“You are wasting my time, nandi. All this I know. Get to it! What have you done?”
“So I met with them, nand’ paidhi, being as good as a dead man otherwise, and hoping—hoping to negotiate some more favorable situation for this district. I reasoned—I reasoned as long as I was still in power here, it would be better than one of their appointed men, would it not?”
“Undoubtedly.” Taking him with them to Najida might indeed be the best thing. If there was a problem on staff, it might find Baiji before nightfall.
Or find them, if they didn’t get the hell out the door Banichi was holding open.
“So I met with them.”
“We have been to this point three times, nandi. Get beyond it!”
“They offered me—being without an heir—they offered me an alliance. They—offered me the daughter of a lord of the South, and I—I said I wished to meet this young woman. I did anything I could think of and objected to this and that detail in the contract—”
“You stalled.”
“Nandi, I—ultimately agreed to the marriage. Which I did not carry out. But I know that I have put this young woman—a very young woman—and her family—in a difficult position. Which they urge is the case. So—”
It could go another half hour, round and round and round with Baiji’s ifs and buts. “ Theyhave put this young woman in a difficult position, nandi. You are not morally responsible. And one will discuss this at length in Najida. Order your car, nandi, and join us there, should you wish to discuss it further. I will not stand in the hall to discuss this.”
“One shall, one shall, with great gratitude, nandi, but let me go withyou!”
“This is enough,” Jago said in the kyo language, which no Guild could crack—but which all of them who had been in space knew. “Nandi! Go!”
“Good day to you,” Bren said, and with his hand firmly on Cajeiri’s shoulder, steered him out the door, where to his great relief Banichi closed in behind them all and let the door shut.
It immediately reopened. “Nandi!” Baiji called at their backs, and Jago half-turned, on the move. “I shall go with you. Please.” Baiji ran to catch up.
“Stay back!” Jago said, and Bren glanced back in alarm as Jago’s gun came up, and Baiji slid to a wide-eyed, stumbling halt just this side of the doors, none of his guard in attendance.
Bren turned, drew Cajeiri with him, and Cajeiri looked back. The Taibeni youngsters were trying to stay close.
Meanwhile their bus, parked out in the sunlight of the circular drive, rolled gently into motion toward the portico.
A sunlit cobblestone exploded like the crack of doom. Bren froze, uncertain which direction to go.
A whole line of cobbles exploded, ending with the moving bus—which suddenly accelerated toward the portico with a squeal of tires. Fire hit it, stitched up the driver’s side door, and it braked, skidding sidelong into the right-hand stonework pillar with a horrendous crash.
The whole portico roof tilted and collapsed in a welter of stones and squeal of nails, the collapsing corner knocking the bus forward. In that same split-second Banichi turned and got off three shots up and to the left.
An impact hit Bren from behind—hit him, grabbed him sideways as if he weighed nothing and carried him the half-dozen steps to the bullet-riddled side of the bus—then shoved him right against it. It was Jago who had grabbed him, Jago who yanked the bus door open while the portico resounded with gunfire.
“Get in,” Jago yelled at him, and shoved him inside, and he didn’t argue, just scrambled to get in past the driver’s seat, and down across the floor. Their driver was lying half over the seat in front. Jago had forced her way in, and threw the man onto the floor, as Banichi got in. Bren got a look past his own knee and saw Banichi lying on the steps holding someone in his arms.
Jago jammed on the accelerator and snapped his head back, tumbling him against the seats. The bus lurched forward, ripping part of the bus roof and pieces of the portico ceiling, tires thumping on cobbles as they drove for sunlight and headed down the drive.
Glass broke. Bullets stitched through the back of the bus, blew up bits of the seats and exploded through the right-hand window.
Jago yelled: “Stay down!”
They hit something on the left and scraped along the side of it—the bus rocked, and Bren grabbed the nearest seat stanchion, sure they were going over, but they rocked back to level, on gravel, now, three tires spinning at all the speed the bus could manage and one lumping along with a regular impact of loose rubber.
But they kept going. Kept going, and made it to the gate.
Bren looked back, then forward, trying to figure if it was safe to move yet, trying to find out was everybody all right.
Banichi had edged forward, on his knees, and the person he had wasc Baiji.
Baiji. Not Cajeiri.
“ Where is Cajeiri?” Bren cried, over the noise of the tires on gravel, one flat, and past the roar of an overtaxed engine. “ Where is Cajeiri, nadiin-ji?”
Banichi was on his knees now, trying to staunch the blood flow from their wounded driver, whose body only just cleared the foot well. Jago drove, and as a disheveled Lord Baiji tried to crawl up the steps and get up, Banichi whirled on one knee, grabbed the lord’s coat and hauled him down, thump! onto the floor, with no care for his head—which hit the seat rim.
Baiji yelled in pain, grabbed his ear. His pigtail having come loose, its ribbon trailed over one shoulder, strands of hair streaming down beside his ears.
But no view, before or behind, showed the youngsters aboard the bus.
“Banichi!” Bren breathed, struggling to both keep down and get around to face Banichi, while the bus bucked and lurched over potholes on three good tires.
“He ran, Bren-ji.” Banichi didn’t look at him. Banichi concentrated on the job at hand and pressed a wad of cloth against the driver’s ribs, placing the man’s hand against the cloth. “Hold that, nadi-ji, can you hold it?”
A moan issued from their driver, but he held it, while Banichi tore more bandage off a roll.
They owed this man, owed him their not being barricaded in Kajiminda with God-knew-what strength of enemy.
But the youngsters were in that situation. All three of them. And Banichi and Jago had left them there.
“Were they hit?” he asked Banichi. It was the worst he could think of.
“The boy will have taken cover. He is not a fool.”
And was Baiji their hostage, intended to get Cajeiri back? What the hell were Banichi and Jago thinking?
He didn’t know. He couldn’t figure. He’d been about to look around for them when Jago had hit him and carried him forward, straight into the bus. He was stunned, as if something had slammed him in the gut. His heart was pounding. And he kept thinking, This can’t be real. They can’t have left the kids. They can’t have left them there.
He sat on the cold, muddy floorboards, with their driver’s blood congealing in the grooves in the mat, trying to think, trying to get his breath as the bus slung itself onto the potholed estate road and kept going. Banichi got up for a moment and pulled the first aid kit from the overhead, with the bus lurching violently and what was probably a piece of the tire flapping against the wheel well at the rear. Banichi got down and started to work again, got the man a shot of something, probably painkiller.
They reached the intersection and took a tolerably cautious turn onto that overgrown road, and then gathered speed again.
They’d lost Cajeiri. They’d grabbed Baiji.
And the hell of it—he, who was supposed to understand such things, didn’t know why in either case.
Chapter 10