Foreigner

Maybe it was a point all paidhiin got to. Maybe he was the most naive, maybe because he’d gone into a relationship with the most friendly of aijiin, and it was so damned easy to ignore the warnings in every text he’d ever studied and fall right into the same trap as the first humans on the planet… expecting atevi to be human. Expecting atevi to do what one naturally expected nice, sane human people to do and, God help him twice, what he wantedatevi to do, what he emotionally neededatevi to do, instead of himself waking up, paying attention to danger signals, and doing the job he’d been sent here for.

He shouldhave made that phone call, back in Shejidan, if he’d had to make it with Bu-javid guards battering down the door. He shouldn’t be thinking, even at this hour, that Tabini was under some sort of pressure and desperately neededhim back in Shejidan, because if that was the case, then the television network Tabini tightly managed wouldn’t be looking for interviews to prove the paidhi was a nice, easy-going friendly fellow, not some shadow-villain plotting world domination or contriving death-rays to level cities.

I will notbetray you, Bren-ji?

What in hell did that mean, before Jago lit out the door and down the hall at the next thing to a dead run? And where’s the gun, Jago? Where is Banichi’s gun?

The logs burned down and fell, showering sparks up the flue. He put on another, and settled back to his book.

Not a word back from Banichi or Jago about what was wrong out there—whether someone had breached the security perimeter, or whether someone odd had simply arrived at the airport or whether they’d had some dire word from Tabini.

He flipped the page, figured out he’d stopped reading the second time somewhere in the middle of it, and turned it back, with a dogged effort to concentrate on the text, in atevi directions, and to make sense out of the antique, ornate type style.

The lights went on again, out again.

Damn, he thought, and looked at the window. The rain was down to spatters now, gray cloud and a scattering of bright drops on the glass. The candles cast a golden glow. White light came from the window, as if the clouds were finally thinning up there.

He laid the book down, got up with the intention of having a look at the weather—heard someone in his bedroom and saw Djinana coming through from the back hall.

“The transformer or a bad wire?” he asked Djinana conversationally.

“One hopes, a wire,” Djinana said, and bowed, at the door. “Nadi, a message for you.”

Message? In this place of no telephones?

Djinana offered him a tiny scroll—Ilisidi’s seal and ribbon, he judged before he even looked, because the red and black was Tabini’s house. He opened it with his thumbnail, wondering was it something to do with the after-breakfast engagement. A cancellation, perhaps, or postponement due to the weather.

I need to speak with you immediately, it said. I’ll meet you in the downstairs hall, It had Cenedi’ssignature.

IX

«^»

Downstairs all the oil lamps were lit and a fire burned in the hearth. The outer hall, with its ancient weapons and its trophy heads and its faded, antique banners, was all golds and browns and faded reds. The upward stairs and the retreating hall below them were cast in shadow, interrupted by circles of lamplight from upstairs and down. Power was still out. Power looked to stay out, this time, and Bren regretted not wearing his coat downstairs. Someone must have had the front door open recently. The whole lower hall was cold.

But he expected no long meeting, no formality, and the fire moderated the chill. He stood warming his hands, waiting—heard someone coming from Ilisidi’s part of the house, and cast a glance toward that recessed, main-floor hallway.

It was indeed Cenedi, dark-uniformed, with sparks of metal about his person, epitome of the Guild-licensed personal bodyguard. He thought that Cenedi would come as far as the fire, and that Cenedi would deliver him some private word and then let him go back to his supper—but Cenedi walked only far enough to catch his eye and beckoned for him to follow.

Follow him—where? Bren asked himself, not as easy about this little shadow-play as about the simple summons downstairs—as difficult to refuse as the rest of Ilisidi’s invitations.

But in this turn of events he had a moment’s impulse to excuse himself upstairs on the pretext of getting his coat, and to send Djinana to find Banichi or Jago—which he knew now he should already have done. Dammit, he said to himself, if he had been half thinking upstairs…