Defiance, page 1
ALSO BY C.J. CHERRYH
THE FOREIGNER UNIVERSE
FOREIGNER
INVADER
INHERITOR
PRECURSOR
DEFENDER
EXPLORER
DESTROYER
PRETENDER
DELIVERER
CONSPIRATOR
DECEIVER
BETRAYER
INTRUDER
PROTECTOR
PEACEMAKER
TRACKER
VISITOR
CONVERGENCE
EMERGENCE
RESURGENCE
DIVERGENCE
DEFIANCE
THE ALLIANCE-UNION UNIVERSE
REGENESIS
DOWNBELOW STATION
THE DEEP BEYOND Omnibus:
Serpent’s Reach | Cuckoo’s Egg
ALLIANCE SPACE Omnibus:
Merchanter’s Luck | 40,000 in Gehenna
AT THE EDGE OF SPACE Omnibus:
Brothers of Earth | Hunter of Worlds
THE FADED SUN Omnibus:
Kesrith | Shon’jir | Kutath
THE HINDER STARS (with Jane S. Fancher)
ALLIANCE RISING
ALLIANCE UNBOUND
THE CHANUR NOVELS
THE CHANUR SAGA Omnibus:
The Pride Of Chanur | Chanur’s Venture | The Kif Strike Back
CHANUR’S ENDGAME Omnibus:
Chanur’s Homecoming | Chanur’s Legacy
THE MORGAINE CYCLE
THE COMPLETE MORGAINE Omnibus:
Gate of Ivrel | Well of Shiuan | Fires of Azeroth | Exile’s Gate
OTHER WORKS:
THE DREAMING TREE Omnibus:
The Tree of Swords and Jewels | The Dreamstone
ALTERNATE REALITIES Omnibus:
Port Eternity | Wave Without a Shore | Voyager in Night
THE COLLECTED SHORT FICTION OF C.J. CHERRYH
ALSO BY JANE S. FANCHER
DANCE OF THE RINGS
RING OF LIGHTNING | RING OF INTRIGUE | RING OF DESTINY
Copyright © 2023 by C. J. Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher
All rights reserved. Copying or digitizing this book for storage, display, or distribution in any other medium is strictly prohibited. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, please contact permissions@astrapublishinghouse.com.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Jacket art by Todd Lockwood
Jacket design by Katie Anderson
Book design by Stanley S. Drate/Folio Graphics Co., Inc.
Edited by Betsy Wollheim
DAW Book Collectors No. 1947
DAW Books
An imprint of Astra Publishing House
dawbooks.com
DAW Books and its logo are registered trademarks of Astra Publishing House
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN 978-0-7564-1590-7 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-7564-1592-1 (ebook)
First edition: October 2023
To my readers:
Jane is no stranger to this series. She’s bounced ideas back and forth with me on no few of Bren’s stories. And since she has been co-author with me on the Alliance books, it seems only just that she share credit in this series as well, in which she has definitely had a hand and written many scenes. This is a book from 2020, that year of trial, several health crises, and five surgeries amid a quarantine, and we both survived it and both worked on this book—not only have we survived, but we have come out of it with books and renewed energy, and we are very glad to present this one, after a two-year gap in Bren’s account. Credit also to the most patient of publishers: Betsy Wollheim, who waited and waited, and kept waiting for us. And very much to our readers, the most excellent readers on Earth, we cannot thank you enough. To you, our readers, to our excellent surgeons and doctors, and to our very patient publisher and editor, we respectfully dedicate this book; and a very special dedication to Jane’s brother, Allen “Chip” Fancher, pilot extraordinaire, our technical advisor—clear skies forever, Chip!
—C.J. Cherryh
Contents
Also by C.J. Cherryh
Title Page
Copyright Page
To my readers
Map
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
The Dual Regencies of Ilisidi of Malguri
1
Rock and sway, rock and sway as the Red Train raced along the track in a ceaseless envelope of sound. It wearied the body, day upon day of it—at least—one assumed day and night, since the Red Train had no windows . . . just a little port atop the evacuation panel through which one could see a thin double handspan of sky.
One recalled too easily a handful of recent encounters with the world beyond that portal. Tall wooden buildings looming beyond a thick veil of falling snow; a star-studded night sky, turned to day by the roaring exhaust of a lander’s engines; a terrifying bus ride between the Koperna rail station and the home of Bregani, Lord of Senjin.
A final glimpse of that same war-torn capital as the Red Train once again swallowed them up . . .
Bren—Bren Cameron, paidhi-aiji, which was to say human translator to Tabini-aiji, the head of the atevi aishidi’tat—had, with his aishid, his bodyguard, been assisting Tabini’s grandmother Ilisidi, the aiji-dowager, on . . . a little train trip.
That was how the aiji-dowager had described it, in prospect.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Constantly. Eternally.
Bren lifted his head, swiped back strands of blond hair that escaped his ribboned queue. He sat then, elbows on the too-high table, head in hands, with a cold cup of tea in imminent danger of vibrating itself off the edge. A book lay open before him, his recent pillow.
