Inheritor (10 page)

He
trusted
Tano and Algini. He'd had no hesitation at all to put himself in their hands during the trip.

But he grew just a little anxious when unscheduled planes veered into his path. It probably was exactly as security said, an island pilot not used to the concept of air
traffic
, let alone
control
. The son of the lord of Dur was not a likely sophisticate, much less a plotter in high places.

He shut his eyes and was
there
again, in the same plane seat where he'd spent so many hours this last, long, meandering trip. He could all but feel the cool surface of the juice glass in his fingers, a contrast to the heat of the water that pounded down on him.

He could if he thought about it look again out that aircraft window onto the vast mineral-blessed south, Talidi province just off the wingtip, misty blue-green hills, grass with that slightly younger green of springtime, well advanced in the south, and all that pollen, hazy clouds of it.

Talidi province and the Tasigin Marid.

He couldn't say he blamed atevi for asking themselves at least now and again what the paidhi-aiji
or
their esteemed aiji had in mind for the nation, in moving the paidhi into such prominence and now having
two
paidhiin in residence under the same roof, when the very essence of the Treaty was emphatically
one
paidhi. Some lords of the Western Association had indeed been more than a little suspicious of human motives even before the ship had shown up.

While a handful of truly devout conspiracy-theorists believed Tabini had known the ship was coming back and that he'd been in collusion with the human president on Mospheira from the day of his accession: a more unlikely combination one couldn't imagine.

But since the events of today,
everything
in that equation had to be re-reckoned.

Not that one expected immediate capitulation in the fall of a major player in the opposition to Tabini today: atevi lords weren't so graceless or quick to desert former allies. But they might sidle gracefully and as unobtrusively as possible closer to center, and closer to Geigi, who would thus undergo the most dangerous period of his rise in importance, because the neighbors would try him, now. They would test Geigi's cleverness, his finesse, his business acumen and his personal dignity. It was almost a sure bet that no less than Direiso would, directly or indirectly, test Geigi's security.

But no one had to tell an atevi lord
that
.

And since, with the lord of the Tasigin Marid dead, Talidi province, in which the villages of the Marid lay, now found its best customer for industrial supplies in lord Geigi's province,
that
would surely give the pro-Tabini dissidents and the worker associations within Talidi province the encouragement to turn toward Tabini and the central authority, not toward the coalition that had been trying to form in the Marid.

It was typical of Tabini's politics. A river would be flowing in one direction, and Tabini would place a charge to divert it so suddenly into another channel the fish swimming in it had no warning.

As Direiso up in the Padi Valley (she was not a peninsular lord) had to be doubling her security this evening, perhaps not even yet believing the degree of danger she was in if she didn't change course fast: she was clever and quick — she was alive because of that. But she was self-confident, meaning she
had
no man'chi, meaning she
felt
no man'chi, as aijiin of highest rank had and felt none, and was not a follower of anyone, but attracted man'chi:
that
meant she was dangerous in a way other atevi weren't psychologically armed to be.

Her followers were scattered, and
would
act after her death, breaking up into smaller associations difficult to track and possibly attracting others due to the different chemistry of the sub-associations. That was the protection high lords always had against assassination: kill them and you had not one large problem but twenty smaller ones, harder to track.

But so did Tabini have that defense. More so. Direiso only
thought
she could ride the waves Tabini's fall would generate. It was a time when atevi, threatened from the skies, could least afford to be indecisive, and most of the lords of the Western Association knew that Tabini was the only leader saving them from civil chaos.

He truly wished the Direiso matter were settled. He
didn't
trust any stated changes of direction or belief on her part. Even if atevi emotion
and
politics made it instinctually natural for her to make such changes, he wouldn't believe them. He'd never met the woman but he knew he didn't
like
her or any one of her followers.

Another psychological warning flag.
He
couldn't feel it as natural,
he
couldn't judge in his own blood and bone what was natural for any atevi to do, and he couldn't help but think how very, very delicately poised the whole of human and atevi survival was right now.

