Betrayer

  “Best here that you wear exactly what you’re wearing.” Atevi dress was far less apt to excite comment. “We can ask staff to try to find you a change. Child’s sizes will work.”

  “I haven’t my makeup!”

  “Next time you’re kidnapped, try to pack.”

  “Don’t joke, Bren!” There were the tears, just under the surface. “I look like absolute hell.”

  He’d gotten wary of saying things to Barb. No, you don’t look like hell, was the automatic reassurance, but he’d had enough trouble disengaging Barb after their several-year relationship. And of all people on earth he could have shared close quarters with, Barb wasn’t his choice of roommates.

  Of all people on earth he could have underfoot during a lifeand-death diplomatic mission, Barb wouldn’t be his choice, either: not Barb and her emotional reactions—and not the aggressive inexperience of the young Guildswoman who’d turned up with her.

  “Were you at all able to speak to anybody?” he asked her. Barb understood far more Ragi than she spoke. “There were no Mosphei’ speakers among them, were there?”

  “No,” Barb said, and her lip trembled. She held the atevi-scale teacup in both hands, elbows on the table, and took a steadying sip. “I tried to talk to them, and they hit me.”

  “The kidnappers? Or the people here?”

  “The kidnappers.”

  “So the locals have treated you fairly well?”

  “Fairly well, I guess,” Barb said. “But they wouldn’t listen, either.”

  “What did you try to tell them?”

  “I’m not too fluent.”

  “Well, but what did you want them to know?”

  “I tried to say I was from Najida, and I mentioned your name and the aiji-dowager. I hoped they’d phone you.”

  Interesting point. Barb had drawn a mental difference between her kidnappers and where she was now. It might not be a real difference; but somewhere in Barb’s subconscious, it might signify that she had, in fact, seen a difference.

  But he didn’t bet their lives that nobody on Machigi’s staff had a few words of Mosphei’, either, and the room was undoubtedly bugged. So it was worth being careful and steering Barb away from certain topics.

  “Well, but by then we were out trying to find you. Did you stop at any house, even a shed, a fueling station?”

  “We just drove. Forever.”

  “Didn’t stop at a fuel station.”

  Shake of her head, gold curls moving. And a wince. “Ow. No. We didn’t.”

  So they’d come prepared, maybe with a double tank. “Did you hear any names?”

  “I couldn’t hear much. I was in the back of the truck, and this man—he didn’t talk. Just sat there with a gun in his hands.”

  “Rifle?”

  A nod.

  “Guild uniforms?”

  A nod.

  It confirmed Veijico’s story. The truck had been moving incredibly slowly, but it was still moderately impressive that Veijico had managed to intercept it afoot. It was much more impressive that she’d taken them out.

  He was certain that the truck had been trying to draw attention to itself and get a reaction, wanting to be tracked into Taisigi clan territory. What they might not have anticipated was the desperation and outright rule-breaking lunacy of one young Guildswoman tracking them. They’d have expected her to follow Guild procedure: contact authority and track them until they chose to lose her.

  Their mistake.

  And the behavior added points to the dowager’s theory that it wasn’t Machigi who’d ordered that kidnapping. Machigi had been a bit more subtle than that.

  The Taisigi had reportedly closed in immediately after Veijico had shot the kidnappers, so they had been watching, too. Guild were not prone to emotional reactions or personal retribution. But there was a limit to that professionalism, if Veijico had just shot down a number of their partners.

  The fact was they had not shot Veijico, roughed her up, or even questioned her closely. They had handled her as someone attached to Barb and kept her with Barb, proper treatment for a high-ranking prisoner, one assumed by her situation and her species to be a prize worth taking home.

  It was a jigsaw puzzle of pieces that could fit together, if one assumed someone was setting up the Taisigi and also assumed that Machigi had had time to hear about it, investigate it, and set his people in place.

  His people still hadn’t stopped that truck themselves. Possibly they’d spotted Veijico, who was staying hidden from the truck, but maybe they hadn’t seen her at all and had been surprised by her attack on the kidnappers.

