He saw a map in his mind, a map that showed him the countryside between Adigian and Shejidan, a region crisscrossed with small roads between villages, population quite concentrated in this region, and with many towns of size.
It was a place where, above all else, they had no wish to engage their enemy. Nor would their enemy wish to engage them, here, in the heartland of Tabini’s staunchest allies.
Had they seen the dowager? Was she all right? The boy was asleep again, against his shoulder. He had no wish to badger his staff with the unanswerable, when they were using their spare moments to think of details that might keep them alive.
Eyes shut. There was a period of dark, vaguely punctuated by potholes, turns, and once, the awareness of another episode of crowd noise, while the bus tires hummed over another stretch of concrete pavement.
Like going to the mountains over on Mospheira, that pavement sound.
Like holidays with his family, with Toby and his mother, he and his brother headed up the mountain to ski, their mother to soak up the fireside and a few drinks at the lodgec Squeal of brakes. Loss of momentum.
He waked.
They had come to a fueling station: He saw the pump, and the dusty gray back side of a rural co-op building, with a red tractor with a harrow sitting idle, a wagon nearby piled high with sacks probably of grain, a railway car on a siding, typical of such places.
A truck was ahead of them at the pump. It moved on. They moved on, pulling briskly up to that point. He scanned all about them for a car, for any hint of one. At the same time he heard the bus door open, then heard bumping and thumping about the outside of the bus.
That surely meant they had found fuel, and were taking it on—insurance, he said to himself muzzily, and the boy, exhausted, never woke, though there was a quiet exchange of surmises between Jegari and Antaro behind him.
He doggedly shut his eyes, thinking their calculations about fuel holding out had been wrong. They had diverted over to this other source. They were still considerably out from the city.
The bus started up again, its doors shut.
“The paidhi is asleep,” he heard Jago say, somewhere above him.
“Let him rest a little.”
He wanted to ask about the car, but they went away and he sank into spongy dark nowhere for an indeterminate time, before he realized the boy’s weight had paralyzed his shoulder and he was in pain.
He moved. He lifted his head. He saw countryside rushing by, above a cloud of dust. He saw a bus overcrowded, with weary passengers sitting on the outer arms of seats, or outright sitting in the aisle, asleep, it might be, while a handful stood near the driver.
It was the first time he had had a clear view out the opposite windows, and he saw a riverside, lined with small trees.
He shifted in his seat, chanced to wake the boy, who lifted his weight, blinked at the daylight, and asked where they were.
“Deep in Ragi countryside, young sir.” Bren rubbed his stubbled chin and got his razor from his kit, down between his feet, with his computer. The razor still had enough charge to shave with, and he did that, while Cajeiri visited the accommodation to the rear.
He was still shaving when the boy came back and sat down, and watched in curiosity.
“Can it grow as long as your hair, nandi?” the boy asked.
“It might, young sir. But one has no wish to scandalize the court.”
“Will you do it sometime?”
“What?”
“Grow it that long?”
“Much too uncomfortable, young sir. And not at all becoming.
And it grows just as slowly as hair on your head.”
“You would be as odd as the kyo.”
“That I might, young sir. But by no means as round.”
A laugh, a positive laugh on this chancy, desperate day. Cajeiri bounced onto his knees to see how his young bodyguard fared, the two of them having returned, one at a time, from their own visits to the accommodation. “Have we any breakfast?” he asked, and the two of them delved down into their gear and found grain and fruit bars.
“Would you like one, nandi?”
Now there was a good reason to have resourceful youngsters for company. He took the offering quite gratefully, tucked the razor back into his kit, and sat and ate slowly, finding it filled the empty spot in his belly.
All the while the land passed their windows, like a dream of places remembered. Not that far. Maybe half a day’s travel by these weaving roads, until Shejidanc Whatever that arrival brought them.
Algini came forward and spoke to the driver at one point, paused for a nod and a courtesy, and went back again, dislodging drowsing Dur fishermen the while. Then Banichi went back to Tano and Algini, while Jago talked to the driver, and then consulted the lord of Durc all of which seemed unusual, and perhaps indicative of communications flowing from some part of their caravan. Bren wanted to snag Banichi on his way back, but could find no way to do so without provoking a host of questions from the youngsters: Banichi was looking straight forward at the road visible through the front windshield, and seemed intent on business.
A conference ensued, Banichi with Jago, and then with the driver. Perhaps it was significant that they took a westerly tack at the next branching of the road—perhaps it was not. They bounced along, then hit gravel where another lane intersected.
“The other buses are not following, nandi,” Jegari said in alarm.
Bren turned in his seat, and indeed, the reasonably unobstructed view out the back windows showed the other vehicles going off down the road they had been on.
That was it. “Pardon, young sir.” Bren levered himself out of his window seat and, with stiffness in his legs, walked up to the front of the bus, where Banichi and Jago both stood on the internal steps, watching the road ahead.
They were on a downhill, and a train was stopped on the tracks in the middle of nowhere. A train with a handful of trucks and a couple of automobiles gathered beside it.
“What are we doing, nadiin-ji?” he asked, spotting those two cars with some hope. “We have left the column.”
“They will meet us,” Jago said. “We have other transport.”
The train, clearly. A diversion off their route. Switch and confuse, he had no trouble figuring that. And the cars.
It occurred to him, then, that there was a train station beneath the Bu-javid itself.
And the dowager must have communicated with them, because there was no one else with the brazen nerve to divert them to that route.
He drew a deep breath, already laying out in his mind what he was sure was the dowager’s plan of attack, telling himself the while that the dowager was stark raving mad. Having made herself a target all the way cross-country, now she was hijacking a passenger train—my God, he said to himself, relieved to think she was safe—and appalled to put the pieces together and guess what she was up to.
And all the while he had a longing vision of the hall outside his own apartment, his staff—his long-suffering staff, and Ilisidi’s.
Home.
But changed, there. Attack had come down on Tabini’s people.
Edi was no longer in charge there, that wonderful old man.
For that among other things, Murini deserved no mercy—if they were in the position of dispensing judgments.
The bus bounced and pitched its way along toward the train, and Tatiseigi’s borrowed automobile was there among the trucks and several other cars: He could not see the dowager or Tatiseigi, but he at last caught sight of Cenedi standing on the bottom step of a passenger car, and at that welcome sight his heart skipped.
A body leaned against him, hard, and tried to worm past him, which in all this bus full of tall adults could only be Cajeiri, intent on a view out the window.
“Cenedi!” the boy cried, having gotten his face near the glass.
“Great-grandmother must be in that train car!”