Deceiver

  He tried. He could not get a breath, and then got a little air: was aware of Tano on his knees trying to keep him flat, and Tano kept coming and going in a tunnel of dark.

  Bad move. Thoroughly bad move.

  “He is dead,” he heard Algini say. And: “Good riddance,” Geigi said, and another huge shadow obscured the light. A strong hand took Bren’s shoulder. “Bren-ji.”

  “One is—” Bren tried to say, but ran out of air. It came to him that he had been shot, and that that was why the room had gone upside down, and why he had hit his head, but he was still alive, which was due to the vest. The vest now, as his numb fingers explored it, had a large frayed spot. He tried to get an elbow under him.

  A halo of faces surrounded him, from his vantage: Tano and Algini left that halo, and Banichi and Jago appeared in their places. “I am quite all right,” he assured them. And attempted to sit up, in which the stiff vest offered no help at all, and his ribs hurt abysmally. Banichi and Jago each took an arm and pulled him gently to his feet; but his head reaching vertical didn’t help, not in the least. He felt sick, and dizzy, and was very glad when they let him down into a chair. He slumped back in the corner made by an arm, and surveyed the carnage in the room.

  He’d given an order. Now Pairuti and four Guildsmen were dead on the floor and he’d risked Tano and Algini and Jago and everybody else who relied on him . . . all because he’d called it urgent.

  “One has been a fool,” he said in a low voice, and thought for a moment he was going to be sick and compound everyone’s distress. He kept it down, however, and got two and three breaths. “Do what you need to do for the mission, nadiin-ji. I am far from dead.”

  “We are secure, Bren-ji,” Jago said.

  “As secure as we shall be,” Banichi said, “until this situation is resolved. We hold Targai.”

  “An unwelcome gift,” Geigi said glumly. “But mine to deal with.”

  “Can you sort out the staff, nandi?” Banichi asked, and Geigi shrugged.

  “Perhaps,” Geigi said, and then ordered his own guard: “Find me one of Pejithi clan.”

  “Nandi,” that man said, and moved off. Bren shifted in the chair, sucking in his middle with a wince; but perhaps no ribs were broken—bruised, yes, but he had gotten off better than he had deserved, no question.

  “Go do what you need to do,” he said. “I am sure I am bruised, no more than that. From now on I take advice, no more of giving it, nadiin-ji. What is necessary, at this point?”

  Banichi’s hand closed on his arm, on the chair, commanding attention. “Lord Geigi must take control of the clan, Bren-ji. We must hold this place. The aiji’s forces will do as they have orders to do. Beyond that—we hold here and trust Cenedi to hold Najida.”

  Some things came clear out of the fog: that the aiji’s forces were dictating next moves, and that the next move beyond Targai was likely to be the Marid, and allout war. They were sitting on the front lines. They were, in fact, holding a major piece of the front lines.

  But the Marid was not limited to land. They had a navy and so did the aiji. There could be conflict striking at Separti Township, or coming into Kajiminda Bay, or Najida Bay—where there were very valuable targets . . . targets Tabini would want to protect; and he hoped to God that Tabini’s forces were not going to start a feud with the Edi locals by going in there in force.

  He had to think. Never mind the headache and the lump on the back of his skull, he had to think.

  And just then every Guildsman in the room twitched: the door had opened, admitting a broad-shouldered Guildsman, with a solid grip on a younger man.

  A very bedraggled, haggard and limping young man in Guild uniform, in the custody of a tall Guildsman with a red band about his arm . . .

  “Lucasi,” Bren murmured, and a dozen thoughts flashed through his mind—Cajeiri’s bodyguards: they had been near Barb, they’d disappeared, and they were here, where Marid agents had been running the place and where the local lord had shot at him. Bren sat up with a wince and started to get up from the chair, but bruised ribs said otherwise.

  “Nandi!” Lucasi cried, and tried to reach him. The Guildsman holding him had another idea, and then Jago stepped into Lucasi’s intended path, cutting him off. The young man protested: “Nandi, we tried to overtake them! We are not traitors!”