  Possibly Machigi, if innocent of the kidnapping, as he maintained, had had a report from his own observers at Najida as to what had happened and where the kidnappers were going . . . an incident that, more than any argument the aiji-dowager’s representative might pose, might have already convinced Machigi that he had a problem, that his neighbors were setting him up.

  Interesting notion, all considered.

  “What are you thinking?” Barb asked.

  “I’m thinking it’s a dead certainty we’re bugged, and it’s not impossible there’s someone hereabouts who can understand some Mosphei’. There’s a lot of that going around lately. But there’s a lot more that doesn’t add up in what happened. We thought you’d been taken to a place called Targai. That’s Lord Geigi’s clan residence, though he’s not been there in years. So Geigi and I went there to ask questions, and the clan lord at Targai turned out to be a problem. Tried to shoot us, in fact. Geigi ended up taking over his clan lordship. He’s over there now, trying to put his clan association back together, and he’s not happy to be there.”

  “Why not happy?”

  “He doesn’t want to be lord of Maschi clan. He’s got enough to do being lord of Sarini Province, and he absolutely intends to go back to the space station and live up there safe from all of this. But that’s where he is.” He’d said what he’d said for the benefit of anyone eavesdropping. If they understood. And afterward he drew a breath.

  Mistake. He winced.

  “You’re hurt,” Barb observed.

  “Oh, bruises. Nothing much.” Quick diversion to Barb’s favorite topic: Barb. “Your head’s far worse. Nasty crack you took. Tano’s very sorry. You just mustn’t emote around armed security. Mustn’t. You could have been shot.”

  “Tano knows me! Did he think I’d assassinate you?”

  “It wasn’t Tano who’d have shot you. The lord’s men in the hall might have, thinking you were coming after me. I was under their lord’s protection, and you were about to touch me. That’s the way it works. Just don’t touch people. And keep a calm face, no matter what.”

  Bowed head. “I was doing pretty good up to that point.”

  “You really must have been,” he said honestly, and he saw that Tano and Algini had come through the hall door.

  Banichi and Jago went over to them. For a moment there was a low conversation with a notable absence of handsigns. His bodyguard evidently wanted their eavesdroppers to have no trouble with whatever they were saying to each other.

  Jago came over to him, then, and quietly refreshed Bren’s cup and Barb’s. “One may report some progress with staff, nandi,” she said—the singular address, along with a turned shoulder, pointedly though quietly ignoring Barb. “We have sent word through the lord’s staff that we wish to make two phone calls in Lord Machigi’s best interest. We have received permission. Tano and Algini will be going to a house security area to make the calls. We are to make them ourselves, under observation, with a written text.”

  “Are we to call Shejidan to reach the Guild?”

  “No. They have agreed to our contacting Cenedi at Najida.”

  “Tell Cenedi this: that we have spoken at length with Lord Machigi and are favorably impressed. Say that he had already recovered both Barb-daja and Veijico from the kidnappers and released them to me as an act of good will, besides agreeing to look for Lucasi. Machigi, we are con
vinced, is not the agency behind the recent attacks in Najida, and possibly he was not involved with other actions that have been attributed to him. We are establishing proof of this and hope to present it soon.”

  Jago nodded, a little bow, and went over to the others.

  “What’s going on?” Barb asked.

  “We’ve gotten permission, we hope, to phone home to Najida. We’ve added, if we can get it in, that we’ve recovered you and Veijico. I can’t promise we’ll get that concession. Local security will be very worried about prearranged signals and verbal code. Things are going to be somewhat tense around here until the lord gets word certain proceedings have been canceled.”

  “Can you get a message from me to Toby?”

  To his brother. Toby had been wounded in the kidnapping incident—and he’d assured Barb that Toby was all right. He wished he were entirely sure that was the case. “No. We can’t. We may not even get the permission to talk about you at all. Excuse me.” He set his cup down and got up and went over to his bodyguard, seeing that Algini and Tano were about to go out the door.

  “Take care, nadiin-ji,” he said to them, wishing at the same time he were going with them. Glad as he was to have recovered Barb and Veijico, he just was not getting his thoughts together with them in the room. He needed somewhere else. He needed a buffer between himself and Barb’s questions, and most of all needed a buffer against her asking him questions about Toby while he was trying to keep his nerves together and think.