“Nandi.” Narani set a fresh pot of tea on the let-down table, and silently provided a clean teacup, rescuing the cold one.
Supper had been his most recent meal. Which meant it was, more than likely, dark outside. Narani kept track of these things.
The light inside the car reflected them both off what appeared to be a velvet-curtained window, a window designed to hide armor plate, an illusion maintained on both sides of the wall—a smoky reflection, image of a travel-frayed pale human and an elegant and tall black ateva.
The motif throughout the original cars of the Red Train was dark wood carved in vines, or mythic figures, red velvet cushions, well-polished brass wherever metal was involved. The Red Car itself, usually rearmost on the train, was centuries old, even predating the arrival of humans on the planet; and Ilisidi’s car and this one might be of the same vintage as that ancient elegance. Lighting was, in all the historic cars, live flame. And where the lighting was, in mercy, not as old as the motifs, it mimicked fire with exquisite, hand-blown bulbs.
That antique lamplight glistened gold across Narani’s aquiline profile, lending a gold tint to honorably-gained silver hair, most properly queued and ribboned.
Bren, less elegant, had gotten a tea stain on his lace cuff, needed a shave, wanted a bath, and wished there were some chair, any sort of chair, that would let his feet rest comfortably on the floor. A tallish human, he was of boyish size to an ateva. His feet, in any seating designed for atevi, never touched the floor, and his person was, to say the least, unique on the mainland.
Narani was head and shoulders taller. Atevi had universally black skin, black hair. Gold eyes that, in the centuries-old lighting of the Red Train, often caught an eerie shimmer. Keen night-sight came with that trait. Human eyes struggled with the print of the book Bren had been reading, on a table somewhat inconveniently high, with the lovely antique lamps.
It was eyestrain and exhaustion that had brought him to go head-down. Sleep came erratically on this trip, in two-hour patches, with all the clues of day and night suspended: it might be blazing noon for what it even mattered by now.
And the motion and the jolting never ceased.
The domestic staff—Jeladi and Narani—waked and slept as Bren did. His aishid, his bodyguard, Banichi and Jago, Tano and Algini, Assassins’ Guild, followed their own schedule, at the moment resting on velvet benches in the unlighted end of the car—not oblivious. They maintained electronics alert to any message from elsewhere on the train. But there had been no message. Not for days. They, with him, existed in suspension. They were in scale with the train and the benches, but even they were finding discomfort in the antique, stiffly stuffed furniture.
He could only imagine what it must be like for those in the cars further back in the train, cars with less luxurious appointment, packed with regular Guild and their equipment, awaiting orders that could send them against an enemy, or home to the ease of Shejidan.
In the next car forward was Nomari, who might become the next lord of Ajuri—if he gained approval. Bren had visited him, but there was painfully little to say between them. Small talk had died early in that atmosphere of uncertainties, and if No mari knew things, relevant things, significant things regarding his old associations with significant people back in the Marid, which was behind them . . . he hid those details or, charitably put, failed to volunteer them; while Bren, who had some influence on people who had to decide on Nomari’s future appointment—was unwilling to talk about that, either. Oh, Nomari was very accommodating, habitually taking on whatever character one wanted, reshaping himself continually. That was how Nomari had lived his life before this. Nomari knew the darkest side of the Dojisigin and the Senjin regions of the Marid all too intimately, having been a target for their Shadow Guild assassins from his childhood on, and having spied for more than one lord in the region they had just left.
And with his future depending now on his acceptance in the north, within the aishidi’tat, in which Bren had influence, Nomari was understandably anxious in the paidhi-aiji’s presence. At least—that was the impression he gave.
There was the car shared by Homura and Momichi and the guard assigned to them. But both in social rank and in terms of casual conversation—a visit would not be comfortable for either side there. They had been Shadow Guild, part of that splinter group devoted to the overthrow of the aishidi’tat. They claimed that that association was not by their choice. They claimed to have changed loyalties—were sworn to Bren, and to the aiji-dowager. But their loyalty had yet to be proven beyond any reasonable doubt, there was plenty of reasonable doubt in Bren’s view, and casual conversation had no chance in that car.
Ilisidi’s car, behind his, was the source of all current information on the situation they had just left and on where they were going, taking a train full of armament and Assassins’ Guild with them. But no information had been flowing to this car. Banichi, and even Tano, who was particularly good at ferreting information out of other units, got nothing from her bodyguard. The dowager’s chief bodyguard, Cenedi, technically in command of all the Guild aboard the train, had not visited them or the car devoted to Guild ops since Koperna.
There had been a major revision of the train at Koperna, in Senjin province, several boxcars of Guild equipment being attached behind the Red Car and a sizeable number of Guild units being added with them. That addition could be a simple relocation of units and equipment back to the capital at Shejidan—the operation in Senjin was finished and Red Train could not haul all that number of cars up the way they had come, the infamous Hasjuran switchbacks: they had to go the lowland route, across the entire width of the south, over to Najida, north past the mountain ridge, then back half across the distance they had just covered below the mountains—finally to reach the capital in Shejidan.
