He doggedly shut his eyes, thinking their calculations about fuel holding out had been wrong. They had diverted over to this other source. They were still considerably out from the city.
The bus started up again, its doors shut.
“The paidhi is asleep,” he heard Jago say, somewhere above him.
“Let him rest a little.”
He wanted to ask about the car, but they went away and he sank into spongy dark nowhere for an indeterminate time, before he realized the boy’s weight had paralyzed his shoulder and he was in pain.
He moved. He lifted his head. He saw countryside rushing by, above a cloud of dust. He saw a bus overcrowded, with weary passengers sitting on the outer arms of seats, or outright sitting in the aisle, asleep, it might be, while a handful stood near the driver.
It was the first time he had had a clear view out the opposite windows, and he saw a riverside, lined with small trees.
He shifted in his seat, chanced to wake the boy, who lifted his weight, blinked at the daylight, and asked where they were.
“Deep in Ragi countryside, young sir.” Bren rubbed his stubbled chin and got his razor from his kit, down between his feet, with his computer. The razor still had enough charge to shave with, and he did that, while Cajeiri visited the accommodation to the rear.
He was still shaving when the boy came back and sat down, and watched in curiosity.
“Can it grow as long as your hair, nandi?” the boy asked.
“It might, young sir. But one has no wish to scandalize the court.”
“Will you do it sometime?”
“What?”
“Grow it that long?”
“Much too uncomfortable, young sir. And not at all becoming.
And it grows just as slowly as hair on your head.”
“You would be as odd as the kyo.”
“That I might, young sir. But by no means as round.”
A laugh, a positive laugh on this chancy, desperate day. Cajeiri bounced onto his knees to see how his young bodyguard fared, the two of them having returned, one at a time, from their own visits to the accommodation. “Have we any breakfast?” he asked, and the two of them delved down into their gear and found grain and fruit bars.
“Would you like one, nandi?”
Now there was a good reason to have resourceful youngsters for company. He took the offering quite gratefully, tucked the razor back into his kit, and sat and ate slowly, finding it filled the empty spot in his belly.
All the while the land passed their windows, like a dream of places remembered. Not that far. Maybe half a day’s travel by these weaving roads, until Shejidanc Whatever that arrival brought them.
Algini came forward and spoke to the driver at one point, paused for a nod and a courtesy, and went back again, dislodging drowsing Dur fishermen the while. Then Banichi went back to Tano and Algini, while Jago talked to the driver, and then consulted the lord of Durc all of which seemed unusual, and perhaps indicative of communications flowing from some part of their caravan. Bren wanted to snag Banichi on his way back, but could find no way to do so without provoking a host of questions from the youngsters: Banichi was looking straight forward at the road visible through the front windshield, and seemed intent on business.
A conference ensued, Banichi with Jago, and then with the driver. Perhaps it was significant that they took a westerly tack at the next branching of the road—perhaps it was not. They bounced along, then hit gravel where another lane intersected.
“The other buses are not following, nandi,” Jegari said in alarm.
Bren turned in his seat, and indeed, the reasonably unobstructed view out the back windows showed the other vehicles going off down the road they had been on.
That was it. “Pardon, young sir.” Bren levered himself out of his window seat and, with stiffness in his legs, walked up to the front of the bus, where Banichi and Jago both stood on the internal steps, watching the road ahead.
They were on a downhill, and a train was stopped on the tracks in the middle of nowhere. A train with a handful of trucks and a couple of automobiles gathered beside it.
“What are we doing, nadiin-ji?” he asked, spotting those two cars with some hope. “We have left the column.”
“They will meet us,” Jago said. “We have other transport.”
The train, clearly. A diversion off their route. Switch and confuse, he had no trouble figuring that. And the cars.
It occurred to him, then, that there was a train station beneath the Bu-javid itself.
And the dowager must have communicated with them, because there was no one else with the brazen nerve to divert them to that route.
He drew a deep breath, already laying out in his mind what he was sure was the dowager’s plan of attack, telling himself the while that the dowager was stark raving mad. Having made herself a target all the way cross-country, now she was hijacking a passenger train—my God, he said to himself, relieved to think she was safe—and appalled to put the pieces together and guess what she was up to.
And all the while he had a longing vision of the hall outside his own apartment, his staff—his long-suffering staff, and Ilisidi’s.
Home.
But changed, there. Attack had come down on Tabini’s people.
Edi was no longer in charge there, that wonderful old man.
For that among other things, Murini deserved no mercy—if they were in the position of dispensing judgments.
The bus bounced and pitched its way along toward the train, and Tatiseigi’s borrowed automobile was there among the trucks and several other cars: He could not see the dowager or Tatiseigi, but he at last caught sight of Cenedi standing on the bottom step of a passenger car, and at that welcome sight his heart skipped.
A body leaned against him, hard, and tried to worm past him, which in all this bus full of tall adults could only be Cajeiri, intent on a view out the window.
“Cenedi!” the boy cried, having gotten his face near the glass.
“Great-grandmother must be in that train car!”
“That she will be, I am sure,” Bren said, moving his foot out of danger, the boy was so intent on leaning as much of him as possible against the passenger railing. The bus gave a final lurch, then an abrupt, brake-hissing halt cast Antaro against him. The girl murmured, “One regrets it deeply, nand’ paidhi.”
“One hears,” he answered absently, seeing the bus door opening, and himself caught in that press at the doorway with his computer and his baggage stranded back at his seat. There was no way to reach it. “Jago-nadi! My baggage!”
“We have it, nandi,” Tano said from the aisle, and that was that.
The door was open, the way led out, and Bren managed to negotiate travel-numbed legs down the high steps. The last had to be a jump, down onto the graveled slope beside Jago, Banichi just ahead of them and Cajeiri and the Taibeni pair hard behind.
“Hurry out of the open,” Banichi urged them and the youngsters alike, and Bren asked no questions. They had stopped by Tatiseigi’s car, which was bullet-punctured all along its side, and they made all haste toward the nearest open door, that of the third car behind the engine.
Up the steps, then, and face to face with an old and ridiculous problem, that human legs just did not find train steps easy. He hauled himself up to the first step at Cajeiri’s back, and, Cajeiri having struggled up on his own comparatively short legs, the boy turned and irreverently seized his arm, to haul him after.
And then straightway forgot about him, as they reached the aisle. The car, furnished in small chair-and-table groupings, was crowded with atevi in formal dress and Guild black, along with a scattering of Taibeni in woodland brown, most of them armed.