Destroyer

“The world is changing,” Ilisidi said. “Living things do change, Tati-ji. Even the hills change. Kabiu itself moves slowly, but it does move, as the very earth moves. Baji-naji. There is always room to flex, or a thing breaks, Tati-ji.”

Around the flank and uncomfortably up from behind. Tatiseigi looked disquieted, and very much out of sorts.

“Look at this boy,” Ilisidi said, “half Atageini, and tell me there is no co

“Clearly!”

Ilisidi took up her napkin. “We shall discuss this without the boy.”

“To be sure.” Tatiseigi was still irate, but the thunder and the fury sank, a temporary lull, like a pause in a storm that had only had its initial run. “To be sure. Take the paidhi with you.”

Tatiseigi laid aside his own napkin. Breakfast was over. There were courtesies, bows, as they rose. Bren had the notion he had just been in a war, and wished only to clear the area without complete disaster.

“Nand’ Bren,” Cajeiri said, and fixed him with an eye-level stare. That was all he said, just an acknowledgement of his presence, and the boy’s disquiet, perhaps, at certain transactions.

“Nandi,” he said, and let everyone including Tatiseigi precede him off the balcony, back into the hall. He was cold, chilled through. He was always cold at these open-air breakfasts. He walked out to collect his bodyguard and retraced his steps with them through the halls, with every confidence that they had heard everything that passed out there… staff on the next floor might have heard a good part of it.

Upstairs, then, and behind their own doors, where Tano and Algini had kept things safe and secure.

“It did not go well, nadiin-ji,” he said, “but it was not disastrous. No one was assassinated.”

Banichi thought it fu

Which argued, perhaps, that going into a critical debate with Cajeiri at hand was not the best choice.

Wind blew through open windows, wind stirring the gauzy i

He had had a night’s sleep, even a decent night’s sleep. But when he tried to think about what to say to Lord Tatiseigi, if he could get a quiet meeting, it completely refused to take shape in his brain, as if that was not what he ought to be thinking about, as if the whole world was pulling at his sleeve, wanting his attention, refusing to deal logically, or at least, refusing to deal in human logic. He wanted to throw himself into bed, pull the covers up around his ears and lie there getting warm and digesting a too-large breakfast—desire for the tastes had led him to overindulge, and he had eaten to appear uninvolved while the barbs flew—but the desire for sleep was not a desire for sleep. He knew himself, that the instant his head hit the pillows he would start processing the things he had heard, sifting them for every nuance, regretting things not said, and things said. It was his job to parse such things: something in what the dowager and Tatiseigi had said, or something he had picked up elsewhere this morning or last night, had begun to make a nest in his subconscious. If he went to bed, he would have to undress, to save the clothes; if he delayed to undress, he might lose the thought. And right now the safest place for him was a large, well-padded chair in the sitting area, and not letting those subconscious thoughts surface and distract him from what he, dammit, needed to think about. It could be as foreign to the problem as a remembrance of something Barb had said. He began to wonder if it was something he had eaten or drunk, the somnolence was so urgent, so absolutely pressing.

He sat, finding warmth in the well-padded chair, attempted to distract himself with a view of the land and sky outside, all veiled in blowing gauze, but he kept seeing the metal and plastics of the ship. He kept thinking of Jase, who had a food-short population on his hands, and tanks to get into operation, and who would have loved half of the breakfast he had just had. Of Barb. Of Toby, at the wheel of his boat. Crack of sails in a stiff breeze.

Shuttle runway. Wheels down.

He had done precious little good down there, except to serve as a lightning rod for Tatiseigi’s irritations. Or possibly to provoke them. He had no idea whether Tatiseigi had included him in the breakfast of his own volition, or whether Ilisidi had insisted on it to a

Or to have a lightning-rod handy, to prevent topics being raised which she had no wish to discuss at the moment.

Should he send a message to the old man, request an audience independent of Ilisidi? He had not the least idea what to do now. He heard his staff talking quietly in the bedroom. He supposed that was a debrief and a strategy session. He ought to participate. He ought to have a brilliant idea what to do from here, and whether he ought to stay here, and urge the dowager to stay here, where there was at least reasonable protection—or whether he should go to Shejidan and present the untried arguments before Banichi’s Guild.

He knew what he had rather not do—which was to go to Shejidan. But it was fear that held that opinion. Logic might dictate otherwise, if he could summon the will to think straight.

Too much breakfast, too much comfort here.

He had to talk to his staff, once they’d had a chance to talk to everyone else, once Ilisidi had a chance, ca

Waiting. Waiting was the very devil.

Chapter 10

He must have dozed, sitting there in the armchair, tucked up against the slight cool breeze from the open window. He came awake with the passage of a shadow between him and the light, and saw Banichi standing between him and the windows. Jago was with him. Tano and Algini were behind them.

“Nadiin-ji?” He sorted his wits for relevant recent information and remembered breakfast, and a post-breakfast conference in progress among his staff.

“We have a plan, Bren-ji.”

Wonderful. A plan. He so much wanted a plan. He had failed to come up with one, and he was sure Banichi’s was going to involve his staff doing something that would risk their lives.

He mustered the wit and fortitude to say no to those gathered, earnest faces.

“Sit down, please, nadiin.” He wanted a quiet conference, one in which they did not cut out his sunlight, or loom over him with superior force. “One hopes it by no means involves your going to Shejidan without me.”

Not a twitch. “No, Bren-ji.” From Banichi. “It involves Lord Tatiseigi’s men going there.”

“One would hardly count on his assisting us.”

“For the dowager’s sake,” Jago said. “One believes he would order it for her. Not for us, never for us, but possibly for her.”

“In Shejidan,” Tano said, “his messengers can enter the Guild Hall reasonably unremarked, under far less threat of hostile measures from the Kadigidi. And they can present the facts of the heir’s claim.”

“But to claim the succession—that would seem as if the Atageini think Tabini is dead, nadiin-ji.” He was far from sure that turning their support from Tabini to Cajeiri was a good idea. “And would it not look as if we support that theory?”