But Banichi was alive. He’d made that choice, whatever atevi understood. He couldn’t have gone off and left him and Jago, to go off with Ilisidi—he didn’t know what part of a human brain had made that decision, the way atevi didn’t consciously know why they, like mecheiti, darted after the leader, come hell come havoc—he hadn’t thought, hadn’t damned well thoughtabout the transaction, that the paidhi’s life was what aijiin were shooting each other for. It hadn’t mattered to him, in that moment, running down that slope, and he still didn’t know that it mattered—not to Tabini, who could get a replacement for him in an hour, who wasn’t going to listen to him in anyone else’s hands, and who wasn’t going to pay a damn thing to get him back, so the joke was on the people who thought he would. He didn’t know anything. It was all too technical—so that joke was on them, too.
The only thing he had of value was in the computer—which he ought to drop into the nearest deep ravine, or slam onto a rock, except it wouldn’t take out the storage—and if they collected it, it wasn’t saying atevi experts couldn’t get those pieces to work. And experts weren’t the people he wanted to have their hands on it.
He shouldhave done a security erase. Ifhe’d had the power to turn it on.
God, do what to save that situation, tip them off it was valuable? Make an issue, then botch getting rid of it?
Just leave it in the bag, let Nokhada carry it back to Malguri?
The rebels were sitting in Malguri.
Dark. The steps coming and going.
The beast on the wall. Lonely after all these centuries.
He couldn’t talk to Banichi. Banichi couldn’t walk, couldn’t fight them—he couldn’t believe Banichi lying back like that, resigning the argument and all their lives to Cenedi.
But Cenedi was a professional. Like Banichi. Maybe together they understood things he couldn’t.
Jago crossed the width of the hill to blame him and hit him in the face.
Cold and dark. Footsteps in the hall. Voices discussing having a drink, fading away up the steps.
A gun was against his skull and he thought of snow, snow all around him. And not a living soul. Like Banichi. Just shut it out.
Give it up.
He didn’t understand. Giri was dead. Bombs just dropped and spattered pieces all over the hill, and he didn’t know why, it didn’t make any sense why a bomb fell on one man and not another. Bombs didn’t care. Killing him must be as good as having him, in the minds of their enemies.
Which wasn’t what Cenedi had said.
There began to be a sea-echo in his skull, the ache where Cenedi had hit him and the one where Jago had, both gone to one pain, that kept him aware where he was.
In his own apartment, before Cenedi’s message had come, before she’d left, Jago had said… I’ll never betray you, nadi Bren.
I’ll never betray you…
XIV
« ^ »
Not doing well, he wasn’t—with one pain shooting through his eyes and another running through his elbow to the pit of his stomach, while two or three other point-sources contested for his attention. The rain had whipped up to momentary thunder and a fit of deluge, then subsided to wind-borne drizzles, a cold mist so thick one breathed it. The sky was a boiling gray, while the mecheiti struck a steady, long-striding pace one behind the other, Babs leading the way up and down the rain-shadowed narrows, along brushy stretches of streamside, where frondy ironheart trailed into their path and dripped water on their heads and down their necks.
But there wasn’t the same jostling for the lead, now, among the foremost mecheiti. It seemed it wasn’t just Nokhada, after all. None of them were fighting, whether Ilisidi had somehow communicated that through Babs, or whether somehow, after the bombs, and in the misery of the cold rain, even the mecheiti understood a common urgency. The established order of going had Nokhada fourth in line behind another of Ilisidi’s guards.
One, two, three, four, regular as a heartbeat, pace, pace, pace, pace.
Never betray you. Hell.
More tea? Cenedi asked him.
And sent him to the cellar.
His eyes watered with the throbbing in his skull and with the wind blasting into his face, and the desire to beat Cenedi’s head against a rock grew totally absorbing for a while. But it didn’t answer the questions, and it didn’t get him back to Mospheira.
Just to some damned place where Ilisidi had friends.
Another alarm bell, he thought. Friends. Atevi didn’t have friends. Atevi had man’chi, and hadn’t someone said—he thought it was Cenedi himself—that Ilisidi hadn’t man’chito anyone?
They crossed no roads—with not a phone line, not a tilled field, not the remote sound of a motor, only the regular thump of the mecheiti’s gait on wet ground, the creak of harness, even, harsh breathing—it hypnotized, mile after rain-drenched and indistinguishable mile. The dwindling day had a lucent, gray sameness. Sunlight spread through the clouds no matter what the sun’s angle with the hills.
Ilisidi reined back finally in a flat space and with a grimace and a resettling on Babs’ back, ordered the four heavier men to trade off to the unridden mecheiti.
That included Cenedi; and Banichi, who complained and elected to do it by leaning from one mecheita to the other, as only one of the other men did—as if Banichi and mecheiti weren’t at all unacquainted.
Didn’t hurt himself. Expecting that event, Bren watched with his lip between his teeth until Banichi had straightened himself around.
He caught Jago’s eye then and saw a biding coldness, total lack of expression—directed at him.
Because human and atevi hormones were running the machinery, now, he told himself, and the lump he had in his throat and the thump of emotion he had when he reacted to Jago’s cold disdain composed the surest prescription for disaster he could think of.
Shut it down, he told himself. Do the job. Think it through.
Jago didn’t come closer. The whole column sorted itself out in the prior order, and Nokhada’s first jerking steps carried him out of view.
When he looked back, Banichi was riding as he had been, hands braced against the mecheita’s shoulders, head bowed—Banichi was suffering, acutely, and he didn’t know whether the one of their company who seemed to be a medic, and who’d had a first aid kit, had also had a pain-killer, or whether Banichi had taken one or not, but a broken ankle, splinted or not. had to be swelling, dangling as it was, out of the stirrup on that side.
Banichi’s condition persuaded him that his own aches and pains were ignorable. And it frightened him, what they might run into and what, with Banichi crippled, and with Ilisidi willing to leave him once, they coulddo if they met trouble at the end of the ride-—if Wigairiin wasn’t in allied hands.
Or if Ilisidi hadn’t told the truth about her intentions—because it occurred to him she’d said no to the rebels in Maidingi, but she’d equally well been conspiring with Wigairiin, evidently, as he picked it up, as an old associate only apt to come in with the rebels if Ilisidi did.
That meant queasy relationships and queasy alliances, fragile ties that could do anything under stress.
In the cellar, they’d recorded his answers to their questions—they saidit was all machimi, all play-acting, no validity.
But that tape still existed, if Ilisidi hadn’t destroyed it. She’d not have left it behind in Malguri, for the people that were supposedly her jilted allies.
If Ilisidi hadn’t destroyed it—they had that tape, and they had it with them.
He reined back, disturbing the column. He feigned a difficulty with the stirrup, and stayed bent over as rider after rider passed him at that rapid, single-minded pace.