Foreigner

Four of them to handle him. Ludicrous. But his legs weren’t working well. One foot was asleep. His hands wouldn’t work. He tried to get up before they found a way of their own, and two of them dragged him up and locked arms behind him to hold him on his feet, although one of them could have carried him. “Sorry,” he said, with the foot collapsing at every other step as they took him out the door, and he felt the fool for opening his mouth—he was so damned used to courtesies, and they seemed so damned useless now. “Just tellCenedi,” he said as they were going down the corridor. “Where are we going?”

“Nand’ paidhi, just walk. We’re ordered not to answer you.”

Which meant they wouldn’t. They owed him nothing. That they gave him back courtesy was comforting, at least indicating that they didn’t personally hold a grudge, but it didn’t mean a thing beyond that. Man’chiwas everything—wherever theirs was, you couldn’t argue that.

At least they took him up the steps, into the hall. He held out a hope they might pass Cenedi’s office, and they did—but that door was shut, and no light showed under it. Damn, he thought, one more hope gone to nothing—it shook him, ever so small a shaking of his remaining understanding, but the thoughts kept wanting to scatter to what was happening, what might happen, whose these men were—and that wasn’t important, because he couldn’t doanything about it. He could sort through the questions they’d asked, and try to figure what they wouldask—that… that was the only thing that would do any good; and he couldn’t trust that the persistent question about the gun was even the important one—it might be what they wanted him to focus on while they chipped away at what he did know… while they figured out where the limits of his knowledge were and how useful he was likely to be to them.

There wasn’t any damned launch facility—that was the scariest question, and they were wrong about that, they had to be wrong about that: he couldn’t make it true by any stretch of the imagination. But the stockpiling—they had the trade figures. He couldn’t lie about that. Atevi had finally gotten the lesson humans had taught, knew they were accumulating materials useful in certain kinds of development, and he could tell them far too much, if they asked the right questions and used the right drugs. Cenedi had said the same thing his own administrators had said: he wasn’t going to be any hero, unless he could think of a better lie than he’d thought of, impromptu, already… and build on what he’d said.

God, only hopetying the gun to Tabini was their immediate objective, and not the rest of it—they hadn’t beaten Tabini, couldn’t have, and still be asking what they were asking—

But he couldn’t give them any more on that score.

Couldn’t. Daren’t. Couldn’t play the game down that dangerous path. He needed to use his head, and his head wasn’t all that clear at the moment—he hurt, and the thoughts went tumbling and skittering at every distraction, into what might happen and what he could do and daren’t do and how much choice he might have.

They brought him around by the kitchens, and down the corridor to the stairs he’d once suspected might be wired—Ilisidi’s back stairs, her apartment, and her wing of the fortress, completely away from the rest of Malguri.

“Banichi!” he yelled as they began that climb—and his guards took a numbing, tighter grip on him. “Banichi! Tano! Help!” He shoved to pitch them all down the stairs—grabbed the railing with one hand and couldn’t hold on to it. One guard got an arm around him, tore him loose and squeezed the breath out of him as his partner recovered his balance.

“Banichi!” he yelled till his throat cracked; but he wasn’t strong enough to throw them once they were on their guard. They carried him upstairs between them, and down the upstairs hall, and through the massive doors to liisidi’s apartments.

Thick doors. Soundproof doors, once they shut. Ilisidi’s premises smelled of floral scent, of wood fire, of lamp oil. There was no more point in fighting them. He caught his breath and went on his own feet as best he could—he’d done his best and his worst: he let them steer him without violence, now that they were out of hearing of help—across polished wooden floors and antique carpets, past delicate furniture and priceless art and, as everywhere in Malguri, the heads of dead animals—some extinct, hunted out of existence.

A gasping breath caught the clean, cold scent of rain-washed air. Windows or balcony doors were open somewhere, wafting a breeze through the rooms, the next of which were in shadow, lamps unlit, air colder and colder as they went, finally through a dark drawing room he remembered, and toward the open-air chill of the balcony.