Deliverer

“The airport and these planes leaving may have been a diversion,” Jaidiri said from the side of the room. “They may have deliberately let the Taibeni boy escape, to give out that news.”

Jago had her own electronics, was into the information flow within the staff, clearly, and still listening with one ear, her finger pressing that unit close. “The boy jumped from a moving truck.

Cajeiri is now alone with these people and unconscious, as Jegari last saw. He observed their truck go toward the freight depot as he was trying to reach an office.” A pause as she, and by his look, Banichi, both listened to what was apparently an ongoing account.

“The boy said he knew the men, aiji-ma. He had seen them in the apartment, as the dowager’s guests—”

“Caiti,” Cenedi said sharply.

“Easterners,” Jaidiri muttered, as Cenedi’s back stiffened.

“The aiji-dowager is approaching the city,” Cenedi retorted, “and has no part in this. Her relations with Caiti are not close. Where was your staff, nadi?”

A sore point, clearly. “Men of yours as well, nadi.”

“Drugged,” Banichi said shortly. “The heir’s entire guard, nadiin.”

“Except the young attendants,” Jaidiri muttered.

“And who carried away my son?” Damiri asked sharply. “Who, on this staff, nadiin, drugged Guild security? And why is no one preventing that plane from landing in the south!”

The silence persisted a few beats. Nobody knew the first. Nobody had the resources for the second. Nothing outflew an airliner.

Ground resources in the south were scarce—not nonexistent: scarce, and difficult to contact in a secure mode.

“Banichi, Cenedi-nadi,” Tabini said, and beckoned them close.

“Nand’ paidhi.” Tabini beckoned to him.

He had not expected it. He went, and he bowed, and knelt down by Tabini’s chair, in intimate hearing. And what the aiji’s guard thought of this conference one could only imagine: the man must be seething.

But then Tabini said, “Jaidiri-nadi,” and beckoned that man to join them. Jaidiri did so, a stiff, disapproving presence.

“The culprits are likeliest Eastern,” Tabini said, “and our position is that we will not negotiate with them in whatever they demand.

If my grandmother goes East, nand’ paidhi, you will join her.”

“Yes, aiji-ma.”

That the kidnappers were Eastern was certainly the most logical assumption in the current situation—and Tabini’s position was the only position he could take in the situation. Both Tabini and his grandmother had to maintain their grip, and after them, that boy, and, no, Ilisidi might actually have done in a husband and maybe a son and might conceivably be aiming at her grandson, Tabini, but the boy she alone had raised— God, had that been part of Tabini’s motive in sending his son and Ilisidi on that voyage? To forge that sense of co

The mind jolted absolutely sideways, when it needed desperately to be here and now, eye to eye with Tabini, as Tabini laid a hand on his shoulder, a grip that bruised. “You are valued, paidhi-aiji. You are valued.”

“Aiji-ma, my value in this situation is my persuasion. I beg to try.”

“Defend my grandmother,” Tabini said sharply. “Thankless though the task may be, keep her alive, paidhi-aiji, her and my son.

We want her back.”

“Aiji-ma.” Acceptance of his proposal—with all it meant.

Persuasion. He was profoundly touched, and simultaneously terrified.

Assure the aiji-dowager turned from Eastern to western man’chi?

Break the influence of her neighbors, if it was a factor—if, somehow, Ilisidi was in on this maneuver? Give her a politically safe turn-around if she was actually behind the kidnapping?

The boy being attached to his grandmother and not to his fatherc the boy might become a force in the East, a rival claimant, to shift the balance of power. All these things flashed across his horizon like summer lightning.

And he had no choice. “I shall do everything possible, aiji-ma. I shall do absolutely everything possible.”

“Cenedi-nadi,” Tabini said, and as Bren got up, Cenedi came close, not without Jaidiri’s frowning and jealous attention.

“Nandi,” Cenedi said. And if there was a man in the room at an unenviable focus of attention, it was Cenedic sent here, in advance of the dowager taking action. He was, literally, in danger of his life, if Tabini had any suspicion at all.

Or not. Tabini, like Ilisidi, was capable of playing a very, very subtle hand.

“Go to the airport. There is no need for my grandmother to come to the Bu-javid. We know where one of those planes has gone, most surely, nadi. Do you dispute this likelihood?”

“One does not dispute, nandi,” Cenedi said. And without aiji-ma.

No acknowledgment of man’chi. Only Cenedi was, being in the household of the aiji-dowager, entitled to that familiarity.

“The paidhi will accompany you and the aiji-dowager: she may take command of the search in the East. One trusts she will act for the aishidi’tat.”

Cenedi, his face deep-graven by duty and the dowager’s service, frowned. But this time he bowed deeply. “In her name, nand’ aiji, and subject to her orders.”

Tabini’s hand shot out and seized Cenedi’s forearm. “Return my son, Cenedi-nadi. And her, and the paidhi-aiji. Return them alive.”

“Yes,” Cenedi said: how did one refuse the force of that order?

Bren froze, and remembered to breathe as Tabini released Cenedi’s arm.

A second bow. Then Cenedi straightened and walked out. Bren hesitated a breath, a glance at the aiji. They were leaving Tabini—abandoning him to Jaidiri’s competency, and to the attitudes and conflicted man’chiin of the court, all of which evoked the greatest misgivings. He wished, not for the first time, that Tabini’s guard of many years had survived the coup, and that every resource Tabini had once had was around him nowc But they were not. He bowed. He glanced from Banichi to Jago, and bowed slightly to Lady Damiri, and walked out, hearing Banichi and Jago fall in behind him.

Cenedi was outside that room. They went together, with Cenedi’s two men, out into the outer hall, where Taibeni stood on guard.

“You will be welcome, nandi, one has every confidence,” Cenedi paused to say, plain to be heard. “Her plane will be landing—one assumes it will get clearance.”

“One is certain it will,” Bren murmured; and Jago: “I shall see to the packing.” Leaving Banichi with him, and not leaving him alone with Cenedi, she went down the hall at a fast clip, and Banichi nodded to Cenedi. “We are ready.”

“Nadi,” Cenedi said, and with a nod of his head to Bren, “nandi.”

And they headed for the lift, with no more than that.

No question that plane was going to stay on the ground any longer than it took to refuel, not unless the dowager was hellbent on an interview with her grandson, and one doubted that would happen until there was a definitive answer, one doubted it extremely.

“The hotel has been searched, nandi,” Cenedi said after they were in the lift, after one of Cenedi’s men pushed the button. “Caiti’s party has indeed remained. And left in the night. One plane has turned east. One north. One south.”

North was no problem. South, however, south was bad news.

Scary news. If anything had moved south, it would likely be the Assassins’ Guild, not the paidhi, who had to deal with that.

And a plane happened to go south when Caiti’s party moved east?

Their mission might, by that fact, be in the right direction; or it might be following a diversionc No. If, at very worst, the dowager was involved— God, di

It could not be their concern: they had to deal quickly with the target they were given, and the best chance of stopping events short of a bloodbath was the dowager’s going back to her own region and knocking critical heads together, among her own neighborsc granted she was not behind this, God help them. If Caiti had made some deal with the south—the dowager knocking heads was not an inconsiderable force. The paidhi couldn’t be everywhere. He couldn’t do a damned thing if they had taken the boy south. He could do something in the East, with his co