Bloody damn hell. Call. Calling might have been in order, all right — for her to call him when he was in town — at least to have called the hospital. She'd probably been off on her honeymoon.
He'd forgiven her — everything but that "Please call," the way she'd always say when they'd disagreed. She knew the hours he kept in a work crisis, she knew she should call in the morning if she wanted to catch him with a personal problem. But, no, he should call her. Tonight. Heshould call her. He should do the negotiating, meaning cajole her into doling out this little reaction and that little reaction until he guessed his way through her crisis and placated her.
For what? For getting married? He wasn't in the mood.
He reached irritably for the television remote, flipped it on to find out what was on the news, and saw himself, sitting at the council table, heard himself, and knew that Mospheira could pick up that broadcast quite nicely — as the mainland regularly picked up whatever Mospheira let hit the airwaves.
There was footage of damage to something somewhere, but that wasn't bomb damage from Malguri; it seemed to be nothing more than a windstorm taking the roof off a local barn. A machimi play was on the next channel, a machimi he knew, a drama of inheritance and skullduggery, the resolution to which lay in two clans deciding they hated a third clan worse than they hated each other — very atevi, very logical. Lots of costumes, lots of battles.
Glassy-eyed and fading, he flipped back to the news, hoping to hear the weather, wishing for a cold front to alleviate what promised to be a still, muggy night.
The news anchor was saying something, this time without footage, about a parliamentary procedure recalling members of the Assassins' Guild to the city, a procedure which a spokesman for the Guild called an administrative election.
The hell, he thought, disquieted. They censored his mother's letter and Banichi was gone for a day and a night on administrative elections, while Cenedi said it was a crisis in the Guild? Jago also had a vote. And might be casting it.
And Banichi had said something about the Guild rejecting contracts on the paidhi. Disturbing thought. By how much, he wondered, had they voted down the contracts? And what would acceptance of those contracts have meant to Tabini's stability in office?
He found no comfort in the news. He could watch the play, which at least had color and movement. But the eyes were going and the mind had already gone or he wouldn't contemplate staying awake at all.
He was aware of dark, then, a suddenly dark room, and he must have slept — the television was showing a faint just-turned-off glow and a large man was standing in front of it.
"Banichi?" he asked faintly.
"One should never acknowledge being awake," Banichi said. "Delay gives one just that much more advantage."
"I have a house full of security," he objected. "And I haven't a gun any longer."
"Look in your dresser," Banichi said.
"You're joking." He wanted to go look, but he hadn't the strength to get up.
"No," Banichi said. "Good night, Bren-ji. Jago's back now, by the way. All's well."
"Can we talk, Banichi?"
"Talk of what, nadi?" Banichi had become a shadow in the doorway, in the dim light from some open door down the hall. But Banichi waited.
"About the election going on in your Guild, about what Cenedi found it his duty to warn me about — about what I suppose I'd better know since I've accepted another of Ilisidi's invitations."
"With suggestive grace, nadi. One issurprised."
"I like the old woman," he said shortly to a silhouette against the doorway, and well knew the word didn't mean likein the humanly emotional sense. "And there, of course, I have information I don't get here."
"Because you think the aiji-dowager is a salad and you value information from those most interested in disinforming you?"
He knew he should laugh. He didn't have it in him. It came out a weak moan, and his voice cracked. "Nadi, I think she's a breath of fresh air, you're a salad, yourself, and I'm collecting everything I can find that tells me how to make humans in the sky not fly down tomorrow morning in satellites and loot the Bu-javid treasures — I'm so damned tired, Banichi. Everybody wants my opinion and nobody wants to tell me a damned thing, how do I know she's disinforming me? Nothing else makes sense."
Banichi came and stood over him, throwing shadow like a blanket over him. "One has tried to protect you from too much distraction, nadi."
"Protect me less. Inform me more. I'm desperate, Banichi. I can't operate in an informational vacuum."
"Jago will take you to the country house at Taiben, at your request. It might be a safer place."
"Is there anything urgently the matter with where I am?"
That provoked a moment of troubling silence.
"Is there, Banichi?"
"Nand' paidhi, Deana Hanks has been sending other messages under your seal."
"Damn. Damn. — Damn." He shut his eyes. He was perilously close to unconsciousness. So tired. So very tired. "I don't mean to accuse, but I thought you had that stopped. What's she up to?"
"Nand' paidhi, she's in regular communication with certain of the tashrid. And we don't know how she got the seal, but she is using it."
He had to redirect his thinking. Three-quarters of the way to sleep, he had to come back, ask himself why Taiben, and where Hanks got a seal.
"Came with it," he said, "a damn forgery. Mospheira could have managed it."
"One hesitated to malign your office. That thought did occur to us. Equally possible, of course, that the forgery was created by our esteemed lords of the tashrid. And I don't say we haven't intercepted these messages before sending them on. They're some of them — quite egregiously misphrased."
"Dangerously?"
"She asked the lord of Korami province for a pregnant calendar."
Pregnant calendar and urgent meeting. He began to laugh, and sanity gave way; he laughed until the tape hurt.
"I take it that's not code?"
"Oh, God, oh, God."
"Are you all right, Bren-ji?"
He gradually caught his breath. "I'm very fine, thank you, Banichi. God, that's wonderful."
"Other mistakes are simply grammatical. And she speaks very bluntly."
"Never would believe you needed the polish." Humor fell away to memories of Deana after the exams, Deana in a sullen temper.
"We are keeping a log. We can do this — since it's our language under assault."
He laughed quietly, reassured in Banichi's good-humored confidences that things couldn't be so bad, that they could still joke across species lines, and he was fading fast, too fast to remember to question Banichi about the weather report, before, between flutters of tired eyelids, he found Banichi had ebbed out of the room, quiet as the rest of the shadows.
He hoped it would rain again and relieve the heat, which seemed excessive this evening, or it was the padding he was obliged to put around him.
Still, he was sleepy, and he didn't want to move — Banichi was all right, Banichi was watching, and if he waited patiently there was, he discovered, a very slight and promising breeze circulating through the apartment, from open windows, he supposed, perfumed with flowers he remembered —
But that was Malguri, was it not? Or his garden.
He shut his eyes again, having found a position that didn't hurt, and when he felt the breeze he saw the hillsides of Malguri, he saw the riders on tall mecheiti.