  “I want to hear him, nadiin-ji,” Bren said quietly, and did get to his feet, with Banichi’s hand under his elbow. He got a breath and fixed Cajeiri’s missing bodyguard with a steady stare and one question. “Where is Barb-daja, nadi?”

  “Nandi, Veijico—Veijico—is still tracking the kidnappers. They were in a closed truck, four of them, with the lady . . .”

  “On what road?” Jago asked sharply.

  “The main road. East. I had put my foot in a hole. I could no longer keep up. But the truck stopped here. So we did not trust the Maschi lord . . . we hid. We waited. And then the truck went on. And Veijico went after them. And I was waiting for her—until Ragi Guild came in.”

  “And where was your communication back to operations?” Jago asked.

  Lucasi cast a look at her and shook his head. “I—was not equipped, nadi. We have the short-range. We do have that.”

  “You left the grounds. You did not advise the officer of the watch. You did not take proper equipment. You went off without instruction.”

  We just . . . we thought—we thought, Jago-nadi, we thought—” Lucasi took a deep breath and wiped his face with both hands, shaking his head. “We had orders.”

  “From whom?” Banichi asked.

  “From the young lord, nadi.”

  “From a child, nadi!”

  “To whom we were assigned, nadi!” He made a profound bow to Bren, a slighter one to Banichi. The ribbon of his queue had come half undone. He was dusty, dirty, and thoroughly wretched-looking. “I take all responsibility. Help my partner. Veijico will die before she leaves the trail now, and it is my fault, nadiin, entirely my fault.”

  “You involved the paidhi’s brother and led him out of a secure house,” Jago said.

  “He came, nadi. We told him go back! We knew there was an alert in progress. We thought the young gentleman might have gone down to the boat—”

  “So you took the extravagant action, you involved non-Guild, and at no time did you communicate with operations, though you had short-range available!”

  Lucasi’s face became pained. “The young gentleman despises us. He avoided us. We thought—we thought it was on our account, that he had gone out, to teach us a lesson.”

  “And why did you go to nand’ Toby at all, nadi?”

  “We were wrong,” Lucasi said. “We know now. We were embarrassed. We thought—we thought we could get the young gentleman back, we could save him from a reprimand—we might mend matters. Intruders fired at us. Nand’ Toby went down. We tried to get to position to return fire and protect him, but then the lady bolted uphill, across our line of fire. We saw them take her. We dodged around and got up as far as the road. Then we heard the young gentleman shouting at us from the porch. We moved to get between the intruders and him, and then we had his orders to retrieve the lady. We tried. We ran out onto the road and saw a truck in the distance. We tried to catch up with it. Then we thought—we need to know which way it will go at the intersection, toward the town or toward the train station, so we can report that. So we tracked them toward the intersection, and then—then we found ourselves out of range of house communications. The truck, nandi, had kept going east, toward the train station or the airport, and then we thought if there was a train, if they tried to take her aboard we could do something—but they kept going past the depot. We thought it might be the airport—but—then we thought—if we can reach Targai, the lord there will help us.” The young man ran out of breath and shook his head. “We were wrong, nandi. And we just—all along, once we had left short-range, we thought if we could get her back—we could redeem some of our mistakes.”

  “Fools,” Ja
go said. “Young fools. There was a phone at the train station and another at the airport.”

  The young man looked dismayed. “We—failed to think of that, nadi.”

  “Did you fail to think, nadi, or were you even thinking in terms of reporting? You were bent on following that truck. You knew what fools you had been and were bent on saving your reputations, to the lady’s detriment.”

  “The truck was not going that fast, nadi, and we thought—we thought—it was trying to look ordinary. We could keep up if we cut across the land. We could find out where it was based. We were willing to die, if we could get good information on the lady! We at no time risked losing her!”

  “So,” Banichi said harshly, “you created the situation. Now you have somehow misplaced your partner and the lady.”

  Lucasi hung his head and looked miserable. “I put my foot in a hole in the dark. My own fault. Veijico kept going, and I came back for help.”

  “Finally!” Banichi said. “A thorough mess you have made of it, nadi.”

