They were drawing close enough to the capital to pass through more towns such as Leposti at any moment, where they might meet help—or opposition. Jago kept a fast pace through the car, Banichi bringing up the rear, but pausing a moment for a word with Cenedi, who nodded to something. Banichi cast a look back, as if in thought of the dowager.
So much Bren saw in his passing the door. In the next moment the wind hit him, the racket and rush of the unprotected platform, next to the thunder of the engine, an area where watching one’s step was life-and-death. A ladder confronted them, a straight-up ladder, atevi-scale, and the whole platform vibrated with the joints in the tracks, with the deafening noise of the locomotive over all and under all.
“Nandi,” Jago shouted into his ear. She took the computer strap from his shoulder, indicated he should climb first, and he did, hauling himself up the widely-spaced rungs as fast as he could, aware by the vibration in the rungs that someone was on the ladder behind him, likeliest Cajeiric he heard the boy shout something to someone, but he didn’t stop or look down. He came up at nose-level with a catwalk, exposed to the raw wind, and hauled himself up onto that gridwork, kneeling on the metal surface and holding to the railing—thank God there was a railing. The train was passing through empty countryside at the moment, with a town in the distance.
And a swing of his head forward, into the wind, brought him the unexpected sight of a banner aloft, streaming flat out in the wind, atevi figures atop the train, sitting or lying, weapons braced. That banner was the red and black of the Ragi, of Tabini’s house.
That was how the towns and villages turned out to mark their progress. That was the declaration they flew, unmistakable defiance of the authority claiming Shejidan.
Wind battered him as the train began a long curve. He felt Cajeiri’s presence behind him. He summoned strength to wind-chilled muscles, hauled himself up off his knees, holding to the catwalk rail, and moved as briskly as he could along the outside of the generator and engine. The engine gave off the breath of hell itself, heat and fumes stinging and making his eyes run. Above all was the racket, and the rumble and the power of the machine, shaking his fingers to numbness on the railing.
The Ragi banner—outrageous and uncompromising: Know us, know this is the moment, if Ragi will stand up and be counted. This is the moment, if man’chi will draw you.
Why send off Antaro in the heir’s coat? Why send Cajeiri up to the engine? Diversion, to be surec but should anyone think the young lord would leave this train, this banner?
Except if security feared a traitor in their midst, in contact, somehow, with Murini’s forces.
One of Tatiseigi’s men such a traitor might be, or one they had no way to know among their other allies.
But would the heir desert his father’s cause, under such circumstances? Would he leave his great-grandmother?
Murini would, in a heartbeat. It was the recipient of the information that counted: Murini might believe the boy would go.
Murini always had, changing sides with every breezec a long, long history of fast footwork.
Quivering iron railing slid constantly under his hands. Wind battered him as the train’s turn smoothed out, gathered speed, and carried the exhaust away in favor of cold, rushing air. His catwalk ended in another ladder. This one brought him down to a small, sheltered platform with a door into the cab, while another ladder offered steps downward. The driving wheels thundered under the small gridwork platform where he stood, making it impossible to hear.
Light footsteps shook the ladder above him. Cajeiri came down, and the gridwork platform was too small to gather company, with Jago and Banichi coming after. He reached high for the latch of the metal door and with his utmost one-handed effort, wrenched it open and shoved it wide. Guild in black leather met him as he shouldered his way past the metal edge, men holding heavy weapons angled up in the narrow corridor. Hands reached down, helped him climb up the last high steps, pulled him safely up into the short cab corridor.
Detail overwhelmed him, doors, guns, banks of switches, levers, gauges whose purpose he understood but had no idea how to read.
He had to trust the armed men at his back. He was concerned with the whereabouts of his staff, seeing Cajeiri had climbed in after him.
Then Jago arrived up the short steps, exchanged a few words with the Guildsmen on duty, and indicated with a shove at Bren’s shoulder that he should keep on moving down the short corridor into the cab itself.
He cast a second look back, unsatisfied until he saw that Banichi had gotten inside and the door was shut.
Switches, gauges, and levers. He made the passage along beside the power plant itself. Ahead of him, around a slight dogleg for the engine bank, a white light glared through the engine’s broad windshield, offering a hazy view of the sky. It silhouetted a handful of armed personnel and others who must be the engineer and his crew. He walked forward, seeing too little detail in the unexpected light.
One man in that crew turned his head, and he recognized a familiar, light-edged face.
“Aiji-ma,” he exclaimed, utterly confounded.
“Paidhi-ji.” Tabini seized his arm and pulled him forward, into a nook between operators’ seats, moving him into a safe, warm place.
And made a second reach. “Son.”
“Tai-ji,” Cajeiri said, completely amazed at being likewise hauled into Bren’s nook. The heir presented an unlikely figure, overwhelmed in a Taiben ranger’s green jacket, small hands exiting the sleeves to grasp hold of the seat nearest. The driving mechanism under their feet thumped like an overexcited heart as Tabini reached and took his son by the shoulder.
And in that moment, in the forward windows at Tabini’s back, the city itself appeared, a sprawl of red-tiled roofs serpentining this way and that. High above it all rose the hill of the Bu-javid, where they were going, if any information still held true.
“How is your great-grandmother?” Tabini shouted at his son.
“She is very well, tai-ji, but Uncle Tatiseigi has a bullet in his arm and they sent my bodyguard away disguised as me, which I did not want! Where is ami?”
Mama, that was.
“She is with the buses, with her father and the Ajuri,” Tabini said, and spared a hand for Bren’s shoulder, on a level with his son’s. “And you, paidhi-aiji. Are you well?”
“Perfectly,” Bren answered, finding his breath short and his whole grasp of the situation tottering. “Perfectly well, aiji-ma.”
A faint buzz penetrated the thunder of the locomotive and a shadow of wings spread over the windshield and diminished: A plane sped low overhead, streaking low along the track in front of them, then rose as it reached a hill, skimming like the wi’i-tikin in flight.
Scouting the track ahead, Rejiri was, and in utter hubris, letting them know he was up there—up there, all along their way, watching the track, advising them, making their hazardous course possible, an airborne presence elusive as quicksilver, there when they needed him. The boy that had set the nation’s air traffic control in an uproar had redeemed himself today, no question, and they saw him rise, with a waggle of his wings, off on a course toward the distant heights of the city.
An explosion puffed smoke beside the plane. Another. Rejiri waggled his wings as if to chide the agent of this reckless attack, and flew on undaunted.
8
The little plane made a brazen, lazy circle all about the heights of the Bu-javid, reconnoitering—and clearly challenging the opposition to take a shot at it. Bren watched it from a relatively armored position in the engine cab, sure that this time, after days of being shunted aside, deprived of vital information, and relegated to a marginal existence by the Atageini, he could no longer complain he lacked a firsthand view of events. He had his computer slung on his shoulder, resolved to protect the machine from all accidents. He had Banichi and Jago standing near him, which he would have chosen above all things. He also had Cajeiri marginally in his charge—someone had to have the boy in hand, since Tabini, who was near him, was conferring not with Ismini, his own head of staff, who was nowhere to be seen, but with Cenedi and Banichi, the three of them laying plans the rest of them would follow.