Inheritor

Banichi made his mechieta extend a leg and got up, in that haste the maneuver needed. Others were getting up. Bren had Nokhada kneel and as he rose, turned and landed in the saddle, he saw Jase attempt to do the same.

Attempt. Jase failed, was left clinging to the saddle ring with one foot hung and the other off the ground as the mechieta rose and tried to turn full circle in response to Jase’s unwitting grip on the rein. It was a dangerous halfway, from which a man could fall with his foot still trapped; but Haduni was there instantly to put a hand under Jase and boost him up, disheveled and with his braid loosening, but safe. Jase still pulled, and the mechieta resisted, lifted his head and turned another circle until Jase apparently realized it was his own fault and slacked the grip on the rein.

“It took me a while,” Bren said.

Jase still looked scared. Well a man could be. And dizzy. For a man who had trouble with the unclouded sky and kept taking motion sickness pills, the mechieta turning while he was off balance was not, Bren was sure, a pleasant thing.

“You’re doing fine,” Bren said.

And with no warning but a ripple of motion through the herd Nokhada spun and joined the others in a rush after Ilisidi, who had taken off. Bren looked back, scared for Jase, but he had stayed on. Jago fell back to join him as the herd sorted itself out, Nokhada fought the rein to get forward, and Banichi rode ahead of him.

But the rush settled into a run for a good long while. Ilisidi, damn her, was having the run she’d wanted, a perverse streak she had, a desire to challenge a man’s sense of self-preservation, never mind Jase was fighting to stay on and scared out of good sense.

He dropped further back, a fight with Nokhada’s ambitions, and came past the boy from Dur, who was riding with a death grip on the saddle straps and excitement in his eyes. He came alongside Jase, then, who was almost hindmost in the company. Jase was low and clinging to the saddle, his whole world doubtless shaking to the powerful give and take of the creature that carried him.

“What are we doing?” Jase yelled at him. “Why are we ru

“It’s all right!” he yelled back. And yelled, in Ragi, what he’d said on the language lessons when Jase had reached the point of anger: “Call it practice!”

Jase, white-faced and with terror frozen on his features, began suddenly to laugh, and laugh, and laugh, until he wondered if Jase had gone over the edge. But it wasfu

In a while more, as Babsidi ran out his enthusiasm for ru

“Good!” Bren said, and Banichi said, riding past him, “Well done, Jase-paidhi!”

Jase glanced after Banichi with a strange look on his face, and then seemed to decide that it wasa word of praise he’d just heard. His shoulders straightened.

The mechieti never noticed. The boy from Dur dropped back to ride with them and with Haduni and Jago. But then Nokhada decided she was going to go forward, giving little tosses of her head and moving as if she could jump sideways as easily as forward, meaning if she found an excuse to jump and bolt, she would.

Bren let her have her way unexpectedly and touched his heel to her ribs, which called up a willing burst of speed around the outside of the herd and up to the very first rank. She nipped into place with Ilisidi and Cenedi, where she was sure she belonged.

“Ah,” Ilisidi said. “nand’ paidhi. Did he survive?”

“Very handily,” he said, and knew then the dowager had kept onepromise she’d made in coming here, to give the new paidhi the experience he’d had.

And Jase had laughed. Jase had sat atop a mechieta’s power and stayed on, Jase had been told by a man he hadn’t trusted that he had done quite well, and Jase was still back there, riding upright and holding his own under a wide open and cloudless sky.

And by that not inconsiderable accomplishment Jase was better prepared if they had to move: it waspractice; and practice like that had been life and death for him—in a lot of ways.

The sun declined into the west until it shone into their eyes and made the land black, and nothing untoward had happened. The sun declined past the edge of the steep horizon toward which they were climbing, and the light grew golden and spread across the land, casting the edges of the sparse, short grasses in gold.

Suddenly, with the topping of a rise, a white machine-made edge showed above the dark horizon, far distant.

Mogari-nai: the white dish of the earth station, aimed at the heavens. Beyond the dish in that strange approach to dusk, the blue spark of warning lights. Microwave towers aimed out toward the west, a separate establishment.

They rode closer, and now the sky above the darkening land was all gold, the sun sunk out of sight. One could hear in their company the sounds that had been their environment all day: the moving of the mechieti, in their relentless, ground-covering strides; the creak of harness; the rare comment of the riders. Somewhere below their sight the sun still shone, and they discovered its rim again as, between the shadow of cliffs falling away before them, the ocean shone faintly, duskily gold—no longer Nain Bay, but the Strait of Mospheira.

The last burning blaze of the sun then vanished still abovethe horizon. The mountains of Mospheira’s heart, invisible in the distance, were hiding the sun in haze.

“A pretty sight,” Ilisidi said.

If they had not struck their traveling pace when they had, they would have arrived well after dark. Ilisidi, Bren thought, had wanted the daylight for this approach to the earth station and its recalcitrant Guild.

A peaceful approach. Banichi had said that was her intent, at least.

23

A prop plane, a four-seater, sat beyond the dish of the earth station, marking the location of the airstrip, and beyond it, a low-lying, modern building, was the single-story sprawl of the operations center.

The vast dish passed behind them, the dusk deepened to near dark, and the company stayed close around the dowager as they rode. Bren eyed the roof ahead of them and had his own apprehensions of that long flat expanse, and the chance of an ambushing shot from that convenient height. He was anxious about their safety and hoped Banichi and Jago in particular wouldn’t draw the job of checking out the place. It looked like very chancy business to him, and chancier than his security usually let him meet.

They stopped. A good thing, he thought.

But the mechieti had scarcely gotten their heads down for a few stolen mouthfuls of grass when the door to the place opened, bringing every mechieta head up and bringing a low rumble and a snort from the mechiet’-aiji, Babsidi, who was smelling the wind and was poised like a statue, one that inclined toward forward motion.

“Babs,” Ilisidi cautioned him. One atevi figure had left the doorway and walked toward them at an easy pace, nothing of hostility about the sight, except the black clothing, and the fact that the man—it wasa man—was armed with a rifle which he carried in hand.

But about the point that Bren was ready to take alarm, the man lifted a hand in a signal and one of Ilisidi’s men rode forward to meet him.

Not even of Tabini’s man’chi, Bren thought, though Banichi had said Tabini was moving; it seemed to be all Ilisidi’s operation. But it was reassuring, at least, that they had had someone on site; perhaps, as Banichi had also said, preparing security for Ilisidi’s tour, much as Tabini’s security had prepared the way for him on tour.