“But the Guild officers,” he began, still aching for information, any small bit she could give him. “Have they gotten out a message?”
“These persons were so imprudent as to lodge in an upstairs room in an ancient and hostile building. These historic houses are barrel vault upon barrel vault and massively built—precision in such matters is quite possible.”
“Were we in an upstairs room, nadi!”
A tone of amused shock. “But, Bren-ji, we never allowed enemies to occupy the room beneath us!”
Tatiseigi would have an apoplexy about his missing floor, was all he could think for the moment. The enormity of what his staff had done, in terms of assassinating Guild representatives—perhaps Guild leadership—he could hardly grasp. But no message to Shejidan had gone, it seemed; clandestine hardly described them, and certain forces were likely scrambling to meet their challenge.
And the Guild officers were dead. If the two had imagined that they had actually installed any proper precautions in the room below them, if they had had confidence in the man’chi of someone within the house, in the Atageini staff or otherwise to aid and abet their movements—
Clearly someone had prevented those particular precautions from moving into position in the room below. His staff seemed extraordinarily well-briefed on what had happened, even smug, if he could read Jago’s tone.
And he knew their ways. He knew that Banichi had no inclination to be the second man into an action he could much better direct, or to take a purely defensive position when someone aimed at their lives. Neither was Cenedi so inclined, nor was the dowager he served—Tatiseigi might have hesitated, even Tabini might have paused to consider. But the only likely argument between Cenedi and Banichi after two years of running operations together would have been which of them moved first.
The Guild officers, the biggest threat to come at them directly from Murini’s side, hadn’t even made it to supper.
And what did Banichi do next? Now what did one possibly do, when one had blown up one’s own officers, and was running buses full of farmers into the capital?
At the moment he felt inclined to sink down into the nearest seat and let his stomach settle, but his own seat was a few rows back, and the nearest was occupied, like most of the seats, by an ordinary provincial, a man in a rough canvas jacket, with a hunting rifle in callused hands. The type was everywhere. In all those buses. Tabini was in the airplane, and Banichi and Cenedi were calling the shots, never mind Tabini’s personal bodyguard.
He was suddenly overwhelmed by the scale of it. By the force of what they had launched.
“You should sit down, Bren-ji,” Jago said.
“This is a war we bring, Jago-ji.” Atevi society had known no open warfare since the War of the Landing—skirmishes, yes; civil unrest, yes; sniping between bodyguards of lords in conflict, constantly—but not a conflict that swept up every clan on the continent, flagrantly involving bystanders. Not involving middle-aged men with hunting rifles.
And assassinating Guild officers, the Guild being supposedly the keepers of the law and the peace, the impartial, every-sided court of appeal…impartiality and fairness had clearly gone by the board; so had legally mandated support for the sitting aiji. But his staff had delivered an answer for it.
“Bren-ji?”
“Do we hope simply to drive all the way into Shejidan, Jago-ji?”
“Perhaps.” Far too lightly.
“Or are we going to the train station?”
“We refuel there, nandi, at the station pump.”
“And the Guild? Are they moving against us?”
“We have moved to convince certain forces within the Guild, persons of certain man’chi, nandi—that Gegini was no fit leader.”
Not from the grave, he wasn’t, that was quite clear.
Cenedi and Banichi. Extravagant action, high and wide action, of a sort subordinates didn’t undertake on their own.
It was not just to protect him, he thought. It was much beyond that. Banichi and Jago had been Tabini’s staffers before they were his. In the nature of things, there always was one higher man’chi that overrode what they owed to him.
So had Tabini appropriated them? Given them such an order? Or had the dowager herself?
And coordinated it, dammit all. The echoes of that explosion had hardly died before Tabini was airborne, headed into trouble ahead of them, precipitating this flood of buses and trucks.
