Invader Page 3

  He ducked to the side, to the limit he could, caught sight of Hanks and her guards. “You,” he yelled out, “be on that plane, Ms. Hanks. You’re entirely out of line!”

  “Show me the order from the Department.”

  “I’ll show you an arrest warrant, next thing you see.”

  “Bren-ji,” Jago said, and with an inexorable grip on his arm, hurried him toward the lift, as he heard angry atevi voices behind them, Banichi ordering Hanks’ guards to get her back to her residency and not to the airport.

  Which countermanded his orders, ominous note; Banichi derived his authority and his instructions from Tabini; and Banichi was in no good mood as he overtook them at the lift door. They went inside; Banichi followed them in and pushed the lift button to take them up.

  “Banichi-ji,” Bren said. “I fear I aggravated the situation. Not to excuse it, but she believes she was slighted in the Department sending me here without notice to her. That was the gist of it.”

  “Nadi,” Banichi said, still hot. “I will report that interpretation to those who can judge.”

  He’d never seen Banichi this angry, not even under fire, and he wasn’t inspired to continue on the subject. It wanted extensive phone calls to straighten this one out—one hoped before the plane received orders to clear atevi airspace. Hanks had been, even on a second and third thought, entirely out of line back there. He couldn’t read what was afoot—except that Hanks belonged on that outbound plane, and that, slow-witted as he might be thanks to the painkiller, he wasn’t taking undue offense.

  It wasn’t a friendship. He and Hanks had never liked each other, not in university, not in the Foreign Office, not in the halls of the Department. Their candidacies for the office had had different political supporters. He’d won; he’d become Wilson-paidhi’s designated successor. She’d ended up as alternate, being far less fluent—she’d had the political patronage in the executive of the Department, but he’d had her on technicalities and nuances of the language in ways the selection process couldn’t ignore, no matter Hanks’ friends in high places.

  But that she met him, clearly in breach of the Treaty, and threw a public tantrum—God, he didn’t know what insanity had gotten into the woman. It shook him.

  Probably she’d been blindsided as he’d been—one branch of the State Department moving faster than Shawn Tyers in the Foreign Affairs branch could get hold of the paidhi-successor through the phone system, possibly this afternoon.

  Or, equally a possibility during any crisis between atevi and humans or atevi and atevi, the phone system might be shut down between Mospheira and the mainland. An hours-long phone blackout was certainly no excuse for Hanks’ outburst; it was precisely when the paidhi was most supposed to use his head. He hadn’t liked Hanks, but he’d never considered her a total fool.

  The arm ached from the jolt he’d taken against the wall. He wasn’t up to physical or mental confrontations today. Banichi had apparently reacted in temper, a first; Hanks had blown up; and, what was more, Hanks’ security had been set personally in the wrong, publicly embarrassed and outranked. You didn’t do that to atevi loyal to you. You didn’t put them in that position.

  An atevi internal crisis, which he greatly feared could be the occasion of his precipitate recall—some shake-up ricocheting through atevi government—was no time to fine-tune his successor’s grasp of protocols, especially when she went so far as to attack him in public and launch her security against his, who, on loan from Tabini himself, far outranked her middling-rank guards. This performance deserved a report and a strong warning.

  More immediately, he needed to get on the phone to Tabini and Mospheira and get Hanks out of here. They could assuredly hold the plane for Hanks. There was no more important cargo Mospheiran Air carried than the paidhi and the paidhi-successor in transit, and it could sit there until they got Hanks aboard.

  Two phone calls necessitated, Hanks and a security glitch, inside a minute of debarking; God, he had much rather go to the apartment he knew, his comfortable little affair on the lower tier of the building. It had a bed he was used to and servants he could deal with—

  And a garden door, which had, in the paidhi’s suddenly critical and controversial rise to prominence in atevi society, become an egregious security hazard.

  That fact came through to him with particular force as the lift cranked to a halt and he saw the floor indicator saying, not 1, the public level, but 3, the tightest security not only in the Bu-javid but anywhere on the mainland.

