Foreigner

The shivers had become violent. He gave a shake of his head, tried to answer, wasn’t sure Ilisidi wanted an answer. The rim of the sun cast a sudden, fierce gleam over the mountains across the lake, flaming gold.

“This young man is freezing,” Ilisidi said. “Get him inside. Hot tea. Breakfast. I don’t know when he may get another.”

When he may get another? He wanted explanation, but Ilisidi’s bodyguard hauled him out of his chair—the ones he knew, who knew him, not the ones who had brought him from below. He couldn’t coordinate his getting up. He couldn’t walk without staggering, the cold had set so deeply into his joints. “My apartment,” he protested. “I want to talk to Banichi. Or Jago.”

Ilisidi said nothing to that request, and the guards took him from the balcony into the dead air of the inside, guided him by the arms through the antiques and the delicate tables—opened a door to a firelit room, Ilisidi’s study, he supposed, by the books and the papers about. They brought him to the chair before the fire, wrapped a robe about him and let him sit down and huddle in the warmthless wool. They piled more logs on the fire, sent embers flying up the chimney, and he was still numb, scarcely feeling the heat on the soles of his boots.

A movement in the doorway caught his eye. Cenedi was watching him silently. How long Cenedi had been there he had no idea. He stared back, dimly realizing that Cenedi along with Ilisidi had just gained his agreement—and Cenedi had arranged the whole damned shadow-show.

Cenedi only nodded as if he’d seen what he came to see, and left, without a word.

Anger sent a shiver through him, and he hugged the robe closer to hide the reaction. One of Ilisidi’s guards—he remembered the name as Giri—had lingered, working with the fire. Giri looked askance at him. “There’s another blanket, nadi,” Giri said, and in his sullen silence got up and brought it and put it over him. “Thin folk chill through faster,” Giri said. “Do you want the tea, nand’ paidhi? Breakfast?”

“No. Enough tea. Thank you.” Cenedi’s presence had upset his stomach. He told himself—intellectually—that Cenedi could have done him far greater hurt: Cenedi could have put enough pressure on to make him confess anything Cenedi wanted. He supposed Cenedi had done him a favor, getting what he needed and no more than that.

But he couldn’t be that charitable, with the livid marks of atevi fingers on his arms. He’d little dignity left. He made a desultory, one-handed twist of his hair at the nape of his neck—he wanted to make a plait or two to hold it, but the arm they’d twisted wouldn’t lift while he was shivering. He was angry, in pain, and in the dim, dazed way his brain was working, he didn’t know who to blame for it: not Cenedi, ultimately; not Ilisidi—not even Tabini, who had every good reason to suspect human motives, with the evidence of human space operations over his head and his own government tottering around him.

While he’d been doing television interviews with newscasters and talking to tourists who hadn’t said a damned thing about it.

His office had probably rung the phone off the desk trying to get hold of him, but atevi news was controlled. Nothing of that major import got out until Tabini wanted it released, not in this Association and not in others: atevi notions of priority and public rights and the duties of aijiin to manage the public welfare took precedence over democracy.

The tourists might nothave known, if they hadn’t been near a television for some number of days. Even the television crew might not have known. The dissidents who must have gravitated to Ilisidi as a rival to Tabini… they would have had their sources, in the hasdrawad, in the way atevi associations had no borders. They would have wanted to get to the paidhi and the information he had, urgently. At any cost.

Maybe the rival factions had wanted to silence his advice, the character of which they might believe they knew without hearing him.

Or maybe they had wanted something else. Maybe there had never been an assassination attempt against him—maybe they’d wanted to snatch him away to question, to find out what a human would say and what it meant to their position, before Tabini took some action they didn’t know how to judge.

Tabini had ordered their rushed and early return from Taiben—after arming him against the logical actions of the people Tabini already intended to send him to?

Had the attempt on his bedroom been real in any sense—or something Tabini himself had done for an excuse?

And why did someone of Banichi’s rank just happen to be in his wing that night? The cooks and the clerks didn’t merit Banichi’s level of security. It washis room they’d been guarding—Tabini had already been advised of the goings-on in the heavens.

But somebody of Banichi’s experience let a man he was guarding sleep with the garden doors and the lattice open?

Things blurred. He felt a clamminess in his hands, was overwhelmed, of a sudden, with anger at the games-playing. He’d believed Cenedi. He’d believed the game in the cellar, when they’d put the gun to his head—they’d made him think he was going to die, and in such a moment, dammit, he’d have thought he’d think of Barb, he’d have thought he’d think of his mother or Toby or someone human, but he hadn’t. They’d made him stand face-to-face with that disturbing, personal moment of truth, and he hadn’t discovered any noble sentiments or even human reactions. The high snows and the sky was all he’d been able to see, being alone was all he could imagine—just the snow, just the sky and the cold, up where he went to have his solitude from work and his own family’s clamoring demands for his time, that was the truth they’d pushed him to, not a warm human thought in him, no love, no humanity—

His hand flew up to his face scarcely in time to bury the sudden rush of helpless, watery reaction that he told himself at once was nerves, the psychological crash after the crisis—that, at least, was human, if anything he did was human, or natural, if anything he did was anything but one damned calculated move after technologically, politically calculated move—

“Nadi.” Giri was hovering over him. He didn’t know Giri. Giri didn’t know him. Giri just saw the paidhi acting oddly, and the dowager didn’t want him to die because she had use for him.

It was good that someone did.

He wiped his eyes, leaned his head back against the chair and composed his face, mentally severing the nerves to it, drawing smaller and smaller breaths until he could be as statue-calm as Banichi or Tabini.

“Are you hurting, nand’ paidhi? Do you need a doctor?”

Giri’s confusion was fu

“No,” he said, before Giri could escape in alarm. “ No, dammit, I don’t need a doctor. I’m all right. I’m just tired.” He shut his eyes against further ministrations, felt the leak of tears and didn’t open his eyelids, just kept his breathing calm, down a long, long, head-splitting spiral of fire-warmth and lack of oxygen, that bottomed out somewhere in a dizzy dark. He heard a confused set of voices talking in the background, probably discussing him. Hell, why not? he asked himself.

Usually it was the servants that betrayed you, the likes of Djinana and Maigi, Tano and Algini. But in the flutter of ba

Blood on the terrace, Jago had said, coming back out of the rain, and Banichi’s face had turned up in the mirror.

The beast walked Malguri’s halls after midnight, when everyone was asleep… looking for its head, and damned upset about it.