Foreigner: (10th Anniversary Edition) (30 page)

A humid, cold gust of wind swept in the open front doors, fluttering the candles and making a sputter of wax from the wax-jack that sprinkled the polished wood of the table. He thought of calling out to the staff to shut the
door before the rain hit, but they were all out of convenient range, and he was almost finished. The tourists would be outbound in only another moment or two, and the door was providing more light to the room than the candles did.

Thunder boomed, echoing off the walls, and he was down to the last two tourists, an elderly couple who wanted “Four cards, if the paidhi would, for the grandchildren.”

He signed and sealed, while the tourists with their ribboned cards were congregating by the open doors. The vans were pulling around, and the air smelled like rain, sharp contrast to the smell of sealing-wax.

He made an extra card, his last ribbon, for the old man, who told him his grandchildren were Nadimi and Fari and Tabona and little Tigani, who had just cut her first teeth, and his son Fedi was a farmer in Didaini province, and would the paidhi mind a picture?

He stood, feeling the stretch of stiffening muscles, he smiled at the camera, and at the general click of shutters as others took it for permission. He felt much better about the meeting, encouraged that the tourists proved approachable, even the children behaving far more easily toward him. It was the closest he supposed he’d ever come to meeting ordinary folk, except the very few he met in audience in Shejidan, and in the success of the gesture and in the habits of his job he felt constrained to a reciprocal courtesy, seeing them to the doors and onto their buses—always good policy, the extra gesture of good will, despite the chill; and he
liked
the old couple, who were following at his elbow and asking him about his family. “No, I don’t have a wife,” he said, “no, I’ve thought about it—”

Barb would die of boredom and frustration, in the cloister the paidhi lived in. Barb would stifle in the surrounding security, and as for being circumspect—her life wouldn’t tolerate the board’s questions, she wouldn’t pass
… and Barb … he didn’t
love
her, but she was what he needed.

A boy crowded near him, right up against his arm, and said, not too discreetly, “I’m that tall, look.” Which was the truth. But his parents hastily snatched him away, declaring that that was a very
insheibi
thing to say, very indiscreet, rude and dangerous, and begging the paidhi’s pardon could they possibly take a picture with him if a member of the paidhi’s staff could possibly snap the shutter?

He smiled, atevi-style, waited while they arranged the shot, and looked civilized and as comfortable as possible, standing with the couple as the camera clicked.

More cameras went off, the moment he stepped away, a veritable barrage of shutters.

And a random three pops outside the open doors. He turned in a heart-frozen shock, recognizing the sound of gunfire, as someone grabbed him by the arm and slammed him against the open door—as the tourists all rushed out under the portico in the rain.

Another shot rang out. The tourists cheered.

It was Tano half-smothering him, when he hadn’t even known Tano was close. “Stay here,” Tano said, and went outside, his hand on his gun.

He couldn’t stand there not knowing what was happening, or what the danger was. He risked a glance after Tano’s departing back, keeping the rest of him behind the substantial door. He saw, in the gaps of a screen of tourists, a man lying on the pavings out in the rain, and at the same remove, atevi figures coming from the lawn to the circular drive, near the cannon, mere shadows through the veils of rain. A bus driver, ignoring the whole affair, was shouting for his tourists to get aboard, that they had a long drive today, and a schedule for lunch on the lake, if the weather passed.

The tourists boarded, while the atevi shadows stood around the man lying on the cobbles. He supposed the
shooting was over. He came out and stood in front of the door as the damp gusts hit him. Tano came back in haste.

“Get inside, nand’ paidhi,” Tano said. The first van was moving out, tourists pressing their faces to the windows, a few waving. He waved back, helpless habit, frozen by the grotesqueness of the sight. The van made the circular drive past the cannon and the second bus passed him.

“It’s handled, nand’ paidhi, get inside. They think it was machimi for the tourists, it’s all right.”

“All right?” He held his indignation in check and steadied his voice. “Who’s been killed? Who is it?”

“I don’t know, nand’ paidhi, I’ll try to find out, but I can’t leave you down here. Please go upstairs.”

“Where’s Banichi?”

