God, he wanted his hands on Hanks!
Preferably before Hanks ended up in Direiso’s camp.
Without warning Ilisidi started out, and they were moving. One of Ilisidi’s men told the communications staffers who were walking down to stay to the inside of the road so a mechieta didn’t shoulder them off a cliff.
Better to hit the rocks on the inside of the curve than the ones at the bottom of the cliff, was the way the man put it, to a collection of people, mostly young, already scared by their situation; but they fell in, keeping in a group as they walked and trying to stay clear of the mechieti.
“The staff will have to tag after us as best they can,” Banichi said. “I have a feeling we’ll out-pace them considerably; and that may be best for their sakes.”
“What’s waiting for us down there?” Bren asked as they moved into the dark and the starlight of the road.
“Tabini’s men, nadi, and some of Ilisidi’s who came in by train from Shejidan, if, baji-naji, we have fortune on our side for a few more hours and they’ve met up without shooting each other.”
They passed the split in the road, that which led around the rim to the cannon fort, the route the tourists used. Another mechieta shouldered in, with Jase aboard and Haduni leading it by the rein. “Nadiin,” Haduni said, “the dowager has lent Jase-paidhi Nawari’s mechieta for the trip down.”
Nawari had left in the plane. Nawari was one of those who ordinarily rode close to Ilisidi.
“Jasi-ji,” Jago said out of the dark by Bren’s left, “he means when we run, you take the rein from him, stay low and hang on. He’s holding the rein now because if he lets go you’ll be up there with the dowager very fast.”
“Yes.” Jase acknowledged an order with atevi brevity. And to Bren. “I’ll certainly hang on, nadi.”
The head of the party had reached the fork of the road that slanted sharply down in the starlight, down and down into dark. As yet they kept a moderate pace, but the first hairpin turn came a good deal sooner than Bren expected, the mechieti still moving briskly, but not so the staff walking down couldn’t stay with them.
The next hairpin and the next tier of the road brought the town lights into view, not as many lights as one saw looking down, say, from a plane on a Mospheirancity by night.
But those lights might be fewer than ordinary tonight, since one could well suppose the townsfolk were not unaware of the crisis, and were probably listening to radio and television in hopes of news or public safety announcements.
It was a steep road at the next turn. Very steep for the tourist buses that were the summer traffic up this road; but one paved lane was very broad for mechieti; and the front rank at the fourth hairpin turn struck a faster downhill pace that would leave the group afoot behind very quickly. Nokhada was in a far better mood, pricking her ears forward and hitting a stride that advanced her just marginally through the pack.
Her rider didn’t stop her. That made her happier still; and Jase’s mechieta stayed with her.
Next switchback. “Nadiin,” Jago said, riding near Bren, as Banichi came on Jase’s far side. “If we come under fire, stay on. Our security is holding the road into town, and it will not be Guild opposing us, but all the same, present as low a profile as possible. There is a chance of Kadigidi partisans.”
It was never hard to pick out the leaders in an old-fashioned atevi cavalry charge. It never had been. It was part of the ethic—and maybe, Bren thought, among other fearful thoughts, that risk kept wars to a minimum, in a species where the leaders went first, not hindmost. The gun knocked hard against his ribs as the dowager let Babsidi gather speed. Nokhada was right on the front rank with Babsidi. Cenedi’s mechieta was; and Jase’s; and Banichi’s and Jago’s. As they reached the lowest part of the road they were running nearly all-out, security maneuvering only to put their bodies between their charges and the likelihood of snipers as the road let out onto a town highway.
A human might not be wired to know what passions it could touch off in the hearts of atevi instinct-driven to follow such a leader as Ilisidi was. He’d seen the maneuver in the machimi plays, he recalled that, the mad dash of riders across a landscape, a move he’dunderstood for a dramatic convention, but which often preceded a sort-out, a realization of atevi loyalties.
But as they came into the streets of the township of Saduri, he felt real emotion gathering in him. Hadn’t the waving of a flag, the call of a trumpet meant something to humans once? They couldn’t but follow. No matter whether Ilisidi or the atevi she led rationally knewwhat she was invoking— thishuman felt it.
A shot from somewhere blasted white chips of plaster from a building onto what was now black, starlit pavement ahead of them; and fire racketed back at that source from riders all around him. From another answering source more fire broke out somewhere ahead on the road. He was aware every smallish rider in their group was a target. He knew he was supposed to keep his head down and he knew that using the gun he carried and putting his head up to do it was a stupid risk—but in his heart-pounding excitement Jago’s warning at the start was all that held him from such foolishness.
Do what Jago said. Listen to his security. Get through this alive and take down the ones who’d threatened him and his the way hecould deal with them, not with a gun, but by getting to what they wanted before they did, and interdicting them from everything they intended tonight.
A flare went off behind them, a brilliant burst of light that threw them all into silhouette. Then he hoped the Guild workers, caught on the road above this fire-fight, had the sense to take cover. They’d stirred no random fools but an ambush. Tabini’s men were notin possession of this area. They passed side streets that would lead to the harbor, each one of which could become a shooting gallery.
Then a single small light blinked ahead of them and a second red one, twice, to the right.
That might surely be signals of their own allies. Abruptly, Ilisidi took Babsidi around a corner, down a ghostly deserted street, and rode hellbent through the heart of a not-quite-sleeping town toward the harbor.
“Aiji-ma!” someone cried from a window above the street and others yelled it. But the street was dark.
“Go!” shadows yelled at them from an intersection, in utter darkness. “ ’Sidi-ji! Go! Go! Go!”
The darkness of the streets gave way to open night sky and hills and the sheen of water, and they went toward that gap. A light flashed in a window above the street, near the end of the block, and when they reached that open harborside, other atevi shadows appeared with that same flashing of lights, some white, some red, in a pattern that must silently tell Ilisidi and the Guild with them what was critical for them to know.
Ilisidi stopped on harborside against a weather-shelter. A sign by the water and another on the railing said Ferry, and gave a departure schedule, but there was no ferry there for them.
A boat was coming, however. Not a ferry, if one could judge who’d only seen them on television, but a fair-sized boat, just the same.
“Is that someone we want?” Jase asked faintly, having seen it too, as mechieti all around them breathed and blew and harness creaked. One could just make out the spreading disturbance of the boat’s wake, as, against a shadow of low hills well across the water, it made its way on a diagonal toward them.
“ Late,” Ilisidi breathed. “After all these years, every damned appointment, Geigi is still late, damn him!” She signaled Babsidi to extend a leg, and got down—a glistening dark trail was on her hand, and Cenedi wanted immediately to see to it, but: “It’s a damned plaster-chip,” she said. “The man’s revised his arrival time three times—half an hour more, he says, and he’s stilllate!”