Pretender

They passed the door. And there, blessed sight, Banichi stood, rifle in hand, and Algini next to him, giving directions, waving them down what was, yes, the first level corridor, a place of priceless handwoven ru

“We are clearing the upper floors, nandi,” Banichi said. “The adherents of the Kadagidi have not generally stayed to meet us.”

Bren wanted to sit down on the spot. His legs all but tried to do so on their own, but he locked his knees and kept his feet under him. “Very good,” he managed to say, the first thing he had gotten out of his throat. He had no sight of Tabini or his guard at the moment. Jago drew him on down the hall, with Cajeiri, until they reached a small conversational area, with an incongruous bouquet of flowers in a low vase on a table, everything kabiu, everything in meticulous order, as a rattle of shots went off somewhere down the hall.

He didn’t sit down. He thought if he should sit down, he wouldn’t get up. He stood leaning against the paneled wall, his eyes darting in the direction of the gunfire, which had ceased.

Jago watched that direction, too, and all others, until a Guild Assassin trotted down the corridor toward them, with no hostile intent evident.

“We have the lifts,” that woman said, and Jago made a move with her rifle, signaling they should go now.

They jogged back the way the woman had come, down past the door they had used, and on around the corner. The majority of their party was there, Tabini in the lead.

And shots exploded off the wall in a shower of plaster and stone fragments. Bren began to reach for his gun, but a body hit him and Cajeiri at once, a black leather jacket up against his face, his back against the wall, Cajeiri next to him: Jago had covered them both, and he felt her body jolt hard, heard an intake of breath.

“Jago-ji!”

She spun about against them and let off a burst of fire, her muscles jumping to the recoil of the gun she held one-handed. Then the pressure of her weight let up. She stood rock-solid, facing back down the corridor, and now, Bren was able to see, other Guildsmen had taken off back the way they had come, to secure it against any advance.

“Jago, you were hit.”

“Bruised, nandi.” She swung about and herded them both into a position sheltered from the corners. Tabini had moved to cover them. The armor inside the jackets, Bren thought. Thank God.

Then Tano showed up in the hall from which they had come, waving an all-clear, and stances relaxed all around. Tabini came back to see to his son, to offer Jago a nod of appreciation which she received tight-lipped, with a bow.

“The Kadagidi staff has asked to remain in their premises, aiji-ma,” one of the Guild reported. “They will admit our perso

An unenviable position. Bren feared for his own people.

But there were conventions exempting domestic staff—if there was any staff in that establishment that wasn’t Guild.

“Granted,” Tabini said. “Set a guard on their door and outside their windows.”

And monitor all communications. That went without saying.

Even a human from the Island knew that would happen. He drew two relieved, shaky breaths in succession, knowing where Jago and Tano were, wishing he had a notion where Banichi and Algini had gotten to, or what was going on downstairs.

Then a report came in—he heard half of it—that the buses had reached the heart of the city, and that they were coming toward the hill.

“Mother is coming,” Cajeiri said confidently, in his higher voice.

Mother, and perhaps, if the business downstairs had gone well, great-grandmother and great-uncle would come upstairs and help Tabini restore order. The Guild around them was taking a more relaxed stance, as if what was flowing in electronic communications was reassuring. Bren took the leisure to cast a worried look at Jago, to be sure she had told him the truth: Her face showed a little pain, but she occupied herself entirely with reloading, her dark face utterly concentrating on that, and perhaps on what reached her by the communications unit she had in her ear.

The lift worked. The racket in the shafts near them reported the cars in motion, and Bren had thought they had shut that down.

Bren cast a worried glance in that direction, and at Tabini, who had spared no glance at all for the noise and the sporadic gunfire somewhere downstairs, as if he knew very well what was going on.

The lift passed them, stopped somewhere on the floors above.

“Secure the audience hall,” Tabini said, and that hall was on this floor, the main floor, which communicated with the outside via broad, public stairs, down to the U-shaped road—the road by which the arriving buses might most logically attempt to come in and discharge their passengers.

A pair of Guildsmen moved off in that direction, and vanished around the corner.

Silence then. For several whole breaths there was no racket, no sound of combat. Bren counted off his heartbeats, about the time it would take the Guildsmen—a man and a woman—to reach the public areas.

A door boomed open in a great vacancy, in the empty audience hall, a place ordinarily crowded with petitioners and favor-seekers, and noisy as a train station. It sounded lonely and hopeful now, the begi

Tabini gave a wave of his hand. Forward, that gesture said; and it was no time to lag behind. They moved on quickly around the next corner, into the broad public corridor.

The outer doors of the Bu-javid were still shut—the doors that at all hours and in every weather stood open for any citizen to visit the lower halls, to deliver petitions to the offices, to visit bureaus and secretaries, and most of all to deal face to face with their aiji in the public sessions.

“Open the doors,” Tabini said, first of all orders after the opening of the audience hall, and security moved at a run to go unlock those huge doors and shove them open wide—not without a certain readiness of weapons and a cautious look outside.

What came in was the dark of night, and a breeze came with it, a breeze that would clear away the stench of gunfire and smoke, a breeze that stirred the priceless hangings and ran away into the farthest reaches of the floor.

The audience hall stood open and safe. Tabini sent Guildsmen in to join the others, and then walked in himself, the rest of them trailing after. The place was in decent order, give or take a stack of petition documents, heavy with seals and ribbons, that had scattered across the steps of the dais.

“Those will be collected,” Tabini declared, treading a path among them, up the few steps to his proper seat. He would by no means ask Guild staff to do that secretarial business. Petitions were the province of the clerks, who had not yet appeared.

Tabini took his accustomed place. Beckoned, then.

“Go, young sir,” Bren said, urging Cajeiri with a little push, and Cajeiri drew up his shoulders, straightened his rumpled, borrowed coat, and walked the same path as his father, to stand by his chair.

A second time Tabini beckoned, and Bren had the overwhelming urge to look behind him, to see if Tabini meant some other person of note—Tabini would not be so foolish or so downright defiant of criticism as to want him to mount those stairs. He should not. He had to find a way to advise Tabini against it, but could think of none.