“Out there,” Tano said. “Everything’s all right, nadi, come, I’ll take you to your rooms.” Tano’s pocket-com sputtered, and Tano turned it on, one-handed. “I have him,” Tano said. It was Banichi’s voice, Bren thought, thank God it was Banichi, but where was Jago? He heard Banichi saying something in verbal code, about a problem solved, and then another voice—telling gender with atevi voices wasn’t always easy—saying something about a second team and that being all right.

“The dowager,” Bren said in a low voice, suddenly asking himself—one had to ask, with the evidence of death on the grounds—was Ilisidi somehow involved, was she all right, was she somehow the author of what was happening out there, with Banichi?

“Perfectly safe,” Tano said, and gave him another gentle shove. “Please, nadi, Banichi’s fine, everyone is fine—”

“Who’s dead? An outsider? Someone on staff?”

“I’m not quite sure,” Tano said, “but please, nadi, don’t make our jobs more difficult.”

He let himself be maneuvered away from the doors, then, away from the blowing mist that made his clothing damp and cold, and across the dim hall and up the stairs. All the while he was thinking about the shadows in the
rain, about Banichi out there, and someone lying dead on the cobbled drive, right by the flower beds and the memorial cannon—

Thinking uneasily, too, about the alarm last night, and about riding up on the ridge not an hour ago, with Ilisidi and Cenedi, where any rifle might have picked them off. The vivid memory came back, of that night in Shejidan, and the shock of the gun in his hands, and Jago saying, like a bad dream, that there was blood on the terrace. Like outside, on the lawn, in the rain.

His knees started shaking as he climbed the stairs to the upper hall. His gut was upset before he reached the doors to his apartment, as if it
were
that night, as if everything was slipping again out of his control.

Tano strode two steps ahead of him at the last and opened the door to his receiving room, to what should feel like refuge, where warm air met him like a wall and light flooded in from a window blind with rain. Lightning flashed, making the window white for an instant. The tourists were having a rain-drenched ride down the mountain. Their lunch on the lake seemed uncertain.

Someone had invaded the grounds last night and that someone was dead on the drive, all his plans cancelled. It hardly seemed reasonable that no one knew what they were.

Tano rang for the other servants, and assured him in a low voice that hot tea was forthcoming. “A bath,” Bren said, “if they can.” He didn’t want to deal with Djinana and Maigi right now, he wanted Tano, he wanted people he knew were Tabini’s—but he was scared to protest that to Tano, as if a question to their plans could turn into a challenge to their conspiracy of silence, a sign that the prisoner had gained the spirit to rebel, a warning that his guards should be more careful—

Another stupid thought. Banichi and Jago were the ones he wanted near him, and Tano had said it, his personal needs could only hinder whatever investigation Banichi was pursuing out there. He didn’t
need
to know
on the same level that Banichi needed to be following mat trail in the rain, needed to be asking questions among the staff, like how that person had gotten in or whether he had come with the bus or whether Banichi had somehow made a terrible mistake and it was just some poor, mistaken tourist out on the lawn for a special camera angle.

The people on the bus would miss one of their own number, wouldn’t they? Wouldn’t one or the other busloads be asking why a seat was vacant, or who that had been, or had it all been machimi, just an actor, all along, an entertainment for their edification? Wasn’t it historic, and educational, here at Malguri, where fatal accidents happened on the walks?

Djinana and Maigi were quick to answer his summons, and hastened him out of Tano’s care and into the drawing room in front of the fire—peeling him out of his damp coat as they went and asking him how breakfast had gone with the dowager … as if no tourists had come in, as if nothing was going on out there, with any possible relevancy to anyone’s life—

Where was Algini? he suddenly wondered. He hadn’t seen Tano’s partner since yesterday, and someone was dead out there. He hadn’t
seen
Algini last night, just shadows passing through his room. He hadn’t seen Algini maybe since the day before … what with the incident with the tea, he’d lost his sense of time since he’d left Shejidan.

Tano hadn’t looked worried. But atevi didn’t always express things with their faces. Didn’t always express what they felt, if they felt, and you didn’t know …

“Start the heater,” Maigi said to Djinana, and flung a lap-robe about him. “Nadi, please sit down and stay warm. I’ll help you with the boots.”

