“Maybe we should stop running,” he gasped, the faintest of whispers, far softer than their running through the woods. “Very likely nand’ Bren will have gotten to his estate, and mani and all her people are going to be out, and so will nand’ Bren and before long my father will have people here, so all we need to do is get out of the way, find a hole and get in it until they settle this.”
“You should, nandi,” Jegari whispered back, likewise bending, hands on knees. “And Antaro and I can go find help.”
“We all should!”
“Then Antaro can stay with you, nandi, and I shall go.”
He shut his eyes. Opened them again, trying to imagine the maps he had studied, among the many things he had studied. “No,” he said. “No. We shall just walk a while. We shall walk. If we find a good place, we can hide. But if we can get to nand’ Bren’s estate first—that would be safest.”
“They may attack there, nandi. This whole coast may be in rebellion.”
“Lord Geigi is Maschi. Baiji is Maschi. The coast is Edi. The Tasaigi are in this.” He was out of breath. He bent over again and gasped for air. “Southerners. They do not belong here. There cannot be that many of them. We shall go—we shall go until we reach nand’ Bren’s estate, and then—then we shall just sit there and watch. And, by morning, people will be out and about and if it looks all right—we can go in. It is far better than sitting here hiding on Kajiminda land.”
“We have to be careful, nandi,” Jegari said. “We have to be very careful if we go out in the open.”
“When shall we do it? By sunlight?” He held his side, where it ached. “Now is the time, nadiin-ji. Let us just walk a while. Let us walk quietly.”
They began, then, to do that. And he thought they were going in the right direction: he hoped they were. The sea, he thought, all the peninsulas and the woods that did not grow up and down, but tilted, made him unsure of direction. This whole coastline tilted, in his estimation. It wandered: at ground level it was nothing like it was on the big map in the library, and the coast was very irregular.
And that was stupid. It was an entirely infelicitous and careless approximation. The librarian should be thoroughly ashamed of such records.
Jegari stopped, frozen. Antaro seized Cajeiri’s arm, and pulled him to the side, signaling he should be quiet.
She backed him into a shelter of thorny undergrowth, crouching there as Jegari likewise edged into that cover. He heard nothing. Nothing, as they made themselves as inconspicuous as possible.
He shivered, and tried not to. It seemed a long time.
Then his ears told him someone was out there, somebody not as shining bright as he knew he was in his pale coat. Somebody maybe in Assassins’ black.
But in stalking and being stalked he told himself he was in very good company. In a forest, if not a sailboat, his Taibeni companions were very much at home.
He held his breath while something like the wind moved through the woods. For a scary moment he saw their shadowy shapes, and there were two or more of them.
The enemy was going toward nand’ Bren’s estate. Where mani was.
The night grew chill. Bren rubbed knees gone half-numb and watched out the bus window in the only directions he could watch, westward and south. Cenedi had gone outside a little time ago, and delayed about matters, whatever he was doing, likely talking to men posted outside. The dowager simply waited, with the rest of her guard. Those who did speak, spoke together quietly—a whisper too low for Bren’s ears to pick up.
Then Cenedi came back, and Tano and Algini, who had been busy with some sort of electronic equipment to the rear of the bus, got up and conferred with Cenedi, also very quietly, in the front of the bus.
Bren folded his arms for comfort and waited, Ilisidi not saying a thing, but then the formidable cane reached across the aisle and thumped his seat. He looked. Her face was utterly lost in the darkness, just a glimmer of silver about her hair.
“Aiji-ma,” he said in the lowest of voices.
“You are very quiet and contemplative tonight, Bren-paidhi.”
“One apologizes, aiji-ma. One is extremely concerned for the situation.”
Silence. Lengthy silence in the dark.Then the cane went softly thump! on the bus deck.
“If they harm him,” Ilisidi said, “they are dead. And there will be retaliation.”
“Aiji-ma,” he said. That was all. He was the peacemaker, the bridge, and in all his career, he had never been able to make headway with the South.
He had damned sure not read the boy accurately. God, where had an eight-year-old suddenly got the notion to grow up on them and take his own way?
Even atevi hadn’t seen this coming—maybe because they’d attributed the unorthodox behavior to a human influence they were trying to diminish in the boy. Aiji-born: Cajeiri was apt to do any damned thing, was what, and neither species was going to predict him. A brilliant, if erratic prospect.
If he lived to grow up.
The conference forward broke up. Cenedi came back solo, a looming shadow in the dark, and said, to Ilisidi, “We consider that Banichi and Jago have likely moved all the way to the house by now, nandi. There has been no sound of fire. We have gotten the regular signal from them.”
They would use a simple blip on a given frequency, nothing that could be easily read by the opposition, who probably were using their own signalsc which their security would be simultaneously trying to pick up. Tano and Algini had broken out gear of their own, and he would about lay a bet it was involved in trying to do exactly that.
Himself, he took Cenedi’s information for comfort, and kept his own observations quiet: it was Ilisidi’s call, if orders were to follow. Guild operations were not the paidhi’s domain.
“If we were to move closer to the house,” Ilisidi said, “we might more likely draw out persons of interest.”
“No, ’Sidi-ji,” Cenedi said with no doubt at all, and added: “Besides, we cannot leave this road open. This is our task: we have simply to sit here.”
Thump! went the dowager’s cane, a quiet and very dissatisfied thump. But she did not countermand her bodyguard. So they sat some more.
Two, and now four shadows moved silently through the woods. Cajeiri hunkered down with his companions and held his breath. They had been lucky so far, having made as much noise as they had, and having rushed through the woods headlong getting away. When the Guild had investigated why that sensor-thing had jammed in the orchard tower, the rusty claw was as good as a written note to say, “Someone was here.”
But then, the people occupying the house had just had a man slide down the roof, whether or not the man had actually gone off the edge, and if that man was able to say he had been hit by something before he lost his balance, that was a reasonable and very noisy indication in itself that someone had been spying on the house, someone who did not much mind a man falling off the roof. It was possible that man would not talk, and would never talk, and one had the luxury to somewhat hope he had not killed the man; but he had shot someone before this, so it would not be the first, and if this was the man who had tried to assassinate them he was not going to have bad dreams about this one. He was determined on that. He would not be sorry in the least, if this was the man who had tried to kill nand’ Bren. He had been desperate. And he had had to do something fastc had he not? He had hadto.
They moved now, the three of them, without saying a thing to each other. They did their best to sound only like the wind moving, and to avoid breaking branches—a very un-windlike sound.
Here was where the Taibeni were expert, and he tried to learn from them, never letting a branch snap back, bending every opposing twig gently and passing it to the next behind, to release very, very softly. He copied their way of setting the feet down very surely, and with as little disturbance as possible; and sometimes stopping—just suddenly stopping cold, frozen, so they could hear, Jegari informed him, touching his own ear—clearly meaning he should listen, too. They had seen four men pass them. They had no way of knowing if there were more coming behind them.