Not this morning. Good morning, nand’ paidhi, how are you feeling, nand’ paidhi? More berries? Tea?

Then, finally, with a downcast glance, from Moni, who seldom had much to say, “We’re very glad you’re all right, nand’ paidhi.”

He swallowed his bite of fruit. Gratified.

Appeased. “Did you hear the commotion last night?”

“The guard waked us,” Taigi said. “That was the first we knew of anything wrong.”

“You didn’t hear anything?”

“No, nand’ paidhi.”

With the lightning and the thunder and the rain coming down, he supposed that the sharp report of the gunshot could have echoed strangely, with the wind swirling about the hill, and with the gun being set off inside the room, rather than outside. The figure in the doorway last night had completely assumed the character of dream to him, a nightmare occurrence in which details both changed and diminished. His servants’ utter silence surrounding the incident had unnerved him, even cast his memory into doubt… not to mention his understanding and expectation of atevi closest to him.

He was glad to hear a reasonable explanation. So the echo of it hadn’t carried to the lower-floor servants’ court, down on the side of the hill and next the ancient walls. Probably the thunder had covered the echoes. Perhaps there’d been a great peal of it as the storm onset and as the assassin made his try—he’d had his own ears full of the gunshot, which to him had sounded like doom, but it didn’t mean the rest of the world had been that close.

But Moni and Taigi were at least duly concerned, and, perhaps perplexed by his human behaviors, or their expectation of them, they didn’t know quite what else to say, he supposed. It was different, trying to pick up gossip when one was in the center of the trouble. All information, especially in a life-and-death crisis, became significant; appearing to know something meant someone official could come asking, and no one close to him reasonably wanted to let rumors loose—as he, personally, didn’t want any speculation going on about him from servants who might be expected to have information.

No more would Moni and Taigi want to hear another knock on their doors, and endure a second round of questions in the night. Classically speaking—treachery and servants were a cliche in atevi dramas. It was too ridiculous—but it didn’t mean they wouldn’t feel the onus of suspicion, or feel the fear he very well understood, of unspecified accusations they had no witnesses to refute.

“I do hope it’s the end of it,” he said to them. “I’m very sorry, nadiin. I trust there won’t be more police. I knowyou’re honest.”

“We greatly appreciate your confidence,” Moni said, and both of them bowed. “Please be careful.”

“Banichi and Jago are on the case.”

“That’s very good,” Taigi said, and set scrambled eggs in front of him.

So he had his breakfast and put on his best summer coat, the one with the leather collar and leather down the front edges to the knee.

“Please don’t delay in the halls,” Taigi said.

“I assure you,” he said.

“Isn’t there security?” Moni asked. “Let us call security.”

“To walk to the audience hall?” They wereworried, he decided, now that the verbal dam had broken. He was further gratified. “I assure you there’s no need. It was probably some complete lunatic, probably hiding in a storage barrel somewhere. They might go after lord Murida in the water garden at high noon—not me. I assure you. With the aiji’s own guards swarming about… not highly likely.” He took his key and slipped it into his trousers. “Just be careful of the locks. The garden side, especially, for the next few days.”

“Nadi,” they said, and bowed again—anxious, he decided, as they’d truly been when they’d arrived, just not advertising their state of mind, which atevi didn’t. Which reminded him that he shouldn’t let his worry reach his face either. He went cheerfully out the door—

Straight into a black uniform and, well above eye-level, a scowling atevi face.

“Nand’ paidhi,” the guard officer said. “I’m to escort you to the hall.”

“Hardly necessary,” he said. His heart had skipped a dozen beats. He didn’t personally know the man. But the uniform wasn’t one an assassin would dare counterfeit, not on his subsequent life, and he walked with the officer, out into the corridors of the complex, past the ordinary residential guard desk and into the main areas of the building—along the crowded colonnade, where wind gusted, fresh with rain and morning chill.

Ancient stonework took sunlight and shadow, the fortress walls of the Bu-javid, the citadel and governmental complex, sprawled over its high hill, aloof and separate from the urban sprawl of Shejidan—and down below those walls the hotels and the hostelries would be full to overflowing. The triennial public audience, beginning this morning, brought hundreds of provincial lords and city and township and district officials into town—by subway, by train—all of them trekking the last mile on foot from the hotels that ringed the ancient Bu-javid, crowds bearing petitions climbing the terraced stone ceremonial road, passing beneath the fortified Gate of the Promise of Justice, and trekking finally up the last broad, flower-bordered courses to the renowned Ninefold Doors, a steady stream of tall, broad-shouldered atevi, with their night-black skins and glossy black braids, some in rich coats bordered in gilt and satin, some in plain, serviceable cloth, but clearly their courtly best. Professional politicians rubbed shoulder to shoulder with ordinary trade folk, lords of the Associations with anxious, unpracticed petitioners, bringing their colorfully ribboned petitions, rolled and bound, and with them, their small bouquets of flowers to lay on the foyer tables, an old custom of the season.

The hall at the end of the open colonnade smelled of recent rain and flowers, and rang with voices—atevi meeting one another, or falling into line to register with the secretaries, on whose desks, set up in the vast lower foyer, the stacks of documents and petitions were growing.

For the courtiers, a human on his way to court business through this milling chaos was an ordinary sight—a pale, smallish figure head and shoulders shorter than the crowds through which he passed, a presence conservative in his simple, unribboned braid and leather trim—the police escort was uncommon, but no one stared, except the country folk and private petitioners.

“Look!” a child cried, and pointed at him.

A mortified parent batted the offending hand down while the echoes rang, high and clear, in the vaulted ceilings. Atevi looked. And pretended not to have seen either him or his guard.

A lord of the provinces went through the halls attended by his own aides and by his own guards and the aiji’s as well, and provoked no rude stares. Bren went with his police escort, in the same pretense of invisibility, a little anxious, since the child’s shout, but confident in the visible presence of the aiji’s guards at every doorway and every turn, ordinary precaution on audience day.

In that near presence, he bade a courteous farewell to his police escort at the small Whispering Port, which, a small section of one of the great ceremonial doors, led discreetly and without official recognition into the back of the audience hall. He slipped through it and softly closed it again, so as not to disturb the advance meetings in progress.

Late, he feared. Moni and Taigi hadn’t advanced the hour of his wake-up at all, simply shown up at their usual time, lacking other orders and perhaps fearing to do anything unusual, with a police guard standing at his door. He hoped Tabini hadn’t wanted otherwise, and started over to the reception desk to see where he fitted in the hearings.

Banichi was there. Banichi, in the metal-studded black of the aiji’s personal guard, intercepted him with a touch on his arm.