Pretender

He had not done at all what he hoped. From the attempted assassination to the dowager’s taking over the core of the information, things had not followed the script, and he had lost all his threads, absolutely lost them. But maybe it had gone well enough, except his ill-conceived dive at Tabini.

The dowager went for a few words with her grandson. Cajeiri went to talk with his mother. The chamber lights went up. Bren hesitated, then decided to collect his security about him and get back to the dowager’s apartment as quietly and quickly as he could.

“Paidhi.” Tabini spotted him, and crossed the small distance in a couple of strides, to which he could only bow and try to explain his actions.

“Aiji-ma.”

Tabini seized his arm in an atevi-strength grip. “We will remember,” Tabini said, which was what one said in accepting a personal debt; and then it dawned on him Tabini meant his presumptuous dive for the floor, that atevi instinct could only construe as great devotion, the most charitable construction Tabini could put on matters—knowing the paidhi had been the target. But it was still a human reason: Tabini of all people should know that; and he couldn’t have Tabini starting to think otherwise, not even in the most secret and illogical depth of his heart.

“Aiji-ma,” was all he dared say, and bowed desperately, and found himself let go and excused. He wanted only to get back to the dowager’s apartment where he could sit and reassemble the pieces of the last hour. He was losing the coherent memory of what he had said to the assembly. He hadn’t yet examined his sense of atevi logic to figure how the blowup within Tabini’s guard could be construed by the aiji’s enemies. He only knew it was going to create controversy, particularly as the paidhi’s guard had taken over, along with the dowager’s.

Who were eastern.

Wait until that hit the news.

He bowed his way to the edge of the group, found Jago and Tano with him, and said, “We should go back to the apartment, nadiin-ji.

Quickly.”

“Nandi,” Jago said, never questioning the decision, not explaining where Banichi and Algini were at the moment. Bren had the notion of business in progress, business likely regarding the would-be assassin, and deep inquiries among security that had led far outside the chamber and possibly all the way to the Assassins’ Guild—where Algini had a word or two to say.

But best, he thought, that he should clear the scene and render matters less complicated for his staff. There was a problem, a serious problem working somewhere in the vicinity, no question of that, and Jago and Tano needed to get him to safety and get back here to support Banichi and Algini in whatever was going on.

He headed for the side door, kept quiet the entire way out of the assembly and into the small service hall, where a few bodyguards waited, notably Ilisidi’s young men.

Safe, then, he said to himself, drawing an easier breath. Trust Ilisidi’s men, yes, absolutely. Just let them live through the next dozen hours. Let Algini’s allies win inside the Guild.

And let him get a phone link to the Island, and a relay to Jase up on the station, to explain the good and the bad of the current situation. Rumors had to be flying from the capital to the coast by now. He wasn’t sure how long he might stay in office—or stay alive, he wasn’t sure what might develop if he never got to explain to Mospheira or to Lord Geigi exactly what had gone on, before it grew more tangled than it was, and before they had to send another paidhi over here to try to deal with a general discontent with humans.

They exited quickly into the main hall, headed for the lift. The carpeted, beautiful hall outside had a gathering crowd of legislators and their staffers, particularly those of the tashrid, seeking their own apartments upstairs as the legislature left the chambers. Such a traffic was nothing unusual after a session. It was not what he wanted to encounter. He’d hoped to have beaten it in his retreat.

“The paidhi,” someone exclaimed, and heads turned. “Nand’ paidhi,” someone addressed him, and that address he was obliged to acknowledge: The speaker, the man coming toward him, was the lord of Dur, to whom he owed ever so much.

“Nandi.” He bowed, and by then others were pressing on him with enthusiastic protestations, Jago and Tano establishing a line of retreat to the lift car by the reach of arms toward that wall.

“It was extraordinary, extraordinary,” Dur said to him, as he heard the lift door open. Other legislators pressed close about him, even touched him, all positive, thus far. The lift made its departure, most of the crowd blocked from reaching it.

“Baji-naji,” he murmured to Dur’s enthusiasm, that eternal expression of events in imbalance. “One expects security to be quick in investigation of the matter—one fears now it was aimed at my person, and one was entirely wrong to have moved near the aiji—”

Not to mention flattening him to the floor.

“But well done,” the graying lord of Maidin said—a woman who had supported the aiji in critical votes, and the expression found several voices in approbation, and more hands actually touched him, a strange and uneasy sensation among atevi, who did not touch, except among intimates. It was eerily like an atevi family occasion, as if, among these diverse lords some sort of current was ru

“Nandiin,” he said, shaken by the pain. It dawned on him that, the aim of the threat aside, he alone had been in position to do what many in the hall would have instinctively done. He had carried out their instinct to protect their aiji, no matter his own, human-driven reasons for doing it, and the motion was what counted with them. That was both the trap and the fact of the case.

He had acted for them. It was that tricky word muidi, that almost meant gratitude, and somewhat meant surrogate, God help him—Jago and Tano didn’t extract him not only because this crowd posed no threat, it had a political dimension. It wasn’t forgiveness they offered the paidhi; atevi were never keen on forgiveness, in their own pragmatic way, having no trust in its future, given their own passions. It was acknowledgment of a feeling they felt that did have a future, a sentiment of belonging and identity, and he was utterly awash in it, carried along by it—literally, as the crowd’s pressure moved him away from the lift and into a corner.

Lord Tatiseigi appeared in the mix, arm in a sling, the lord of the Atageini capturing his person from his other possessive protector.

There was a fierce strength in the old man’s good hand, at least enough for a human, and it closed on his arm.

“Lord Bren,” the old man a

“And west!” someone shouted, while the blood left Bren’s hand and his bodyguard found no way to rescue him. Now the younger lord of the Ajuri had shown up and pushed in.

“—and the west!” the old man said, not missing a beat, nor surrendering him to Damiri’s father, “and the east and the north and the south, besides! Let us gather up the power and deal with traitors as they deserve! Approbation, we say, approbation for the safe return of the aiji-dowager and the heir, our great-grandnephew, and our support of the Ragi aiji and his allies forever!”