Defiance, page 8
“She has ordered deployment?”
“He has ordered deployment. Artillery. The mobile units. Everything.”
He. Cenedi. Significant distinction. Meaning only Cenedi’s name appeared on the orders.
He sensed increasing distrust between Cenedi and his aishid. Understandable, but he wondered if he should address it.
“That is a relief,” he said cautiously.
Jago’s face gave nothing away. “How long the force will stay, he may know, but we do not. It will certainly not go back aboard tonight. We are deploying to the south of the station, beside the road. And—” She paused, pressed her earpiece. “We now have a team moving, taking possession of that hill.”
A wave of relief passed through him. It bothered him, that hill. Had he chosen the place for Najida station, it would have been a little further south—if he had anticipated times like this one. But he had not had that choice. It was what it was.
And the fast-moving mobile units being offloaded—there were five of those—would mean flexibility in their stance, with heavier equipment, and the ability to get a team up on that hill. It was, overall, excellent news.
“I shall do what I can to see the Guild stays here,” he said. “I had rather see her back in Shejidan; and I have to be in Cobo in short order, but Najida’s safety will be a consideration.”
“That is our assumption,” Jago said. “Command is lifting the silence in the deployment as of a quarter hour from now. Com will be restored to routine operations and ordinary chatter. For our enemies’ benefit.”
Normal noise was being restored. Under strict discipline. Let the Shadow Guild hear what they would expect to hear . . . a camp being set up. All of it.
High command would have a different information stream. All of that was well and good. Reality was another matter. Reality was what they were going to sort out when they got off the constant rattle and shake of the train, had stable ground under their feet, and, one hoped, a restoration of face-to-face communication.
With just one chill, rainy, too-exposed spot to get through first.
“I assume Headquarters knows this. I assume Tabini-aiji does.” A breath. “This is insane, Jago-ji. Have we any sense what is going on next door?”
Jago gave a slight shrug. “We have no idea. If things have come to a crisis with her, he will follow her orders above those of the Guild or Tabini-aiji—have no doubt. And why Banichi should be shut out of communication we do not know.”
“I might be the reason.” He voiced his concern for the first time.
“Bren-ji, she can have no complaint of you.”
“I could have stepped left in Koperna, where she would have stepped right. One has no idea.”
“She has never been resentful of you, Bren-ji. You were set in charge in Koperna. Decisions were made. They worked. There is no reason at all to think this silence is against you.”
He looked at the empty teacup before him, and recalled another cup, in the drafty, medieval fastness of Malguri, in a hall unblessed by electricity or fan-driven heat. “Still, things in the Marid have not gone all to her liking, and I am not sure what I could have done to anticipate . . .”
“With information withheld, even from us,” Jago said, “even from us, Bren-ji, only Cenedi knew what she intended. She can have no complaint. You certainly did not enable Tiajo’s escape. It happened before we descended from Hasjuran.”
“The leaders having escaped the net,” he said, “one wonders what they brought with them to Jorida. Not the nicest of their followers, one is certain.”
“We may have numbers from Lord Geigi. And from our force in the Dojisigin—more information. The Master of Jorida will know useful things if we can make contact with him, which is what we would attempt, were we in Cenedi’s place. We do not expect a major move on Najida at this time. A tactical force to try and take out the dowager . . . or you . . . is our deepest concern at the moment. The Shadow Guild moves by individuals. By stealth. One does not catch them in the field. We anticipate a period of offers—negotiation between the Master and Suratho: the Guild might well prefer to enlist him and dispense with Lord Tiajo and her whims of the hour—but not yet, is our opinion. The Master is no fool, by reputation, and Tiajo certainly is. They know her, they know how to control her, but a fool is a fool and of limited use. If he is still alive, the Master will, we think, negotiate and cooperate—at least for a time. He is reputed to be intelligent. He may be smarter than they are.”
