“Somebody was hurt.”
“Nand’ Siegi fixed them.”
“Good,” nand’ Toby said. “No word on Barb?”
He shook his head. “No. No word.”
“Bren safe?”
“Yes,” he said. “Banichi and Jago go with him.”
“Good,” Toby said. He seemed to be drifting again, then woke up, lifted his head, and looked around him a little. “Where is this?”
“Safe here,” Cajeiri said. And pointed up. “Dining room.”
“Ah,” Toby said, as if that had made sense to him. He lay back, breathing deeply. “You’ve been here a lot.”
He understood all of that. “Nand’ Bren said stay with you.”
“Thank you,” Toby said in Ragi.
He wassomebody important, too important to be on errands, there was that. But he was proud when nand’ Toby said that.
“Good,” he said in ship-speak. “Damn good.”
Nand’ Toby thought that was funny for some reason. At least nand’ Toby grinned a little, which reminded him of nand’ Bren. Toby was dark and Bren was gold, but in that expression they looked a lot alike, very quiet, a little shy, and totally lighted up with that grin.
He knew far, far too much of what was going on to be comfortable lying to nand’ Toby. He was glad when Antaro came back with a cup of soup and some wafers and gave them something specific to do.
Nand’ Toby drank half the soup and ate one wafer, and said he wanted more later. So he was getting better.
There was that.
But talk with nand’ Toby was difficult and full of pitfalls, and finally he said, to dodge more questions, that he was going to go upstairs and see if there was any news.
He took his time coming back down. There was nothing more to hear anyway, except that nand’ Bren had crossed into Marid territory. He was very relieved nand’ Toby had gone back to sleep.
The land sloped generally downward, and the road, as such, was a grassy track, about bus-wide, between low scrub evergreen. Limestone took over again from basalts, old uplift, old violence.
It was not a maintained roadc but there had been vehicle tracks pressing down the grass and breaking brush in the not too long ago—perhaps traffic that had come from Targai, or to it.
There was no other presence as the sun sank behind the heights. There was a scampering herd of game, and once, rare sight in the west, a flight of wi’itikin from a fissured cliffside. Bren noted that and thought of the dowager, who aggressively protected the creatures in her own province. Ilisidi would approve of that, at least.
The clouds above the western hills turned red with sunset and the driver had turned on the headlamps by the time they came on the sea—a startling vista, stretching from side to side of the horizon: that much red-lit water, and a few small islets, within shadowy arms of a large bay.
Lights sparked the dimming landscape, some near the water, more clustered somewhat inland.
“Tanaja,” Bren said, and Banichi and Jago, who had been catching a nap he envied, woke and turned to see.
Most of the bus had been nappingc the ability of the Guild to catch sleep where it offered was remarkable; and the bus had been silent the last couple of hours, Guildsmen taking the chance to rest now: tonight—
Tonight, none of them could vouch for. Wake us when we come downland, Jago had said; and he just had, faithfully.
Tano went back and waked others. Algini, who had slept only intermittently, did something involving the communications, possibly relaying a message through Targai, possibly just checking, Bren had no idea.
The driver—the third since they had set out this morning— stopped for long enough to trade out, possibly himself to catch a little nap. Bren earnestly wished he could, but napping under such circumstances had never been a skill of his.
He simply sat and watched Banichi and Jago and Tano and Algini consulting together, over at Tano’s and Algini’s seats; and was aware that Banichi went back to consult Damadi. Otherwise he simply watched those distant lights get closer, and brighter in the declining light.
Then there was a sudden flare of white light ahead, twin headlights. Some vehicle had been waiting for them—a bit of a surprise to him, but not, he would wager, to his aishid, nor to the aiji’s men.
The bus came to a slow halt, and opened the door, and two shadowy figures walked into the bus headlights, silhouetted against their own, coming from a truck parked across the road. Those two walked up to the side of the bus.
Banichi ran things now. Banichi instructed the driver to open the door, and one Guildsman mounted the steps and stopped, silently looked toward Bren, and with a sweep of his eyes, scanned back toward the rear of the bus. The aiji’s men had all stood up. The tension in the air was considerable. But no hands went to weapons.
Bren stood up slowly, facing the Marid Guildsman, who gave a barely discernible nod of courtesy. Bren returned it, as slightly. Then: “Follow us,” the man said, and turned and walked down the steps again, rejoined his partner and returned to the truck.
They hadn’t asked anything provocative, such as the paidhi-aiji leaving his protection and coming with them—which they would not have gotten.
They hadn’t shown a weapon.
Bren sat down without comment, and Jago sat down opposite him while Banichi instructed the driver to do exactly what the man had asked, and follow the truck. Its headlights lit dry grass, and swept over rock as the truck completed a turn, and then the bus started moving.
Banichi sat down.
“That didn’t go too badly,” Bren said.
“Trust nothing, Bren-ji,” Banichi said. “This is not a place to trust.”
“One understands, emphatically, Nichi-ji. But well done.”
Banichi shrugged. “Thus far,” he said, and that was all.
The dark was full now, with a bright moon in the sky. The lights picked out tall grass, or brush, or occasional pale rock, and the pitch of the road was generally downward toward the distant, moonlit bay. They crossed railroad tracks, and then Bren had an idea they must have arrived very near the city, and he had a notion their position was fairly well on the northern side. He knewthe maps. He knew the rail routes from years ago, the old theoretical arguments with the Bureau of Transportation. It was a curiously comforting sense of location, as if something had become solid.
A turn in the road brought the city lights much, much closer. He knew absolutely where he was.
And wished himself and everyone on the bus almost anywhere else.
Panic would be very, very easy. But this was not a hazard the Guild could solve, short of turning about and making a run for the border, which was hardly sensible at this point. They were here. They had chosen to be here, on the dowager’s order, and there was nothing for it now but for the paidhi, whose job it was, to collect his wits and put himself together.
Calm. The first thing was to make sure the meeting took place.
The next thing was to make sense to someone from a very different region and bearing a centuries-old resistence to everything he represented.
It could be done. All of diplomacy was founded on the notion that it could be done.
He had talked to the alien kyo. He had made sense of Prakuyo an Tep. Could Machigi be that difficult?
Probably. Prakuyo an Tep had owed him a favor, by Prakuyo’s lights. It was not exactly the case with Machigi.
Curiosity, however, was an attribute generally of the intelligent—and nobody had ever accused Machigi of being stupid.
Insecurity was another probability: Machigi was young. Insecurity meant instability. Not set in his ways, at least. But prone to skitter off mentally onto unguessable tracks. His time-scale and expectations, too, would not be that of a mature man.