Then he felt a draft — saw the curtains move, then, and realized to his dismay the farther door was open.

He stopped. He didn't knowthe doors hadn't been open all along. He almost retreated, then thought that was what he'd come for: he had to shut and lock that door.

He went to it, moved to shut it and felt a faint presence on his side of the room — he couldn't see it, he couldn't identify it… he couldn't swear it was there. Panic sweated his palms.

Don't acknowledge you're awake, Banichi had told him. It was like that. He moved slowly away with the gun in hand, asking himself what now, what next — he didn't know it wasn't his imagination, he didn't know it wasn't one of his own — he didn't know what to do.

The glass doors near him burst in gunfire, curtains billowed, glass fell in shards, and the presence he'd felt hurtled out of the dark, knocked him stunned to the floor, scrambled over him. The gun had left his hand. Weight crushed him to the tiles. A second burst of gunfire punched the curtains back, and lights swept the balcony. An atevi body lay breathing hard atop him as shots flew over their heads, raked the walls, showered them with plaster and porcelain until the shots stopped.

Then the ateva got up to a crouch and went out the shattered doors, leaving him a second to scrabble across a dark and fragment-littered floor after the gun — he found it in the dark, but the floor and his head had collided in that fall, his arm ached with a mindful fury and his knees buckled as he tried to get up.

There was no more gunfire, at least. He found himself sitting on the floor of the breakfast room in the dark, finally got wobbly legs under him and edged in what he trusted was a prudent crouch out toward the threshold of the shattered doors, gun in shaking hand.

"Get down!"

Banichi's voice, clearly. Banichi shoved down hard on his shoulder, the night went red, and he sat down, winded and blind for an interval, while Banichi occupied the doorway onto the balcony and kept him out of line of whatever was going on — watching, Bren thought, but having no such luck as a clear target. There were just too many people, too many windows.

But if attack had come here —

"Tabini," he said to Banichi.

"Safe," Banichi said. "Stay down, nadi!"

"Sorry," he breathed. "I was checking the doors."

"One could tell. I came in that way. Stay down."

He was content for the moment, in the flare-up of pain from the shoulder, to sit exactly as he was, in a fetal tuck, with the arm hurting only vaguely.

"Where —" he thought to ask. "Where's Hanks? Is this set up, or — ?"

"Hanks-paidhi is missing from her apartment," Banichi said, "and Baighi is dead."

Then it wasn'tsomething Tabini had done. Baighi was Tabini's. Hanks was in someone else's hands. "I was on the phone with her," he said, still having trouble getting breath. "I heard what might have been a shot, I put the phone on Record —"

"This will have been useful," Banichi said. "Is it still running?"

"Unless someone's stopped it. The lady's office. I laid the receiver down."

"I'll see to it," Banichi said. "Are you all right, Bren-ji?"

"I'm fine. Who wasthat out there? Who's done this?"

"I'm not certain. I don't think I hit anyone."

"Ilisidi —" he said. He hadn't thought, until then, of Ilisidi's apartment below his — of the possibility of Ilisidi's danger — or — he suddenly realized — Ilisidi's involvement.

But that was too crazed. An attack like this, lacking all finesse — Cenedi wasn't like that. Cenedi didn't need to blow walls down.

The Atigeini themselves were a possibility. Damiri's outraged relatives might count doors cheap if they could get a human presence out of their ancestral residence, and get their name clear with the conservatives with whom they had more than slight ties —

Two — very good — very alarming — possibilities. And he could hope it was the Atigeini — he could earnestly hope it was the Atigeini — or even the Guisi. The man who'd fired on him in the legislature, the man Jago had killed — his relatives might have planned a retaliation, except —

"The matter against me," he said to Banichi, "didn't pass the Guild. Did it? Or is there another? These — reckless as they are — -don't feel like amateurs, Banichi."

"No," Banichi said, to which associated question was uncertain. But it covered the matter. And left him with a chill despite the sultry evening.

"Where's Jago? Is she all right?"

"Roof," Banichi said shortly.

Jago was in condition for that kind of gymnastics. Banichi, with his currently game leg, wasn't. And Banichi wasn't pleased, he picked that up. Jago was the junior in the partnership, Jago wasn't the one Banichi would ordinarily have in that position.

But there was in nottoo long a time a shadow against the curtains, and an exchange of some kind with a hand signal — Banichi waved to someone he could see from where he sat — and the affair dragged on in nervous silence, maneuvering or scouting going on, but he didn't want to chatter like a fool into Banichi's ear while Banichi needed his attention for business. What it meant was a power struggle going on in the Bu-javid, a quiet, discreet shifting of position among lords' protective security; a matter of fencing, he guessed, arms clenched on a nervous stomach, as various lords tried to figure out exactly who'd moved, where they'd moved, why they'd moved, and what side they were on^or who was winning in-this unannounced shadow-war.

Ludicrous, on one level. Grimly humorous. And not. Atevi historically didn't engage in vast conflicts, when little ones would do. But important people and ordinary ones could end up quite effectively dead.

Eventually a faint voice spoke from the pocket-com, and whatever the verbal code said, Banichi judged it safe to stand up — hand holding the edge of the door, which Banichi ordinarily didn't need, so the leg was bothering him, considerably; Banichi had taken a heavy jolt himself, in that tackle, and Banichi wasn't in a happy mood.

"Get back," Banichi said to him, no politeness about it, and Bren got up cautiously and moved through the dark room in the direction Banichi pointed him, steps breaking already broken glass where the panes had come in, a shot from outside, Bren judged. There was nothing but empty air out in front of that balcony, until one got a very distant vantage from the ell of the distant roof of the legislative halls: the lower roofs weren't at any useful angle for someone trying to get a shot into the apartment.

The legislative roofs. A very good shot with a very good sight.

Or someone rappeling down from the roof above. Where Jago was. He was worried about her safety up there in what was a very high-above-the-courtyards world of what didn't look like safe tiles. But he had no desire to harass Banichi away from necessary concerns, and he was sure Jago was one of the most urgent.

Banichi shepherded him out into the corridor, out into a darkness farther-reaching than it had been when he'd gone down into the area — more lights were off, and Banichi took him as far as Damiri's dark office before he turned on a very dim penlight, picked up the recording cassette from the phone, and pocketed it.

"This," Banichi said, "was well thought. Thisgives us a chance."

Praise could turn a man's head — and distract him from the other information Banichi gave him by that: that the attack on Hanks might have caught Tabini and the Bu-javid staff totally by surprise.

Which left a broad range of the offended and the ambitious for suspects, if Hanks was the principle target.