“And being here, this is our window in which we can do something about them. They will need time to rebuild, if that is their aim, to plan their revenge, if they decide all hope is lost. Granted we have an opportunity, but the timing, Jago-ji. The timing. With every Guild resource concentrated in the Marid, Ajuri with a lord yet to confirm, Kadagidi vacant and scattered, the Padi Valley down to one reliable, experienced lord, and he as old as the dowager, not to mention the difficulties of five thousand refugees with a history of riot and disorder literally hanging over our heads . . . At times I feel I am standing on quicksand. We do not have infinite time to deal with any of these things.”
“We have the Shadow Guild uprooted, stripped of resources and as yet unplanted. Jorida, if they take it, has the economic power it has wielded for a thousand years—but has no Guild, no force, no weapons to speak of. Without the Master to manage Jorida, the Shadow Guild has no trade to produce funds for their bribes. Ammunition and food, they can steal, but they need backing. The Master could win them away from Tiajo. He might try. But what would he gain? The question is whether the Master’s goals are in any wise compatible with theirs.”
“Machigi’s rail line,” Bren said, out of a sudden realization.
Jago looked at him.
“The commonality, Jago-ji,” Bren said. “Jorida has made its fortune monopolizing the sea trade, but with Bregani allied with Machigi and rail connecting their two capitals, that monopoly’s days are numbered. The Dojisigin is in major disruption. With Tiajo . . . and more importantly, Suratho . . . out of the way, it would take very little for some disgruntled leader to rise up in the Dojisigin and back the aishidi’tat forces, rallying a significant number of the citizenry to join him in a new regime—even joining the aishidi’tat. Resurrect that old rail line into Dojisigin, repair relations with Senjin, trade by rail, and Jorida’s cash flow is entirely gone. That is leverage.”
“But not for years,” Jago said. “While that rail is being built, while the lines from Dojisigin to Najida are repaired, Jorida’s near monopoly remains. —Possibly through the Master’s lifetime. It is possible that is all that matters to him.”
“The Marid can begin to ship direct to Cobo. That is a stroke of the aiji’s pen. We can dry up their funds. And benefit new trading partners in the Marid.”
“There is one more trade,” Jago said, “in corrupting man’chi. Illicit trade. They have been brokering artifacts from the Southern Continent for years. High value, small bulk. Drugs. We saw a sample of that in Koperna. If that ship is carrying more than Shadow Guild stowed in it, if they have been collecting those objects for years, doling them out at need . . . Suratho could win her way quietly, without openly challenging the aishidi’tat, and rebuild. If it funds the Master of Jorida—both sides of that transaction can be happy, before the railroads begin to dominate. Continue that trade as a cover for his second set of books. Unrest among his people? The Shadow Guild can take care of that. It would not be a good neighbor to Kajiminda and Najida.”
“It is only scarcely so now. The commerce in fruit sustains Kajiminda. Najida ships its own fish by rail.”
“Poverty,” Jago said, “makes Shadow Guild recruitment easier. And Ashidama could become a new Marid for them, with much greater access to the provinces of the aishidi’tat. All they need is a few years. And the threat of the railroad and the pressure of changes in the Marid would only hasten the conditions that send them recruits.”
It was a bleak outlook on the situation, one in which time was not an asset. He knew all the pieces of the things Jago said. And three more, that Jago had not mentioned: the absence of Lord Geigi from Kajiminda, the old, old resentments of the Edi at having been removed from Mospheira and settled on this coast to enable humans to live there, and the issue of the Edi having supported themselves in poor years by wrecking Ashidama ships on their rocks.
“There is certainly plenty of resentment to feed the situation,” he said, “with the Edi.”
“And the Shadow Guild excels at sowing chaos. Staging attacks on the Townships to appear Edi in origin might make their presence more welcome. Present themselves as protection.”
“Machigi’s hunting range extends clear to Ashidama,” he said. “Ample opportunity for mischief there. If Ashidama goes a bad direction, Machigi would act—but I would not depend on him to take care of Jorida, if the Master cooperates. One cannot see a future for Tiajo taking power in Ashidama, except as a figurehead.”
“She may already be food for fishes. One cannot imagine she has been pleasant on the voyage, and what use has she, outside the Dojisigin?”
