Deceiver: Foreigner #11 (24 page)

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Authors: C. J. Cherryh

BOOK: Deceiver: Foreigner #11
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“Your guest is not my concern,” Bren said mildly. “One trusts the fellow is busy at his writing. My brother is down here. Where would he be?”
“The third left, nandi.” The young man walked ahead of them, escorting them that far, and knocked on the door for him before retreating and leaving Banichi and Jago in charge.
The door opened. Toby saw him with some relief—stood aside as he entered, and left the door open; but Banichi and Jago opted for the hall, and shut the door, likely to go back and pass the time sociably with Ilisidi’s lonely and very anxious youngest guard.
Barb sat at the little table, where the light was best, doing a little writing herself. The disturbed second chair showed where Toby had likely been sitting before he heard the door and got up. The bed, just beyond the partial arch, was made and neat: the servants would have seen to that; but maybe two ship-dwellers had taken care of it themselves.
“Are we being let out?” Toby asked hopefully.
“Sorry. Not yet.” Bren dropped into the chair by the door and heaved a heavy sigh as Toby sank back into the second chair at the table.
“Ah, well,” Toby said. “Any idea when?”
“Well, it’s stayed quiet out. We haven’t had any further trouble. And Geigi’s talking about going home to his estate—that may provoke something. Likely it will. But
if
it does, it may shift the trouble over to Kajiminda—and that may get your upstairs room back.”
“That still throws you short,” Toby said. “If you can get Geigi home, you can at least get us to our boat.”
“Sorry. The bus doesn’t go down the hill. You’re safer here.”
“You can only play so much solitaire,” Barb said, and Toby said nothing, only looked glum.
“You’re exposed to snipers down on the boat,” Bren said. “It makes me nervous, your being there.”
Sighs from both of them. “We can’t go into the garden, I suppose,” Barb said.
“No,” he said. “But it’s not forever. There’s movement in the situation.”
“What kind of movement?”
“Best not discuss all of it. But things are happening.”
“We’re not pacing the floor yet. We’ve threatened murder of each other if we get to that.”
“The room is bigger than the boat.”
“There’s no deck,” Toby said. “And there’s no window. —I’m not complaining, Bren. Honestly not.”
“You’re complaining,” he said wryly. “And I’m honestly sympathetic. Just not a thing I can do to make it safe out there.”
“We’re just blowing off steam,” Toby said. “Honestly. We aren’t complaining. Being alive is worth a little inconvenience. We’re grateful to be here—grateful to the servants who gave up their room for us. We’re here, we’re dry, we’re not full of holes—”
“I’ll relay that to the fellows who live here,” he said, with a little smile. “But I can at least give you a day pass. Things have quietened enough you’ll be welcome up-stairs at most any time. Just don’t wait for directions. Duck down here fast if there’s an alarm of any kind. I’m afraid the library’s off limits now; just too crowded in there. But you can use the sitting room, what time we’re not having other meetings. Staff will signal you. I’ll advise them to tell you that.”
“We’ve become the ghosts in your walls,” Barb laughed. “Spooks in the basement.”
“That’s it,” he said.
“Staff has been really good,” Barb said. “They won’t let us make our own bed. We tried, and the maid had a fit.”
He laughed gently. “The juniors have that job and if they don’t do it, the seniors will be on them. Don’t object.” Which said, he got up to go.
“What?” Toby protested. “You’re not staying for a round of poker? We play for promises.”
“I’m up to my ears in must-dos. I just want you to know there’s some movement in the situation, and so far, so good. We have people watching your boat round the clock. No worries down there.”
“Can we possibly help?” Toby asked. “Can we actually
do
anything around the place? Can we hammer nails, carry boxes, help with the repair?”
He shook his head. “That’s the downside of having an efficient staff. They have their ways. Just relax. Rest. Take long baths.”
“Can I at least get some coastal charts?”
Those were slightly classified. But he did have them. And Toby was in Tabini’s good graces. He nodded. “I’ll send a batch down.”
That
brightened up his two sailors. He felt rather good about that.
So he took his leave, collected Banichi and Jago, and went back upstairs to his office, while Banichi and Jago, secure in the knowledge of exactly where he was, in a fortified room with storm shutters shut, got a little down time of their own.
“Coastal charts,” he recalled. “Toby wanted coastal charts.” He went over to the pigeonhole cabinet, unlocked the case and pulled out several. “Have these run down to him, nadiin-ji. I take responsibility.”
Jago went to do it. Banichi diverted himself to somber consultation with Tano, Algini, and Nawari.
And he sat down with the database again, trying to discover how Pairuti’s bloodline—and Geigi’s—connected to the world at large, over the last three hundred years.
 