  Tano and Algini left on their mission. He didn’t go back to the couch. He tried turning his back on the whole room, standing by the fireside, trying to compose a mental list of things he needed to keep in mind. His computer was back home. He didn’t have its resources.

  Barb, to her credit, took his signal; she sat still and sipped her tea and didn’t talk to him for at least the next five minutes.

  He was framing a course of logical argument, an approach to negotiations with Machigi, what he could imply, what he could offer in the way of inducements—

  A knock at the door announced some arrival.

  Thoughts flew in a dozen directions. Tano and Algini wouldn’t be back this soon. His heart rate kicked up a notch. Barb sat there looking frightened, while Jago’s hand rested very near her sidearm and Banichi stood similarly poised, on the other corner of the room.

  It proved to be nothing more than house staff bringing their belated breakfast, a rather large breakfast on a rolling cart, and they were clearly bent on serving it.

  It smelled good. A lot better than last night’s toast.

  “Just leave it, please, nadiin-ji,” he said, and that had to be that, courteously. The servants would assume what they liked and report him as rude. But they were not going to linger in the room, big-eared and listening.

  “Veijico,” Jago said with a meaningful glance, and Veijico took a plate and took a little of every dish, plus a cup of tea, and sat down and began to eat.

  Barb looked confused.

  “Veijico tries it first,” Bren said. “We’ll wait about half an hour.”

  “I’m starving,” Barb said.

  He felt like saying, peevishly, Suit yourself, but he didn’t. He didn’t say anything, discovering himself in an uncharacteristically short temper. He just turned and went back to the fireplace.

  Barb followed him. “Are you upset?”

  He really, truly didn’t want to argue right now; and he wasn’t in a good mood. But he said, patiently, “I’m thinking. I have to present a case to our host, and I haven’t composed it yet, and there’s nowhere to work but here. I’ll eat when I’m done. It’s all right. I’ll just stare into space for about an hour. Please.”

  She looked a little put out. Barb was good at that. She didn’t understand any activity that didn’t involve discussing the matter. But at least she took a broad hint and went away under her small dark cloud.

  And he’d known her long enough he could accept that she’d take quiet offense, and be upset, and want to know intimately everything that was going on. He’d known her long enough and well enough to accept her reactions with a total failure to give a damn, except for Toby’s sake.

  Getting her back to Toby and getting both of them on their boat, out of atevi waters and back to safety at Port Jackson, where he could be sure they weren’t a target . . . even that had to be put on a lesser priority. All personal questions did. Toby mattered in these equations only because he was, among other things, an agent of the Mospheiran government and knew things that might be of interest to certain people on this side of the straits. Barb knew an uncomfortable lot—but couldn’t speak but half a dozen words of Ragi.

  But the only way now to keep that knowledge out of play was to ignore it, stop worrying about Toby—and hope Barb never dropped the wrong name near a hidden microphone. He couldn’t even tell her what names not to drop.

  He stood, he thought through things Lord Machigi might ask him, and what he could answer—he asked himself what he could possibly offer as inducements for better relations with a young warlord bent on conquest as a means of keeping his several clans in line. Machigi had been practicing the old Momentum theory of leadership: start a war, keep everyone facing the enemy—and avoid discussing domestic problems for another decade.

  Most long-term successful leaders of the Marid had adopted that policy in one form or another.

  So how could he get anything different out of Machigi? How to be sure he caught Machigi’s lasting interest?

  Trade him something really good short-term?

  What did a young warlord want that a diplomat could give him?

  What was Machigi going to want that the aiji-dowager could give him?

  They had talked vaguely yesterday about the space station, but that was far, far from something Machigi could actually realize—let alone explain to the peasant fishermen and the city ship owners and merchants who were the majority of Machigi’s district. Fishermen and merchants were his constituency, the people who kept him in power, despite the ambitions of certain high-level local influences that might want to replace him. Machigi’s hold on them was his popularity with the trades—and with the subclans. But it was a precarious hold, and let Machigi present some proposal that was too far from the interests of fishermen and merchants, and he could lose that popularity.