“Suratho might need her to gain entry in Jorida, but nothing beyond that unless she can rapidly make herself key to the Master’s approval. Even if Tiajo survives as a figurehead, Suratho will do the negotiating. But there is no way Suratho can make herself a lord.”
“Of a kind, she is,” Jago said. “She owns the man’chi of the Shadow Guild, not Tiajo. But she has no way to attract the man’chi of merchants, honest or otherwise. And I have never heard that the Master is other than a merchant, not lordly, but not ill-served, either. He has real power. And he knows with whom he trades. This is not the man Suratho would hope to deal with, but he is the man she will have to deal with, and persuade. Trinkets will not win him. This was never the situation with Tiajo, who is asi-man’chi, and nothing would ever improve that.”
Asi-man’chi. A dimension of that emotion humans did not and could not grasp in atevi terms. Self-absorbed did not remotely describe it. Psychopath came closer. With, in this case, a taste for whatever glittered.
One began to grasp the significance in that—that Tiajo had a position, hereditary, over the Dojisigi, which gave her the power she had wielded, and the Shadow Guild had enabled her to maintain it. But Tiajo was not going to impress anyone in a region where that hereditary office was meaningless. A proper leader, capable of inspiring man’chi, might emotionally influence others. Tiajo lacked that dimension. That thing that drew others. Be it pheromones or something less substantial—Tiajo lacked it. Critically. Outside of her hereditary domain—or coldly legal authority—she had no power.
“So it is all Suratho,” Bren said. “In Jorida, it has to be Suratho.”
“If I truly understand Tiajo, that is what it was even in the Dojisigin. Tiajo had the title that legitimized it. Suratho had the power to rule.”
Interesting, that. Disturbing. Tiajo was a monster in human terms. He had never dealt with one in atevi terms. Never conceptualized one that simply would evaporate in foreign territory. Why had they kept her? Perhaps to legitimize, coldly, what inherited authority could do, but unless Suratho chose to humor her whims, Tiajo was incapable.
“Suratho,” Jago said, “does have what Tiajo lacks. And the economic choice she will offer is potent—considering how Machigi’s railroad and the shift of power in the northern Marid will threaten the Master’s future income.”
“The future.” Concern for Ilisidi’s health had him thinking in new ways. “One wonders just how far into the future matters to the Master. He has held Ilisidi off for a lifetime. Now he has to deal with someone like himself—with the power, perhaps, but not the paper.”
“Power enough to procure paper. One would not wish to trade Suratho for the Master—who has been a relatively modest threat.”
He drew in a breath. “One does begin to understand why Ilisidi has pushed so hard to get here. Just as well the Master is looking behind him as well, before accepting Suratho’s offer. But that ship will have made it in. Negotiations between the Master and Suratho will have begun—unless he has gone to ground. We cannot precisely sail down in my yacht and ask for a meeting.”
“We believe no more than twenty Guild units arrived on that ship. We have forty-two aboard, with what we picked up at Koperna.”
“That many?”
“Cars were transferred to the Red Train at Koperna.” She gave him a level gaze. “The day we arrived.”
“You think she was planning to leave Koperna early.”
“I think there was no ship of ours in position to counter the one now at Jorida.”
“Deliberately so?”
“Possibly. The aiji was the one to move a ship toward Amarja, and by then it was too late: Suratho had already folded resistance in the Dojisigin, removed Tiajo from her base of power.”
He took a distracted sip of icy tea, the prospect of convincing Ilisidi to retreat to Shejidan getting dimmer by the moment.
“All in all,” Jago said, “it was well-done, Bren-ji, what we have done. Do not think otherwise. The situation has arrived on the west coast, and the Master is not ignorant who Tiajo is, even if he might not know Suratho. Both leaving the Dojisigin means at the very least the aiji’s forces will prevail, and that Bregani will come out well to his advantage in signing as he did. He has every motive to keep his agreements.”
“I hope so.”
“I am certain.” She touched her ear. “We are to stay, the word still is, two days.”