  2

  The Atigeini residence certainly lacked, in Bren’s estimation, the charm of his single room on the lower garden court—but one couldn’t apply a word like charm to a palace.

  There was a staff of, Jago informed him, setting down his computer beside the reception room door, fifty. Fifty servants to keep the place in order.

  Grand baroque, maybe. Extravagance, definitely.

  Gilt and silver wash on the cabinets and tables.

  Priceless murals. Gilded carvings. He only wanted a bed. A place, a closet, a couch to sit on, anywhere to let his arm stop aching.

  “Nadiin,” a woman said, bowing, as she met them in the foyer, “nand’ paidhi. My name is Saidin, chief of staff. Welcome.”

  “Nand’ Saidin,” Bren murmured, and reflexively returned the bow, stiff arm and all. She was clearly a woman of dignity and proper decorum, even gifted on the sudden with a human guest. “I regret very much disarranging the staff. Thank you so much for your courtesy.”

  “Our lady is pleased to provide you comfort, nand’ paidhi. Would you care to see the arrangement of the premises?”

  Banichi frowned and looked to him for opinion—but one could hardly, under the circumstances of being offered a palace, decline the honor.

  “I’d be delighted, nand’ Saidin. Thank you.”

  “Please do us the honor,” Saidin murmured, and walked ahead of him, Banichi and Jago close behind. Saidin was middle-aged, slender—her coat was beige brocade, her slippers matching, in the very latest fashion; her braid was a simple affair, incorporating pink and green ribbons in the heraldic style of centuries of service to aristocracy. She was of that class of servants, clearly, born, not hired, to the lifelong duty of a particular house to which she was possibly, though unofficially, related. He knew the type—the sort of woman, he thought, who deserved both respect for her position and understanding for her passionate devotion to the premises.

  “This is the outer section, nand’ paidhi, which serves all the formal functions, with the state dining room, the reception salon, the post-of-guard, which has been modernized…. The inner rooms are the master bedrooms, each with bath. The bedrooms all give out onto a circular salon surrounding the private dining hall….”

  Hand-loomed carpets and needlework drapes. The paidhi was never, in the interests of his job, a cultural illiterate, and the areas of his brain that didn’t at the moment have all they could handle in etiquette, security and the animal instincts of balance, were respectfully absorbing all the nuances of regional and period design around him. Mospheira imported handmade as well as synthetic fabrics, some very expensive, but Mospheira had seen this kind of work only once, a single sample in a glass case in the War Museum.

  And in this apartment, far more extravagant than Tabini’s own, one walked on such carpets. In the reception salon next to the entry, one looked out clear glass windows past priceless draperies, intricately figured in muted gold, to the same view that Tabini’s apartment enjoyed next door: the tiled roofs of the historic Old City spread out below the hill, the blue range of the Bergid—scantly visible on this stormy evening, beneath gray and burdened clouds. Wind, rain-laden, breathed through the apartment from open windows and hidden vents alike. He’d transited climates as well as provinces, begun to feel summer was decidedly over, and, now, felt as if he’d skipped across months and come in on another spring, another world, a situation months, not days, removed.

  The paidhi was a little giddy. Doing s
urprisingly well, considering. He wasn’t sorry to have the tour. He’d grown not merely security conscious but security obsessive in recent days. He wanted to know the lay of the place, and whether there were outside doors, and whether a footfall echoing from one direction was surely a servant and from the other potentially an intruder.

  “Are there other outside doors?” he asked. “Even scullery exits?”

  “All external exits are to the foyer,” Banichi said. “Very secure.”

  “There have been extensive revisions in the early part of this century,” Saidin said. “You’ll notice, however, that the stone and the wood matches exactly. Lord Sarosi did personal research to locate the old quarry, which presently supplies stone for other restorations within the Bu-javid, including the new west portico….”

