Tracker (17 page)

“Her
manners.”

“No, honored Mother.
My
manners. One is very glad you came.
Thank
you for coming to be sure I was all right.” He piled another pertness atop it all, but he meant it. “I would be happy if you would sit and take tea. Eisi will be back in a moment.”

“Oh, you keep glorious state here, do you? We should not repair to the sitting room, safe from wild creatures and ink?”

“The sitting room is my father's sitting room. This is mine.
My
apartment.”

“Your suite of rooms.”

“Yes,” he said, maintaining a level stare. It was not his intention to argue with her. “It is just a suite. But my staff is good. And if you would like tea, I can make it myself.”

“With such hands?”

He wiped his hands with the better side of the stained handkerchief. “I can.”

“Then I would, indeed,” Mother said with a faint smile, “take a cup of tea.” That somewhat surprised him. He went to arrange the chairs—and remembering his dirty hands and still-damp cuff, he refrained from touching the fabric, and wiped the wood with his elbow where he touched it. He carefully arranged two cups, opened the tea canister and added tea to the ceramic strainer, then filled the pot from the spigot of the antique samovar, trying not to fingerprint it. His mother adjusted the chairs herself and took a seat—having inspected the chairs for ink. He set the pot and cups on the tray and added the sugar caddy. His mother preferred sweet tea.

He took the tray to the side table, and carefully served her cup, just as Liedi came hurrying back from the rear of the suite to take over.

“Thank you, Liedi-ji,” he said quietly. “Is Eisi all right?”

“He is very well, nandi,” Liedi said quietly, and offered the first cup to Mother, who took it with a careful smile. Cajeiri took the second, and Liedi slipped out of the way. Boji began to set up another fuss, but Liedi had wisely brought an egg from the kitchen.

“That is the
hungriest
creature I have ever seen,” his mother said.

“He will always behave for an egg,” he said. “He really will do no real damage when he gets loose. He only bites if you take hold of him by surprise. And he will come to me, most times.”

“He has an aroma.”

“He bathes every day. We bring water, and put down towels, and he washes himself.”

“Well, that is a good habit,” Mother said, with a sip of tea. Thunder rumbled again, and Boji, in his cage, looked up nervously toward the ceiling. “Such a storm. Your father is in a meeting downstairs. One believes his guard will have told him we have been struck by lightning.”

“But we are safe,” he said. It was a question.

“Oh, one is very sure,” Mother said, and then, pensively: “You were away on the ship for two years. While we were in hiding, there was a storm, a very bad one. Your father and I were sleeping in a storage shed. And the roof leaked. Then half the roof fell in on us, midway through the night.”

He was not sure he should laugh. His mother and his father had had Shadow Guild hunting them during that time and it had been very grim. “What did you do?”

“There was nothing we
could
do,” Mother said with remarkable cheerfulness. “We sat there. We could see the clouds and the lightning through the hole. But we doubted we would catch fire if we were hit. We were too wet.”

He still wasn't sure whether he was supposed to laugh. Mother was like that.

“We had no breakfast either,” his mother said more somberly, taking a bit more tea. “I shall always remember that morning. I have never been more miserable than that night. But we were very glad to see the sun.”

It was the first story he had heard from his mother or his father about the days when he had been away on the ship and his mother and father had been hiding in hedgerows. Everybody in the Bujavid apartment
except
his mother and father had eventually been killed.

From those years forward he had attached man'chi very strongly to his great-grandmother, and also to his father, but not so keenly. His mother—

He had lost her, he thought distressedly. He had lost her when he had left the world. And she had been with his father, while both of them were being hunted through the north.

But he had missed all that.

Why
did
you come this morning? he wanted to know. But he was afraid to ask. It was too close to a challenge, and he did not challenge his mother.

There was a smaller peal of thunder.

Why are you here instead of with my sister? he wanted to ask. What do you want?

