“Come, young sir,” Bren said, collecting the boy with an arm about his back. “Let our security do its job.”
“I have a gun,” Cajeiri announced, this boy scantly eight.
“Keep it in your pocket,” Bren said, “as I do mine. If you draw it, you will immediately strike an enemy eye as a threat, and you will attract bullets to both of us, vastly annoying our bodyguards.”
“I want to fight!”
“Not even your father wants to fight, young sir, nor do I. Let us stand here at the start of the hallway, and not be in the way of those whose business it is to protect us. That is our best service.”
“My father is up there!”
That he was, right up near the windows, which security would not like, but there was damned little arguing with Tabini at this moment. The headlights of the train picked out rough-hewn rock in their distant view of the windshield.
Then smooth concrete, and always that row of lights along the top of the tunnel—lights dimmed to insignificance in the blaze of fire that burst ahead of them. The whole train shook, and kept going through a sheet of fire, right on to the white flare of artificial light that dawned in the windshield.
Multiple tracks, the broad platforms for freight and passengers, cars on the siding and another train engine apparently moving, but on another track, headed out.
Home, the station from which he’d left on every journeyc and seen now through the windshield of an engine cab bristling with firearms, a vantage on the place he’d never in his life imagined to have. The whole Bu-javid was above their heads now, the hill, the capital, the center of Sheijidan and the aishidi’tat.
The train slowed, hissed, squealed to a halt, and suddenly a fracture appeared in the windshield glass, silent, compared to the scream of the brakes. No one even ducked—only one of Tabini’s guard stepped between him and the window, and at Bren’s elbow, Cajeiri moved forward.
“Do not have the gun out, young sir,” Bren said, grabbing a coat sleeve and wishing he could confiscate that deadly item from immature hands. “Keep your head down.”
“But—” from Cajeiri, and at that moment Jago stepped near and seized Bren’s arm. He seized Cajeiri’s in turn, and took him where Jago led, which was back into the short corridor, and, bending low under the window, toward the door and the ladder down to the outside.
Out the door then, into the echoing cavern of the terminal and the reek of smoke and explosives in the station.
Jago stopped them half a breath—they were not the first out on that short steel platform: Banichi was. Banichi went down the ladder to the track itself.
“I shall follow you very closely, Jago-ji,” Bren said at her back.
“Use both hands for yourself, if you please.”
“Yes,” Jago said shortly, and dived down after Banichi.
It was relatively quiet, given the noise from the idling engine right at their backs, given, Bren thought, the pounding of his own heart, which he swore was keeping time with the train and just as loud. Two deep breaths on that little nook of a platform. Banichi’s whistled signal pierced the ambient noise.
“We shall go down and to the right,” Jago said, “along by the wheels, then up onto the platform. Follow.”
She moved, instantly, and Banichi was out of sight. “Stay with me,” he said to Cajeiri, and scrambled after Jago, down the atevi-scale ladder, down beside the massive driving wheels. Jago moved ahead of them, staying low, below the concrete lip of the platform, and Bren saw Banichi was up ahead, where a straight steel maintenance ladder led up to the main level. Banichi set a foot on it, reversed his rifle, and put the butt up above his head.
Fire spattered back, missing entirely.
“They are not Guild,” was Jago’s acid comment.
Not Guild. Banichi had ducked down and moved down the trackside, evidently on the hunt. Fire was echoing out from the top of the train.
“Stay here,” Jago said, about to backtrack, and about that time fire broke out from behind them, from up on car level, about where Ilisidi’s car was. Fire came from the windows as well as the top of the cars, directed at what, Bren had no idea. His mind supplied the broad panorama of the Bu-javid terminal, where a loading dock and broad passenger platform ran side by side in the large artificial cavern, with its pillars and buttresses. About fifty meters from the passenger terminal, a handful of freight and business offices, their very walls part of a massive pillar that went up several stories, and about twenty meters beyond that, a rock wall and the inset of a bank of lifts that went straight up into the offices and residences of the Bu-javid itself, doors tastefully enameled in muted tones, themselves an artwork—not to mention the several tapestries and the vases, designed to provide passengers tranquility and pleasant views, before the bustle and hurry of the trains.
Fire rattled out and richocheted off the train engine over their heads. More fire came from right above them, out the windows of the cab, and presumably their people on the roofs of the train had not stayed any longer to be targets—were likely either down within the train or had gotten off onto the platform immediately as they came in and moved out. The whole cavern resounded with gunfire, first in one direction and then another, and he had lost sight of Banichi in one direction and suddenly missed Jago in the other.
They had left him—left him altogether, which they rarely did. She was off down the trackside.
His job was to stay low and stay out of trouble, and this he was resolved to do. “Come,” he said to Cajeiri, spotting a nook beside the massive drive wheels, a nook that led right down under the engine itself, a place grimy and black with grease, but a veritable fortress against most anything that might come.
“What if the train should move, nandi?” Cajeiri asked.
“Then lie flat,” he said. But the train had gotten itself into a position at the end of the line, only the roundtable could face it about, and that only after the cars were detached. Their train was not moving, and could not be moved, no matter a deafening explosion that filled the track area with stinging smoke.
Cajeiri moved to get out. Bren grabbed the coat and hauled him back.
“Great-grandmother,” the boy said.
“The aiji-dowager can take care of herself, young sir. Stay with me. Guild is positioning itself out there, and that thick smoke is part of it. This is not the time for us to be wandering loose.”
He could not read the boy’s face in a dark now compounded by thick smoke. Next, Bren thought, the lights might go. But he heard distant shouts, people calling out for someone to move south.
They were certainly not Guild, he said to himself. He maintained one arm about the boy, the other snugging his computer close. The only flaw in his plan that he could see was that his own staff might not realize he had gone to cover, but he had no means to tell them except to use a pocket com, and that might not be prudent—even if they had time to answer a phone call. He heard little short whistles, low and varied in tone—difficult to get a fix where they were, but those were Guild, likely their own Assassins moving and advising one another of their movements in a code that seemed to shift by agreementc much as he had heard it, he recognized only those signals his staff made with the intent he understand.
Boom. And rattle. The ground itself shook. The lights dimmed significantly, not that there was a thing to see from their vantage between the wheels, and meanwhile the smoke had sunk even to low places, stinging the eyes and making his nose run. He blotted at it, and found his calves cramping as he squatted there, not a good thing if they had to run for it.
Someone moved near them. He saw legs, out between the wheels, but the smoke and the shadow obscured identity.
“Bren-ji.”
Jago’s voice.
“Here,” he said, and let go of Cajeiri’s coat. The boy crawled out ahead of him, and he exited on eye level with Jago, who leaned on a rifle, kneeling on the end of a wooden tie beside the rail.