Foreigner

“Don’t joke.”

“I’m not joking. God, I’m not joking. We have to likesomebody, we’re bound to like somebody, or we die, Banichi, we outright die. We make appointments with grandmothers, we drink the cups strangers offer us, and we don’t ask for help anymore, Banichi, what’s the damned point, when you don’t see what we need?”

“If I don’t guess what you like, you threaten to ruin my reputation. Is this accurate?”

The headache was suddenly excruciating. Things blurred. “Like, like, like—get off the damned word, Banichi. I cross that trench every day. Can’t you cross it once? Can’t you cross to where I am, Banichi, just once, to know what I think? You’re clever. I know you’re hard to mislead. Follow, Banichi, the solitary trail of my thoughts.”

“I’m not a cursed di

“Banichi-ji.” The pain reached a level and stayed there, tolerable, once he’d discovered the limits of it. He had his hand on the stonework. He felt the texture of it, the silken dust of age, the fire-heated rock, broken from the earth to make this building before humans ever left the home-world. Before they were ever lost, and desperate. He composed himself—he remembered he was the paidhi, the man in the middle. He remembered he’d chosen this, knowing there wouldn’t be a reward, believing, at the time, that of course atevi had feelings, and of course, once he could find the right words, hit the right button, findthe clue to atevi thought—he’d win of atevi everything he was giving up among humankind.

He’d been twenty-two, and what he’d not known had so vastly outweighed what he’d known.

“Your behavior worries me,” Banichi said.

“Forgive me.” There was a large knot interfering with his speech. But he was vastly calmer. He chose not to look at Banichi. He only imagined the suspicion and the anger on Banichi’s face. “I reacted unprofessionally and intrusively.”

“Reacted to what, nand’ paidhi?”

A betraying word choice. He wasslipping, badly. The headache had upset his stomach, which was still uncertain. “I misinterpreted your behavior. The mistake was mine, not yours. Will you attend my appointment with me in the morning, and guard me from my own stupidity?”

“What behavior did you misinterpret?”

Straight back to the attack. Banichi refused the bait he cast. And he had no ability to argue, now, or to deal at all in cold rationality.

“I explained that. It didn’t make sense to you. It won’t.” He stared into the hazy corners beyond the firelight, and remembered the interpretation Banichi had put on his explanation. “It wasn’t a threat, Banichi. I would never do that. I value your presence and your good qualities. Will you go with me tomorrow?”

Back to the simplest, the earliest and most agreed-upon words. Cold. Unfreighted.

“No, nadi. No one invites himself to the dowager’s table. You accepted.”

“You’re assigned—”

“My man’chiis to Tabini. My actions are his actions. The paidhi can’t have forgotten this simple thing.”

He was angry. He looked at Banichi, and went on looking, long enough, he hoped, for Banichi to think in what other regard his actions were Tabini’s actions. “I haven’t forgotten. How could I forget?”

Banichi returned a sullen stare. “Ask regarding the food you’re offered. Be sure the cook understands you’re in the party.”

The door in the outermost room opened. Banichi’s attention was instant and wary. But it was Jago coming through, rain-spattered as Banichi, in evident good humor until the moment she saw the two of them. Her face went immediately impassive. She walked through to his bedroom without comment.

“Excuse me,” Banichi said darkly, and went after her.

Bren glared at his black-uniformed back, at a briskly swinging braid—the two of Tabini’s guards on their way through his bedroom, to the servant quarters; he hit his fist against the stonework and didn’t feel the pain until he walked away from the fireside.

Stupid, he said to himself. Stupid and dangerous to have tried to explain anything to Banichi: Yes, nadi, no, nadi, clear and simple words, nadi.

Banichi and Jago had gone on to the servants’ quarters, where they lodged, separately. He went through to his own bedroom and undressed, with an eye to the dead and angry creature on the wall, the expression of its last, cornered fight.

It stared back at him, when he was in the bed. He picked up his book and read, because he was too angry to sleep, about ancient atevi battles, about treacheries and murders.

About ghost ships on the lake, and a manifestation that haunted the audience hall on this level, a ghostly beast that sometimes went snuffling up and down the corridors, looking for something or someone.

He was a modern man. They were atevi superstitions. But he took one look and then evaded the glass, glaring eyes of the beast on the wall.

Thunder banged. The lights all went out, except the fire in the next room, casting its uncertain glow, that didn’t reach all the corners of this one, and didn’t at all touch the servants’ hall.

He told himself lightning must have hit a transformer.

But the place was eerily quiet after that, except for a strange, distant thumping that sounded like a heartbeat coming through the walls.

Then far back in the servants’ hall, beyond the bath, steps moved down the corridor toward his bedroom.

He slid off the bed, onto his knees.

“Nand’ paidhi,” Jago’s voice called out. “It’s Jago.”

He withdrew his hand from beneath the mattress, and slithered up onto the bed, sitting and watching as an entire brigade of staff moved like shadows through his room and outward. He couldn’t see faces. He saw the spark of metal on what he thought was Banichi’s uniform.

One lingered.

“Who is it?” he asked, anxiously.

“Jago, nadi. I’m staying with you. Go to sleep.”

“You’re joking!”

“It’s most likely only a lightning strike, nand’ paidi. That’s the auxiliary generator you hear. It keeps the refrigeration ru

He got up, went looking for his robe and banged his knee on a chair, making an embarrassing scrape.

“What do you want, nadi?”

“My robe.”

“Is this it?” Jago located it instantly, at the foot of his bed, and handed it to him. Atevi night vision was that much better, he reminded himself, and took not quite that much comfort from knowing it. He put the robe on, tied it about him and went into the sitting room, as less provocative, out where the fireplace provided one kind of light and a whiter, intermittent flicker of lightning came from the windows.

A padding, metal-sparked shadow followed him. Atevi eyes reflected a pale gold. Atevi found it spooky that human eyes didn’t, that humans could slip quietly through the dark. Their differences touched each others’ nightmares.

But there was no safer company in the world, he told himself, and told himself also that the disturbance was in fact nothing but a lightning strike, and that Banichi was going to be wet, chilled, and in no good mood when he got back in.

But Jago wasn’t in her night-robe. Jago had been in uniform and armed, and so had Banichi been, when the lights had gone.

“Don’t you sleep?” he asked her, standing before the fire.

The twin reflections of her eyes eclipsed, a blink, then vanished as she came close enough to rest an elbow against the stonework mantel. Her shadow loomed over him, and fire glistened on the blackness of her skin. “We were awake,” she said.

Business went on all around him, with no explanations. He felt chilled, despite the robe, and thought how desperately he needed his sleep—in order to deal with the dowager in the morning.

“Are there protections around this place?” he asked.

“Assuredly, nadi-ji. This is still a fortress, when it needs to be.”

“With the tourists and all.”