Follow, Tabini was saying to all who had ever followed him—irresistible as the mecheiti leader, dashing hellbent for whatever destination, in the echoes of that explosion. Atevi of the Ragi man’chi were feeling more than an emotional tug at their hearts. Their whole being plunged toward that leader, pell mell, an attraction not in his wiring. He might be immune for the hour, capable of a second, critical thought—deciding things on love, that slower, more anguished emotion. But his staff wasn’t wired that way. It was the aiji who’d called, and they’d moved. Ruthlessly, comprehensively, without consulting him…dammit.
“The aiji ordered you,” he said to Jago. “Did he? He didn’t rely on his own security.”
Jago’s hand closed on his wrist. “We may die in this effort, Bren-ji. And our Guild resists emotional decisions. But this time, yes, we are obliged to go.”
“The paidhi is likewise obliged,” he said, closing his hand atop hers, a contact atevi ordinarily did not invite or accept. “We humans have our own feelings. We understand.” He did. Tabini had called in a debt, drafted his staff, the dowager’s, his own. They could get killed. But if it was the time to do it, if his staff was going, then he damned sure was. “Are the Atageini going into this on the same grounds? Are they solidly with us?”
“They must,” Jago said, and it made sense. Tatiseigi’s historic premises now had suffered at least two rooms in utter wreckage, the upstairs premises and the room immediately below, not to mention the lily foyer, the stables, and the driveway hedge. Ridiculous items on the surface—but a matter of Atageini sovereignty.
Add to the stack of circumstances, the self-claimed Guildmaster was dead within an hour of his arrival under Tatiseigi’s roof—it could be argued it had been about an hour short of their own intention to assassinate Tabini—a first strike against Ragi power, but the Atageini had been the site of the response, and they had had to make a fast decision.
As Murini had been prepared to make. His own shaken wits informed him that if Guild had come in to assassinate Tabini, it was not going to be the final blow, and it was not going to stop any time soon. There was much, much more intended.
Tatiseigi had had no choice but become involved—the epicenter of the event, exposed to any outrage, beginning with that Guild intrusion, and expanding to every alliance the old man had. The old man had seen it come over the horizon when the dowager had showed up at his gates. Murini had sent in the Kadagidi, Tabini had moved in immediately after with his counterrevolution, the Guild had come in next to take Tabini out in a finessed strike, one that would leave the dowager alive, for her unique value to national stability, and no one had ever seemed to care about Tatiseigi in the process—but only one outcome of this whole affair possibly led to Tatiseigi’s grand-nephew being in supreme power over the aishidi’tat, and he wasn’t letting events pass him by this time.
An entire lifetime of evading conflict until the dust was already settling, a lifetime of being moderately obstructionist to Tabini’s modernization policy, and suddenly Tatiseigi was taking his whole province to war behind Tabini-aiji to put him back in power.
He found his way back to his seat, Cajeiri meanwhile kneeling and talking volubly to his two young escorts, who held the seat behind. Cajeiri turned around as Bren eased past that obstruction and sat down in his own place next to the window.
“The other buses are supposed to keep this bus on the inside,” Cajeiri informed him. “So snipers will have no targets. But we should keep our heads down if shooting starts, nand’ paidhi, Nawari said so, because it will be very h
eavy guns and they could blow this bus to bits.”
Cheerful lad. “Whose bus is this, does one have any notion?”
“It belongs to Dur,” Cajeiri said, which was Rejiri’s clan. “The lord of Dur and his bodyguard and the fishers’ association, too, nandi! They came in from the train station while the young lord took the plane!—I know where Dur is,” he added, apropos of nothing about the bus itself. Ilisidi had kept him at his lessons during their flight, and he did know his provinces. “Dur helped mani-ma in previous times.”
“That they did, young sir,” Bren murmured. He had an inner vision of a nightbound coast with fire and smoke on every hand, and an improbable ferryboat plowing in toward the beach at the most critical of moments. “And so they help her again, for which we all shall remember them with great favor.”
If any of them lived long enough to remember this current madness. But it was what a proper nobleman said, regarding a favor. Favors lived long past the favor-doers. Favors bound the generations together. It was one of those givens, that a house never forgot an obligation. And his house must not—if he could have any progeny. The thought had dawned on him long before this, that this boy came as close as he himself could ask, the child of his teaching, the boy he was going to send into years beyond his reach.
