Inheritor

“ He’s gone home. I mean— he’s gone home up to the coast, Mr. Cameron. They shut the office.”

“They shut the office.”

“ Well—” The voice lowered. Sounded shaky. “ Mr. Cameron, the State Department shut it down. They’ve fired everybody in the whole Foreign Office, except I worked for both offices. I’m the night operator.”

“Polly?” He remembered a dark-complexioned young woman with a part down the middle of her head.

“ Yes, sir, Mr. Cameron. And they’re going to fire me, too. They record all the calls. I can’t call out. Is there something you can tell me that I can tell somebody?”

“Good night, Polly.”

“ Yes, sir.” The voice was very faint. Hushed as it was, she sounded like a child. “ Have a good evening, sir.”

Damn, he wanted to say. And wanted to slam the receiver down. But he didn’t. He drew a deep breath and calmed his nerves.

“Nand’ dowager, the State Department has discharged everyone in the Foreign Office. Even the Secretary has gone home. That’s what I’m told, and I believe the young woman who told me. Yolanda-paidhi may well have gone somewhere. But I’m very fearful she hasn’t.”

Jase, leaning on the counter, hung his head and looked utterly downcast.

“So,” the dowager said.

“I know where she’d come,” a young voice said.

And with one accord everyone looked at the boy from Dur.

24

There were maps. Ilisidi’s security had very detailed maps, which they had brought into the small, glass-walled conference room just off the main communications center. Out there beyond the glass, technicians of the Messengers’ Guild kept routine broadcasts going and, being mostly Saduri locals stranded away from their homes by the crisis, gratefully had their suppers off the official buffet. In this room, standing around the conference table with the chairs pushed back to the glass, all of them that had to make the plans were the crowded but willing audience as Rejiri of Dur-wajran ran his hand over a profusion of numbers and topographical lines on the shoreline of Mospheira—including this area, which was not detailed on most atevi maps.

“Most illegal boats come from the Narrows, here,” Rejiri said with his fingers on the narrowest part of the strait, that nearest Aidin. “And there’s a very bad current in the Narrows, so it looks like a real good place to go across but it isn’t. Freighters know, but they come down from Jackson and catch the current and drive hard. They have the big engines, too. But the little boats, they can’t carry that much in their tanks, nand’ dowager, and if they go too hard they’ll run their tanks dry and especially if they don’t have a lot of extra tanks aboard they’ll be in a lot of trouble. If they leave out of Jackson and go with the current and the wind’s not in their faces off Aidin headland they can cut across and the current will just carry the little boats to Dur. But the sneaky thing is if you don’t know anything but boating in safe water and you don’t know you’re in the current and you think you’re going across, and you aren’t, you’re going way, way south. You want to have a lot of cans of fuel, a whole lot of cans. But if you run out or sometimes if you go out of Bretano—if you do that, and some do, they all come in right here.” The boy pointed to a spot on the outer shore, at the place where it turned in to Saduri Harbor—and drew a second breath. “That beach. If you drop a bottle in at Jackson or Bretano it’s got to come here. You can find all sorts of stuff after a storm. Just junk, most times. But if there’s a boat tried to smuggle stuff in, or if they don’t make Dur, they’ll break up on the rocks at the point or they’ll make landfall somewhere right along here. And weather’s been bad. Which could help them along but the seas are going to be awful, too.”

“What does he say?” Jase wanted to know. The boy had a rapid patter, an accent, and he was using words Jase didn’t know. Bren gave him the condensed version in Mosphei’.

“He’s saying the current through the strait is very strong. Boats starting from Mospheira if they don’t reach Dur, it carries them onto a beach near Saduri.”

“Water current.”

“Yes.” Hedidn’t know what caused a current. It wasn’t the time to find out. He had a council of war around him and Jase. The dowager was looking grimly at the map over which he was sure her knowledge of plans that might be affected was superimposing other considerations, and the boy went on.

“Nand’ dowager,” the boy said. “I could take the plane out there. I could get to Dur and tell my father you need help.”

Ilisidi scowled at the boy. “You don’t have a key.”

“One doesn’t need a key, nandi.”

“One forgot. Stealing airplanes is your trade. How doesone start it?”

“One pushes a button, nand’ dowager.”

“A security disaster. Stay here. I plan to charge your father your hourly keep.”

“But I could help!”

“Gods felicitous, boy, this is the communications headquarters for half the continent! Do you think we can’t phoneyour father?”

“But they might tap the phones. Mightn’t they, nand’ dowager?”

There was quiet for a moment, and Cenedi said, “It might be a useful diversion. And the boy’s presence on the radio could get four men in una

“A damned fool of a boy whose welfare is in myhands.”

“Nand’ dowager, I could go right off the cliff and beon approach. I could fly men into Dur! And we’ll get my father to shut the ferry down, so nobody can go from Wiigin to here! If you send men, he’ll believe me!”

“Wari-ji.”

The man so named leaned a hand on the table. “One does see it as possible, aiji-ma. And the boy has a point.”

“Instruct him. If he can start the thing, ifit has fuel—let him go. And go now. We haven’t touched Dur, so as not to involve them, but Dur has touched us. So let them act, if they will.”

“Yes,” the man said. Nawari was his entire name. “Boy.”

The boy darted to the man and toward the door, remembered to bow, and went where the man beckoned him to go. There was a silence in the glassed-in room until the door was shut. On the end of a console counter outside in the communications center, the carefully prepared buffet laid in the path, and the boy pocketed a sandwich as he passed that table, against, Bren supposed, famine on the way to Dur.

It was safe food: their own people had brought it, as Bren understood, when they came in to secure Mogari-nai. Even if everyone but the paidhiin had had the foresight to tuck emergency rations into their pockets once they left the baggage behind.

“There’s fuel in the plane,” Ilisidi said. “As happens. Our staff flew it here.” There were men still on guard on the roof and about the area of the transmission towers, men who had certainly gotten up to Mogari-nai somehow, but there were too many for one small plane. “One would leave the young fool here, but one can lay odds he’d be in the midst of matters.” The dowager’s fingers rested on the map, on the aforenamed beach and the island of Dur. “Dur-wajran and its position has been a concern. I do rely on the boy’s assessment of his father’s man’chi, and I am relieved on that score. We havea number of men on Dur. They came in two days ago on the ferry from Saduri, but they’re there as tourists unless they receive orders or see trouble. Nawari will provide them orders for quiet and specific actions and, with the active cooperation of the lord of Dur, we can close off Wiigin from Saduri by water. The boy canbe useful in that regard. As is his advice useful. Trust every local youth to know that beach. And if that isthe case, so do the Kadigidi know it. They mayhave advised a boatload of otherwise inept human sailors to put out from Jackson Harbor with enough fuel just to keep the bow to the waves. Smugglers have used Dur, generally, since the stretch of beach in question is government reserve. So Cenedi informs me.”