Light footsteps shook the ladder above him. Cajeiri came down, and the gridwork platform was too small to gather company, with Jago and Banichi coming after. He reached high for the latch of the metal door and with his utmost one-handed effort, wrenched it open and shoved it wide. Guild in black leather met him as he shouldered his way past the metal edge, men holding heavy weapons angled up in the narrow corridor. Hands reached down, helped him climb up the last high steps, pulled him safely up into the short cab corridor.
Detail overwhelmed him, doors, guns, banks of switches, levers, gauges whose purpose he understood but had no idea how to read.
He had to trust the armed men at his back. He was concerned with the whereabouts of his staff, seeing Cajeiri had climbed in after him.
Then Jago arrived up the short steps, exchanged a few words with the Guildsmen on duty, and indicated with a shove at Bren’s shoulder that he should keep on moving down the short corridor into the cab itself.
He cast a second look back, unsatisfied until he saw that Banichi had gotten inside and the door was shut.
Switches, gauges, and levers. He made the passage along beside the power plant itself. Ahead of him, around a slight dogleg for the engine bank, a white light glared through the engine’s broad windshield, offering a hazy view of the sky. It silhouetted a handful of armed personnel and others who must be the engineer and his crew. He walked forward, seeing too little detail in the unexpected light.
One man in that crew turned his head, and he recognized a familiar, light-edged face.
“Aiji-ma,” he exclaimed, utterly confounded.
“Paidhi-ji.” Tabini seized his arm and pulled him forward, into a nook between operators’ seats, moving him into a safe, warm place.
And made a second reach. “Son.”
“Tai-ji,” Cajeiri said, completely amazed at being likewise hauled into Bren’s nook. The heir presented an unlikely figure, overwhelmed in a Taiben ranger’s green jacket, small hands exiting the sleeves to grasp hold of the seat nearest. The driving mechanism under their feet thumped like an overexcited heart as Tabini reached and took his son by the shoulder.
And in that moment, in the forward windows at Tabini’s back, the city itself appeared, a sprawl of red-tiled roofs serpentining this way and that. High above it all rose the hill of the Bu-javid, where they were going, if any information still held true.
“How is your great-grandmother?” Tabini shouted at his son.
“She is very well, tai-ji, but Uncle Tatiseigi has a bullet in his arm and they sent my bodyguard away disguised as me, which I did not want! Where is ami?”
Mama, that was.
“She is with the buses, with her father and the Ajuri,” Tabini said, and spared a hand for Bren’s shoulder, on a level with his son’s. “And you, paidhi-aiji. Are you well?”
“Perfectly,” Bren answered, finding his breath short and his whole grasp of the situation tottering. “Perfectly well, aiji-ma.”
A faint buzz penetrated the thunder of the locomotive and a shadow of wings spread over the windshield and diminished: A plane sped low overhead, streaking low along the track in front of them, then rose as it reached a hill, skimming like the wi’i-tikin in flight.
Scouting the track ahead, Rejiri was, and in utter hubris, letting them know he was up there—up there, all along their way, watching the track, advising them, making their hazardous course possible, an airborne presence elusive as quicksilver, there when they needed him. The boy that had set the nation’s air traffic control in an uproar had redeemed himself today, no question, and they saw him rise, with a waggle of his wings, off on a course toward the distant heights of the city.
An explosion puffed smoke beside the plane. Another. Rejiri waggled his wings as if to chide the agent of this reckless attack, and flew on undaunted.
8
The little plane made a brazen, lazy circle all about the heights of the Bu-javid, reconnoitering—and clearly challenging the opposition to take a shot at it. Bren watched it from a relatively armored position in the engine cab, sure that this time, after days of being shunted aside, deprived of vital information, and relegated to a marginal existence by the Atageini, he could no longer complain he lacked a firsthand view of events. He had his computer slung on his shoulder, resolved to protect the machine from all accidents. He had Banichi and Jago standing near him, which he would have chosen above all things. He also had Cajeiri marginally in his charge—someone had to have the boy in hand, since Tabini, who was near him, was conferring not with Ismini, his own head of staff, who was nowhere to be seen, but with Cenedi and Banichi, the three of them laying plans the rest of them would follow.
This train was not only aimed at the center of the city, but about to force its way into the very heart of the hill on which the Bu-javid sat, that was increasingly clear: Tabini was determined to drive it as deeply as it could penetrate into the tunnels that led to the rail station inside the Bu-javid.
And, Bren thought, if he were in charge of Murini’s defenses, and only pretending to have fled, the very first thing he would do was park a locomotive in those tunnels—the only obstacle available that could possibly stop this iron juggernaut. Stop it, and jam the tunnel with the resulting wreckage.
It was not a comforting thought. Presumably Tabini had thought of it. Presumably Guild in Tabini’s man’chi were running ahead of them, making sure this did not happen. One had no way of knowing if Ismini and the team that had guarded Tabini during his exile were part of that effort, or were serving as decoy, or if there was some other reason for Tabini’s reliance on older, better-known Guild help.
And where were the buses and the trucks at this point? Where was the majority of their strength? Gathering more supporters, they might be, but the buses were traveling a circuitous webwork of roads leading toward the city—still out in the country, news of their coming stirring others to join—or resist—the passage into the suburbs of Sheijidan, doubtless, but not making the kind of time they made.
Tabini’s advance had met no great resistence, however—not yet.
And Sheijidan itself was a strongly Ragi city, not strongly affiliated with their varied Padi Valley cousins, who were Ragi only in part, and in part not, and married into this and that other ethnicity—the hills, the coast, the south. The city itself would surely have borne Kadagidi rule very uneasily.
The boy standing beside him, their young vessel of all key lineages, brought in the Padi Valley’s confused bloodties—and profited more from that heritage than Murini ever could or would, if the day went their way. It was demonstrable in that caravan of buses and trucks that the whole Padi Valley, Murini’s birthplace, had fallen in with Tabini’s advance on the capital. No question this boy’s return from space would ring the death knell of Murini’s hopesc unless this boy should die, or be proven to have fallen under unacceptable influences— The paidhi’s, notably, which state of affairs he himself had vehemently denied to all listeners, all the way from the coast.
So why in hell did Tabini insisting on bringing him with the boy, in the engine cab, in this most public of gestures?
Because Tabini, stubborn as they came, didn’t intend to fail in this attempt, that was what, and he intended to make Murini a dead issue, incapable of protest or politics. The paidhi-aiji, one could only think, was still part and parcel of all Tabini’s decisions, the adviser, the arbiter of his more outrageous opinions—and, though the paidhi himself had doubted it at times, it seemed demonstrable now that Tabini would not step back from that position. Some might see the paidhi as a liability. But others, diehard supporters of the aiji, might see the paidhi as the single binding-point of everything, every choice, every controversial step Tabini had made on the way to this upheaval: Take me back, accept me intact, accept my decisions, and keep your objections behind your teeth, his challenge seemed to be. Admit I am right, and then have my son after me, this ultimate uniter of all clans, or bring me down, and lose my son, and lose his promise, and let a feeble union of the south coast and the small clans rule over nothing but chaos—choose that instead, and be damned to you all.