“How long will he stay?” Bren asked Jago directly.
“Not long,” was Jago’s answer. “Tonight perhaps.”
“How did he know his way in the first place?” Bren wondered, because that thought had begun to nag him.
“Banichi sent him with that instruction” Jago said. “I’m very sure. And Banichi won’t have missed a thing.”
“What in hell do you do if you meet guards?”
“One will endeavor not to meet guards,” Jago said.
Some things there was just no disputing; and in some arguments there was simply nothing left to say. Banichi would come back. He believed that implicitly. Banichi would come back.
And true to his instruction, Nojana reported his intention to depart at midnight, enjoyed a cup of tea with him and the security staff, thanked the servants for their attentions, and stood ready to walk back down the corridors to take a lift to the core, with no more baggage than he’d arrived with… to the outward eye.
And could a human observer miss a tall shadow of an atevi in a pale yellow corridor, where there was no place to take cover?
Atevi hearing was good; but that good? He was doubtful. Banichi was armed, and needed no weapons against unarmed humans; but the very last thing he wanted was harm to the crew, even of a minor sort.
“I have all you’ve entrusted to me,” Nojana said, “nand’ paidhi.”
“I have no doubt,” Bren said. Nojana seemed to read his worry as a lack of confidence in him, and he had no wish to convey that at all. “I know Banichi has none.”
“Nandi,” Nojana said.
Then Tano quite deftly opened the door and let him out, one more time to trace his way through foreign corridors.
Chapter 19
They expected Banichi to arrive sometime after midnight. “Wake me” he said to Jago, who shared the bed with him that night. He knew her hearing, and her light sleeping, that she would in no wise sleep through Banichi’s arrival.
“Don’t be angry,” she asked of him.
“I shan’t be,” he said, lying close beside her. When he thought about it, he knew he was disturbed, and wished Banichi had asked before he did such a thing; but anger was too strong a word. Banichi was rarely wrong, never wrong, that he could immediately recall.
“Has he ever made a mistake?” he asked her, and Jago gave a soft laugh.
“Oh, a few,” Jago said, Jago, who knew Banichi better, he suspected, than anyone in the world or off it. “There was the matter of a rooftop, in the south. There was the matter of believing a certain human would take orders.”
“A certain human has his own notions,” Bren said. “And one of them is not to have my staff wandering the halls and me not knowing.”
“In the aiji’s service,” Jago said, “we overrule the paidhi. And the aiji’s orders involve the paidhi’s safe return.”
“The aiji’s orders also involve the paidhi’s success in his mission.”
“Just so, but caution. Caution.”
“Caution doesn’t get the job done.” She distracted him. Jago was good at that. He outright lost track of his argument.
Besides, he intended it for Banichi, when Banichi got back, after midnight.
But he waked in the morning first aware that Jago was not beside him, that the lights in the corridor were bright, and that breakfast was in the offing, all at one heartbeat.
Two heartbeats later he was sure it was past midnight and past dawn and Jago hadn’t done as he’d asked her to.
Or things hadn’t happened as they ought to have happened.
He rolled out of bed and seized up a robe, raking his hair out of his face on the way to the central hall, across it to the security station where Tano and Algini and Jago perched at their console… aware of him from the moment he’d come out the door.
“Where’s Banichi?” he asked at once. “Did he get back?”
“No, nadi” Jago said, and it was clear she was worried. “We have no information.”
“Did he express any belief he might be late?”
“He said it was a possibility,” Jago said, “if he found no way to move discreetly.”
“Discreetly down a bare synthetic hallway,” Bren said in distress. “I’m worried, damn it.”
“I think it well possible that he delayed with the shuttle crew” Jago said. “If something came to their attention or something changed, he might wait to know. In all his instruction there was no indication he considered the schedule rigid.”
“So what did Nojanawalk into? He went out there expecting an easy walk home.”
“Nojana is of our Guild,” Tano said, “and expects everything.”
“I have no doubt of him, then,” Bren said, “but all the same, Nadiin-ji, what is either of them to do if they meet some crewman going about his business?”
“Doors will malfunction,” Algini said.
“Doors will malfunction. I hope not to open onto vacuum, Nadiin!”
“One knows the route that was safe,” Tano said. “Banichi did consider the hazards, nandi, but he wishes very much to assure our line of retreat is open.”
“I agree with his purpose, but the risk…”
“Bren-ji,” Jago said, “something changed when the power failed. The patterns of activity that we monitor here have shifted, whether because part of this station is no longer usable, we have no idea.”
“How do you know these things?” He understood how they monitored activity in the Bu-javid, where they had the entire apartment wired, including some very lethal devices, but here in a structure where they had no other installations…
They had… one other installation.
Shai-shanitself.
And if in fact there was already an Assassins’ Guild presence on the station, at least a periodic one, with the comings and goings of the shuttle, then there might be equipment which came and went in Nojana’s baggage.
“We monitor sounds and activities,” Algini said. “Very faint ones. We know the pattern of the station from before; we know it now. The structure speaks to us. Now, and ever since the power outage, it speaks differently.”
Being paidhi-aiji, having mediated the transfer of human technology to the mainland, as well as being within very high atevi councils, he knew of atevi innovations that bore no resemblance to technology he knew on Mospheira, and no few of those innovations were in surveillance.
He had had a certain amount to do with the galley specifications: in this collection of monitors and panels and instruments his security had brought aboard… he knew very little, asked very little, mindful of his allegiance these days, and only hoped never to walk into one of the traps that guarded his sleep.
“Can you show me?” he asked.
“Yes,” Algini said.
It was not an encouraging image, knowing the little he did know regarding the station. It indicated a change since the power outage, at least, a change in where Algini estimated personnel were grouped, where they traveled. Everything pointed to a disruption of a region forcing detours.
“I’ve no idea what caused it,” Bren said. “I can’t ask Kaplan-nadi. It would give too much away. I refuse to ask Cl to be off talking to the captains if one of our people is lost.”
“Yet one can’t break pattern,” Tano said quietly. “Nandi, it would seem wisest to do as you always do.”
“Bedevil Cl and ask for Jase?” Bren muttered. “Do you see any shift of activity in the area of the shuttle?”
“Nothing out of previous pattern there,” Algini said, “except activity that would be consistent with fueling.”
“Very well done.” He was astonished by his security, astonished by what information they couldprovide him.
But none of it said why Banichi was late.
“I think,” he said slowly, “that I’d rather rely on the chance Banichi’s chosen this delay, and that anything I could do might bring adverse consequences. Do you think so, Nadiin-ji?”
“One believes so” Jago said, but he had the most uneasy notion that she might make a move after her partner—her father—without telling him in advance.