Deceiver

Most of the bus had been nappingc the ability of the Guild to catch sleep where it offered was remarkable; and the bus had been silent the last couple of hours, Guildsmen taking the chance to rest now: tonight—

Tonight, none of them could vouch for. Wake us when we come downland, Jago had said; and he just had, faithfully.

Tano went back and waked others. Algini, who had slept only intermittently, did something involving the communications, possibly relaying a message through Targai, possibly just checking, Bren had no idea.

The driver—the third since they had set out this morning— stopped for long enough to trade out, possibly himself to catch a little nap. Bren earnestly wished he could, but napping under such circumstances had never been a skill of his.

He simply sat and watched Banichi and Jago and Tano and Algini consulting together, over at Tano’s and Algini’s seats; and was aware that Banichi went back to consult Damadi. Otherwise he simply watched those distant lights get closer, and brighter in the declining light.

Then there was a sudden flare of white light ahead, twin headlights. Some vehicle had been waiting for them—a bit of a surprise to him, but not, he would wager, to his aishid, nor to the aiji’s men.

The bus came to a slow halt, and opened the door, and two shadowy figures walked into the bus headlights, silhouetted against their own, coming from a truck parked across the road. Those two walked up to the side of the bus.

Banichi ran things now. Banichi instructed the driver to open the door, and one Guildsman mounted the steps and stopped, silently looked toward Bren, and with a sweep of his eyes, sca

Bren stood up slowly, facing the Marid Guildsman, who gave a barely discernible nod of courtesy. Bren returned it, as slightly. Then: “Follow us,” the man said, and turned and walked down the steps again, rejoined his partner and returned to the truck.

They hadn’t asked anything provocative, such as the paidhi-aiji leaving his protection and coming with them—which they would not have gotten.

They hadn’t shown a weapon.

Bren sat down without comment, and Jago sat down opposite him while Banichi instructed the driver to do exactly what the man had asked, and follow the truck. Its headlights lit dry grass, and swept over rock as the truck completed a turn, and then the bus started moving.

Banichi sat down.

“That didn’t go too badly,” Bren said.

“Trust nothing, Bren-ji,” Banichi said. “This is not a place to trust.”

“One understands, emphatically, Nichi-ji. But well done.”

Banichi shrugged. “Thus far,” he said, and that was all.

The dark was full now, with a bright moon in the sky. The lights picked out tall grass, or brush, or occasional pale rock, and the pitch of the road was generally downward toward the distant, moonlit bay. They crossed railroad tracks, and then Bren had an idea they must have arrived very near the city, and he had a notion their position was fairly well on the northern side. He knewthe maps. He knew the rail routes from years ago, the old theoretical arguments with the Bureau of Transportation. It was a curiously comforting sense of location, as if something had become solid.

A turn in the road brought the city lights much, much closer. He knew absolutely where he was.

And wished himself and everyone on the bus almost anywhere else.

Panic would be very, very easy. But this was not a hazard the Guild could solve, short of turning about and making a run for the border, which was hardly sensible at this point. They were here. They had chosen to be here, on the dowager’s order, and there was nothing for it now but for the paidhi, whose job it was, to collect his wits and put himself together.

Calm. The first thing was to make sure the meeting took place.

The next thing was to make sense to someone from a very different region and bearing a centuries-old resistence to everything he represented.

It could be done. All of diplomacy was founded on the notion that it could be done.

He had talked to the alien kyo. He had made sense of Prakuyo an Tep. Could Machigi be that difficult?

Probably. Prakuyo an Tep had owed him a favor, by Prakuyo’s lights. It was not exactly the case with Machigi.

Curiosity, however, was an attribute generally of the intelligent—and nobody had ever accused Machigi of being stupid.

Insecurity was another probability: Machigi was young. Insecurity meant instability. Not set in his ways, at least. But prone to skitter off mentally onto unguessable tracks. His time-scale and expectations, too, would not be that of a mature man.

Arrogance? That went with the office.

Tano and Algini were busy with their seatful of gear. Likely the experts at the rear of the bus, with their own collection of black boxes, were listening to the ambient. Whether they attempted to contact their allies at this point, or whether they were only passively gathering information, was a Guild decision, specifically Banichi’s, as far as he could tell, Damadi having ceded command to him—the paidhi-aiji being in charge of the situation. Banichi and Jago both did have recourse to short-range communication, and no reaction came from the truck that was guiding them.

The city was on a level with them, now, and the road became a real road, and then an avenue leading inward, but not in a straight line, rather in that sinuous fashion of atevi main streets, with little branches to the side, with clusters of dwellings and shops in inward-turned associationc in that regard, Tanaja was not that foreign. Pedestrians, mostly clustered around restaurants and such, were on the lighted streets— pedestrians who stopped and stared at the anomaly passing them, and cleared a path for them.

The road wended upward slightly, and the avenue became a tightly wound spiral uphill, through gardens and hedges, and this, too, was not that foreign a notion. The citadel of a town was its seat of government, and it was most commonly on a hill—though that hill was most commonly built up and paved over.

This hill was simply gardens, formal gardens, until they reached a lighted building, and a cobblestone drive, and a major doorway.

They were in. They were at the heart of what was not that large a city—Tanaja had a population, one recalled, of about a hundred thousand in itselfc more of the Transportation and Commerce statistics. Fish. Spices. Game. Roof tiles and limestone. Those were its major exports.

The mind leapt from fact to fact. It was not time to panic. The bus was coming to a stop now, as the truck stopped ahead of them, and more people came toward the bus from the lighted portico.

Banichi got up. So did Jago. “Open the door, nadi,” Banichi said, and Bren got up, feeling a little panicked, his collected thoughts scattering. He had no information to process. Just things to absorb, the number of those about the bus that they could see—about twenty, he thought, which probably meant at least that many again that they did not see.

The door opened. Another Guildsman, an older man, came up into the bus and looked at Banichi and Jago, at him, and back over the bus as a whole. It was a scowling, intent face, deliberate, Bren thought, betrayal of hostility, in a culture that avoided display. But no weapon was drawn.

Banichi’s face, in profile, was completely serene. So was Jago’s.

“The paidhi will come with us,” that man said.

Unvarnished, but not impolite, skirting the edge of courtesy. And here it was. Bren moved a step. Banichi and Jago, who were in front of him, moved. And a hand went up.

“Only the paidhi’s aishid,” the man said, and gave way.

A better requirement than might have been, evidencing a certain willingness to follow the courtesies—or seeking to remove leadership and direction from the rest of the Guildsmen on the bus: thatwas not the case. Damadi was perfectly capable of acting on his own.