“Two days,” Bren said, puzzled. It was clearly an infelicity unless something else was implied, and it did not seem so.
“I have no idea.” Jago answered the unspoken question.
“She is not going on to Shejidan,” Bren said. “I am strongly suspicious it is not two days.”
Jago received something over com, and pressed her earpiece closer to her ear. “The bus is here. We are to board as quickly as possible. The truck will follow, under escort.”
“Nomari?”
“Will come with us.”
“Homura and Momichi?”
Banichi said, from near the door to the passageway: “They are coming, Bren-ji. Cenedi’s word.”
Homura and his partner Momichi, who had asked to go with them out of Koperna. Two former Shadow Guild who were not in the Dojisigin, the most logical place for them to be, if they were truly looking for their two missing partners. Two former Shadow Guild who might believe there was little chance now that their missing partners were still alive. They had wanted to come west, but whether it was to find their partners and rescue them, or to avenge them—was a question.
And Cenedi had said bring them. Into his house.
Damn.
The train blew a long blast that, the wind being right, might be heard clear to Najida estate. That, indeed, was a sound he had heard more than once from a different vantage, and he was doubly glad to hear it now.
5
Rain pelted down as the Red Train opened its doors onto the platform and cold, wet air wafted back into the train corridor, along with the sound of the still active engine. The dowager’s party was first to exit, and she had emerged from her cabin cloaked and looking, from what Bren could see beyond broad, black-clad atevi shoulders, very much herself.
The line moved—Cenedi and Nawari on either side of her, Casimi and Seimaji in front, and the four others of her guard behind, with Asimi, her maid and dresser; and her physician, Siegi. Banichi and Jago were after that; and Bren was sandwiched behind them, viewless, with Tano and Algini behind.
Behind them, Nomari and his party, then Momichi and Homura and their guards, who were not, properly, an aishid. The line moved out, reached the steps, and the rain, which a brisk wind carried into the train.
A large black umbrella went up, above the dowager. Bren noted it with envy before he made the calculated step—more a jump—down to the boards of the platform, with Banichi and Jago waiting to assure his safe landing.
Fresh air. A faceful of hard rain, wind-borne. Not a concrete and roofed platform such as city stations offered, but an open boardwalk and the guttered eaves of an office and storage.
While the occupants of the Red Train, under ordinary circumstances, might have sat here an hour or more waiting for the rain to stop, as the train refueled and took on water, security concerns indicated no delay.
An umbrella, Bren thought, would have been a grand idea, had any of them except the dowager known to pack for other than snowy Hasjuran. Now with a driving rain beating down and soaking the shoulders of his coat, he necessarily kept to the dowager’s pace across the platform, as needs must everyone behind him.
It was indeed evening, a murky grey evening, and the train let off gusts of steam that rose up in clouds from below the platform. Cold rain puddled on the weathered boards faster than the gaps between them could drain it.
Keep moving, was the rule. There was the untrustworthy hill, though the windbreak wall screened them somewhat. The station occupied an otherwise (if one could see it) barren flat beside the turning wye and the water and sand towers. Stairs pierced the broad wooden platform, a descent down to ground level, where they had shelter from above, but no longer had the windbreak, and Nawari, holder of the dowager’s umbrella, struggled to maintain it. Bren was stalled for several moments on the top steps of the wind-whipped descent, before they were clear to follow the dowager’s company down and enable the ones following them to get under cover.
The modern, sleek estate bus sat below amid clouds of steam, its door open for them. Less visible than the gleaming red bus, the market truck had made it after all. It hulked behind, serviceable old creature, a dim brown presence obscured by its own headlights, upper structure faintly lit by the taillights of the bus.
Rain reached them sideways, intermittent with the warm breath of the steam engine, but there was no hurrying for those stranded on the stairs, neither up nor down. The dowager took a step, paused, then took another, with Cenedi on her right, who supported her now with an arm about her—distressing sight. The intermittent progress stopped altogether, and nand’ Siegi, the doctor, pressed forward through her escort.
