Titles by
C. J. CHERRYH
THE FOREIGNER UNIVERSE
FOREIGNER
DEFENDER
INVADER
EXPLORER
PRECURSOR
INHERITOR
DESTROYER
PRETENDER
THE ALLIANCE-UNION UNIVERSE
DOWNBELOW STATION
MERCHANTER’S LUCK
FORTY THOUSAND IN GEHENNA
SERPENT’S REACH
AT THE EDGE OF SPACE Omnibus:
Brothers of Earth | Hunter of Worlds
THE FADED SUN Omnibus:
Kesrith | Shon’jir | Kutath
THE CHANUR NOVELS
THE CHANUR SAGA Omnibus:
The Pride of Chanur | Chanur’s Venture | The Kif Strike Back
CHANUR’S HOMECOMING
CHANUR’S LEGACY
THE MORGAINE CYCLE
THE MORGAINE SAGA Omnibus:
Gate of Ivrel | Well of Shiuan | Fires of Azeroth
EXILE’S GATE
OTHER WORKS
THE DREAMING TREE OMNIBUS:
The Tree of Swords and Jewels | The Dreamstone
ALTERNATE REALITIES Omnibus:
Port Eternity | Wave Without a Shore | Voyager in Night
THE COLLECTED SHORT FICTION OF C.J. CHERRYH
ANGEL WITH THE SWORD
CUCKOO’S EGG
C.J. CHERRYH
PRETENDER
Copyright © 2006 by C.J. Cherryh
All rights reserved.
Jacket art by Donato.
DAW Books Collectors No. 1355.
DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
ISBN: 978-1-1012-1863-1
All characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.
The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
For Sharon and Steve,
who have walked us off cliffs
and helped us move books.
C.J. CHERRYH
PRETENDER
Copyright © 2006 by C.J. Cherryh
All rights reserved.
Jacket art by Donato.
DAW Books Collectors No. 1355.
DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
ISBN: 978-1-1012-1863-1
All characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.
The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
For Sharon and Steve,
who have walked us off cliffs
and helped us move books.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
1
The room had suffered, not from the attackers, but from the defenders of the house, who had taken no pains at all about recovering ejected shells—the detritus of combat was scattered about the floor, a few items lying on the rumpled coverlet of the bed, on the table. One, an apparent ricochet, having landed on the floor around the corner, in the large bath. Damage from the attempted intrusion of the enemy, numerous holes pocked the walls and woodwork. At some point during the battle for the house, someone among the room’s defenders had shot an exit hole through the door, complementing the several inbound rounds that had taken out the door lock and lodged in an opposing wall…without, one hoped, catching any of the house’s defenders along the way. The door had been kicked open after that, evident by the scuff marks on the paint near the shattered lock, as the invaders rushed the room. But the foremost intruder from the hall had hit a chest-high wire at that point, and Bren was very glad the staff had cleared away the evidence.
He was, considering all the other scars of war, overwhelmingly glad to find his computer where he had left it, hidden behind a stack of spare towels on the bottom shelf of the linen press…neither defenders nor invaders having had an inclination to open the storage cupboard of spare towels and bedsheets. No stray shot had hit it, nothing had damaged it, and, on his knees, having extricated the precious machine and its accompanying security modem from their hiding spot, Bren sat on the floor in front of the cabinet with both on his lap, too exhausted, mentally and morally, to struggle up again.
“Is something wrong, Bren-ji?” Jago appeared by him, and he tucked the computer case under his arm, clenched the modem in his hand, and made the effort to get up. Jago helped with a hand under his elbow, lifting him to his full height—which, for a tall human, was about equal to her black-clad shoulder. Even Jago appeared the worse for wear at this hour, her Guild leathers and her ebony skin alike streaked with pale dust from the road and the shattering of plaster, her usually immaculate pigtail a little wind-frayed from a wild ride and a wilder night. Bren’s own pale hands showed bloody scrapes. He had dirt under his nails, which would have been a scandal to his domestic staff if they had been here and not up on the station. They were all of them, himself and his atevi bodyguard, candidates for a good long soaking bath. He smelled of human sweat, Jago of that slightly petroleum scent, but a bath seemed out of the question at the moment. There seemed too much to do to contemplate such a luxury this afternoon, there was no domestic staff at hand to take care of the cleanup: It was all up to them; and he was sure that once he sank into warm water, he would be completely lost.
“Tired, Jago-ji,” he murmured, inserting the modem into a case pocket. “Simply tired.” He heaved the precious computer’s carrying-strap up to his shoulder, not sure what else to do with the computer, wondering whether he should go on using the same hiding place and being too exhausted to be confident in his logical choices at this point. He hadn’t so much as taken his coat off since their arrival in the room, and his clothing bore mud, soot, and the scrapes of hedge branches, not to mention mecheita-spit and bloody rips in cloth he had taken riding through a gap in the estate’s wire fence. “But one dares not lie down yet.”