But that was a challenge, too. He found nothing he dared ask. Thunder boomed, distant and retreating. And he saw a brushy hill in his memory. And Najida's lower hall.

“The thunder makes a noise and Seimiro frets and goes back to sleep,” his mother said. “She has no understanding of it. My son sees fire and smoke. And feels shells landing.”

He looked at her, disturbed. “It does sound a little like that.”

“Is that so?” she asked him. “Is that what you hear in the thunder?”

“Yes,” he admitted, disturbed, and tried not to let the inky cuff-lace touch the cup. “Yes, honored Mother.”

“One thought so,” his mother said, and took a sip of tea.

She was
different
than Great-grandmother. A great deal different. He had no idea what she wanted.

“An attack would sound like that,” his mother said. “Is that what you thought?”

“One did,” he said, “For an instant.”

“So,” his mother said. “So did I. For an instant. We have that in common, son of mine. We have both heard guns in the distance. We have both seen things we wish not to have seen. And your father is in a meeting and your bodyguard is at training. So I thought, My son might find a visit just now—comfortable.”

He was not comfortable. He had had Boji loose, he had ruined a shirt
and
a coat. He had put inky fingerprints on the tea-caddy, and the teapot, and might have inked his trousers as well—not to mention the chair arm, where he was doggedly remembering not to set his hand down.

“One greatly regrets the accident, honored Mother.” Boji would not stay quiet. Boji had finished his egg, and was now becoming a nuisance, rattling his cage.

“Thunder,” Mother said. “Just thunder. The coat is not your best one. The ink missed the carpet, did it not?”

“It did, honored Mother.” It was the second time Mother had asked that, and she didn't make that sort of mistake. He wondered if there
was
a spot. “It never got to the edge.”

“So,” Mother said, and set down her teacup. “The storm seems to have gone over us. I shall go back to your sister—so long as you are well.”

She rose. He set aside his teacup, stood up and gave a little bow.

She went to the door. He hurried, before Liedi, to open it for her.

“Visit me,” she said. She only lived down the hall in the same apartment. They saw each other, and Father, at breakfast and lunch and supper, every mealtime since he had gotten home. It was strange to say,
Visit me.
But he felt it as a very solemn invitation.

“I shall,” he said. She left, and he shut the door.

His fingers had smudged the white paint near the door latch. He thought about rubbing the mark off, but that cuff was what had done it. He used the other elbow, the coat being beyond salvage anyway, then walked back to his room to change clothes.

 • • • 

A second thunderstorm came rolling in half an hour after the first, with thumps that Bren swore all but made ripples in his teacup, even within the thick walls of the Bujavid.

Lightning had hit a pole and dislodged some tiles from the Bujavid roof, which rather well accounted for the initial boom. A work crew was up there assessing the damage from the inside. He thought they could have rather well waited in case of another strike—and he hoped they had run for cover as the second wave rolled in.

A report from Jeladi said that there was a handspan of water on the rails near the Guild District, by the old canal.

Power had been out for a bit in the east end of Shejidan, again due to a lightning strike.

Najida had gotten its share of rain from this system, Bren was sure. And the assurance the workmen had gotten the new wing roof sealed was good. He just hoped
Jaishan
was safe at dock and not in transit with the peninsula and its rocks alee.

The winds of an ordinary spring met summer and did ritual battle. It was a rhythm old as the hills—literally. And it was a warm and comfortable thing to have the city's most solid walls between him and the storm.

He'd had lunch. Now he had those letters to write, and when the storm passed, a courier could go out to the spaceport by train, quietly, and without publicity of any kind, bearing his request for passenger space on the next shuttle after this one. He could surely manage to wrap up his business sufficiently in the next couple of weeks, and he rather hoped a quiet message had already gone up to Tillington from Shawn saying, simply, Make no statements whatever on the Reunioner matter, so that at least nothing worse would happen up there.

