He didn’t know what he’d said—or done. He didn’t know how he’d come to deserve her temper or her calculated spite, except Jago didn’t like the questions he’d asked Banichi. He’d trod on something, a saner voice tried to say to him. He might have vital keys if he shut down any personal feeling, remembered exactly what he’d asked, or exactly what anyone had said. It was his job to do that. Even if atevi didn’t want him doing it. Even if he wasn’t going to get where they promised him he was going.

He lost the hillside a moment. He was on Ilisidi’s balcony, in the biting wind, in the dark, where Ilisidi challenged him with facts, and the truth that he couldn’t trust now to be the truth, the way he couldn’t pull the pieces of recent argument out of his memory.

He was on the mountain, alone, seeing only the snow—

On the rain-drenched hillside, with Jago deserting Banichi, cursing him for going after her own partner—and in the smoke, with the ricocheting bullets left and right of him.

The cellar swallowed him, a moment of dark, of helpless terror—he didn’t know why the images tumbled one over the other, flashed up, replacing the rainy thicket and the sight of Ilisidi and Cenedi ahead of him.

The shock of last night had set in—a natural reaction, he told himself, like the details of an accident coming back, replaying themselves over what was going on around him—only he wasn’t doing it in safety. There wasn’t any safety anywhere around him. There might never be again, only the bombs had stopped falling, and he had to focus and deal with what was ringing alarm bells through the here and now.

Banichi had challenged Ilisidi on the preparation of those bombs for a reason.

Banichi wasn’t a reckless man. He’d been probing for something, and he’d gotten it: Ilisidi had come back on him with a What do you know? and Banichi had claimed to know nothing of Tabini’s plans, implicitly challenging Ilisidi again to take himto that cellar and see what they could get.

Where was Banichi’s motive in the confrontation? Where was Ilisidi’s in the question, with so much tottering uncertain?

Putting Tabini’s intentions in question…

God, the mind was going. He was losing the threads. They were multiplying on him, his thoughts darting this way and that way… not making sense and then making him terribly, irrationally afraid he still hadn’t figured the people he was with.

Jago hadn’t backed Banichi, anywhere in the argument. Jago had attacked him, told him to shut up, followed him across the hill to say exactly what she’d already told him and then hit him in the face. Hard.

Nobody had objected to Jago hitting him. Ilisidi hadn’t. Banichi hadn’t. They’d surely seen it. And nobody stopped her. Nobody objected. Nobody cared, because the human in the party didn’t read the signals and maybe everybody else knew why Jago had done it.

The threads kept running, proliferating, tangling. The dark was all around him for a moment, and he lost his balance—caught himself, heart thumping, with a hand on Nokhada’s rain-wet shoulder.

It was the cellar again. He heard footsteps, but they were an illusion, he knew they were. He’d taken a knock on the head and it hurt like hell, shooting pains through his brain. The footsteps went away when he insisted to see the storm-gray of the hills, to feel the cold drops off the branches above him trickling down his neck. Nokhada’s jarring gait scarcely hurt him now.

But Banichi was alive. He’d made that choice, whatever atevi understood. He couldn’t have gone off and left him and Jago, to go off with Ilisidi—he didn’t know what part of a human brain had made that decision, the way atevi didn’t consciously know why they, like mecheiti, darted after the leader, come hell come havoc—he hadn’t thought, hadn’t damned well thoughtabout the transaction, that the paidhi’s life was what aijiin were shooting each other for. It hadn’t mattered to him, in that moment, running down that slope, and he still didn’t know that it mattered—not to Tabini, who could get a replacement for him in an hour, who wasn’t going to listen to him in anyone else’s hands, and who wasn’t going to pay a damn thing to get him back, so the joke was on the people who thought he would. He didn’t know anything. It was all too technical—so that joke was on them, too.

The only thing he had of value was in the computer—which he ought to drop into the nearest deep ravine, or slam onto a rock, except it wouldn’t take out the storage—and if they collected it, it wasn’t saying atevi experts couldn’t get those pieces to work. And experts weren’t the people he wanted to have their hands on it.

He shouldhave done a security erase. Ifhe’d had the power to turn it on.

God, do what to save that situation, tip them off it was valuable? Make an issue, then botch getting rid of it?

Just leave it in the bag, let Nokhada carry it back to Malguri?

The rebels were sitting in Malguri.

Dark. The steps coming and going.

The beast on the wall. Lonely after all these centuries.

He couldn’t talk to Banichi. Banichi couldn’t walk, couldn’t fight them—he couldn’t believe Banichi lying back like that, resigning the argument and all their lives to Cenedi.

But Cenedi was a professional. Like Banichi. Maybe together they understood things he couldn’t.

Jago crossed the width of the hill to blame him and hit him in the face.

Cold and dark. Footsteps in the hall. Voices discussing having a drink, fading away up the steps.

A gun was against his skull and he thought of snow, snow all around him. And not a living soul. Like Banichi. Just shut it out.

Give it up.

He didn’t understand. Giri was dead. Bombs just dropped and spattered pieces all over the hill, and he didn’t know why, it didn’t make any sense why a bomb fell on one man and not another. Bombs didn’t care. Killing him must be as good as having him, in the minds of their enemies.

Which wasn’t what Cenedi had said.

There began to be a sea-echo in his skull, the ache where Cenedi had hit him and the one where Jago had, both gone to one pain, that kept him aware where he was.

In his own apartment, before Cenedi’s message had come, before she’d left, Jago had said… I’ll never betray you, nadi Bren.

I’ll never betray you…

XIV

« ^ »

Not doing well, he wasn’t—with one pain shooting through his eyes and another running through his elbow to the pit of his stomach, while two or three other point-sources contested for his attention. The rain had whipped up to momentary thunder and a fit of deluge, then subsided to wind-borne drizzles, a cold mist so thick one breathed it. The sky was a boiling gray, while the mecheiti struck a steady, long-striding pace one behind the other, Babs leading the way up and down the rain-shadowed narrows, along brushy stretches of streamside, where frondy ironheart trailed into their path and dripped water on their heads and down their necks.

But there wasn’t the same jostling for the lead, now, among the foremost mecheiti. It seemed it wasn’t just Nokhada, after all. None of them were fighting, whether Ilisidi had somehow communicated that through Babs, or whether somehow, after the bombs, and in the misery of the cold rain, even the mecheiti understood a common urgency. The established order of going had Nokhada fourth in line behind another of Ilisidi’s guards.

One, two, three, four, regular as a heartbeat, pace, pace, pace, pace.

Never betray you. Hell.

More tea? Cenedi asked him.

And sent him to the cellar.

His eyes watered with the throbbing in his skull and with the wind blasting into his face, and the desire to beat Cenedi’s head against a rock grew totally absorbing for a while. But it didn’t answer the questions, and it didn’t get him back to Mospheira.