Pretender

No. Hell would freeze over before Tatiseigi abandoned the historic premises to Kadagidi looters.

More and more vehicle engines started, until the racket on the drive drowned their hearing and the lights blinded them to the deeper dark.

A whistle sounded near them then, low and perfectly audible above the noise. Bren’s heart leaped up. Jago whistled back, and a shadow joined them.

Banichi was back—Banichi and several other accompanying shadows whose identity Bren didn’t guess and didn’t venture to ask.

Shadow-signals passed, in too dim a light for human eyes, but enough, clearly, for his bodyguard to communicate, possibly even to recognize faces.

And Banichi was safe and had brought reinforcements with him.

Thank God.

Might one be Tabini, and the airplane a diversion? None were tall enough.

“Come,” Jago said, and a grip on his arm rescued him immediately as he foolishly caught his foot in a root and nearly fell flat on his face. Jago settled the jacket back onto his shoulder. He forged ahead, trying to keep an atevi pace, blind in the dark. Jago, who could see, cued him with pressure on his arm where to dodge an obstacle, steered him through a gap in the hedge where headlamps blazed and trucks and buses loomed up like strange lumpish beasts. Fumes from their engines stung the ordinarily pristine air, hazing the light like fog.

Banichi took the lead of their group, and slipped through the gap between two buses. Headlamps threw him into distinction for a moment. Those few newcomers with him—illumined for the instant in the lights—proved to be Taibeni, and one other who looked like one of Tatiseigi’s security staff. Bren sucked in his breath and kept with Jago, moving quickly in the lights and feeling like a pale-ski

Banichi had stopped by a bus door, holding the mounting rail and, the moment Jago brought him up, Banichi seized Bren’s arm and propelled him up the three towering, atevi-sized steps onto the deck.

Bren stumbled onto the last step, used a push of his hand on the flooring and a snatch at the passenger rail to haul himself aboard.

Another hand seized his shoulder and hauled him into the aisle as the rest of his team clambered up after him, their strength and weight rocking the bus, which, unlike others, sat dark and quiet, its aisle and its occupants all in shadow.

“Nand’ Bren!” a young voice exclaimed—a voice he knew as well as he knew the dowager’s. Cajeiri was aboard. And the bus seats—headlamps of other vehicles provided a glow through the windows, enough, at least, for outlines and shadows—filled with passengers, might contain the Taibeni youngsters, at least, if not the dowager herself—he expected her, and Cenedi, and the men he knew.

“Here,” that high young voice said, and a hand reached across the back of an empty seat, patting it—a whole vacant bench seat in an otherwise crowded bus. Doubtless the young folk had preserved it for him. He set a knee in the seat and strained his eyes forward, searching among those standing in the aisle, concerned to make sure all his own bodyguard had made it aboard—whatever this hurry meant, wherever they were about to go.

To the mountains, maybe. To safety—masked by all this to-do, this shifting of pieces on the board.

A shadow loomed above him. A heavy hand rested on his shoulder. He sensed rather than saw Banichi’s presence shutting out the light from that direction.

“Are you all right?” he asked Banichi as he heard the bus door shut.“Where are we going, Banichi-ji?”

“To Shejidan,” Banichi said.

“The Guild officers,” he began.

“They and theirs are no longer a concern,” Banichi reported.

Not a concern. Just that. There had surely been fatalities in that explosion—fatalities that encompassed the self-proclaimed highest leadership of Banichi’s own Guild—not men they supported, but not easy men to take down, all the same.

And the Assassins who might have come onto the grounds with that pair? Disposed of, just like that?

One noted that they still weren’t turning lights on inside this particular bus. A handful of other vehicles were lit up inside, interior lights recklessly blazing out into the night, while ordinary folk, townsmen and others, got to their seats in what one could only take as a general departure of the massed vehicles.

“Sit down, Bren-ji,” Banichi advised him. “We shall be moving in a moment.”

Shejidan, Banichi had said. All of them, evidently, were headed straight into confrontation.

Banichi left him. He subsided into the seat next to the window.

He had not seen Tano and Algini board, but he was convinced by now that his entire contingent had made it onto the bus, though there were only shadows and occasional profiles to tell him soc seated as he was, and with the backs of heads to look past, he saw one profile that looked very much like Tano talking to one he was sure was Jago.

The red and blue taillights of the bus in front of theirs flared to life, and white light stabbed rear to front of their bus, the headlamps of the bus behind. It was indeed Tano, without his jacket. Algini was with him. Thank God.

In that moment a human-sized form slipped around the end of the seat and scrambled in beside him, breathless and excited, a young hand catching at his arm. “Nand’ Bren! Did you hear how someone blew up the Guild officers?”

“One understands that to be the case, young sir.” He schooled his voice to eve

“Up there,” Cajeiri said, pointing, one thought, to the bus ahead of them “Papa said we should not all be together in the same vehicle, in case of bombs.”

“A very good idea, one is sure.” But not a good idea in public relations, dammit, to put the heir so publicly into the paidhi’s care.

A shiver ran through him. Bren worked his fingers, trying to drive out the night chill that had his hands like ice, trying at the same time to render his breaths even and composed and, thinking that the boy knew far more than he did: “Do you know if we are going to the train station, or just where, young sir?”

“We think we shall go all the way to Shejidan.”

“Do roads even go there?”

“Except a very short bit in the south, which Cenedi thinks we can cross with no trouble. Uncle Tatiseigi has a whole book of maps!”

Thinks we can cross, echoed in Bren’s head, as he numbly braced his computer next to him in the seat, an armrest on the left, against the wall. A book of maps, probably the very finest, most expensive, fifty years ago.

No trouble, is it? He was more than dubious about the information. Shejidan? Not likely, he said to himself.

Cajeiri got up on his knees on the seat and turned around to exclaim to his young bodyguard, “Have you the packets with our breakfast, Gari-ji? The paidhi will be very hungry.”

The paidhi’s stomach was upset. Breakfast was very far from his mind, but a packet came forward, and Cajeiri handed him a fruit bar, taking another for himself.

And no sooner had the boy gotten up on his knees again to lean on the seat back than the bus ahead of them started to move, slowly lumbering forward.

That seemed to indicate that other buses in line ahead of it were moving, but how they advanced any distance at all in that direction, considering the complete fender-to-fender jam-up in the hedged driveway, Bren was far from sure. Cajeiri twisted back forward and plumped down in his appropriated seat.

The bus ahead of them turned where Bren was sure there was no turn, right into the hedge, as happened, a parting insult to the manicured planting that had separated the drive from the Taibeni camp.

Their own turn followed, broken hedge branches scraping the sides and bottom of their bus as they ground, lurched, and bumped their way over the roots.