“Let us check the bed,” Jago said, and left him in order to do that check, electronically, with one of the little handhelds her Guild used.
Checking for bugs. For booby traps. Her partner, Banichi, was over by the windows, likewise engaged, and Tano and Algini, the other pair of his bodyguards, were in the bath, also looking for bugs and explosives, one surmised. All of them were gathering up shell casings.
“Is the chair safe?” he asked, meaning the fragile green-and-white-striped and doubtless pricelessly historical item in the corner.
Fragile from the atevi viewpoint: For a human, child-sized on an atevi scale, the chair was more substantial, even well-padded, and he was glad when Jago came back, surveyed it, and pronounced it safe for him to sit in.
Lord Tatiseigi, lord of the estate, had had his domestic and security staff make the first sweep of the premises, and they had cleaned up the bodies, blood, and broken items before they declared the room fit for occupancy. In any event, these rooms had fared better than the suite next door, where Kadagidi cla
n Assassins had made their actual entry into the house, and possibly left gifts that made one just a little anxious at the moment about standing near the north wall. Bren had less confidence in his host’s staff than in his own—Tatiseigi’s staff were competent at their work—competent, if woefully underequipped in communications and electronics—but he felt much safer knowing his own staff was giving it their own close inspection, with more skill, recent practice, and far better equipment.
Water started running in the bath, a thunderous flood in that huge, atevi-scale bathtub. It was a seductive sound, and more than a testing of the plumbing, since it went on. Tano and Algini had made an executive decision and started drawing hot water for the household.
And Bren looked at his hands, at the grime, the cuts, the stray mecheita-hair and mecheita-sweat that had gotten all over his sleeves and trousers, reconsidering the bath question and the question of letting the adrenaline run down.
The unpleasant fact was the day was well advanced and they still weren’t assured the Kadagidi weren’t coming back tonight.
Or, worst of all thoughts, and one that had been at least a passing topic of discussion downstairs, their victory—and the knowledge Tabini was on the premises—might drive the Kadagidi to more desperate measures, even before dark: They might be desperate enough to attempt an air strike, in which case there was no safety and no time to settle in here as if there were. True, the Assassins’ Guild had passed a formal resolution condemning attack by air as anathema in clan warfare, and in that resolution declared that the Guild would exercise severe and automatic sanctions against violators. But the Guild as a whole had not turned a hand to prevent the overthrow of Tabini-aiji, had it? It had not bestirred itself to condemn the Kadagidi lord, Murini, for setting himself up as aiji in Tabini’s place, had it, then? The Guild had not leapt in to protect Tabini’s grandmother and his heir when they, innocent parties in any dispute between the two clans, returned from space. The Guild had not intervened last night to prevent the Kadagidi from attacking them here in a neutral clan’s province. So there was a little justifiable suspicion downstairs that the Guild had not supported Tabini-aiji as whole-heartedly as they ought before his downfall, and that their lack of response in preventing a third clan being attacked had allowed some already questionable moves, all on one side of the equation.
Still, a man in the position of Lord Murini of the Kadagidi, who had gotten the Guild to take this dubious position of neutrality, letting him stage a bloody coup in the capital and declare himself ruler of the Western Association—which was to say, the whole continent—still had to worry about one potent force in atevi politics, and that force was public opinion. The various clans only recently united, had a long history of independent thought and independent and regional action. There associations within the Association which were historically much stronger than any modern ties, and Murini was already risking his neck by proclaiming himself aiji before the blood of household staff was dry on the carpet.
More, granted he had gotten the Assassins’ Guild to stay out of action, he was beholden to someone for that favor. He dared not go violating publicized Guild resolutions, creating a scandal for Guild leadership, and worse, contravening the Guild’s established principles of politics in his new-minted claim to power.
So there were three powers, all teetering out of equilibrium: the people, the Guild, and the man who called himself (with his clan) the new authority. And if any one of the former two tipped away from him, Lord Murini, so-named Murini-aiji, stood to lose all his advantage. It would be calamitous for his authority if the Assassins’ Guild decided suddenly to take the side of Tabini-aiji, who was not dead, and who was, in fact, currently lodged four rooms down, his staff going through much the same precautionary cleanup of premises. It was very clear that Tabini would accept Guild neutrality, but hold a grudge for its inaction in preventing his overthrow, and might forgive that grudge if the Guild now budged toward his side.
