He didn’t like it. He didn’t like the other little gift, either, the one with the bullets. He didn’t at all like machinery plummeting out of the heavens and landing in atevi orchards he was responsible for protecting from such intrusions.
But that was the situation they had to work with—that or see chaos and overthrow in the aishidi’tat far ahead of any disturbance modern tech might make in the atevi culture. The aishidi’tat was still suffering aftershocks— And the boy’s welfare—Cajeiri’s—outright overrode ordinary precautions, workaday rules, even major ones. The paidhi was supposed to mediate and rule on the introduction of tech, not have it in the hands of his staff before he had a chance to study the question. He ought to forbid it. He ought to tell them shut it down, let it alone, let them solve the problem without it.
Things were too precarious, advantage too important.
He took the gear. He didn’t order any curtailment of its use. Any advantage they could get: that was his thinking, now, right or wrong. Speed in settling this business. News. News would do.
“There was that baggage delay at Cadienein-ori,” Banichi said darkly. “It may have involved the young gentleman.”
Shocking notion. They had the boy in a trunk? “Guild has gotten there?”
In force, he meant. And that was a truly stupid question and Banichi failed to answer it. Guild never mentioned where allied Guild was, not on a mission.
“We should go back downstairs,” Jago said. “Are you comfortable with that situation, Bren-ji?”
“Absolutely,” he said. Into the matter with the driver, and the source of their information—he did not inquire, having asked his one stupid question for the hour. They might tell him, but he decided his mental energy was better spent on the dowager, and on readying himself for dinner. If there was information to be had, it would properly come to the dowager before it came to him—and the dowager’s staff was not resting at all at the moment.
He looked forward to supperc and not at all in anticipation of the food.
10
There were appetizers and preserves, there was a presentation of game of the season, with triangular heaps of vegetables of varied colors—not to mention the sauces, the breads, the crackers and soups—there were three of the latter, each in small cups, the whole dinner service at a modest portable table set near the fire, just the dowager for company.
It was, Ilisidi remarked, snowing heavily out. The bus was still parked in the drive, and the driver was still in interview with the dowager’s young men.
And, exhausted by the mere sight of the pile of food, one had to sit waiting and hoping for what else the dowager might have learned, or guessed, or understood, besides the weather report. It was absolutely impossible to breach etiquette with a superior even at such an intimate supper.
But Ilisidi could do so, if she chose. After the formal compliment to the cook, and well before the after-dinner brandy, a message came, which was simply, in the words of the young man who delivered it: “It is Caiti’s summer house, nandi, in the Haidamar.”
“Well, well, well,” Ilisidi said, seeming to taste the words when she said them. She looked up at Bren, then, and gave a decidedly unpleasant smile. “My great-grandson is indeed with them, nand’ paidhi, and the name of the villain is indeed Caiti.”
That—however grim—was the best news of the day. They had guessed right. They had followed the right movement. “Whatever the dowager wishes to do,” Bren said, “the paidhi-aiji supports.”
“A visit, one thinks,” Ilisidi said.
To Caiti’s domain? Bren wondered in alarm, but the dowager took a serving of sweet berries, seeming unruffled.
In a moment more she remarked: “We shall call on my neighbor.
We have so seldom spoken in recent years.” After yet another bite she added: “Your presence is requested, paidhi-ji.”
The neighbor?
Which neighbor, of several?
That was the likeliest cause of the driver’s apprehension— trouble in Malguri’s own district. At least two pieces of information began to come together.
“Tonight, aiji-ma?”
“Tomorrow at first light,” the dowager said, and added: “Overland.”
Cajeiri had a bad, bad headache.
In the dark. Smelly, musty dark.
It was somehow and very surely not Great-grandmother’s apartment. That much was clear in all the overset of things that had been true when he went to bed. It was none of the confused sequence of places he had dreamed. Somewhere, he knew he had heard Jegari tell him he was going to leave him and would try to bring help, and the whole world had been roaring and moving, but a slit-eyed attempt to see where he was now produced no Jegari, no information but a cold, black space, the hard-padded surface he was lying on, and a thin wool blanket without a sheet or a pillow.
That was not Great-grandmother’s apartment.
He felt further, opened his eyes more than a slit, and felt an attack of nausea, not to mention the widening of the splitting headache, right behind the eyes. It was utterly dark. There were no sounds. This place was cold as the ship could be cold, but it smelled of age. Age—and what mani would call very bad housekeeping.
The silence around him was as curious. He had never been in a place this quiet. No Jegari, no Antaro, no staff. Just a drip of water.
Plink. Plink. Plink.
Well, it was scary. But it took more than dark to put him in a panic. He had been in the deep passageways of the ship, in a section with no lights, where it was colder than this. He had found his way through, had he not?
He heaved himself up to sit, hugging the blanket about him. He was as naked as he had gone to bed, and the blanket was scratchy, nothing of quality at all, besides smelling musty. His stomach felt more than empty: it felt as if it would like to turn inside out and his head was going to implode if it did. He had to concentrate for the next few moments on breathing and settling that feeling.
He was, he decided, about to be mad instead of scared. But being mad was going to hurt his head. So he tried not to be that, either.
He tried to think instead. That by no means helped his headache, but he needed to know where he was.
It was certainly no place he knew, that was foremost. Ship air was filtered and had its own smells of plastics and heat and humans, besides that the ship had no way to reach down and snatch him up. Great-grandmother’s apartment smelled throughout of fragrant woods and spices and dried herbs. This place smelled of cold damp stone and things decaying and dusty. And dripping, cold dripping.
It was a place few people cared to fix up. It was where they put things they did not care much about, either, that stood to reason; and they put him here. Unless it was the best they had, nobody he trusted would possibly bring him here for any reason. It was a dungeon, that was what. A real dungeon. Like in nand’ Bren’s movies.
Had not Jegari talked about getting help? But when had Jegari been here, and where had he gone?
He just could not remember. He thought he remembered a vehicle, but that was getting away from his memory the longer he stayed awake. And there were legs, dark legs, several pair, and more steps, and there had been a place that moved, and one that roared, and right now his mouth told him he was thirsty and his stomach told him he still wanted to be sick if he moved too fast.
But sitting still was no good. Just waiting for somebody bad to show up was no good.
A foot off the edge reached stone floor and knocked into what proved to be a wooden stool. Something fell off it. Feeling on the stool and beside it he found a metal bottle and a heavy hand-sized cylinder with a switch. He moved that switch, and light stabbed out at bare stone walls and a growth of something dark and nasty on the rock.