Inheritor

There was movement, suddenly, in the room: security headed for the stairs that led, they had all learned, to the roof.

Cenedi was looking not entirely displeased.

Jago came to him, and Banichi close behind. “Lord Tatiseigi,” Jago a

Banichi said, “Either he’s approved the marriage or he’s tracked down the television set.”

The plain of Saduri was a smallish peninsula, shaped like a triangle, and the sea made a deep indentation in one of the legs with the old ca

And the town of Saduri was below them, down at the bottom of a winding one lane road, out of sight from this position and in the dark, but Bren standing at the front entry to the station, with the mechieti moaning and spitting about the night-time summons to the herd, was very sure he had a good description of it.

“I’m glad it’s night,” Jase said. Jase had taken two of his motion sickness pills before he came out, and he fastened his jacket now with multiple tries at the buttons.

“They give you bonuses for this, I’m sure,” Bren said; and Jase, who didn’t get paid any more than he did nowadays, gave a nervous laugh, even a grin.

Jase wasn’t in any wise as anxious as the Messengers’ Guild, whose local assistant director, nand’ Brosimi, and two junior staffers, came to the dowager and wished to stay on to protect the equipment. But Brosimi, who did not at all relish the notion of resistance to an armed lord’s political intentions or simple misuse of the equipment, obeyed Ilisidi’s instruction to send the junior perso

“So long as they aren’t damaging to the equipment,” Ilisidi added, while her men were out calling in the mechieti and the staff that were going to walk down the road were shutting down their consoles.

All nonessential communications ceased when those switches flipped. Phone service was going to be limited in the region. The local province was going on the Emergency Network for such things as fire and ambulance, which one hoped didn’t prove necessary.

But other things were happening. Among the last messages to come in over the news service, there was a train stopped on the tracks near Aisinandi, effectively blocking the northern rail from reaching the area. By amazing coincidence, a switching error derailed another car in Aidin. Somethinghad started moving, and that event wasn’t on Cenedi’s list or Banichi’s.

There was beach on the northern face of the peninsula, ru

It was good news for them, however, because if the small force they now knew was safely on Dur could keep either of the two ferries from operating and also keep boats from landing on Dur’s sandy north shore, they’d assure that Deana went south right into the aiji’s hands.

Motorized transport had moved inSaduri, earlier, and Ilisidi hadn’t stopped it, fearing, Bren judged, that a fight would break out inside town limits with i

That much made tactical sense. But he didn’t figure even yet that he knew all of what was proceeding. Humans in the War had had the advantage of their high tech neutralized by the assumptions they made about whatatevi might do and when they would do it.

Studying atevi campaigns, as he’d done, didn’t tell him why, for instance, they left some of this station active instead of shutting it all down, no matter Tatiseigi’s a

The reason might also lie in the insult it might accord that powerful and influential lord if one didn’t accept his gesture of help in the spirit in which, if they were lucky, it was truly offered.

One wondered where Direiso’s heir was at the moment, whether he was again under Tatiseigi’s roof, or whether Saigimi’s daughter, claimant to Saigimi’s lordship, was with the force almost certainly coming at them.

One wondered exactly where Ajresi, Saigimi’s brother and that daughter’s bitterest rival, happened to be at the moment, and whether Badissuni’s indigestion had swayed his opinions.

If Ajresi wanted to stay neutral, he probably could, with Tabini’s tolerance. If he saw Tabini fall, however, and Direiso rise, the first debts Direiso would have to pay off would be awarding the Tasigin Marid to Saigimi’s wife and daughter, and that meant dispossessing Ajresi, who was too young for peaceful retirement and whose quarrel with Saigimi’s Sarini-province wife was too bitter for him to survive her daughter’s lordship in the Marid.

Add to that tangle of relationships lord Geigi, who had a grudge against the wife for her attempt to dispossess him from his seaside estate at Dalaigi.

There was one thing a great deal different than the last time, at the start of the War of the Landing, when the northern provinces had gone against Mospheira. In that long-ago day the south, the Peninsular lords, had joined the north and the dispossessed Mospheirans in their assault against the island.

This time most of the former atevi inhabitants of Mospheira were ru

And Tabini’s sudden removal of Saigimi, he began to understand, had made the south less, not more likely, to join Direiso.

The coastal ethnic minority around old Nain wasn’t fond of the northern provinces and theywouldn’t side with Direiso, who couldn’t shake her long-time association with Wiigin.

And Dur? Dur, famous mostly for a ferry co

Ilisidi, in the light from the foyer door, got up on Babs, and men searched out their various mounts. Haduni had lost one of his charges, who had flown down to Dur, but he was there to take charge of Jase; and Bren whistled for Nokhada who was notdelighted to see her rider at this hour when she was full of grass and roused from sleep. He hoped the handlers had gotten the girth tight.

He got up in Nokhada’s surly sketch of a bow. There were complaints of mechieti all around them, and Banichi and Jago glided close to him, shadows in the single-source light from the door, as the Messengers’ Guild staff that was going down the road with them afoot moved nervously into a knot by the door.

He had the gun in his coat pocket. The paidhiin were supposed to be unarmed and i

But defend the third of them? He didn’t know how they were going to find a woman from space who’d possibly launched out from Jackson with no skill and no chart and no knowledge of a sea that overmatched even the occasional smuggler.