  “Yes,” Lucasi said. “It is. We tried to do well for the young gentleman. But he despised us. And his order—”

  “Enough of his order,” Banichi said. “An excuse. An excuse, casting blame on your lord.”

  “It is not my intention!”

  “Many things were not your intention, nadi!”

  Lucasi turned his face toward Bren. “Nand’ paidhi, let us at least finish this. The truck I think was going toward Taisigi territory. There still may be time.”

  He hadn’t the hardwiring to read it. The words were one thing. But reading the boy—it took atevi to do that, and he looked from Jago to Banichi. It was by no means reasonable that that truck was not racing toward safety by now.

  “Clever fool,” Jago said, and nudged him with the rifle butt. “It would be bad form to shoot him.”

  “Are you lying, nadi?” Banichi asked.

  “No, Banichi-nadi. I am not lying.”

  “And you think that truck is still loitering about for us to find?”

  “We never ceased to observe it, nadi! My partner is still tracking it, wherever it has gone. She will not have given up. We were ordered, nadiin. We were ordered.”

  Banichi shifted the rifle that had been pointing straight at him, still frowning. “And do you not think you should have exercised more mature judgement on the young gentleman’s behalf? Do you think you were sent to him to concur in every idea he might have?”

  “Nadi,—”

  “This is your one chance, nadi. Will you go on lying to the paidhi-aiji, and to the rest of us? Who has your man’chi, that you could leave your lord and leave him to two Guild-in-training, because a child told you to do it?” Banichi grabbed a fistful of Lucasi’s jacket and jerked him about, face to face. “Are you a child? Or is there something else we should know?”

  “No,” Lucasi said faintly. “No, nadi.”

  Banichi let him go, roughly. “Do as you wish to do with him, Bren-ji. They are not telling all the truth, they violated basic principles, and he is lying, maybe even to himself. You can take him in, in which case he will probably obey our orders, at this point—or you can dismiss him, in which case he will follow his partner as best he can. At least to her, he has man’chi.”

  Bren cast a look at that shocked, miserable face—he knew Banichi, knew Banichi was both ruthless, and kind-hearted, and this was a very young fool, in very deep trouble.

  Not behaving rationally. That was what Banichi was telling him. Things didn’t add up, not with that lazily moving truck, and not with two young Guild who were close to causing a war with the Marid.

  “Nadi?” he asked. “Explain yourself. Explain yourself to me, if you want my help for your sister.”

  “Everything he is saying is right, nandi. We should have reported, we should have worked with the household, we—”

  “Why did you not?” Bren asked. It seemed the central question. “Why did you, together, not do these things?”

  The boy looked to be drowning in questions. He looked at Jago, looked at Banichi, looked at him.

  “There is your question,” Jago said harshly. “Banichi has asked it. The paidhi has asked it.”

  “We are not your enemies!” Lucasi said.

  “You wanted to impress your young lord—when it should have been the other way around. Are you aijiin?”

  Are you crazy? Jago was asking.

  It was a damned machimi play. And it was the last thing he wanted. It was the absolute last thing his aishid wanted, he was very sure, two psychologically messed-up young people who were Guild-trained and knew too much.

  But one thread did make sense. They hadn’t meshed with Cajeiri. They hadn’t been able to attach. And there might be more than one reason for it. “Understand this,” Bren said, “nadi. Your young lord did not grow up on the earth. He learned many different ways up in the heavens. The aiji may have thought that with your excellent skills and your intelligence you might be able to adapt to him—since he may not always give you the signals you expect to have. Are you capable of seeing that? No one warned you. But you were credited for extraordinary qualities, so perhaps his father assumed too much.”

  Lucasi stared at him, mouth slightly open. And the eyes tracked, locked.

  “You cannot see it with my perspective,” Bren said, “but surely, nadi, you will have observed that the young lord, despite being the aiji’s son, is not traditional in his thinking.”

  Something clicked. One thought so, at least. Lucasi’s face looked a peculiar shade.

  “Think on it,” Bren said.

