Who were eastern.
Wait until that hit the news.
He bowed his way to the edge of the group, found Jago and Tano with him, and said, “We should go back to the apartment, nadiin-ji.
Quickly.”
“Nandi,” Jago said, never questioning the decision, not explaining where Banichi and Algini were at the moment. Bren had the notion of business in progress, business likely regarding the would-be assassin, and deep inquiries among security that had led far outside the chamber and possibly all the way to the Assassins’ Guild—where Algini had a word or two to say.
But best, he thought, that he should clear the scene and render matters less complicated for his staff. There was a problem, a serious problem working somewhere in the vicinity, no question of that, and Jago and Tano needed to get him to safety and get back here to support Banichi and Algini in whatever was going on.
He headed for the side door, kept quiet the entire way out of the assembly and into the small service hall, where a few bodyguards waited, notably Ilisidi’s young men.
Safe, then, he said to himself, drawing an easier breath. Trust Ilisidi’s men, yes, absolutely. Just let them live through the next dozen hours. Let Algini’s allies win inside the Guild.
And let him get a phone link to the Island, and a relay to Jase up on the station, to explain the good and the bad of the current situation. Rumors had to be flying from the capital to the coast by now. He wasn’t sure how long he might stay in office—or stay alive, he wasn’t sure what might develop if he never got to explain to Mospheira or to Lord Geigi exactly what had gone on, before it grew more tangled than it was, and before they had to send another paidhi over here to try to deal with a general discontent with humans.
They exited quickly into the main hall, headed for the lift. The carpeted, beautiful hall outside had a gathering crowd of legislators and their staffers, particularly those of the tashrid, seeking their own apartments upstairs as the legislature left the chambers. Such a traffic was nothing unusual after a session. It was not what he wanted to encounter. He’d hoped to have beaten it in his retreat.
“The paidhi,” someone exclaimed, and heads turned. “Nand’ paidhi,” someone addressed him, and that address he was obliged to acknowledge: The speaker, the man coming toward him, was the lord of Dur, to whom he owed ever so much.
“Nandi.” He bowed, and by then others were pressing on him with enthusiastic protestations, Jago and Tano establishing a line of retreat to the lift car by the reach of arms toward that wall.
“It was extraordinary, extraordinary,” Dur said to him, as he heard the lift door open. Other legislators pressed close about him, even touched him, all positive, thus far. The lift made its departure, most of the crowd blocked from reaching it.
“Baji-naji,” he murmured to Dur’s enthusiasm, that eternal expression of events in imbalance. “One expects security to be quick in investigation of the matter—one fears now it was aimed at my person, and one was entirely wrong to have moved near the aiji—”
Not to mention flattening him to the floor.
“But well done,” the graying lord of Maidin said—a woman who had supported the aiji in critical votes, and the expression found several voices in approbation, and more hands actually touched him, a strange and uneasy sensation among atevi, who did not touch, except among intimates. It was eerily like an atevi family occasion, as if, among these diverse lords some sort of current was running that he could not tap or quite understand—an intoxication that led ordinarily dignified atevi he did not even know to brush hands against his back, his shoulders, and, stranger still, led his bodyguard to allow it. Anyone could approach him, anyone could touch him, and the lord of Hajidin actually gripped his arm with bruising force, and let it go again.
“Nandiin,” he said, shaken by the pain. It dawned on him that, the aim of the threat aside, he alone had been in position to do what many in the hall would have instinctively done. He had carried out their instinct to protect their aiji, no matter his own, human-driven reasons for doing it, and the motion was what counted with them. That was both the trap and the fact of the case.
He had acted for them. It was that tricky word muidi, that almost meant gratitude, and somewhat meant surrogate, God help him—Jago and Tano didn’t extract him not only because this crowd posed no threat, it had a political dimension. It wasn’t forgiveness they offered the paidhi; atevi were never keen on forgiveness, in their own pragmatic way, having no trust in its future, given their own passions. It was acknowledgment of a feeling they felt that did have a future, a sentiment of belonging and identity, and he was utterly awash in it, carried along by it—literally, as the crowd’s pressure moved him away from the lift and into a corner.
Lord Tatiseigi appeared in the mix, arm in a sling, the lord of the Atageini capturing his person from his other possessive protector.
There was a fierce strength in the old man’s good hand, at least enough for a human, and it closed on his arm.
“Lord Bren,” the old man announced, “the guest of the Atageini, the protector of the heir—” Lord Tatiseigi let no one forget that heredity. “And clearly of the household of the aiji-dowager, our ally and associate, and of the Ragi of the center. The Padi Valley Association stands firm in its solidity. The upstart who has troubled his own house and usurped rightful authority within the Padi region has been refused admittance. Let fools receive him, and let the Associations of the center—”
“And west!” someone shouted, while the blood left Bren’s hand and his bodyguard found no way to rescue him. Now the younger lord of the Ajuri had shown up and pushed in.
“—and the west!” the old man said, not missing a beat, nor surrendering him to Damiri’s father, “and the east and the north and the south, besides! Let us gather up the power and deal with traitors as they deserve! Approbation, we say, approbation for the safe return of the aiji-dowager and the heir, our great-grandnephew, and our support of the Ragi aiji and his allies forever!”
The old bastard, Bren thought, wondering if his arm was going to break; but the Atageini lord had cannily swept up the broken bits of the alliance and gotten them all concentrated on the dowager, the heir, and Tatiseigi’s relationship to the aiji— never mind one inconvenient human, who found no breath to speak and wished he could only get his arm free.
“And the paidhi-aiji!” Dur shouted out, reinserting the human into the argument.
“The paidhi-aiji!” several cheered, and at that point, thank God, the old man finally let go his arm. Bren resisted the urge to grab the injury and massage it. He bowed, instead, bowed several times while backing up, in the manner of a mere court official, not the vastly overtitled Lord of the Heavens.
“And never forgetting the bravery of the lord of the Atageini and his people,” Bren threw in, in a breath within the racket. “And the Taibeni, and the lord of Dur, who have come so many times to our rescue—” A fast breath, and a chance of rapid escape. “Nandiin, your leave. The paidhi will leave matters in very capable hands.”
There were cheers, a few pats on the back and on the aching arm. But he escaped the corner by retreating along the wall to the lifts, and Jago, again thank God, had likely used a security key to get control of the nearest one and hold it open for him.
He made it inside. He leaned against the wall, looking at Tano and Jago.
“Well done,” Jago said.
“Was it?”
“Well done in all things, Bren-ji.”
The Bren-ji was the part that warmed his soul. Not nand’ paidhi, not Lord of the Heavens. Just Bren-ji, whose staff no one could equal.