Conspirator

“We’ll be out there,” Toby said.

“Stay under cover as much as possible. Don’t present a target. If you need anything, get one of the staff or the villagers to run up to the house. Don’t expose yourselves to snipers—or a kidnapping.”

“Got it,” Toby said. “We’ll be going back down there. You take care.”

“I intend to,” he said, and hugged Toby—and Barb. “Stay alive. If we can get you a navy escort to calmer waters—”

“Don’t distract anybody from necessary business,” Toby said. “Just—you be careful, Bren.”

“I intend to be,” he said, and walked them out of the dining room and on toward the main hall—Banichi and Jago joining them as soon as they exited the dining room.

Another and scandalous public exchange of hugs as he sent them out the door. He did it anyway, while Banichi used his communications to call the escort to the door, to be sure Toby and Barb made it down to the boat safely—and equally to be sure the dowager’s men on the roof didn’t mistake the movement of someone down the winding walk.

“See you,” Toby told him, in leaving.

“See you,” he said in turn, and the escort took Barb and Toby in hand.

Then the servants shut the doors between them, shut them, locked them, and threw the substantial bolts above and below.

“Now we rest,” he said with a deep breath. “I pick up my computer, and we all go to your room, nadiin-ji.”

Chapter 15

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Bren-ji.” Tano turned his chair at the security console to face Bren. “A report has come from the dock. Nand’ Toby and Barb-daja are back on their boat and safely so. There has been no incident. The boat is under repair. The workmen estimate to have the hole sealed before midnight. The pumps are very adequately keeping up with the situation.”

“Thank you, Tano-ji,” Bren said fervently. He had his own place, a chair pulled up to make a workspace at the end of the counter, next to an array of equipment, and he’d been writing reports on the situation while it was fresh in memory. Banichi and Jago took a little time in their respective beds in the next room, and they spoke in low voices, so as not to disturb them.

He hadn’t realized how tightly his nerves had been wound, how anxiously he’d awaited that word from the dock, but he’d ceased to trust momentary lulls in a situation—which often simply meant the enemy had drawn back to reorganize. Getting Barb and Toby out to sea was of great importance—but not overriding their safety. “Message in reply, Tano-ji: tell nand’ Toby wait for a clearance before he sails unless things go very badly here. If you yourself can possibly ask the aiji’s forces for an escort to get nand’ Toby out to seac one would make that request.”

“Indeed,” Tano said, and turned back to his console, to busy himself in communications for some time. Bren went back to his report.

He was uneasy about asking a personal favor from Tabini— diversion of a naval vessel from a major action wasn’t exactly the sort of thing most people asked to be sure a relative got away safely, but the fact was, Toby wasn’t just Toby. He was a potentially valuable hostage. And he wasn’t just a Mospheiran citizen in the wrong waters; or even just the paidhi-aiji’s close relative: he was occasionally and perhaps currently an agent of the Mospheiran government—a spy, in plain fact; a spy who had served Tabini’s interests and hurt those of the Southern conspirators. And that meant he twice over ought to get out of here before he fell into hostile hands. Toby had personal enemies in the South: the South might not know precisely who he was beyond being the paidhi’s relative—which was enough. But once they twigged to what he had done during the Troubles, they would very quickly move to get their hands on him for very different reasons. The fact that Toby had a small operational Ragi vocabulary only put him in worse danger, in that regard.

So he wanted Toby the hell out of the bay and out much, much closer to the Mospheiran coast, just as soon as they could be sure that by sending the Brighter Daysout toward open ocean they wouldn’t be sending Toby straight into the jaws of some force coming intothe bay to launch a sea assault on Najida. A naval escort from Tabini’s side of the mess was the only sure answer.

That, and being sure that repair to the hull was going to hold up under whatever conditions Toby ran into out there once he left his naval escort, whether he had to run hard or dodge fire, or just bear up under the usual spring weather on his way to Port Jackson.

It was, however, the solution to one problem on his hands.

Having his old associate Geigi’s nephew locked in his basement, however—that was not going to be tidied up in one stroke.

Damn, he did not look forward to—

Ramaso himself came in, very somberly, with an underlying tension, and bowed.

“The village, nandi—the elders of the village—one has presented your sentiments. They have requested you come to speak to them in person, in a session of the council, tonight.”

That was a surprise—a disturbing surprise, since he was unprepared: he had no speech, he had no notes, only an untidy situation to report; but an honor—he wasn’t sure a lord of Najida had ever been asked to a village meeting.

“Tonight,” he echoed.

“At sunset, nandi.”

“I shall need to dress,” he said. The protocols of the situation were unprecedented. “In whatever would be appropriate, Rama-ji. I leave it to your discretion.”

“They have also invited the aiji-dowager and her great-grandson.”

For about a heartbeat he was astonished, and could not imagine what the dynamics of that situation werec and then he thought. Edi. With ties to Mospheira before the Landing. The Edi, who traced their descent through their mothers, and especially the grandmothers—the foremothers, guardian spirits, deities to the Edi. The aiji dowager. The aiji’s grandmother, great-grandmother to an aiji-to-come.

It wasn’t just a meeting. It was a precedent-setting Event, this meeting, and it didn’t, perhaps, only have to do with Najida.

“Convey the message to the dowager and ask her, from me, if she would decide about the young gentleman. Say that it may have an interesting relevance to the disappearance of the Edi from Lord Geigi’s household.”

She would go, he judged. Visit Baiji? She’d had conscious reason not to, well-taken, as it turned out. But an Edi village might pique her curiosity, if nothing else. Curiosity was a potent inducement to Ilisidi.

“Yes, nandi,” Ramaso said, and went off to do that.

He sat down and took another note—more, he started pulling up data from his computer, historical notes, geography, a list of names, all in the data files. The Edi ancestors had come down from the north coast, up from the south in ancient times, coastward somewhat when the Ragi Association formed: there had been fighting. And notably, the large group of associated clans had come across from Mospheira, having been forced out by the War of the Landing and subsequently dispossessed by the Treaty of the Landing that ceded the whole island of Mospheira to human rule.

The data listed clans, where each was thought to have been, where they were thought to have moved, what names were common in each. Descent through the mother.

Put upon for two centuries and before: the Edi had been at odds with the Ragi Association, and the Southern Association,and when the Ragi Association had become the Western Association, the aishidi’tat, and made it known they were going to knock some Southern heads, the Edi had found a needful buffer in Geigi’s clan, the Maschi, who were on good terms with the Ragi—smartest move they’d made in a long while. But then the holder of Najida, the last of the Maladesi, had married into the Farai of the Morigi clan in the South— thatlittle piece of business had linked the northern finger of the coast into the Southern Associationc simultaneously betraying the Maladesi’s village, which was mostly Edi, mostly related to the Edi all down the coast.