Remember them. Remember the favors, boy. Keep the old alliances.
“And if bullets do start flying, young sir, I shall rely on you to hit the floor with me. You and your bodyguard. And no guns, if you please. This is a situation where experience counts. One is obliged to be an extremely accurate shot, firing out these windows. There are too many allies wandering around out there.”
“One hears, nandi.” Cajeiri slumped down a little in his seat, arms folded, perhaps remembering his own baptism in fire, not long removed, when he had, though justifiably, killed a man. Tabini’s son was not, of course, if one should ask him, afraid. Tabini’s son, the dowager’s great-grandson, was given no opportunity to be afraid.
Or at least he had never had permission to show it. Delight in gore was, perhaps, his one means of defying the things that scared him very badly.
“Good lad,” Bren said, resisting any human notion he might have of patting the boy on the shoulder. The days when he could do that were passing, hurtling away by the second, as fast as the boy’s childhood. “Brave lad.”
He ought in fact to tell Cajeiri to move away from him and not come near him again on this entire journey. The windows were no protection from snipers, and he was in all respects conspicuous, one pale target shining in any scope. It would be the ultimate tragedy if someone aiming at him accidentally killed the heir.
Some vehicle passed them in the dark, two gold headlamps and an entirely improbable sight coming up from behind—an open convertible, with driver, guard, and two conspicuous occupants, the passenger seats facing backward as well as forward. He leaned forward, not quite believing his eyes, and finding they had not deceived him. It was indeed Lord Tatiseigi and Ilisidi in that open car, passing them at a rate that had to tax that antique vehicle. One had thought Lord Tatiseigi had only owned one automobile, and that surely gone with the stables. Clearly not.
Cajeiri had to see what he was looking at so concentratedly, and leaned hard against him, peering out the window.
“Great-grandmother and great-uncle!” Cajeiri exclaimed in distress. “With Cenedi, one thinks, nandi, in that old car!”
“Indeed it is,” he said, and had a very uncomfortable feeling about what he saw, so uncomfortable a feeling that he excused himself out of his seat and went up the aisle to point out the sight to Jago and Tano. “The aiji-dowager and Lord Tatiseigi just passed us in an open car!”
Tano bent for a look out the windows. So did Jago.
“This is very reckless,” Bren protested, compelled by atevi idiom to a towering understatement. “This is extremely reckless of them, nadiin-ji. What can they be thinking?”
Jago cast him a shadowy look which, in the near dark, he could not read; but she went farther forward to inform Banichi of the situation.
Ilisidi, deciding to make the grand gesture, Bren thought to himself. Tatiseigi, who had been late to every battlefield, whose house had been assaulted, was making his own grand, potentially fatal gesture, right along with the aiji-dowager, who had mixed herself in every conflict of the last half century and more. Now she had shamed the old reprobate into joining her, one romantic fling at destiny…
God, no. They couldn’t.
He staggered his way, burdened with the armored jacket, down the aisle, intent on having his own word with Banichi.
“Banichi-ji, they are trying to kill themselves. They are trying to compel the rebels, are they not, by force of example and man’chi and the dowager’s allies? We cannot allow this!”
“One hardly knows how to stop them at this point,” Banichi muttered, bending low to have a look at what now was out of sight.
“We can at least keep up with them, nadiin,” Bren said.
“Yes,” Banichi said, and moved forward in the bus, up to talk to the driver, and presumably to the old lord of Dur, who, conspicuous in his court dress, in a seat next the driver, and accompanied by several dark-clad bodyguards, was surely due the courtesy of an address. Bren moved up into the general neighborhood, and heard Banichi pointing out the situation to the lord of Dur. The lord—Rejiri’s father—got up from his seat, leaned on the rail, gazing out the front windows at a fading column of lamplit dust, and waved commands at the driver, who with powerful moves of the wheel, swung the bus out of the column in relatively hot pursuit.
“Keep up with them!” the lord of Dur urged his driver. “Go. Go!”