Lose Tabini? There'd be a bloodbath the like of which the world had never seen.

Let the conservatives on Mospheira get out of hand?

Same result.

He was just outright shaken by today's events. He admitted it to himself finally. He'd been riding a fierce downhill course, and leaping from point to point to point until it was damn well no good mapping out where he'd been: where he'd been didn't exist any more. There was no going back to the atevi state that had existed, once upon a time. There was no dealing with the government on Mospheira that had sent him. The people he was loyal to hardly had any power left.

The plane was a pure, unheralded, no-damn-reason accident. Near accident. He was safe. So was a very chastened teenager.

His fingers were wrinkling. He had to go out and breathe air again. Problems were not his problems tonight. Supper was waiting. A very fine supper, prepared by a cook who accommodated his needs quite expertly.

He shut the water down and exited into the cooler air outside, wrapped instantly in a thick towel, a comfort and luxury of having servants which he did enjoy; and which by his order to this all-female staff was the job of one of the older, more — motherly — women.

But a blink of water-hazed eyes showed him not a maid who had flung it about him, but Tano, continuing the personal attendance Tano had given him on the trip. He told himself he should decline Tano's attendance: the man had worked harder today than he had by twice.

On the other hand, since it was Tano, he was able to ask him —

But no, dammit, no. He wasn't going to ask about the content of the other messages that might be disasters awaiting his return. He'd been near a radio, and within reach of security communications, and his staff (forty-seven secretaries and a skilled supervisor devoted to such problems) would have known how to call him if there were anything amiss, including unreadable foreign language telegrams or phone calls. The one bombshell he'd picked out of the basket he'd chosen precisely because it was a telegram, and by that criterion urgent and newly arrived.

There couldn't be any more surprises. Peaceful dinner. Quiet sleep. Back to routine. It was all he wanted. Parsing verbs at Jase. A walk in the gardens — suitably guarded.

He let Tano wrap him in more warmed thick towels, a human vice grown harmlessly popular among atevi, although some still used the traditional sheeting. He accepted an informal and human-sized pair of drawstring trousers, a shirt, and a short, wide-sleeved lounging-robe which was adequate for an intimate dinner in the private dining room. He let his hair, toweled to a residual dampness, rest on his shoulders, as a gentleman or a lady could, in private and before a trusted staff.

A shadow turned up in the tiled doorway, along a row of several such showers.

Jase, coatless, dressed in a dark shirt. His dark hair just barely, in half a year, grown long enough to braid, was tied back and still falling loose around his face. The servants would not have let him out of his room without a coat. Or he'd been — troublesome thought — ignoring the servants.

"There you are," Bren said cheerfully, trying to ignore the glum look Jase gave him. "One wondered about your whereabouts, nadi."

"I don't know where else I'd be." Jase hadn't spoken in the Ragi language. There was no cheerfulness on his face. But it was a homecoming. One supposed. "How was the trip?"

"Fine," he said, persisting in Ragi and in cheerfulness. Jase
wasn't
supposed to speak the human language. Jase had agreed to follow the regimen by which
he'd
learned: no Mosphei' at all. "How have you been, nadi-ji?"

"Fine." Jase switched to Ragi. "I hear there was trouble in the peninsula."

"Saigimi. Yes. Correct noun choice, by the way. — So you did hear."

"Not that much," Jase said. "But the staff was worried."

"Security was in a little hurry to bring me home. But nothing serious. — And you, nadi-ji? Nothing wrong, I hope."

A hesitation. And in the human language: "Welcome home."

Welcome
home
.

A
little edge to that, perhaps. A little irony. Or friendliness. He wasn't sure. It was a term they'd had to discuss in Mosphei'. Jase hadn't understood what
home
was in relation to
this
planet, one of the myriad of little human concepts that had somehow not made it back from the stars unchanged.
Home
to Jase's original thinking was a world.
Home
was Earth.
Home
was, equally, an atevi star neither Jase nor his parents had ever seen, to which they'd returned from wherever they'd gone for nearly two hundred years.

