“Please, nadi!” Bren said.

Gravel went over the edge. Their right tires bridged a washout and narrowly missed the rim. He was certain of it.

Then, around that curve, curtained in rain, a mass of shadow towered on the gray brink. Stone towers and spires rose there, in a rain-crystaled spatter on the glass—he couldn’t tell where the road was, now, except the rattle of gravel under the tires assured him they were still on it.

“Malguri,” Banichi said in his deep tones.

“A fortress of the forty-third century,” the driver said, “the architectural jewel of this province… maintained under the provincial trust, an autumn residence of the aiji-major, currently of the aiji-dowager…”

He sat and hugged his computer case and watched as the towers grew larger in the windshield, as they gathered detail out of the universal gray of the mist, the lake below, and the clouds… then acquired colors, the dark gray of stone and the rain-soaked drip of heraldic banners from the uppermost tiers.

He was used to atevi architecture, was accustomed to antiquity in the City, and found it in the customs of the aiji’s hall, but this place, bristling with turrets and castellations, was not the style of the Landing, like so much of Shejidan. The date the driver had given them was from long, long before humans had ever come into the system, from long before there had ever been a strayed ship or a space station—before—he made a fast re-reckoning—there’d been a human in space at all.

The wipers cleared the scene in alternate blinks, a world creating and recreating itself out of primeval deluge as wooden gates yawned for them and let them inside, onto a stone-paved road that curved beneath a broad, sheltering portico, where the rain only scarcely reached.

The van stopped. Banichi got up and opened the door from inside, on a darkly shadowed porch and open wooden doors. A handful of atevi hastened out of that warm, gold-lit darkness to meet the van—in casual dress, all of them, which fit what Bren knew of country life. Except the boots, it was attire appropriate to a hunting lodge like Taiben, which Bren supposed that Malguri was, in fact, considering the wild land around it… probably very good hunting, when some more energetic member of the aiji’s family was in residence.

He followed Banichi out of the van, computer in hand, reckoning, now that he saw the style of the place, that there might even be formal hunts while they were here, if the staff lent itself to entertaining the guests. Banichi and Jago would certainly be keen for it. He wouldn’t: tramping through dusty weeds, getting sunburn, and staring at his supper down a gun barrel was not his favorite sport. He was concerned for his computer in the cold mist that was whirling about them, sucked under the portico by the drafts; and he was more than anxious to conclude the welcome and get in out of the wet.

“The paidhi,” Banichi was saying, and Banichi laid a heavy hand on his shoulder. “Bren Cameron, the close associate of Tabini-aiji, the very person, give him good welcome…” It was the standard formality. Bren bowed, murmured, “Honor and thanks,” in reply to the staff’s courtesies, while Jago banged the van door shut and dismissed the driver. The van whined off into the storm and somehow the whole welcoming party advanced, by degrees and inquiries into the aiji’s health and well-being, across the cobbles toward the main doors—thank God, Bren thought. A backward glance in response to a question spotted an antique cannon in the paved courtyard, through veils of rain; a forward glance met gold, muted light coming through the doors on a wave of warmer air.

It was a stone-paved hall, with timbered and plastered walls. The banners that hung from the time-blackened rafters looked centuries old themselves, with their muted colors and complex serpentine patterns of ancient writing that, no, indeed, the paidhi didn’t know. He recognized Tabini’s colors, and the centermost banner had Tabini’s personal emblem, the bajion a red circle, on a blue field. There were weapons on every wall—swords and weapons the names of which he didn’t know, but he’d seen them in the lodge at Taiben, with similar hides, spotted and shaded, pinned on walls, thrown over chairs that owed nothing to human designs.

Banichi seized him by the shoulder again and made further introductions, this time to two servants, both male, introductions which required another round of bows.

“They’ll take you to your rooms,” Banichi said. “They’ll be assigned to you.”

He’d already let the names slip his attention. But, was on his tongue to say,—but what about Algini and Tano, on their way from the airport? Why someone else?

“Excuse me,” he said, and bowed in embarrassment. “I lost the names.” The paidhi was a diplomat, the paidhi didn’t let names get away like that, even names of servants—he wasn’t focussing, even yet, asking himself whether these servants were ones Banichi knew, or Jago did, or how they could trust these people.

But they bowed and patiently and courteously said their names again: Maigi and Djinana, honored to be at his service.

Dreadful beginning, with atevi trying to be polite to him. He was being pushed and shoved into places he didn’t know in a culture already full of strangenesses, and he was overwhelmed with the place.

“Go with them,” Banichi said gently, and added something in one of the regional languages, to which the servants nodded and bowed, regarding him with faces as impassive as Banichi’s and Jago’s.

“Nand’ paidhi,” one said. Maigi. He had to get them straight.

Maigi and Djinana, he said over and over to himself, as he followed them across the hall, through the archway, and to the foot of bronze-banistered stone stairs, He realized of a sudden they had just passed out of the sight of Jago and Banichi, but Banichi had said go, Banichi evidently believed they were trustworthy. He had no wish to insult the servants twice by doubting them.

So it was up the stairs, into the upper floor of a strange house ruled by a stranger old woman. The servants he followed talked together in a language the paidhi didn’t know, and the place smelled of stone and antiquity. Plastering didn’t exist in these wooden-floored upper halls, which, he supposed, were for lesser guests. Pipes and wires ran across ceilings clearly ancient, and bare tungsten-based bulbs hung in brackets festooned by aged copper-centered insulated wire, covered with dust.

This is Tabini’s hospitality? he asked himself. This is how his grandmother lives?

He didn’t believe it. He was offended, outright offended, andsomewhat hurt, that Tabini sent him to this dingy, depressing house, with out-of-date plumbing and God knew what kind of beds.

They were running out of hallway. Two huge doors closed off the end. More hiking, he supposed glumly, into some gloomy cubbyhole remote from the activity of the dowager and her staff.

It probably wasn’t Tabini’s fault. It might be the dowager had countermanded Tabini’s arrangements. Grandmother might not wanta human in her house, and might lodge him under a stairs or in a storeroom somewhere. Banichi and Jago would object when they found out. Grandmother would take offense, Tabini would take offense…

The servants opened the doors, on carpet, a spacious sitting room and furniture… God, gilt, carved over every surface, carpets that weren’t, Bren suddenly realized, mill-produced. The soft, pale light came from a large, pointed-arched window with small rectangular panes, bordered in amber and blue panes—a beautiful frame on a gray, rain-spattered nothing.

“This is the paidhi’s reception room,” Maigi said, as Djinana opened another, side door and showed him into an equally ornate room with a blazing fireplace—illicit heating source, he said to himself in a remote, note-taking, area of his brain; but the forebrain was busy with other details, the heads and hides and weapons on the walls, the carved wooden furniture, the antique carpet with the baji-najimedallions endlessly repeated, identical windows in the next room, which, though smaller, was no less ornate.