The noise changed to an echoing thunder that obscured chance remarks inside the cab.

One hoped the people on the roof were safe. It was certainly not where he would have chosen to ride out this journey.

But if there was to be an obstacle, they and he would be among the first to see it: The engineers would have at least as much warning as the headlamps and radio contact providedc not that there was damned much they could do about it. They were moving much too fast now for his liking, fast enough, he feared, to compact the cab into tinfoil if they met another train on their track.

Whisk—through an urban station, with lights on either side and other tracks, a strangely deserted station, where only a scattered few stood on the platforms watching the train pass. Two other city trains were parked there, and those were dark and eerily empty of passengers.

Whisk—into the dark again. The engineer, underlit by the control panel under his hands, was talking to someone on his headset. One hoped it was good information and good news.

Whisk—through another station, likewise deserted, only this one held a freight train, and a handful of shadows, one of whom waved a lantern, and the train slowed.

Back into the dark, then, more slowly still, swerving—if memory served—exactly where the airport train always swerved, where it switched to the Bu-javid track. In a moment they hit the switch-point, a noisy crash.

Faster and faster, then. They were headed for the Bu-javid depot, now, right up into the restricted track.

Ought we not to proceed with more circumspection? He wanted to ask Jago that, but he had dissuaded Cajeiri from such questions, and found himself biting his lower lip as they began, yes, definitely to climb and then to turn.

“How is the track ahead, nadi?” He finally couldn’t help himself.

“Clear, as far as our report runs, Bren-ji.” Because she knew him, because she knew he was trying to think ahead, she added: “The floors above are at present another matter.”

Murini hadn’t pulled out all his supporters. Perhaps Murini had gone, and left them to take the heat—but it would not be easy.

Granted one could believe the reports of where Murini was any more than one could rely on those about Tabini.

Whisk. Another lighted space, with no trains at all, only deserted platforms, amber-lit in the gloom, empty rails gleaming. He remembered it as the station that carried government employees to the foot of the hill.

And still the train climbed, its speed necessarily reduced by the bends in the track. It was inside the hill.

“The paidhi and the young gentleman should go to the aisle aft now,” Banichi came to them to say. Bren perfectly understood: They were getting close to the main station, that station which served the higher levels of the Bu-javid. If anywhere, this was the place that would be defended. Nobody had thrown a train at them yet, but he would lay no bets now.

“Come, young sir,” Bren said, collecting the boy with an arm about his back. “Let our security do its job.”

“I have a gun,” Cajeiri announced, this boy scantly eight.

“Keep it in your pocket,” Bren said, “as I do mine. If you draw it, you will immediately strike an enemy eye as a threat, and you will attract bullets to both of us, vastly annoying our bodyguards.”

“I want to fight!”

“Not even your father wants to fight, young sir, nor do I. Let us stand here at the start of the hallway, and not be in the way of those whose business it is to protect us. That is our best service.”

“My father is up there!”

That he was, right up near the windows, which security would not like, but there was damned little arguing with Tabini at this moment. The headlights of the train picked out rough-hewn rock in their distant view of the windshield.

Then smooth concrete, and always that row of lights along the top of the tunnel—lights dimmed to insignificance in the blaze of fire that burst ahead of them. The whole train shook, and kept going through a sheet of fire, right on to the white flare of artificial light that dawned in the windshield.

Multiple tracks, the broad platforms for freight and passengers, cars on the siding and another train engine apparently moving, but on another track, headed out.

Home, the station from which he’d left on every journeyc and seen now through the windshield of an engine cab bristling with firearms, a vantage on the place he’d never in his life imagined to have. The whole Bu-javid was above their heads now, the hill, the capital, the center of Sheijidan and the aishidi’tat.

The train slowed, hissed, squealed to a halt, and suddenly a fracture appeared in the windshield glass, silent, compared to the scream of the brakes. No one even ducked—only one of Tabini’s guard stepped between him and the window, and at Bren’s elbow, Cajeiri moved forward.

“Do not have the gun out, young sir,” Bren said, grabbing a coat sleeve and wishing he could confiscate that deadly item from immature hands. “Keep your head down.”

“But—” from Cajeiri, and at that moment Jago stepped near and seized Bren’s arm. He seized Cajeiri’s in turn, and took him where Jago led, which was back into the short corridor, and, bending low under the window, toward the door and the ladder down to the outside.

Out the door then, into the echoing cavern of the terminal and the reek of smoke and explosives in the station.

Jago stopped them half a breath—they were not the first out on that short steel platform: Banichi was. Banichi went down the ladder to the track itself.

“I shall follow you very closely, Jago-ji,” Bren said at her back.

“Use both hands for yourself, if you please.”

“Yes,” Jago said shortly, and dived down after Banichi.

It was relatively quiet, given the noise from the idling engine right at their backs, given, Bren thought, the pounding of his own heart, which he swore was keeping time with the train and just as loud. Two deep breaths on that little nook of a platform. Banichi’s whistled signal pierced the ambient noise.

“We shall go down and to the right,” Jago said, “along by the wheels, then up onto the platform. Follow.”

She moved, instantly, and Banichi was out of sight. “Stay with me,” he said to Cajeiri, and scrambled after Jago, down the atevi-scale ladder, down beside the massive driving wheels. Jago moved ahead of them, staying low, below the concrete lip of the platform, and Bren saw Banichi was up ahead, where a straight steel maintenance ladder led up to the main level. Banichi set a foot on it, reversed his rifle, and put the butt up above his head.

Fire spattered back, missing entirely.

“They are not Guild,” was Jago’s acid comment.

Not Guild. Banichi had ducked down and moved down the trackside, evidently on the hunt. Fire was echoing out from the top of the train.

“Stay here,” Jago said, about to backtrack, and about that time fire broke out from behind them, from up on car level, about where Ilisidi’s car was. Fire came from the windows as well as the top of the cars, directed at what, Bren had no idea. His mind supplied the broad panorama of the Bu-javid terminal, where a loading dock and broad passenger platform ran side by side in the large artificial cavern, with its pillars and buttresses. About fifty meters from the passenger terminal, a handful of freight and business offices, their very walls part of a massive pillar that went up several stories, and about twenty meters beyond that, a rock wall and the inset of a bank of lifts that went straight up into the offices and residences of the Bu-javid itself, doors tastefully enameled in muted tones, themselves an artwork—not to mention the several tapestries and the vases, designed to provide passengers tranquility and pleasant views, before the bustle and hurry of the trains.

Fire rattled out and richocheted off the train engine over their heads. More fire came from right above them, out the windows of the cab, and presumably their people on the roofs of the train had not stayed any longer to be targets—were likely either down within the train or had gotten off onto the platform immediately as they came in and moved out. The whole cavern resounded with gunfire, first in one direction and then another, and he had lost sight of Banichi in one direction and suddenly missed Jago in the other.