The units they had with them might be returning to the capital. But the capital was not where Bren wanted those units set down. Their turning point, Najida, on the west coast, was his own lordship, and while the war in the Marid was trying to take down the Shadow Guild establishment in the Dojisigin, word was—the last word they had had, in fact—that the leadership had fled the Dojisigin, escaped the Marid Sea, entered the Southern Ocean, and were sailing along the southern coast parallel to their route, headed somewhere with something in mind. There were no ports along that unpopulated coast, and no port would want them, but maybe one: the Dojisigin’s longtime trading partner, Jorida Isle, in Ashidama Bay, that let out onto the Mospheiran Strait.
Ashidama Bay was only a day or so south of Najida—Bren’s own estate. Najida was where the rail took a northward turn, and where they all hoped for an overnight stop on this interminable train ride.
Bren’s own estate. Not because he was born to the honor. Because it was a trouble spot already, and Tabini-aiji had appointed him to take over a province that hated the Ragi, which was to say, the dominant ethnic group of most of the continent. Najida was home to the Edi people, who were not native to the mainland, and who had been continually at odds with the rest of the mainland and south.
Had it been better for them, that he was human? Humans had dropped out of the heavens and moved in on the west coast—thus starting a war that had ended when the Ragi atevi forcibly cleared the large island of Mospheira—a haze on the horizon of Najida, and now the place on Earth where humans were permitted to live and atevi were forbidden.
The Edi and the Gan peoples had been removed to create that atevi-free enclave.
The Edi had been granted Najida peninsula as their own—it had not been Ragi land to dispose of, but Maschi clan, who did hold it, had been too disorganized to protest. So in went the Edi, who were not happy about it. Humans, excepting only the appointed translator, were confined to Mospheira, and that had ended the War of the Landing, centuries ago.
The Edi might not have been happy about having a human lord, either—Bren had been apprehensive about it; but they had treated him extremely well. He had come to have feelings about them. Love, even, that emotion he tried to be very careful with among atevi, who were differently wired, and who felt different, instinct-driven things. He had that kind of tie to them—and to his aishid and his staff—he had tried not to, but it was a hopeless effort. He was human and much as he tried not to develop such expectations, for his own sake and theirs, he did. But they forgave him. Warmly so. In their way. It was all complicated, his feelings all tangled up with theirs. It was not as intimate with the Edi as with his aishid, his bodyguard—and his staff. But it was still a connection he had to think about, and not abuse. He let himself love the place. His occasional home. He did not want it harmed because of him.
And damn it, that stray ship, headed out of the Marid, and almost certainly bound for Jorida, was not small-scale trouble. The atevi style of conflict was rarely massive movement of forces and pitched battles. It was much more intimate, much more personal—small units of extremely skilled professionals, who did not observe battle lines or conventions of war, were very good at slipping in and out and dealing death very precisely so as to satisfy a grudge, or, in the case of war, cause maximum damage to the other side. When the Assassins’ Guild moved legitimately, they preserved the law, went after a legally defined target, and damage was minimal: the Shadow Guild was a splinter off the legitimate Guild that applied the same skills to gain power for themselves, completely reckless of collateral damage. Power was their game. Getting it, and keeping it.
And their style of conflict was coming, to a people who were governed differently, who had no desire to be ruled by the Ragi—or by acts of terror and retaliation from Ashidama, who had been their enemies for two hundred years without the Shadow Guild getting into it.
He wanted the train to stop at Najida. He wanted the Assassins’ Guild they had with them to deploy at the train station—set up there, and stay there. There was no immediate employment for that force in the midlands and the north. Here, they could keep the war in the Marid from spilling over into the Mospheiran Strait and entangling itself in Ashidama, which was, first, not a part of the aishidi’tat; and second, a major grain supplier to the aishidi’tat. Having a cell of that damnable organization recruiting and training down in Ashidama, involving the tangled history of the three peninsulas in their plans, and being right on the Mospheiran Strait, which divided humans from atevi—
That was a situation with just too many flashpoints.
The aiji-dowager could order the train on to the capital . . . he could debark here with just his own aishid and try to explain to the Edi what was moving in to the south of them . . . he could ask Tabini-aiji to send the force back to Najida to do what the dowager had declined to do—all of these were options.
But the first was the most logical option. And the best for her. If he could get past Cenedi to talk to her.
He worried for her, these last days. Worried about her uncharacteristic silence. A polite written message, his latest effort, returned unopened.
It probably was night by now. It had rather the feeling of night, in the quiet that had settled over everyone. He ought to give up, have staff fold up the table and let down the bed, but if there was a torment beyond sleeping on a table surface, intermittent with something informational to read, it was lying abed staring at the ceiling and counting the thumps and bumps as they rattled through his frame.
For a time, now, though, the last few minutes, it seemed they had hit a smoother stretch of track. It rocked. It soothed. One hoped . . .
A bump, soon followed by another, and another: the respite was always brief. The train just could not make speed. There was no hope of it . . . probably none until Najida. Tensions in the Marid had reduced the number of trains on this run for years. Maintenance had suffered immensely.
