Inheritor

He tried again. Looking for reaction, a fracture, any way past that reserve and into the truth. “Not that I could have found a secure phone immediately. But if I knew there was an emergency here, I’d have found one.”

“Well. I’ll call her. Thanks for checking for me.”

“I’m sorry, Jase. I’m really sorry.”

Jase had his back turned. His bedroom had no exterior windows, just a decorated screen, gilt, beautiful work. In the center was a painting of a mountain, no specific mountain that he knew. Jase stared at that as if it offered escape.

“Yeah,” Jase said. “I know.”

“I have a meeting to go to. With Tabini. I’ll have to go when he calls. But we need to talk, Jase. We need to talk—personally.” He wished to hell he hadn’t come in here for this interview on a fast, in-and-gone-again basis. Assassins talked about a broken-legged contract, where the object wasn’t to kill someone, just to keep them out of action. And, God, such desperate measures did flash through his mind where it regarded Jase’s crisis and the one racketing through atevi affairs right now. “I don’t want you to have to track things secondhand again. I’m sorry. I really am. Please, just take it easy. The staff doesn’tentirely understand. They’re trying to, in all good will toward you.”

“I’ll manage. I’ll call. I’ll talk to you later.”

He couldn’t expect Jase to be cheerful orbalanced, considering the situation; and he tried to desensitize his own nerves to Jase’s jangled reactions with all the professional detachment he owned. Jase had some consideration coming.

Like time to talk, when he could spare it. If he could patch the gulf that had already grown between them. He hadn’t been able to talk. Now he wanted to, and didn’t dare open up the things he had to explain until Jase had weathered this crisis.

But he’d delivered his message. And there wasn’ttime right now. “See you, probably at noon,” he said, and left and shut the door, wishing there were something he could do, and trying to hang on to his own nerves.

Depression, he thought, was very easy from Jase’s present situation. Human psych was part of the course of study that led to his job; he knew all the warnings and all the ways one fought back against isolation, bad news, lack of intelligible information from one’s hosts or one’s surroundings.

Depression: general tendency to want to sleep, general tendency to believe the worst in a situation rather than the better possibilities, general tendency to believe one couldn’t rather than that one could.

And maybe his accepting being told that the phone lines were inaccessible to him without his even objecting to Manasi that it was a legitimate emergency wasn’t just some ship-culture unwillingness to question a rule. Maybe it was a growing depression.

But, dammit, he had problems, too, and didn’t, again, dammit, have time to worry about it right now.

Though he did note, now that he questioned his perceptions, that Jase hadn’t asked him the other critical and obvious question: hadn’t asked if he’d discovered why the ship hadn’t called him first with news of his father’s accident.

Jase hadn’t asked him, second, whether the ship couldhave reached him directly with the information he’d ended up hearing from Yolanda Mercheson via Mospheiran cha

Jase hadn’t asked, and he realized as he walked away that he hadn’t exactly ended up volunteering the information he had from Tano, either, that Mogari-nai maintained there was nocall to Jase.

Maybe, Bren thought, he should go back and raise the issue. Or maybe the situation would find some rational explanation once Jase had had the chance to talk to his mother at some length and find out what had happened—and he did trust that Jase’s call would get through. It was reasonable that Jase’s mother herself might have asked that the news be withheld from Jase, perhaps wanting to get her own emotions under control before she broke the news to him, perhaps not wanting to distress Jase over something he couldn’t help at a time when she might just possibly know that Jase was alone with only atevi around him. He hoped that that would turn out to be the answer. Maybe that was what Jase was hoping.

“Nand’ paidhi,” he heard from a servant as he trekked back through the area of the dining room, “the aiji wishes you to come meet with him now, please.”

“Thank you, nadi,” he said, and shifted mental gears again, this time for Ragi in all the grand complexity of the court language: a session with Tabini was nothing to enter bemused or with the mind slightly occupied, and he would need to go straight over next door.

Tons of stuff to deliver next door, documents, various things for the aiji’s staff, but he’d sent those ahead. Unlike the situation in the past, when he’d resided still within the Bu-javid governmental complex, but far down the hill in his little garden apartment (and far down the list of Bu-javid officers responsible for anything critical.) He had nothing personally to carry when he spoke with Tabini nowadays. He didn’t appear in audience and wait his turn among other petitioners any longer. When the paidhi was scheduled to meet with the aiji in this last half year, he waited comfortably in his borrowed apartment, on a good day with his feet up and with a cup of tea in hand, while the aiji’s staff and the paidhi’s staff (another convenience he had not formerly had) worked out the schedule over the phone and found or created a hole in the aiji’s schedule.

Today the aiji had passed orders, one suspected, to make a hole where none existed. Tabini was squeezing him into his schedule and he would have understood if Tabini had postponed their meeting a second time or a third or fourth, counting what else was going on. If the ship in Sarini Province hadn’t blown up, Tabini had to reckon him and it at a lower priority.

But that Tabini wanted to see him, of that he had no doubt. He and Tabini on good days made meetings long enough to accommodate their private as well as their official conversation. He and Tabini, two men who had come to office young and who shared young men’s interests, often ranged into casual converse about politics, women, philosophy, and the outdoors activities they both missed. Sometimes Tabini would choose simply to discuss the management of game, not the paidhi’s direct concern. Or the merits of a particular invention some ateva had sent up the appropriate cha

He had the feeling that sometimes they had meetings simply because Tabini wanted someone to talk to about something completely extraneous to his other problems.

But definitely not today. There was the interview at noon.

And meanwhile he had a distraught and grieving human roommate whose conversation with his mother might for all he could predict blow up into God knew what.

He went immediately to the foyer, stopped by the duty station to advise Tano they should go now, and was mildly disorganized in his expectations to find Banichi and Jago, both of whom he’d gotten out of the habit of expecting to see. They’d been very much who he expected to see there, once upon a time.

“I’ll escort the paidhi myself,” Banichi said cheerfully, like old times, and left Jago and Tano and Algini to do whatever had involved a group of Guild close together and voices lower than ordinary.

Curious, Bren thought of that little gathering, not curious that they were talking, but that it had fallen so uncharacteristically quickly silent. If their job was to protect him, it did seem appropriate for them to advise him what they were protecting him from.

But no one had volunteered anything. And it was probable that Banichi and Jago were relaying things pertinent to things the paidhi’s conscience truly didn’t want to know about, down in the peninsula.