He eased down into the chair in front of the fire, while Maigi tugged the boots off. His hands were like ice. His feet were chilled, for no good reason at all. “Someone was shot outside,” he said in a sudden reckless mood,
challenging Maigi’s silence on the matter. “Do you know that?”

“I’m sure everything’s taken care of.” Maigi knelt on the carpet, warming his right foot with vigorous rubbing. “They’re very good.”

Banichi and Jago, Maigi seemed to mean. Very good. A man was dead. Maybe it was over, and he could go back tomorrow, where his computer would work and his mail would come.

With the electricity still out, and tourists coming and going, and the dowager exposing all of them to danger on a morning ride?

Why
hadn’t
Banichi interposed some warning, if Banichi had any warning there was someone loose on the grounds, and why
hadn’t
Banichi’s warning gotten to him about the tourists?

Or hadn’t Jago said something to him, yesterday—something about a tour, —but he hadn’t remembered, dammit, he’d been thinking about the other mess he’d gotten himself into, and it hadn’t stuck in his mind.

So it wasn’t their fault. Somebody had been chasing him, and he had walked in among the tourists, where someone else could have gotten shot—if his guards hadn’t, in the considerations of finesse, somehow protected him by being there.

He felt cold. Maigi tucked him into the chair with the robe and brought in hot tea. He sat with his robe-wrapped feet propped in front of the fire, while the thunder boomed outside the window and the rain whipped at the glass, a level above the walls. The window faced the straight open sweep off the lake. It sounded like gravel pelting the glass. Or hail. Which made him wonder how the windows withstood it: whether they were somehow reinforced—and whether they were, considering the wall out there, and the chance of someone climbing it, also bulletproof.

Jago had wanted him clear of it, last night. Algini had
disappeared, since before last night. The power had failed.

He sat there and kept replaying the morning in his head, the breakfast, the ride, Ilisidi and Cenedi, and the tourists and Tano, most of all the happy faces and the hands waving at him from the windows of the buses, as if everything was television, everything was machimi. He’d made a slight inroad into the country, met people he’d convinced not to be afraid of him, like the kids, like the old couple, and someone got shot right in front of them.

He’d fired a gun, he’d learned he
would
shoot to kill, for fear, for—he was discovering—for a terrible, terrible anger he had, an anger that was still shaking him—an anger he hadn’t known he had, didn’t know where it had started, or what it wanted to do, or whether it was directed at himself, or atevi, or any specific situation.

It hadn’t been a false alarm last night—or it was, Barb would say, one hell of a coincidence. Maybe Banichi had thought last night he was safe, and whoever it was had simply gotten that far within Banichi’s guard. Maybe they’d been tracking the assassin all along, and let him go off with Ilisidi this morning in the hope he’d draw the assassin out of cover.

Too much television, Banichi had said, that night with the smell of gunpowder in his room, and rain on the terrace. Too many machimi plays.

Too much fear in children’s faces. Too many pointing fingers.

He wanted his mail, dammit, he wanted just the catalogs, the pictures to look at. But they weren’t going to bring it.

Hanks might have missed him by now, tried to call his office and not gotten through.

On vacation with Tabini, they’d say. Hanks might know better. They monitored atevi transmissions. But they wouldn’t challenge the Bu-javid on the point. They’d go on monitoring, once they were alert to trouble, trying to find him—and blame him for not doing his job. Hanks
would start packing to assume his post. Hanks always had resented his winning it over her.

And Tabini would detest Hanks. He could tell the Commission that, if they didn’t think it self-serving, and part of the feud between him and Hanks.

But if he was so damned good at predicting Tabini—or reading situations—he couldn’t prove it from where he sat now. He hadn’t made the vital call, he hadn’t put Mospheira alert to the situation—

God, that was stupid. He had the willies over some misguided lunatic and now he saw the Treaty collapsing, as if atevi had been waiting all these centuries only to resume the War, hiding a missile program they’d built on their own, launching warheads at Mospheira.

It was as stupid as atevi with their planet-skimming satellites shooting death rays. Relations between Mospheira and Shejidan
had
bad periods. Tabini’s administration was the least secretive, the easiest to deal with of all the administrations they’d ever dealt with.