Pretender

Cajeiri, appearing at his elbow, where he should not be, had just asked him a question. He was not sure what it had been, something about Murini. “One has no idea, young sir.”

“But,” Cajeiri said, and pursued the question.

“One has no idea,” he repeated, tracking the noise of the radio, but unable to hear the transmission. Tano was back there, near it.

Meanwhile he worked his way back to his seat, entraining Cajeiri behind him, and burdened with the thought that if Algini and Tano were more than Guild members, this ungainly bus might itself be a higher-level target than he had imagined, a traveling Guild office— They hadn’t contacted Guild offices in Shejidan, Tano had said, but certain Guild members.

So communications were functioning, maybe including Tatiseigi’s leaky communications system, which Ilisidi was using with abandon, alerting the whole reception area. They were not isolated.

They had control of the railroad switching point at Coagi. They had maps, had support in the countryside, and the means to route their hindmost vehicles to alternative fueling sites: farm tanks, village stations, all sorts of hitherto unimagined sources.

He sat down in his own seat, dazed by the number of vectors this business was taking, trying to think of anything he could personally do. Cajeiri plumped down beside him.

“We must have a very large fuel tank, nand’ Bren.”

“That we do, young sir.”

“How much fuel does this pump have in it?”

“One has no idea, young sir. The tank itself is underground. A very large tank, one hopes.”

“Like the one at Uncle Tatiseigi’s house.”

“Yes.” His mind was skittering off ahead of the moment, toward the rolling countryside around Shejidan, the scores of towns and villages in the most populated area of the country. Roads were not the rule on the mainland. Vehicular traffic did not go town to town; it went, generally, to rail stations, taking merchandise to market, people to passenger stations, and that webwork of small lanes knit the villages together in the process. One wanted to visit a neighboring town? One hitched a ride with a commercial truck or the local village bus on its way to the train station, as they had done. People didn’t ordinarily even think in terms of driving to the capital: Rail carried absolutely everything, goods and people alike.

But the web of roads grew and linked villages, lumpy, bumpy, and gravel in most instances, tire tracks through meadow in others, even in areas where buses ran once a week.

The sheer novelty of vehicles massing and converging along that network of roads, natural as it might be to human culture, might well be utterly off the map of Murini’s expectations, and carry them farther than any assault by rail—if they just took to rail from here, Murini might have cut them off by tearing up track. If they had trusted only to rail, Murini might have picked up the telephone to learn just where they were, and where to stop them. But there were hundreds of village overland routes, through meadows, through woods, and along village centers—across small bridges they could only hope held up, once they reached the stream-crossed meadows near the capital. And their mass could spread out and reform, down this web, taking fuel at farms, gathering strength, Tano had said, and regrouping. Meanwhile their forces were penetrating the rail system, taking switch-points, guaranteeing Murini couldn’t use that system.

Sheer audacity might carry them through the night, might get them a fair distance before Murini figured out what was happening and decided how to stop this assault.

And more villages might come in along the way. If there was any district in the aishidi’tat that had little reason to support Murini, it was that stretch of Ragi ethnicity that bordered Murini’s Padi Valley, from Taiben to the Shejidan countryside. The feud between Tatiseigi of the Atageini and Taiben was only a fractional part of that old rivalry. The Ragi atevi of Shejidan could not be content with some Kadagidi upstart from the Padi Valley suddenly claiming to rule the aishidi’tat, with his accent, his traditions, his history of skipping from side to side of previous coup attempts, as Murini had notoriously done. There was no reason in the world that Shejidan district should rise up to defend any Padi-born ruler.

Rush to arms en masse to overthrow authority? That was not the atevi style. But lend a slight helping hand to tip the balance in favor of a Ragi prince while professional Guild sorted out their internal struggle?

That would start a chain reaction of minor disobedience that might become an avalanche. It had started, when a few brave members of the tashrid had decided to get contagiously ill at Murini’s summons. Had they known where Tabini was when they did it? Had they signaled their support through the Ajuri lord?

Now, when it looked as if the whole Padi Valley except the Kadagidi was coming in to support the father of a prince of mingled Valley and Ragi heritage, it remained to be seen whether the tashrid would still sit at home with sore throat or answer Tabini’s summons to assemble a quorum. Now that the dowager was back from space, Tabini could provide the aishidi’tat his evidence—never mind the economic mess the paidhi had counseled Tabini-aiji into, the advice that had started this mess. Now it was apparent that an upstart Padi Valley lord, in a bloody overthrow of the existing order, had taken his primary support from the detested south—that would never sit well with the Sheijidan Ragi or the Taibeni, under the most favorable of circumstances, once it became clear to them.

Murini’s seizure of power might have gotten their acquiescence early on, when it had seemed part of a general tilt of the whole Association away from Tabini’s policies and toward a restoration of things-as-they-had-been, but once the Padi Valley peeled away from the Kadagidi, led by the Atageini, and once the Taibeni Ragi joined them, and once the mixed-blood prince came home from space, along with Ilisidi, she of the eastern co

The islands had repudiated him, in the person of Dur. The coast, under Geigi, had never supported Murini at all. The east had never been anyone’s but Ilisidi’s.

Now the very center of the Association, the Padi Valley and Ragi highlands districts, had turned soft—turned soft, hell, they were in full career toward Sheijidan to make their opinions heard: there would be the dicey part. Loss of the center and the east of the aishidi’tat left Murini clinging only to the south and his own Padi Valley clan, which was now itself isolated in its violation of neighboring Atageini territory— Murini was in deep trouble. That exhilarating chain of assessments dimmed all the world around him, leaving vague just what anyone was going to do to reunite the individual pieces of this avalanche into a stable structure. The avalanche was pouring down toward the capital. Murini would have increasing trouble mustering any support whatever, and the self-appointed Guild head who had entered Tatiseigi’s estate to bring their agents in position for a surgical strike had done so perhaps foreseeing that the gathering would move on the capital and that only taking out Tabini could stop it without shattering the aishidi’tat beyond repair.

Now that man was dead, along with, one hoped, every agent he had brought with him.

Nasty thought—that there might be other agents scattered through the buses, maybe on this bus, still intent on stopping them.

Presumably, however, the lord of Dur knew his own and Banichi and Jago could vouch for any others. That might not be the case on more motley vehicles, those that had piled on people from various villages.

The thought drove him up from his seat again, pressing past a bemused Cajeiri, to find Tano, where he had gone.