“Your lordship,” Bren said diffidently, edging into the lord’s presence. “One is grateful, for the sake of the young gentleman and the dowager. I am Bren, the paidhi-aiji, an old associate of your son…”
“As who could ever mistake the paidhi-aiji!” Dur cried, and gave a little nod by way of a bow. His personal name was Adigan, Bren recalled that detail the moment the man spoke, immensely relieved to have old resources coming back to him at need. “The distinguished associate of my foolhardy son! Indeed, we are honored, nand’ paidhi, extremely honored to provide yourself and the aiji’s heir our stolen transport. In the haste of boarding and departure, there was little leisure, nor any desire to distract your lordship from needful orders…but one is extremely glad to find you well.”
“The honor is very much mine, nand’ Adigan. One offers most profound gratitude for your gracious welcome, above all for the steadfastness of your house and that excellent young man, your son—” The courtesies flowed desperately on, needful as a steady heartbeat, while the bus engine roared and the driveshaft and the oil pan somehow survived the impact of rocks flung up from underneath as the bus lurched.
Then brush scraped under them, the bus running outside the column onto rougher ground. They chased those dust-veiled taillights, bouncing and bumping so that Bren had to hook both arms around an upright rail. “To you and yours we are profoundly indebted, Lord Adigan. Your son—”
“The boy and that machine, baji-naji, the delight of his days!” The bus jolted. Adigan caught himself by the overhead rail, at the same time making a grab to steady Bren, no slower than his bodyguard. “Faster, Madi-ji! Will an Atageini driver lose us?”
Faster it was. The bus passed others, roaring off into the dark wherever there was an appearance of flat ground, finding its way over open meadow, hitting brush, then falling back into the column where it must, not giving up on the car, in no degree, only seeking a chance to get by. Another bus had swerved aside from the general column, veering into their path, and the driver honked vigorously, while Lord Adigan swore and waved as if the other driver could see his indignation.
“Now! Now!” he cried, and the bus veered far out and around.
They passed the second bus. And hit a depression at the bottom of the hill, a streambed. The bounce of stout shock absorbers nearly threw them all
in a heap as they went over the bank. Water splashed up into the headlamps, splattered the windshield. Then they met the far bank, lurched up and over, and climbed, wheels laboring, then clawed their way up at an angle, until one and then the other wheel rolled over the crest. Banichi steadied both of them, and the Dur bodyguard had likewise stood up, prudently holding on, trying to urge their lord to safety.
“The fool!” Adigan cried, ignoring the guards, waving at the other bus, now behind them.
“Best sit down, Bren-ji,” Banichi said quietly—in point of fact, Bren had little to see at all past that wall of atevi, but a fleeting glimpse of that pair of taillights, like a ruddy will of the wisp, flitting ahead of them. Questions came from the rear of the bus, what was going on, were they under attack, had the brakes failed? One was a high young voice, demanding information.
Adigan turned and shouted to his household and his provincials:
“We are following a car in which the aiji-dowager has taken passage with the Atageini! That fool driver will never leave Dur in the dust!”
One certainly understood where Rejiri derived his notions. A cheer went up from the folk of Dur, a general approbation of their lord’s defiance, and in that commotion Bren began to find his way back to his seat.
“The paidhi-aiji is with us,” Dur shouted out, “and the young heir of Tabini-aiji!”
“Hai!” the cheer went up, to a man.
Well, it was something, being cheered by an allied clan that still owned itself allied, after all the troubles. It set a warmth into one’s bones.
“Thank you, Dur!” Cajeiri waved his arms above adult heads, in mid-aisle, silhouetted in the glare of headlamps behind them. He had a sure grasp of politics, even at his age.
“Hai for Dur!” his young escort yelled out, everyone congratulating everyone else, while Adigan’s bus driver fought manfully not to be wrecked or overset, and Bren clawed his way past and into his seat. Cajeiri hung onto the seat back rail to cheer with his young bodyguard, and the bus bounced and lurched. Their objective, meanwhile, was nimbly eluding them, and they had not even made the train station, let alone Shejidan.