So the last twenty-odd hours had brought a very delicate time for both claimants to the aijinate: Murini, the upstart would-be aiji, with ancient ambitions of an ethnically different clan, had relied on popular discontent under Tabini-aiji’s authority to seize power; Tabini, overthrown, but now with allies—themselves—newly returned from space, now had records and testimony that might change public opinion. In a few days, Murini’s unchallenged supremacy had slid a few degrees, and now the whole thing had headed downhill gathering calamity like a snowball provoking avalanche. Step one: the dowager’s party, including Tabini’s young son, had arrived from deep space and landed on world, in spite of Murini’s plan to keep the shuttle fleet entirely out of action. They had immediately presented themselves on the doorstep of Lord Tatiseigi of the Atageini, the young heir’s great-uncle, and by that action, had put Lord Tatiseigi to the choice of sheltering them or turning his young relative away.
Step two: Murini’s Kadagidi clan, neighbor to Tatiseigi—who had thought they were going to chastise the elderly and habitually neutral Tatiseigi for receiving Tabini’s grandmother and son under their roof—had not only failed in two nights of trying to breach the house and assassinate them all, but last night had found the Atageini’s neighbor to the west, Taiben, supporters of the old regime and relatives of Tabini-aiji’s clan, coming to the Atageini’s defense. It was an unthinkable combination of clans: Taiben and the Atageini had been at loggerheads for hundreds of years, and now they found common cause against the Kadagidi, for the boy’s sake.
Then, third step, Tabini-aiji himself, unheard from for the better part of a year, had shown up to defend his grandmother and his heir, risking life and reign on this one dice-throw: rescue Tatiseigi, drive off the Kadagidi, and support a new compact between Taibeni and Atageini lords.
Suddenly the Kadagidi control of their local Padi Valley neighborhood wasn’t looking as secure as it had three days ago, and centuries of Atageini neutrality in the region began sliding more and more toward commitment to a cause, namely restoration of Tabini-aiji to rule in Shejidan…because that would set a half-Atageini great-nephew up as heir.
So the sun was up. The ancient Atageini house at Tirnamardi still stood, if battered, in the middle of a province now annoyed with the Kadagidi and feeling massively insulted. The historic premises were pocked with bullets, Atageini house stables were burned and its venerable hedges were in tatters, not to mention the damage in the foyer and upstairs, while its lawn held an encampment of neighboring Taibeni and their large and numerous—and now hungry—mounts. The province took these affronts personally and supported their offended lord.
Who overall had fared surprisingly well under such heavy assault, the old premises proving their ancient, blunt-force construction methods had produced very solid walls. The Atageini house stood, and stood well. By the sound of the flood in the bathroom, its plumbing evidently worked and its boilers must be up, producing hot water for the sore and weary household, to judge by comments that wafted out of the bath.
So the aiji-dowager and the aiji had won the first several rounds of the fight, if not the war that was surely preparing. Murini sat in the capital claiming to be the popularly-supported aiji while Tabini-aiji sat in a Padi Valley lord’s house maintaining that he still was. Meanwhile Lord Tatiseigi, their host, was still muttering about the Guild’s general ban on no-holds-barred attacks and its rules about historic properties and premises, as if this was sufficient to preserve the Atageini province and its towns from a repetition of last night. Most of Lord Tatiseigi’s security, who were members of that Guild, held far less optimistic opinions on that score; and senior members of Tabini’s security and the dowager’s were down on the lower floor, laying plans for coping with what they were sure would come with nightfall.
As for one Bren Cameron, paidhi-aiji, interpreter of foreign affairs, Lord of the Heavens and so on and so forth, he sat in the one safe chair in an unsafe world, wondering whether he should open up his computer and look up his notes on the finer print of Guild reg
ulations, searching for loopholes for further attack and simultaneously wondering whether, if he took his boots off to go take advantage of that wonderful hot water in the bathroom, he could possibly get them back on.
He had blisters, he was sure, in places he would rather not describe to his staff. Numerous wood splinters were lodged in his palms. He was amazingly sore.
But he had recovered his computer. And because he had it, he had all his records from space and from the voyage. And because he had those, he possessed detailed evidence which could argue that Tabini-aiji’s unpopular actions had produced results well worth the sacrifices. It was a precious record, and there was a backup for what was stored here—but one copy was in orbit over their heads, and another in his brother’s hands—he hoped safely back on Mospheira by now. On the mainland, on atevi soil, where it was most needed, this was the only copy he could hope to lay hands on, and he wasn’t eager to let the precious computer leave his hands until he had gotten that report to Tabini.
All things considered finally, that was the highest priority, to get a printout or a disk where Tabini could read it and understand what he had. It was the highest priority, even when Tano came out of the bath and reported that the tub was well on its way to being filled, assuming the hot water held out that long.
It was true that in his present state, he was unfit for an audience: even while the world tottered, conventions and custom prevailed, and a man, even the Lord of the Heavens, had to be respectfully presentable to authority…especially an authority shaken by events.