  The rest passed in increasing haze—the salon, the solarium, the bedrooms, the dining area. The staff, all women, so far as he saw, appeared and vanished discreetly, opened doors and closed them as the head of staff silently directed, turned on lights and turned them off again, whisked imaginary dust off a sideboard and straightened a tasseled damask runner—forty-nine additional and mostly invisible servants, a propitious number, Bren was sure, to remain, safeguarding the historic family premises and maintaining decorum in the face of human presence.

  And everything spoke of a mathematical calculation underlying the decor—the eye learned to pick it out, down to the color and number of the dried flowers in the frequent and towering bouquets.

  Every measure of the place was surely propitious for the lady’s family, down to the circular baji-naji figure centered in the beautifully appointed formal dining area: Fortune and Chance, chaos in the center of the rigid number-governed design of the rooms.

  The room began to spin about that center, and the paidhi, in his private, pain-edged haze, suddenly hoped to not faint on the antique carpet. He was by now only and exclusively interested in the guest bedchamber, and the bed they said would be his, next on the tour—

  He walked in, behind the gracious madam Saidin, into a room of immense proportions, with silver satin bedclothes, gold coverlet, gilt bedstead supported by gilt heraldic beasts—a bed wide enough for him and half the Mospheiran Foreign Office. The modern coverlet, Saidin said, exactly duplicated one of the fifty-eighth century, which had been on the bed when the last family occupant of the bedchamber, a fifty-ninth century lord, had met an untimely and probably messy end.

  The family had declined to use it thereafter, but the numbers of the place had been altered to remove the infelicitous influences—two bluewood cabinets of precisely calculated dimensions were the addition that, the paidhi could be sure, guaranteed the harmony of the occupant. The chief of staff would be delighted to provide the figures, should the paidhi desire.

  Six guest bedrooms, besides his own, each with its private bath; halls with doubtless felicitous arrangements of furnishings. He had no desire to question Atigeini judgment, and every desire to stay and prove the bed unhaunted, but the gentle majordomo was clearly proud of the next rooms, which she called, in her soft voice, “The most charming area of the house, lady Damiri’s private residence,” which she was sure the paidhi would find congenial to his work. Lady Damiri had, as an unprecedented favor, opened even her personal library and sitting rooms to her human guest—and he didn’t find the will to deny Saidin, who might well have, in that stiff back and formal demeanor, concerns that a human guest would cast gnawed bones on the carpets and leave germs on the china.

  Clearly he was going to be an inconvenience to the staff, genteel servants of a very highborn lady. And he wanted to begin with a good impression—knowing reports would be passed and that gossip would make the rounds if only inside the Atigeini family, in itself a security concern Banichi hadn’t mentioned, but surely took into account. The last thing he wanted to do for his own safety was to alienate the staff.

  So it was through silver-washed doors to the absent lady’s private sitting rooms, a library with floor to ceiling shelves, a very fine book collection with an emphasis, he saw, on horticulture; and then, across the hall, a small, tile-floored solarium with a view of, again, the city and the mountains. Beautifully carved, windowed doors opened onto a balcony about which Banichi and Jago didn’t look at all pleased—a balcony designed, Bren was sure, long before high-powered rifles had entered the repertoire of the Assassins’ Guild.

  Such thoughts swam leisurely through the paidhi’s wavering brain, along with a sharp longing for his comfortable, quiet little garden apartment, and a fevered consideration of the lady of the apartment with her library of books on flowers—but, sadly, not a garden accessible to her—

  He should recommend his lower-level garden to Damiri. She afforded him her hospitality. He could show her a charming place in the lower halls she’d likely never visited in her rich and security-insulated life.

  In that thought the paidhi was growing entirely fuzzy-minded, and he really had rather sit down than go on to tour the breakfast room. He was certain, all credit to Banichi and Jago, that he had the very best and most secure guest room for himself. He was completely satisfied with the historic bed. He thought the library and the private solarium delightful. He couldn’t bear a detailed tour of the other wonders he was sure abounded, which on another day he might have a keen interest as well as the fortitude to see.

  There was a chair at the door of the solarium. He sat down in it with his heart pounding and mentally measured the distance back to the bedroom. He wasn’t sure he could make it.

