“Fools,” Jago 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 andthe 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.”
“ Areyou 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 hasyour 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 knewBanichi, knew Banichi was both ruthless, and kind-hearted, and this was a very youngfool, 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.
“ Thereis 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 youaijiin?”
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’tbeen 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 myperspective,” Bren said, “but surely, nadi, you will have observed that the young lord, despite being the aiji’s son, is nottraditional 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 notfail 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, hestill had an objective. Barbwas 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 andToby had become expendable—give or take the annoyance that would be to the paidhi-aiji.