Defender

“This is the unity of one. This is the aishidi’tat. This is our heritage.”

A bell rang. Tabini lit the third lamp in utter stillness.

The whole universe seemed to start again. A camera changed focus. Feet shifted. Breath came in and out.

Tabini turned, faced the assembly and lifted his arms. “Go. Observe silence for this one day on the matters under debate. Meet with me tomorrow.”

Silence on matters under debate. Tabini had just put allthe burning issues in that category. He’d destined the whole damned basket of snakes for debate tomorrow—when the paidhi, who’d worked on all these issues, had to be at the shuttle site within the hour.

Tabini having put every issue under legislative seal—no one could talk. The doors at the rear opened, admitting the brighter light of the corridor outside, rendering all of them, human and atevi, old and young, easterner and westerner, as shadows.

With the opening of those doors the smell of flowers overwhelmed the slight petroleum scent of atevi bodies. The hush now was overwhelming. The outward movement, begi

Dared he stop for a word with Tabini? It seemed chancy to Bren even to turn his head and look toward the aiji’s household. He had a side view of Ilisidi and uncle Tatiseigi waiting in starched silence.

The outward movement reached the next to last row, the outflow proceeding with dispatch. At least there’d been no gunshots outside.

Their own row took its turn and moved out.

Bren followed Jago out, and Banichi followed him, the three of them, felicitous three, a unity differently destined than the crowd outside. The sarcophagus, the arcane secrets of death and the atevi’s dealing with it, was at his back. Light was in the hall. The recessional suddenly felt to him like an escape toward life, toward a wholly different world, fleeing questions of eternity and mortality and Tabini’s motives down here…

Tabini didn’t consult him, didn’t invite him to the most important legislative session in a decade—well and good. There was no call for hurt feelings. He had urgent jobs he hadto do, up in orbit, and Tabini was in regional contentions.

He and his bodyguard went out those guarded doors among the flowers, into the outward flow of the elite and the powerful of the aishidi’tat, everyone on their way to the two lifts. There was talk, now, and there were guarded looks, brooding looks, satisfied looks—one could practically know the province by the expression.

He still didn’t know what he thought. He didn’t know whether what he’d been dragged down here to do had simply evaporated, and Tabini wasn’t talking—or whether his mere appearance in the ceremony was enough to accomplish some purpose, and Tabini wasn’t talking.

He could damned well bet there’d be conferences among allies who had been here. There’d be frantic opinion-seeking among the news services. He desperately wanted to avoid the news people, and they’d be swarming thick in the halls above.

He was due to be off the planet inside an hour now, and that, at the moment, seemed a very good idea.

They reached the lift, waited, in the murmurous silence of the hall. “Did you see the offering from Keishan?” one lord asked another indignantly.

Bren personally had not, nor wished to look, in this hazardous precinct where looks said it all. He had no idea which among the cloyingly perfumed flowers belonged to Keishan, but Keishan’s neighbors clearly did, and were somehow disturbed by the placement, or the size, or the color, or a hundred other declarations someone could find improper.

“This way, Bren-ji.” Banichi rarely pulled court rank to do his job, but they were late, as was, and with an out-thrust arm and a judicious eye, Banichi shunted him ahead of village nobility. Jago quickly blocked the lift door for him, and to Bren’s dismay and relief, gave them the entire lift car to themselves.

Rude, to the lesser lords. Justifiable, but rude. Bren didn’t know what to say—but when Assassins’ Guild security indicated their charge should move, a wise man moved, and heaved a shaken little sigh of deep appreciation in the little time they rode by themselves.

“Is there a problem?” he asked them. But immediately as he said it the door opened onto another wall of flowers on the main floor—flowers, and lenses, and news service reporters who spotted a high source and meant to have it at any cost.

“What does the paidhi’s office have to say, nand’ paidhi?” was the loudest question, along with, “Is there a crisis, nandi?”

“I am apprized of none,” he answered, his only safe answer. “I’m bound back to the station on the scheduled flight.” He was relieved to let his security whisk him along to another bank of lifts.

The door shut.

“No particular difficulty,” Banichi answered the prior question.

The lift rose up, let them out. They walked down a short hall in the restricted residency of the Bu-javid and took yet one more lift, this one securitied and keyed, down again.

Down and down to the rocky core of this hill which was the Bu-javid, the governmental nerve center, the seat of legislative authority, the state venues and the residence of the aiji and the highest lords… and the place of tombs.

“It should be a quiet ride, nadi-ji,” Jago said on the way down.

He very much hoped so.

“Tabini never did tell me why I’m here,” he said.

“It’s a puzzle,” Banichi said. And what puzzled Banichi decidedly puzzled most people. And gave him no better information.

The lift let them out in an echoing vault of concrete and living rock, a large, heavily guarded hall, a mostly vacant walk toward the Bu-javid’s internal freight and passenger train station—huge spaces, cut into the high hill, with guarded accesses for the trains.

Forklifts carried cargo to and fro. Security offices were constantly busy. Everything here was scrutinized—everything examined.

A red-curtained train waited at the siding—theirs, beyond a doubt, one of the short, well-appointed specials that sometimes had tagged them on to a long-range train, sometimes ran them straight to the airport.

It was the latter, this time, and Bren made a quick check of his wristwatch as they walked.

“We’re just a little late,” Banichi said. “No worry, nadi.”

No worry.

“I need a copy of Tabini’s speech, nadiin-ji.”

“As soon as possible,” Jago assured him, and he hoped that would happen before he was in the air. Absolutely no copies had been leaked, not even to intimates and staff, and he remained marginally uncertain whether Tabini, damn him, might have ad-libbed the whole thing. Tabini was capable of it, completely capable, but it was important enough he thought not. He himself wanted a re-read before the tone cooled in his memory, and neither he nor staff could take time now to secure one by ordinary cha

They approached the red-curtained car—Tabini’s private car, on loan to him… and he recognized the operations car that went next. It was arguably the tightest security on the rails. Banichi quickened his pace, entered the passenger car first to check out the situation there, then came back to signal him and Jago to come inside.

A guard just inside surrendered a computer case, thecomputer, to Banichi, and Bren breathed a sigh of relief as Banichi handed it to him. The man was Tabini’s, known to them. The car next door likely held the rest of that team. All of that was Banichi’s concern. Bren took his precious computer—the computer he’d not expected to have to leave anywhere he wasn’t, and had. He’d rather leave a newborn child on a railway track than have it out of his hands for five minutes—but if he trusted any staff as allied to him, it was logically Tabini’s.

Not that Tabini wouldn’t spy on him—excruciating to contemplate certain of the computer’s files in Tabini’s hands, but at least there would be no hostile use of them.