  “Nadi Bren?” Jago asked as their guide hesitated.

  “A fine chair,” he breathed, and patted its brocade arm. “A very fine chair. Very comfortable. I’ll be very pleased to work in this room. Please—convey my profound thanks to lady Damiri for allowing me this very kind—this very—extraordinary hospitality. I very much regret her inconvenience. But I can’t—” He wasn’t doing well with words at the moment. “I can’t—manage any formality tonight. Please convey to Tabini-aiji my intention—to be in my office tomorrow. It’s just that, tonight—I’d like my computer. And my bed. And a phone.”

  “We’re both to stay here, nadi,” Banichi said. “In these apartments. Guarding you. We’ll carry your messages.” They all towered above him, a black wall of efficiency and implacable hospitality that seemed to cut off the daylight. “Tano will occupy the security station and the small suite at the front door. He’s already moving in—he has arrived with your suitcase. Your belongings will be in the drawers. Algini will join him in the security station, as soon as he’s back from the hospital—we estimate, within a day or two.”

  “Not serious, I hope….”

  “Cuts and contusions. Perfectly fine.”

  “I’m very glad.” His head was going around. He rested his chin on his fist, elbow on the arm of the chair, to fix a center of rotation in the environment, somewhere around Jago’s figure. “I was very glad—very glad you came to the airport. Thank you. I wouldn’t—”—wouldn’t have trusted, was the expression that leaped to mind. He wasn’t censoring quickly enough. He’d made himself a maze of syntax. “—wouldn’t have had such confidence in strangers.”

  Damn, he wasn’t sure how that parsed, either. He might just have insulted Saidin and the whole staff. He couldn’t remember the front end of his own sentence.

  “No difficulty at all,” Banichi said. “Jago and I will establish ourselves in the red and the blue rooms, nearest your own, if that’s agreeable.”

  “Of course.” He didn’t know how Banichi stayed on his feet: Banichi was walking wounded himself, limping slightly all through their tour about the apartment, but Banichi went on functioning, because that was the kind of man Banichi was, while the paidhi—

  “Nadi Bren?”

  The room went quite around. And around. He shut his eyes a second, until it stopped, and he drew a shaky breath. “Nadiin,” he said, determined to settle some details—what was going on, and why the extraordinary security, “is there anythi
ng else you can tell me about my situation? Is there a threat, a difficulty, a matter under debate?”

  “All three,” Jago said.

  “Regarding the ship over our heads?”

  “Among other small matters,” Banichi said. “I regret, Tabini-aiji must see you as soon as possible, nand’ paidhi. I know you’d rather be in bed, but these are our orders. I’ll explain your exhaustion and your inconvenience, and perhaps he’ll come here.”

  “What small matters? What matters? I haven’t had any news since I left.”

  “The hasdrawad and the tashrid. The ship. Nand’ Deana.”

  The hasdrawad and the tashrid he could guess. They were in emergency session. He’d understood he could postpone his speech to them by at least the term of his illness. The ship. That was a given. He knew that was why his presence and his ability to translate was so vital to the aiji. Touchy, the Foreign Office had said of the course of events with it. But—

  “The aiji has not held audience with this Hanks person,” Jago said. “He has not regarded this substitution as legitimate.”

  “But,” Banichi said, “certain individuals have indeed approached Hanks-paidhi. Tabini wishes to talk to you about this situation as soon as possible. Within the hour, if you can possibly manage it.”

  He’d thought he hadn’t the strength to get up. He’d thought he’d no reserves left.

  But the thought of Hanks occupying his office, holding meetings, as Banichi hinted, with God-knew-whom on her own, making her own accommodations on questions he’d resisted, resisting what he’d already settled—in the middle of this crisis—

  It wasn’t a phone-call solution. He needed to know what had happened between Hanks and Tabini before he dropped angry phone calls to Mospheira into the mix.

  “I absolutely need to talk to Tabini,” he said. “Now. I’ll go there.” The room might still be going around, but he had a sudden sense of what he had to focus on.