“This is mygun.”
He was confused. He sat there with his skin gone to gooseflesh and finally moved to pull a blanket into his lap. He heard commotion in the garden, Jago yelling at other guards.
“This is mygun,” Banichi said forcefully. “Can there be any question this is my gun? A noise waked you. I lay in wait for the assassin. I fired. What did you see?”
“A shadow. A shadow coming in through the curtains.” Another shiver took him. He knew how foolish he had been, firing straight across and through the doors. The bullet might have kept going across the garden, into the kitchens. It could have ricocheted off a wall and hit someone asleep in another apartment. The shock persisted in his hands and in his ears, strong as the smell of gunpowder in the air, that didn’t belong with him, in his room…
The rain started with a vengeance. Banichi used his pocket-com to talk to the searchers, and to headquarters, lying to them, saying he’d fired the shot, seeing the intruder headed for the paidhi’s room, and, no, the paidhi hadn’t been hurt, only frightened, and the aiji shouldn’t be wakened, if he hadn’t heard the shots. But the guard should be doubled, and the search taken to the south gates, before, Banichi said, the rain wiped out the tracks.
Banichi signed off.
“Why did they come here?” Bren asked. Assassins, he understood; but that any ordinary assassin should come into the residential compound, where there were guards throughout, where the aiji slept surrounded by hundreds of willing defenders—nobody in their right mind would do that.
And to assassinate him, Bren Cameron, with the aiji at the height of all power and with the nai’aijiin all confirmed in their houses and supportive—where was the sense in it? Where was the gain to anyone at all sane?
“Nadi Bren.” Banichi stood over him with his huge arms folded, looking down at him as if he were dealing with some feckless child. “ Whatdid you see?”
“I told you. Just a shadow, coming through the curtain.” The emphasis of the question scared him. He might have been dreaming. He might have roused the whole household and alarmed the guards all for a nightmare. In the way of things at the edge of sleep, he no longer knew for sure what he had seen.
But there had been blood. Jago said so. He hadshot someone.
“I discharged the gun,” Banichi said. “Get up and wash your hands, nadi. Wash them twice and three times. And keep the garden doors locked.”
“They’re only glass,” he protested. He had felt safe until now. The aiji had given him the gun two weeks ago. The aiji had taught him to use it, the aiji’s doing alone, in the country-house at Taiben, and no one could have known about it, not even Banichi, least of all, surely, the assassin—if he had not dreamed the intrusion through the curtains, if he had not just shot some innocent neighbor, out for air on a stilling night.
“Nadi,” Banichi said, “go wash your hands.”
He couldn’t move, couldn’t deal with mundane things, or comprehend what had happened—or why, for the gods’ sake, whythe aiji had given him such an unprecedented and disturbing present, except a general foreboding, and the guards taking stricter account of passes and rules…
Except Tabini-aiji had said—‘Keep it close.’ And he had been afraid of his servants finding it in his room.
“Nadi.”
Banichi was angry with him. He got up, naked and shaky as he was, and went across the carpet to the bath, with a queasier and queasier stomach.
The last steps were a desperate, calculated rush for the toilet, scarcely in time to lose everything in his stomach, humiliating himself, but there was nothing he could do—it was three painful spasms before he could get a breath and flush the toilet.
He was ashamed, disgusted with himself. He ran water in the sink and washed and scrubbed and washed, until he no longer smelled the gunpowder on his hands, only the pungency of the soap and astringents. He thought Banichi must have left, or maybe called the night-servants to clean the bath.
But as he straightened and reached for the towel, he found Banichi’s reflection in the mirror.
“Nadi Bren,” Banichi said solemnly. “We failed you tonight.”
That stung, it truly stung, coming from Banichi, who would never humiliate himself as he had just done. He dried his face and rubbed his dripping hair, then had to look at Banichi face on, Banichi’s black, yellow-eyed visage as impassive and powerful as a graven god’s.
“You were brave,” Banichi said, again, and Bren Cameron, the descendant of spacefarers, the representative of six generations forcibly earthbound on the world of the atevi, felt it like a slap of Banichi’s massive hand.
“I didn’t get him. Somebody’s loose out there, with a gun or—”
“ Wedidn’t get him, nadi. It’s not your business, to ‘get him.’ Have you been approached by anyone unusual? Have you seen anything out of order before tonight?”
“No.”
“Where did you getthe gun, nadi-ji?”
Did Banichi think he was lying? “Tabini gave it…”
“From what placedid you get the gun? Was this person moving very slowly?”
He saw what Banichi was asking. He wrapped the towel about his shoulders, cold, with the storm wind blowing into the room. He heard the boom of thunder above the city. “From under the mattress. Tabini said keep it close. And I don’t know how fast he was moving, the assassin, I mean. I just saw the shadow and slid off the bed and grabbed the gun.”
Banichi’s brow lifted ever so slightly. “Too much television,” Banichi said with a straight face, and took him by the shoulder. “Go back to bed, nadi.”
“Banichi, what’s happening? Whydid Tabini give me a gun? Why did he tell me—?”
The grip tightened. “Go to bed, nadi. No one will disturb you after this. You saw a shadow. You called me. I fired two shots.”
“I could have hit the kitchen!”
“Most probably one shot did. Kindly remember bullets travel, nadi-ji. Was it not you who taught us? Here.”
To his stunned surprise, Banichi drew his own gun from the holster and handed it to him.
“Put that under your mattress,” Banichi said, and left him—walked on out of the bedroom and into the hall, pulling the door to behind him.
He heard the lock click as he stood there stark naked, with Banichi’s gun in his hand and wet hair trailing about his shoulders and dripping on the floor.
He went and shoved the gun under the mattress where he had hidden the other one, and, hoping Jago would choose another way in, shut the lattice doors and the glass, stopping the cold wind and the spatter of rain onto the curtains and the carpet.
Thunder rumbled. He was chilled through. He made a desultory attempt to straighten the bedclothes, then dragged a heavy robe out of the armoire to wrap about himself before he turned off the room lights and struggled, wrapped in the bulky robe, under the tangled sheets. He drew himself into a ball, spasmed with shivers.
Why me? he asked himself over and over, and asked himself whether he could conceivably have posed so extreme a problem to anyone that that individual would risk his life to be rid of him. He couldn’t believe he had put himself in a position like that and never once caught a clue of such a complete professional failure.
Perhaps the assassin had thought him the most defenseless dweller in the garden apartments, and his open door had seemed the most convenient way to some other person, perhaps to the inner hallways and Tabini-aiji himself.