Meticulous research on kinships. Who was related to whom and exactly the sequence of exterior and internal events—negotiations in which certain marriages had been contracted and when they had terminated, and more importantly with what offspring, reared by which half of the arrangement, and with what claims of inheritance. Dry stuff—until you discovered you had a relative poised to lodge a claim or engage an Assassin to remove an obstacle.
One of the interesting tactics of marriage politics was infiltration of another clan: marry someone in, let them arrive with the usual staff. That staff then formed connections with other, local staff—and even once the original marriage had run its course—it left a legacy in that clan that
could
be activated even generations down.
And there the paidhi ran head on into that most curious of atevi emotions: man’chi. Attachment. Affiliation. When it triggered, by whatever triggered it, be it the right pheromones or a sense of obligation or ambition or compatible direction—one ateva bonded to another. When it happened properly, in related clans or within a clan, it was the very mortar of society. When it happened between people from clans that were natural enemies, it could be hell on earth.
There’d been a lot of marrying, for instance, of Marid eligibles out and around their district, begetting little time bombs—people never quite at home in their birthclan, longing, perhaps, for acceptance; and one could imagine, ultimately finding it—because the Marid clans were not stupid.
So the web grew, decade by decade, and that sort of thing had been going on for a lot of decades all up and down the coast and somewhat inland. Sensibly, a stable person was not going to run amok in the household at the behest of some third cousin down in the Marid. But take a little unscheduled income from that cousin for some apparently meaningless datum? Much easier. If you were a very smart spymaster, you didn’t call on people for big, noisy things or life changes. You got bits and pieces from several sources and never let any single person put two and three pieces together.
If you were a lord like Geigi, who’d actually married into the Marid, or drawn a wife out of there, you sensibly worried about the safety of your household—but that household being Edi, the likelihood of any lingering liaison was not high at all. It had surely frustrated the Marid, and perhaps made them wonder who was spying on whom. Geigi’s ex-wife had not risen high in her life, nothing so grand, after Geigi. She’d gone off to the Marid taking all Geigi’s account numbers with her, but Geigi, Rational Determinist that he was—had not been superstitious. He had immediately changed them, and the Marid’s attempts to get into those accounts had rung alarms through the banking system, a defeat that had greatly embarrassed Machigi’s predecessor.
It had been an elegant, quiet revenge that had done the wife’s whole family no good at all. Doubtless they took it personally.
Paru was the subclan in question, on the ex-wife’s father’s side. He wrote that name down, then got up and walked to the security station, the library, walked in after a polite knock and laid that name on the counter.
Jago, who was nearest, looked at it, and looked up at him curiously.
“This is the clan of Geigi’s wife,” he said, “who was greatly embarrassed in her failure to drain his accounts. And they
do
own a bank in Separti Township: Fortunate Investments. One simply wonders if they have any current involvement.”
“Paru,” Algini mused. “Fortunate Investments, indeed.”
“Certainly worth inquiring,” Tano said.
“Bren-ji is doing our job, nadiin-ji,” Jago said, amused.
“One does apologize,” he said, though the reception of his little piece of information was beyond cheerful. It clearly delighted his aishid.
“Permission to discuss with Geigi’s staff,” Banichi said.
His bodyguard had a new puzzle. They were cramped in these quarters, they were operating nearly round the clock, and Banichi and Jago had bruises and stitches from the last foray, but they had a puzzle to work on. They were happy.
“I leave it in your hands, nadiin-ji,” he said. “Whatever you deem necessary.”
And they thought his small piece of information was worth tracking. Nobody said, as they usually did, oh, well, they had already investigated that.
So he went back to mining the database with a little more enthusiasm.
 
When one was put out with half one’s aishid and not speaking to them, it was a grim kind of day. Everybody in nand’ Bren’s house was serious and busy. Cajeiri was
bored, bored, bored,
and tired of being grown up, which he had been all morning and most of the day, but it was not
his
fault half his aishid were obnoxious, and he was tired of dealing with them, so he just found excuses to keep them elsewhere and away from him—it was no cure, but it at least made him happier.
There was a beautiful bay out there, probably sparkling in the sunshine, with boats and everything—but one would never know it, in the house, with all the windows shuttered tight.
There was a garden out there, with sky overhead and things to get into that they had never had time to investigate.
But it was off limits, because there could be snipers.
There was the garden shed, and the wrecked old bus, and all sorts of things worth seeing, not even mentioning there was Najida village not too far away, about which they had only heard, and which they had never yet visited.
And there were fishing boats and the dock and all the shops on down the beach toward the village, from a blacksmith to a net-maker. The servants talked about the net-maker’s son, who was about his age, so he gathered, and it was all off limits, because of snipers and kidnappers. The net-maker’s son could be outside in the sunshine. The aiji’s son was stuck inside, behind shutters.
The Marid was a damned nuisance to him personally, along with all the real harm they had done to completely innocent people, including one of mani’s young men being dead, which was just hard even to think of and terribly sad. When
he
was aiji, he was going to be their enemy, and they had better figure how to make peace with him or it would turn out very badly for them.
Probably his father was thinking the same thing, by now, and one was sure Great-grandmother was not going to forgive what the Marid had done, but he wished he knew what his father was doing, and one
never
knew entirely what Great-grandmother was going to do, but it could be grim.
It was a scary, worrisome thing, to send Guild out on a mission. Nand’ Bren had had to send Banichi and Jago out, and Jago had gotten hurt, which he was really sorry about. And if things got really bad, they were going to have to send a lot of Guild out, and people he knew could get killed. He hated even thinking about that.
He just wished the Marid lords would do something really stupid and that his father’s men—mostly strangers—would go in and settle with them before somebody he knew got hurt.
But the Marid sat down in their land and had their fingers in everything, including, apparently, trying to finagle or bluff their way into Geigi’s clan, if what Lucasi and Veijico occasionally reported back was true. The Marid had possibly infiltrated the Maschi, and Great-grandmother was making a lot of phone calls, but his informants had no idea what she was saying or who she was calling, except it was code.
And Lord Geigi and nand’ Bren were planning to go take Kajiminda back.
And the Edi thought they were going to replace his father’s Guild, who were occupying it at the moment.
And meanwhile Guild was investigating things on the other side of Kajiminda, down in Separti Township, because Marid agents had set up down there.
But that was not all that was going on, because once Lord Geigi had taken Kajiminda, he was going to go inland and visit his cousins in the Maschi stronghold, and it was possible he was going to tell the current Maschi lord to retire so Lord Geigi could take over the whole clan. How this was going to work, one was not certain, but it sounded risky, and people were likely to say no to that . . .

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