Inheritor

Jase swung. Bren didn’t even think about doing it—he hit Jase hard. Jase grabbed his coat, Bren blocked a punch with one arm, hit Jase in the gut, and had to block another punch.

They hit the table together, holding on to each other. The candle fell, they both overbalanced and went down, and Bren writhed his way to his knees, blind, angry, and being hit by an idiot he wanted to kill. Before he got a grip on Jase, Jase got a grip on him, and they knelt there on the floor like two total fools, each with a deathgrip on the other’s coat, sleeve, arm, shoulder, whatever.

“Get up,” he said. “We’ve put the damn candle out. Are you trying to burn the building down?”

“Damn you.”

He shook at Jase. Jase was braced. They were that way for several more breaths.

“Are they going to walk in and find us like this?” he asked Jase. “Get up!”

“Let go.”

“No way in hell.”

“Truce. Let go.”

He didn’t let go. He started to get up, Jase started to get up, and they got up leaning on each other, still holding on to each other, managing a slow, mistrustful disengagement.

Fool, he said to himself. He wasn’t surprised. He wasn’t happy, either, as he trusted Jase’s common sense enough to pick up the candles, the extinguished one in the holder and the entire basket of them that had been overset.

He took a match, relit the candle. They’d delivered body blows, at least of those that had landed; and hadn’t done each other visible damage, give or take dust on their clothes. The candle and the wan light from the window showed him Jase with hair flying loose, collar rumpled, a sullen look. He figured it had as well be a mirror of himself at the moment.

“We have to go to di

“In this wreckage?”

“ Thisis a Historic Monument, Jasi-ji, and I suggest if she declares it’s a palace on the moon you bow and agree that it’s very fine and you’re delighted to be here.”

There was a long silence from the other side.

“Yes, sir,” Jase said.

“I’m not sir.”

“Oh, but I thought you’d taken that back. You are siror you aren’tin this business, so make up your mind!”

“Damn that talk. This is not your ship. You’re supposed to be doing a job, you’re not doing it, you damn near created a rift in the government and I brought you here to patch the holes, the gapingholes, in your knowledge of these people, theircustoms, theirlanguage, and yoursensitivity to a vast, unmapped world of experience to which you’re blind, Mr. Graham. I suggest you say thank you, put yourself back to rights, and don’t expect atevito do the job you volunteered for. They weren’t born to understand you, they’re on theirplanet, enjoying theirlives quite nicely without your input, and I suggest if you approach atevi officials who owe theirprecious scant time to their own people, you do so politely, appreciate their efforts to understand you, they choose to make such efforts, or I’ll see you out of here.”

“Thank you,” Jase said coldly.

“Thank you for waiting to blow up.”

“Don’t push me. Don’tpush me. You need my good will.”

“Do I? You could have an accident. They’d send me another.”

There was a small, shocked silence. Then: “You’re an atevi official. Is that the way you think of yourself?”

“You don’t question me, mister. When it comes to relations withthe atevi, I amsir, to you, and you do as you’re told. You and your rules-following. This is the time for it, this is the time in your whole life you’d betterfollow the damn rules, and nowyou want to do things your own way! What do I need to diagram for you? Where did you get the notion youknow what in hell’s going on? Or did I miss a revelation from God?”

A long, long silence, this time. Jase didn’t look him in the eye. He stared at the floor, or at dust on his clothing, which he brushed off, at the light from the window, at anything in the world but him.

“I think we should go back to Shejidan,” Jase said to the window. “This isn’t going to help.”

“Well, it’s not quite convenient at the moment to go back. You asked for this, and you’ve got it. So be grateful.”

“The hell! You’ve lied to me.”

“In what particular?”

A silence. A silence that went on and on while Jase stared off into nowhere and fought for composure.

There was a small rap at the door.

“Nadi?” Bren asked, wishing the interruption had had better timing, to prevent the incident in the first place. He shouldn’t have hit Jase. It hadn’t helped. The man had lost his father. He was on a hair-trigger as it was. He’d chosen this particular time to bear down on the language, probably becauseof his father’s death; and now he didn’t know where he was: he was temporarily outside rational expression.

The door opened.

“Is there a difficulty, nadiin?” Banichi asked—Banichi, who was lodged next door, and, if there was anyone besides Ilisidi’s chief of security, Cenedi, who was likely to have heard the entire episode, he’d about bet Banichi had the equipment in his baggage and would use it.

“No,” he said. “Thank you, Banichi-ji. Is everyone settled? What’s our schedule?”

“A light di

“We’ll be ready. Thank you, Banichi-ji.”

“Nadi.” The door closed.

“He heard us,” Bren said quietly.

“I thought they took orders from you,” Jase said in a surly tone.

“No. They don’t. One of a great many things you don’t know, isn’t it?”

Another small silence.

“You needto know, Jase. You’d better learn. I’m trying to help you, dammit.”

“I’m sorry,” Jase said then. “I’m just—”

Jase didn’t finish it. Neither did he. He waited.

“I am sorry,” Jase repeated, in Ragi. “Nadi, I was overturned.”

“Upset,” he said automatically and bit his lip. “Overturned, too, with reason. Jasi-ji. I know that. Can we recover our common sense?”

“Nadi,” Jase said, “I wish to see the ocean. Will it be possible?”

“Nadi, you’re very forward to keep asking me. If I were atevi I should be offended. Learn that.”

A small hesitation. A breath. “Nadi, I take your information, but you are not atevi and I wish very much to know and not be surprised.”

“I’ll try to find out,” Bren said. “There are things I don’t understand.” He hesitated to say so, but there were very quiet alarm bells ringing in the subconscious. “Observe a little caution. This is in excess of the conditions I expected. We arepossibly in danger, nadi. One wonders if we have quite left behind the events in the city.”

“Is this part of the lesson?”

Layers, upon layers, upon layers. “No,” he said. “It isn’t.”

“Are you lying to me right now?”

“No,” Bren said. “And of course, if I were, I would say I wasn’t. But I’m not. I’ve turned us over to Tabini’s grandmother, and I don’t know what the truth is. The aiji thought us safe to be here. But I am, however mildly, concerned at the conditions. I can’t say why I’m concerned. I just would expect—somewhat more comfort than we have here, more evidence that someone had some idea of the conditions here beforethe aiji-dowager took guests here.” He wasn’t sure Jase followed that. But there was something ticking over at the back of his brain now that he was no longer focusing on Jase’s potential for explosion. That feeling of unease said that the dowager had security concerns, very reasonable security concerns, as did they. As did Mogari-nai, some distance away across the plain, which one would expect would be a very sensitive area; and they weren’t seeing the security level at this place he had expected.

“Can you ask Banichi?”

“Within his man’chi, yes.”

“Qualified yes.”

“Always. It always is.” It was the truth he gave Jase, and the answer was one that struck deep at what was human and what was atevi. He understood Banichi’s priorities and took no offense at them. He wasn’t in the mood to explain. He wasn’t in the mood now to doubt his own security.