On his agenda, too, was a matter which achieved more significance with the Tillington matter afoot. Cajeiri had written to him this morning, a formal letter with only a few childish calligraphic shortcuts, reporting that everything was very well next door and would he
please
invite him to a dinner party soon.

But there was a second issue, and a more troubling one. Cajeiri added that he had written to his associates up on the station—and he had somewhat expected letters from his associates to come down on this current shuttle. He was worried, but he did not want to ask his father, and he felt that asking Lord Geigi would attract his father's attention.

It would. It attracted the paidhi's attention and made him ask why, a second time, was there possibly a problem with correspondence being delayed, and who was at fault?

Perhaps the children had just not written in time to get their letters included in the physical mail. But—all of them?

He was a little concerned. He had put off his answer to the young gentleman's letter this morning only because he had had the committee meeting. But he intended a serious inquiry into the possibility of missing mail, and he sincerely hoped that the answer was a simple case of the kids missing the deadline.

But—missing mail had been a problem before this. And the fact that Tillington's office was on a rampage about the children's visit and the children's ties to Cajeiri did occur to him in the question. If Tillington had taken it on himself to stop the children's letters, a call to Jase was in order, and there was one more point in his problems with Tillington, depending on whether he wanted to go up quietly—or with forewarning of official displeasure. He had to decide on that matter.

But before he made that call, he wanted details from Cajeiri, to start with facts.

That was one issue on his mind, that, the letter to the port director, and the fact that, perhaps at breakfast tomorrow, he had to break the news to the boy that
he
was going up to the station and Cajeiri wasn't. At least he could promise Cajeiri he would find the letters, if they'd been sent.

He hadn't seen the boy since he'd been back, hadn't communicated with him as he'd intended to do. He'd met with Tabini more than once, had been
in
the apartment, but the boy had evidently been told it was business and he should stay out of the way. He'd managed to talk with Ilisidi twice before she left. He'd managed to exchange a few words with Tatiseigi in the legislature before
Tatiseigi
left for his estate. He'd even exchanged a few words with Damiri.

But Cajeiri—no. Cajeiri hadn't been accessible. He'd been telling himself for days he needed to make time to check on the boy—but problems kept coming up and the schedule kept pressing on him. Now the boy had had to write a letter to tell him something he should have known about, and beg him for a breakfast invitation, poor lad, now that all his other prospects had left town.

He'd had far, far better intentions than that.

A knock came at the office door. Narani entered, bearing the message bowl with a single cylinder.

“This just arrived, nandi.”

Not Shawn, which was the letter he had been waiting for.
That
would have been under Presidential seal, and in a diplomatic pouch, not a plain steel cylinder that meant the Messengers' Guild had transmitted it.

That left few possibilities. Jase. Geigi.

He reached for it and opened it, extracted and flattened the message while Narani waited for a possible response.

It was from Toby. His brother, who lived aboard his boat.

Storms in the strait, he thought instantly.

God, are he and Barb all right?

Hi there,
the typescript letter began.
We're fine, that first. We took a little bit of a beating two days ago, lost the antenna and a railing, not to mention both bilge pumps, which was the greater concern. We've just limped into Najida on the manual pump and they've offered help putting things to rights. We could make it back to Port Jackson now, I'm pretty sure, now that I've located a new bilge pump—I'm going to owe a local fisherman. The front's moving past, but we're real tired, and Najida was our safest choice. We got in an hour ago, still having quite a bit of wind here. Ramaso says we should stay as long as we want, but I think officially I should ask.

We're
fine. Barb was with him. They were both all right. They'd gotten to Najida.

He just hoped the boat wasn't too badly damaged.

With your permission, we're going to be here a few days. We're likely going to do a little more repair, either locally purchased or shipped over. Ramaso says not to worry, that he'll order anything we need and put it on your tab. But I'm going to arrange a transfer of funds to cover it; we'll feel better. I don't know how to convey that to Ramaso in a way he'll understand.