  “Nandi,” Lucasi said, “give me the chance. You can. I will not fail you.”

  At doing what? one wondered. Something had just ticked over, perhaps; but he wasn’t wired to feel it—he never let himself expect to be, even if he’d just tried to reason down an atevi line of thought.

  But in this mass movement of forces, in the fall of Targai, in Geigi’s succession to the clan lordship, in the Edi accession to a lordship, and the maneuvering of that truck, a deliberate challenge from the Marid, if the boy was not lying—in all of this, he still had an objective. Barb was nowhere in the aiji’s plans, and not that consequential in Mospheira’s, or Shejidan’s, or even the Marid’s. She was a silly woman. Nobody who’d taken her could communicate with her, and that meant her value was only as a provocation. She was disposable, unless somebody knew what Toby was; and higher and higher up the chain of command, somebody might realize what they had, which would make two governments realize both she and Toby had become expendable—give or take the annoyance that would be to the paidhi-aiji.

  And the paidhi’s not being a warlike office, neither was he on duty, once they had gotten Geigi into Targai, removed Pairuti, and taken that stronghold out of Machigi’s control. He was dismissed from usefulness, at the moment, and he had a promise he had made.

  “You will obey my aishid,” he said, “on your life, Lucasi, from this point on. Where do you think they were going?”

  “The main road. Southeast.”

  Toward Taisigi territory.

  “We had best move,” Banichi said, looking Bren’s way. “If you wish to pursue the lady’s kidnappers, nandi, best Jago and I go, best we move fast and get light transport from the aiji’s forces.”

  That was sensible. That was the way it classically ought to work. Unlike the situation in which Lucasi had left his young lord, he was in a now-allied house, with two of his aishid left, and surrounded by the aiji’s forces, as safe as he would be in Najida.

  But Banichi and Jago alone—to take on the Marid, and add themselves to the list of the young fool’s mistakes?

  “Take some of the aiji’s forces with you,” he said.

  “We cannot, Bren-ji,” Banichi said, and the cannot was the word meaning are not of sufficient rank.

  “Then can I?” he asked, and Banichi’s face betrayed a little reluctance to answer.

  “Can I?” he asked again, and Banichi said: “Officia
lly, yes, Bren-ji.”

  “Find out from their officer how many I can detach.”

  “You must go with the party,” Banichi said, “to have that authority, and that is not advisable, Bren-ji.”

  “Not advisable is spread thickly over this entire situation, Banichi-ji,” he said. “We will take the bus, and a good number of the aiji’s men, if we can arrange that. Speed is of some use. We do not want to enter Taisigi territory.”

  “Nandi,” Banichi said, and turned and went out to the hall. Lucasi bowed deeply and, at Banichi’s nod, left with him.

  Which left Jago standing there with, by now, Tano and Algini, Jago with a profoundly unhappy look.

  “I have promised nand’ Toby,” Bren said. “Jago-ji, we bring Barb back for him. For no other reason.”

  She seemed to find something ironically amusing in that, God knew what. “Understood, Bren-ji.”

  In a moment Banichi came back from the hall with one handsign for his partners.

  Even Bren could read that one. It said, “Ten. Affirmative.”

  19

  The house was looking different, bare, the way it looked when mani was packing to change residences.

  Which was somewhat true. They had all moved to the basement, starting with transporting nand’ Toby downstairs. Staff got one of the tall, paneled screens from the sitting room and padded it all about with sheets and pillows, and then used it to carry nand’ Toby down the steps, himself gently tied to the screen—Cajeiri had watched the process, dutiful to his promise to nand’ Bren, and thought it scary, especially where the stairs turned, but they made it safely. Nand’ Toby was not supposed to walk and he was not supposed to be excited, and that process did not violate either, because mani’s physician, who supervised, had given nand’ Toby a good dose of sedative for the procedure. Cajeiri thought it a very good thing, and he was very glad they had not dropped him.

  And next came the job of moving mani downstairs.

  And since the physician had promised to stay with nand’ Toby for the next hour or so, Cajeiri took Jegari and Antaro and went to help move Great-grandmother.