Barb sat at the little table, where the light was best, doing a little writing herself. The disturbed second chair showed where Toby had likely been sitting before he heard the door and got up. The bed, just beyond the partial arch, was made and neat: the servants would have seen to that; but maybe two ship-dwellers had taken care of it themselves.
“Are we being let out?” Toby asked hopefully.
“Sorry. Not yet.” Bren dropped into the chair by the door and heaved a heavy sigh as Toby sank back into the second chair at the table.
“Ah, well,” Toby said. “Any idea when?”
“Well, it’s stayed quiet out. We haven’t had any further trouble. And Geigi’s talking about going home to his estate—that may provoke something. Likely it will. But ifit does, it may shift the trouble over to Kajiminda—and that may get your upstairs room back.”
“That still throws you short,” Toby said. “If you can get Geigi home, you can at least get us to our boat.”
“Sorry. The bus doesn’t go down the hill. You’re safer here.”
“You can only play so much solitaire,” Barb said, and Toby said nothing, only looked glum.
“You’re exposed to snipers down on the boat,” Bren said. “It makes me nervous, your being there.”
Sighs from both of them. “We can’t go into the garden, I suppose, ” Barb said.
“No,” he said. “But it’s not forever. There’s movement in the situation.”
“What kind of movement?”
“Best not discuss all of it. But things are happening.”
“We’re not pacing the floor yet. We’ve threatened murder of each other if we get to that.”
“The room is bigger than the boat.”
“There’s no deck,” Toby said. “And there’s no window. —I’m not complaining, Bren. Honestly not.”
“You’re complaining,” he said wryly. “And I’m honestly sympathetic. Just not a thing I can do to make it safe out there.”
“We’re just blowing off steam,” Toby said. “Honestly. We aren’t complaining. Being alive is worth a little inconvenience. We’re grateful to be here—grateful to the servants who gave up their room for us. We’re here, we’re dry, we’re not full of holes—”
“I’ll relay that to the fellows who live here,” he said, with a little smile. “But I can at least give you a day pass. Things have quietened enough you’ll be welcome upstairs at most any time. Just don’t wait for directions. Duck down here fast if there’s an alarm of any kind. I’m afraid the library’s off limits now; just too crowded in there. But you can use the sitting room, what time we’re not having other meetings. Staff will signal you. I’ll advise them to tell you that.”
“We’ve become the ghosts in your walls,” Barb laughed. “Spooks in the basement.”
“That’s it,” he said.
“Staff has been really good,” Barb said. “They won’t let us make our own bed. We tried, and the maid had a fit.”
He laughed gently. “The juniors have that job and if they don’t do it, the seniors will be on them. Don’t object.” Which said, he got up to go.
“What?” Toby protested. “You’re not staying for a round of poker? We play for promises.”
“I’m up to my ears in must-dos. I just want you to know there’s some movement in the situation, and so far, so good. We have people watching your boat round the clock. No worries down there.”
“Can we possibly help?” Toby asked. “Can we actually doanything around the place? Can we hammer nails, carry boxes, help with the repair?”
He shook his head. “That’s the downside of having an efficient staff. They have their ways. Just relax. Rest. Take long baths.”
“Can I at least get some coastal charts?”
Those were slightly classified. But he did have them. And Toby was in Tabini’s good graces. He nodded. “I’ll send a batch down.”
Thatbrightened up his two sailors. He felt rather good about that.
So he took his leave, collected Banichi and Jago, and went back upstairs to his office, while Banichi and Jago, secure in the knowledge of exactly where he was, in a fortified room with storm shutters shut, got a little down time of their own.
“Coastal charts,” he recalled. “Toby wanted coastal charts.” He went over to the pigeonhole cabinet, unlocked the case and pulled out several. “Have these run down to him, nadiin-ji. I take responsibility.”
Jago went to do it. Banichi diverted himself to somber consultation with Tano, Algini, and Nawari.
And he sat down with the database again, trying to discover how Pairuti’s bloodline—and Geigi’s—connected to the world at large, over the last three hundred years.
Meticulous research on kinships. Who was related to whom and exactly the sequence of exterior and internal events— negotiations in which certain marriages had been contracted and when they had terminated, and more importantly with what offspring, reared by which half of the arrangement, and with what claims of inheritance. Dry stuff—until you discovered you had a relative poised to lodge a claim or engage an Assassin to remove an obstacle.
One of the interesting tactics of marriage politics was infiltration of another clan: marry someone in, let them arrive with the usual staff. That staff then formed connections with other, local staff—and even once the original marriage had run its course—it left a legacy in that clan that couldbe activated even generations down.
And there the paidhi ran head on into that most curious of atevi emotions: man’chi. Attachment. Affiliation. When it triggered, by whatever triggered it, be it the right pheromones or a sense of obligation or ambition or compatible direction—one ateva bonded to another. When it happened properly, in related clans or within a clan, it was the very mortar of society. When it happened between people from clans that were natural enemies, it could be hell on earth.
There’d been a lot of marrying, for instance, of Marid eligibles out and around their district, begetting little time bombs— people never quite at home in their birth-clan, longing, perhaps, for acceptance; and one could imagine, ultimately finding it— because the Marid clans were not stupid.
So the web grew, decade by decade, and that sort of thing had been going on for a lot of decades all up and down the coast and somewhat inland. Sensibly, a stable person was not going to run amok in the household at the behest of some third cousin down in the Marid. But take a little unscheduled income from that cousin for some apparently meaningless datum? Much easier. If you were a very smart spymaster, you didn’t call on people for big, noisy things or life changes. You got bits and pieces from several sources and never let any single person put two and three pieces together.
If you were a lord like Geigi, who’d actually married into the Marid, or drawn a wife out of there, you sensibly worried about the safety of your household—but that household being Edi, the likelihood of any lingering liaison was not high at all. It had surely frustrated the Marid, and perhaps made them wonder who was spying on whom. Geigi’s ex-wife had not risen high in her life, nothing so grand, after Geigi. She’d gone off to the Marid taking all Geigi’s account numbers with her, but Geigi, Rational Determinist that he was—had not been superstitious. He had immediately changed them, and the Marid’s attempts to get into those accounts had rung alarms through the banking system, a defeat that had greatly embarrassed Machigi’s predecessor.
It had been an elegant, quiet revenge that had done the wife’s whole family no good at all. Doubtless they took it personally.
Paru was the subclan in question, on the ex-wife’s father’s side. He wrote that name down, then got up and walked to the security station, the library, walked in after a polite knock and laid that name on the counter.
Jago, who was nearest, looked at it, and looked up at him curiously.
“This is the clan of Geigi’s wife,” he said, “who was greatly embarrassed in her failure to drain his accounts. And they doown a bank in Separti Township: Fortunate Investments. One simply wonders if they have any current involvement.”