And whatever
home
meant, Jase had never in his life been out of the steel world he'd been born to, until he'd entered a tiny pod and plunged into this world's atmosphere.

"Home, yes, nadi." Bren gave the ends of his hair, which reached the middle of his back when it was loose from its braid, a final squeeze of the towel. Tano was still standing there, along with two of the female servants. Jase had been practicing disconnecting the face and the tones of voice from the content, but it wasn't appropriate here. Or there were other interpretations. Jase had a temper. He'd seen that proved. But he wasn't going to light into Jase with lectures. "Relax. It's staff. Is there a problem?"

"No."

Which meant Yes, in that leaden tone of voice.

Fine. Disasters. He saw it coming. There'd been a crisis in the household.

But it didn't need to preface supper. Dammit, he refused to have it before supper. Not unless there'd been bloodshed.

"Can it wait until after dinner, nadi?"

Jase didn't answer him. It was a sulk. It was aimed at him.

He was in the witness of atevi, both servants and security. He was under a noble roof. He was getting angry — as Jase could make him angry, with a human precision no ateva quite managed. And, dammit, he wasn't going to argue. He made his tone smooth and his expression bland. "All right, if it can't wait, let's go to the library."

"All right," Jase said in that same dead tone.

He led the way. Jase walked with him quietly down the short curving hall from the baths to the main hallway and back to the isolation of the lady Damiri's private library, mostly of antique, fragile books.

Tano followed. Tano, having it unshakably in his atevi mind that Jase
was
of a different leader's man'chi, would
not
allow him alone in Jase's presence, or at least not far alone in Jase's presence when Jase was acting like this. It was well possible that, species aside, Tano picked up some of the same signals he did, of
his
anger, and that he wasn't damned patient at the moment for one of Jase's tempests in an atevi teapot.

Tano took up a post outside the door when he followed Jase inside and shut the door.

"So what is it?" Bren said.

"Just —" Jase lapsed into his own dialect. "Dammit, you could have phoned, that's all."

"For what?"

"It doesn't matter! I waited. I waited every evening. I couldn't even get the damn security to say what city you were in!"

Tano and Algini outranked the security he'd left guarding Jase, that was why. But it was petty business.
Not
the real issue. Jase began arguments by diversion — he'd learned that, and all right, Bren thought, he could chase diversion, if that was where Jase wanted to take this conversation at the moment; and they'd pretend to talk, and pretend to reach a conclusion and have the real issue for dessert.

In the meanwhile, and
in
Ragi:

"Security is security is security, Jasi-ji. They're not an information service. Don't swear about them. They
do
know that word. — And I'm sorry. I couldn't phone and, frankly, risk what you'd say without your knowing you were compromising my security. I'm sorry. I warned you I'd be impossible to reach. I called you four days ago —"

"For 'Hello, I'm fine, how are you?' Thanks!"

"I told you I wouldn't have a secure phone and I didn't. This afternoon, with the situation what it was, radio traffic had to be at a minimum.
What
the hell are we arguing about? — Is something wrong?"

Words didn't come easily in moments of fracture, and the paidhi-aiji knew, hell, yes, he knew, he'd expected it. Jase was close to nonverbal at the moment, too frustrated to find a word in Ragi or otherwise — and he himself, years of study, he'd been through it, too, the moments of sheer disorientation across the cultural interface. Jase's ship didn't remotely comprehend what they'd sent Jase into, without the years of training, without the killer selection process in a University that weeded out candidates with any faults in self-control, and Jase had made heroic efforts at holding back his temper — so much so that atevi had begun to realize they had two very different personalities under this roof and occasionally to observe the fact.

Jasi-ji, madam Saidin had put it to him, is rather more excitable, is he not, nand' paidhi? Is this a correct observation? Or have we offended him?