This is Tabini’s hospitality? he asked himself. This is how his grandmother lives?
He didn’t believe it. He was offended, outright offended, andsomewhat hurt, that Tabini sent him to this dingy, depressing house, with out-of-date plumbing and God knew what kind of beds.
They were running out of hallway. Two huge doors closed off the end. More hiking, he supposed glumly, into some gloomy cubbyhole remote from the activity of the dowager and her staff.
It probably wasn’t Tabini’s fault. It might be the dowager had countermanded Tabini’s arrangements. Grandmother might not wanta human in her house, and might lodge him under a stairs or in a storeroom somewhere. Banichi and Jago would object when they found out. Grandmother would take offense, Tabini would take offense…
The servants opened the doors, on carpet, a spacious sitting room and furniture… God, gilt, carved over every surface, carpets that weren’t, Bren suddenly realized, mill-produced. The soft, pale light came from a large, pointed-arched window with small rectangular panes, bordered in amber and blue panes—a beautiful frame on a gray, rain-spattered nothing.
“This is the paidhi’s reception room,” Maigi said, as Djinana opened another, side door and showed him into an equally ornate room with a blazing fireplace—illicit heating source, he said to himself in a remote, note-taking, area of his brain; but the forebrain was busy with other details, the heads and hides and weapons on the walls, the carved wooden furniture, the antique carpet with the baji-najimedallions endlessly repeated, identical windows in the next room, which, though smaller, was no less ornate.
“The private sitting room,” Maigi said, then flung open the doors on a windowless side room of the same style, with a long, polished wood table from end to end. “The dining room,” Maigi said, and went on to point out the hanging bell-pull that would summon them, “Like that in the sitting room,” Maigi said, and drew him back to be assured he saw it.
Bren drew a deep breath. Everywhere it was stone walls and polished wooden floors, and dim lights, and gilt… a museum tour, it began to be, with Maigi and Djinana pointing out particular record heads of species three of which they confessed to be extinct, and explaining certain furnishings of historical significance.
“Given by the aiji of Deinali province on the marriage of the fourth dynasty aiji’s heir to the heir of Deinali, which, however, was never consummated, due to the death of the aiji’s heir in a fall from the garden walk…”
What garden walk? he asked himself, determined, under the circustances, to avoid the fatal area himself.
It was the paranoia of the flight here working on his nerves. It must be.
Or it might be the glass eyes of dead animals staring at him, mute and helpless.
Maigi opened yet another door, on a bedroom far, far larger than any reasonable bedroom needed to be, with—Bren supposed at least it was a bed and not a couch—an affair on a dais, with spears upholding the curtains which mostly enfolded it, a bed smothered in skins of animals and set on a stonework dais. Maigi showed him another bellpull, and briskly led him on to yet—God!—a farther hall.
He followed, beginning to feel the entire matter of the paidhi’s accommodations ridiculously out of control. Maigi opened a side door to a stone-floored room with a hole in the floor, a silver basin, and a stack of linen towels. “The accommodation,” Maigi pronounced it, euphemismistically. “Please use the towels provided. Paper jams the plumbing.”
He supposed his consternation showed. Maigi took up a dipper from the polished silver cauldron, an ornate dipper, and poured it down the hole in the floor.
“Actually,” Djinana said, “there’s continual water action. The aiji Padigi had it installed in 4879. The dipper remains, for the towels, of course.”
It was genteel, it was elegant, it was… appalling, was the feeling he had about it. Atevi weren’t animals. He wasn’t. He couldn’t use this. There had to be something else, downstairs, perhaps; he’d find out, and walk that far.
Djinana opened a double door beyond the accommodation, which let into a bath, an immense stone tub, with pipes running across the floor. “Mind your step, nadi,” Djinana said. Clearly plumbing here was an afterthought, too, and the volume of water one used for a single bath had to be immense.
“Your own servants will light the fires for you each evening,” Djinana said, and demonstrated that there was running water, while he absorbed that small advisement that Aigini and Tano were not lost, his luggage might yet make it, and he might not be alone with Djinana and Maigi after all.
Meanwhile Maigi had opened up the boiler, which was mounted on the stone wall, and which had two pipes running into it from overhead, down the walclass="underline" the larger one had to be cold water entering the boiler and a hot water conduit carried it out and across to the tub; but he was puzzled by the second, thinner pipe—until he realized that small blue flame in the boiler compartment must be supplied by that smaller gauge pipe. Methane gas. An explosion waiting to happen. An asphyxiation, if the little flame went out and let gas accumulate in the bath.
My God, he thought, racking up violation after violation, several of them potentially lethal as the two servants led the way back through the accommodation and into the hall.
Had Tabini sent him here for safety? Now that he understood what some of these pipes and electric lines must be, he traced other after-thought installations in the ancient stonework, some of which he realized now were certainly carrying methane, throughout the apartments and elsewhere, others of which were an antique electric supply, a source of sparks.
The building was still standing. The wiring was very old. So were the pipes. Evidently the staff had been careful… thus far.
“We, of course, are at your service,” Maigi said as they walked. “Your own staff should be arriving soon. They’ll lodge in the servants’ quarters, too. One ring for them, for personal needs; two for us, for food, for adjustment in the accommodations. We serve Malguri itself, and of course, provide its hospitality in any special requirements the paidhi might have.”
Djinana led the way back to the sitting room—an expedition in itself—and taking a small leather-bound codex from a table, presented it to him along with a pen, “Please add your name to the distinguished guests,” Djinana requested of him, and, as he prepared to do so; “It would be a further distinction, nadi, if you’d sign in your own language. That’s never been, before.”
“Thank you,” he said, quite touched, actually, at the implication of genuine welcome in this shrine, and duly signed in atevi script and, with, ironically, less practice, in Mosphei’.
He heard thumping in the hall. He looked up.
“Doubtless your servants,” Maigi said, and a moment later saw Tano with two big boxes, headed in through the outer door, and, imperiling an antique table, through the reception room.
“Nand’ paidhi,” Tano said, out of breath, and rain-soaked, like the boxes. Djinana hastened to show Tano through into the bedroom, to save the furniture, Bren supposed—and hoped those boxes were his clothes, particularly his sweaters and middle-weight coat.
“Would the paidhi like tea?” Maigi asked, as a thump of the outer door announced some other arrival, probably Algini. A draft fluttered the fire in the fireplace, and immediately, true to his guess, Algini came through the sititing room, equally soaked, and managed to bow in transit, difficult with two huge boxes in his arms.
Everything he owned, he thought, remembering the pile of boxes they had loaded on the train—God, how long did they propose he stay here?
“Tea,” he recalled distractedly. “Yes—” He felt chilled in spite of the fire, having come, a few hours ago, from a much more southerly and coastal climate, and having suffered a long drive over a trying road. Hot tea appealed to him, and it came to him that, in the confusion, he hadn’t had breakfast, or lunch, except a few wafers on the plane. “Is there a cheese pie, do you think?” That was usually safe, whatever the season.