  Tell them they were all going to be prosperous up in space? Or as a result of others going into space?

  They weren’t going to understand that. They wouldn’t believe the Ragi would give them an equal chance at anything.

  Tell them they were going to give up on conquering the west coast and accept an alliance with the hated north?

  That wasn’t going to be an easy sell, either.

  Then there was the old quarrel with the west coast Edi, an ethnic group who had been moved onto that coast many, many decades ago, at the very founding of the aishidi’tat. The Marid had been claiming the west coast—and the Ragi, the ruling clan of the aishidi’tat, had high-handedly moved Edi refugees in and given the west coast to them—fierce fighters and absolutely determined on their own independence. The Edi themselves were allied to the Gan, another displaced ethnic group to the north, who would involve themselves inside the hour if things blew up. And the Edi in particular had been the target of Marid reprisals, and there was exceedingly bad blood there.

  Tell these fishermen and merchants the Edi, already entrenched in Najida Peninsula, were going to gain a lordship in the aishidi’tat and be voting, thanks to the other part of the aiji-dowager’s personal agenda? The whole Marid was going to have a fit when they found that out.

  What in hell could he offer Machigi to induce him to let that slide by unchallenged?

  What was in Machigi’s interest?

  Power.

  Survival.

  Pleasing those fishermen.

  Underlying issues. Poverty, perpetual poverty in most of the Marid, poverty locked to traditionalism and a general low level of literacy.

  An
educational system based on apprenticeship, which didn’t include more than one needed to know to buy and sell or to fish and maintain a boat.

  Bloodfeuds two centuries and more old. In some places on the continent the network of allies and shared bloodfeuds was the cement that held communities together.

  The whole district, with its internal wars and feuds, had lagged half a century behind the technology of the rest of the aishidi’tat. The district had phones, they had electrification—but not everybody in the country did. Their fairly modern freighters got their fuel from refineries to the north, and the whole region stayed dependent on the north for that resource, while hating them for it.

  They had rail, a straight but antique line from the west coast of the Marid to Shejidan, running through Senji and ending at Tanaja. Everything else, absolutely everything else, moved by boat, among clans situated around a common sea.

  The dowager, too, came from a staunchly traditionalist region. Over on the east coast wooden boats still went out to fish. Not every great house and not every village in the East had electricity, to this day, and the dowager’s own house had it only as an afterthought—but in that case, it was stubborn traditionalism.

  In some ways the dowager’s East had a great number of values in common with the Marid.

  In some Eastern districts, by choice, technological development lagged. Distrust of the western Ragi Guilds meant minimal rail and air service, though that was increasing.

  Damn, yes, there were lot of similar points.

  Get the Marid, the most dedicatedly hostile district in the aishidi’tat, to refrain from ancestral feuds and talk to the aiji-dowager?

  He had to be crazy. But there were points in common. Machigi would never agree with the West. But being approached by the East?

  There was a shred of hope in that idea.

  2

  It was at least half an hour before Tano and Algini came back from the phone business, looking unruffled and fairly pleased.

  “Lord Machigi himself listened in, Bren-ji,” Tano said. “So we were plainly informed. We asked permission to call Cenedi with your message. We further asked to report that Barb-daja and Veijico are found. That was granted, with a written text to read from. So we did. We expressed to Cenedi-nadi your personal doubt that Lord Machigi’s orders were behind the kidnappings and the illicit explosives and that you wish him to request a suspension of Guild proceedings against Lord Machigi. Cenedi-nadi agreed and we terminated the call on that basis. We also, under the same arrangement, called the head of Tabini-aiji’s security in Shejidan and informed him first that we are here in Tanaja and that negotiations with Lord Machigi are proceeding at the personal urging of the aiji-dowager and under her auspices. We asked him to relay to Tabini-aiji that you request his personal Filing against Lord Machigi be voided on the same grounds. We are assured that message will be conveyed. Both messages have answers pending, and Lord Machigi’s staff will notify us once the answers arrive.”