“Nadi Bren. Did you sleep last night?”

“No,” he confessed. And hoping: “Did you catch him?”

“No, nadi. There was the storm. We were not so fortunate.”

“Does Tabini know what happened?” He cast a glance toward the dais, where Tabini-aiji was talking to governor Brominandi, one of the invitational private hearings. “I think I’m on the agenda. Does he want to talk with me? What shall I tell him?”

“The truth, only in private. It was his gun—was it not?”

He threw Banichi a worried look. If Banichi doubted his story, he hadn’t left him with that impression last night. “I told you the truth, Banichi.”

“I’m sure you did,” Banichi said, and when he would have gone on to the reception desk, as he had purposed, to give his name to the secretary, Banichi caught his sleeve and held him back. “Nothing official.” Banichi nodded toward the dais, still holding his sleeve, and brought him to the foot of the dais instead.

Brominandi of Entaillan province was finishing his business. Brominandi, whose black hair was shot through with white, whose hands sparkled with rings both ornamental and official, would lull a stone to boredom, and the bystanding guards had as yet found no gracious way to edge the governor off.

Tabini nodded to what Brominandi was saying, nodded a second time, and finally said, “I’ll take it before council.” It sounded dreadfully like the Alujis river rights business again, two upstream provinces against three downstream which relied on its water for irrigation. For fifty years, that pot had been boiling, with suit and counter-suit. Bren folded his hands in front of him and stood with Banichi, head ducked, making himself as inconspicuous as a human possibly could in the court.

Finally Tabini-aiji accepted the inevitable petition (or was it counter-petition?) from Brominandi, a weighty thing of many seals and ribbons, and passed it to his legislative aides.

At which time Bren slid a glance up to Tabini, and received one back, which was the summons to him and to Banichi, up the several steps to the side of the aiji’s chair, in the lull in which the favored early petitioners could mill about and gossip, a dull, echoing murmur in the vaulted, white and gilt hall.

Tabini said, right off, “Do you know who it was, Bren? Do you have any idea?”

“None, aiji-ma, nothing. I shot at him. I missed. Banichi said I should say he fired the shot.”

A look went past him, to Banichi. Tabini’s yellow eyes were very pale, ghostly in certain lights—frightening, when he was angry. But he didn’t seem to be angry, or assigning blame to either of them.

Banichi said, “It removed questions.”

“No idea the nature of the intrusion.”

“A burglar would be a fool. Assignations…”

“No,” Bren said, uncomfortable in the suggestion, but Tabini knew him, knew that atevi women had a certain curiosity about him, and it was a joke at his expense.

“Not a feminine admirer.”

“No, aiji-ma.” He certainly hoped not, recalling the blood Jago had found in the first of the rain, out on the terrace.

Tabini-aiji reached out and touched his arm, apology for the levity. “No one has filed. It’s a serious matter. I take it seriously. Be careful with your locks.”

“The garden door is only glass,” Banichi said. “Alterations would be conspicuous.”

“A wire isn’t,” Tabini said,

Bren was dismayed. The aiji’s doors and windows might have such lethal protections. He had extreme reservations about the matter.

“I’ll see to it,” Banichi said.

“I might walk into it,” Bren said.

“You won’t,” Tabini said. And to Banichi: “See to it. This morning. One on either door. His key to disarm. Change the locks.”

“Aiji,” Bren began to say.

“I have a long list today,” Tabini said, meaning shut up and sit down, and when Tabini-aiji took that tone about a matter, there was no quarrel with it. They left the top of the dais. Bren stopped at the fourth step, which was his ordinary post.

“You stayhere,” Banichi said. “I’ll bring you the new key.”

“Banichi, is anybody after me?”

“It would seem so, wouldn’t it? I do doubt it was a lover.”

“Do you know anything I don’t?”

“Many things. Which interests you?”

“My life.”

“Watch the wire. The garden side will activate with a key, too. I’m moving your bed from in front of the door.”

“It’s summer. It’s hot.”

“We all have our inconveniences.”

“I wish someone would tell me what’s going on!”

“You shouldn’t turn down the ladies. Some take it badly.”

“You’re not serious.”

No, Banichi wasn’t. Banichi was evading the question again. Banichi damned well knew something. He stood in frustration as Banichi went cheerfully to turn his room into a death-trap, mats in front of doors, lethal wires to complete the circuit if a foolish, sleepy human forgot and hurried to shut his own garden door in a sudden rainstorm.

He had been scared of the events last night. Now he was mad, furiously angry at the disruption of his life, his quarters, his freedom to come and go in the city—he foresaw guards, restrictions, threats… without a damned reason, except some lunatic who possibly, for whatever reason, didn’t like humans. That was the only conclusion he could come to.

He sat down on the step where the paidhi-aiji was entitled to sit, and listened through the last pre-audience audience with the notion that he might hear something to give him a clue, at least, whether there was some wider, more political reason to worry, but the way Banichi seemed to be holding information from him, and Tabini’s silence, when Tabini himself probably knew something he wasn’t saying, all began to add up to him to an atevi with a grudge.

No licensed assassin was going to file on a human who was an essential, treatied presence in the aiji’s household—a presence without the right to carry arms, but all the same, a court official and a personal intimate of the aiji of the Western Association. No professional in his right mind would take thaton.

Which left some random fool attacking him as a symbol, perhaps, or someone mad at technology or at some equally remote grievance, who could know? Who could track such a thing?

The only comforting thought was that, if it wasn’t a licensed assassin, it was the lunatic himself or an amateur who couldn’t get a license—the sort that might mow down bystanders by mistake, true, dangerous in that regard.

But Banichi, unlike the majority of the aiji’s guards, had a license. You didn’t take him on. You didn’t take on Jago, either. The rain last night had been a piece of luck for the intruder—who had either counted on the rain wiping out his tracks on the gravel and cement of the garden walkways, or he’d been stupid, and lucky.

Now the assassin wasn’t lucky. Banichi was looking for him. And if he’d left a footprint in a flower bed or a fingerprint anywhere, that man—assuming it was a man—was in trouble.

He daren’t go to a licensed doctor, for one thing. There had been blood on the terrace. Bren personally hoped he’d made life uncomfortable for the assassin, who clearly hadn’t expected the reception he’d met. Most of all he hoped, considering Banichi’s taking on the case, that life would become uncomfortable for the assassin’s employer, if any, enough for the employer to withdraw the contract.

The doors opened. The guards and marshals let the crowd in, and the secretary accepted from the Day Marshal the towering stack of ribboned, sealed petitions and affidavits and filings.

There were some odd interfaces in the dealings of atevi and humans. One couldn’tblame the atevi for clinging to traditional procedures, clumsy as the stacks were, and there wasa computer record. The secretaries in the foyer created it.

But ask the atevi to use citizen numbers or case numbers? Convince them first that their computer-assigned personal numbers were auspicious in concert with their other numerologies. Convince them that changing those numbers caused chaos and lost records—because if things started going wrong, an ateva faulted his number and wanted it changed, immediately.