But there were longer sections that followed his emergency notes, because some things weren’t just lists of names. Some things had to be understood in sequence . . . and ideally in Ragi, from the Ragi point of view.

There was, notably, a new section he had, over recent days, rated important enough to include in the handbook.

He’d gotten a lengthy and very secret file from Lord Geigi of Kajiminda, the day before Geigi had left for the station. Geigi himself figured in the account . . . in the third person. Geigi was far too modest, and far too generous, and definitely underplayed his own importance in events.

“Understand, it is not formally written. It is only a private memoir, very private, and far too blunt. I have not been discreet or courteous, nor even used the honorifics of very great people I would by no means offend. Were it to fall into any hands but yours in this state, I would resign in mortification. But some record needs to be made, by someone who knows things no one of this age will admit.”

“One perfectly understands.”

“You play some part in it. Please fill in anything missing. Correct my misapprehensions of human understanding: that is the important thing. And next time we meet in person, Bren-ji, I shall be very glad to receive your notes to add to mine.”

Geigi had added then, somewhat diffidently, “I may someday, in my spare time, put all these notes into order. I have even thought I might write a book—though one far, far more careful of reputations and proprieties. I would hold your view of events very valuable. I know where I transgress regarding my own customs; but if I violate yours, please advise me.”

It was a remarkable, a revealing narrative—scandalously blunt, by atevi standards. He profoundly trusted Geigi—and it was in an amazing amount of trust that Geigi wanted him to read it. He had taken it with him in the thought that a vacation would give him time to add the promised notes from a human perspective. And he had done a little of that writing, before the vacation had turned out to be other than a vacation.

Today . . . today definitely had not been.

But at the moment, almost as sleep-deprived as Banichi and unable to come down from the events of the morning, he wanted Geigi’s comforting voice, the accent, the habitual wry understatement.

The occasional poetic bent.

His ally was safely in the heavens.

On Earth, after all the events Geigi’s narrative described, things were not quite as stable.1

2

None of them were, in fact, supposed to be on this train. The train belonged to the northern districts of the aishidi’tat. It was bringing a few spare cars southward toward Shejidan. No one should be on board.

And they were supposed to be hosting the preliminaries for young Cajeiri’s birthday party up north, in Atageini territory, at Lord Tatiseigi’s Padi Valley estate, with Jase Graham and the three human children from the space station—Cajeiri’s personal guests.

In uncommon haste, the aiji-dowager had swept up the entire birthday party and headed them all back to the capital. She hadn’t yet notified Tabini-aiji they were coming . . . but then, their bodyguards weren’t trusting outside communications channels of any sort this morning.

With a continent-spanning rail system that ran on a very precise timetable, it would have been impossible and dangerous to keep the movement of their high-priority train completely a secret from other trains on the tracks. So for the benefit of everybody who needed to know anything—including the Transportation authorities—this train was still running empty, its window shades down, a typical configuration for cars out of service. The story they’d given out to Transportation was simple: a legislator in the capital had a family emergency in the north. On legislative privilege, that lord, with his staff, needed a pickup at the Bujavid station in Shejidan at mid-afternoon, and this was an already composed train that could do that handily. That was the story they had fed to Transportation: the train, composed as it was, an older train and coming from the north, could accomplish the pickup in the capital and return to the north to resume its regular operation this evening with no great disturbance to the system.

The track they were using required no routing changes, and one doubted that Transportation would do any checking of the facts behind the order . . . such things happened when a lord had to attend to unexpected business. The dowager’s staff had found an engine on the northern line deadheading one surplus passenger car and three empty boxcars back to a regional rail yard where normally they would have dropped off the passenger car and picked up freight. It had not been that far from Lord Tatiseigi’s little rail depot at the time they had found it—an older, short-bodied train, moreover, and headed in the right direction. Perfect choice.

It was perfectly credible that a legislator in Shejidan might want to get home quickly, given the current political emergency in the north. The rail office had obliged a quiet and high-level Guild request and cleared that train from the northern line to come all the way up to the Bujavid station for that pickup—being a short-bodied train, it could do it—and they would immediately turn it around and send it back up north. One freight shipment would have to be rescheduled for a later train, but it was nothing that needed any special notice to district directors.

The train had made one very brief stop in its passage, a matter of Lord Tatiseigi’s own privilege, a pause which would have attracted no great notice from the Transportation Guild, either—so they hoped. Such small stops, a request for the next passing train to delay for a small pickup, usually involved a crate or two, or even an individual letter, on a clan lord’s privilege—a practice that came down from a slower, less express-minded age, that occasionally caused a small delay in traffic, but it was a lordly and district prerogative the legislature had been unable to curtail.

That old custom served them now. Their other choice would have been to bring the armored Red Train up from the Bujavid to let them travel back in style, in the aiji’s personal car—and that would not only have cost precious hours, it would have excited notice. Armor plate was a good thing. But it was far better not to need it.

The last thing the public had known of the dowager and the foreign visitors’ whereabouts was that the dowager’s plane had taken the dowager and the heir, and possibly Lord Tatiseigi, off across the continental divide to the East, to await the birthday guests at her estate at Malguri . . . about as secure an estate as there was anywhere. The public knew that the space shuttle had landed earlier than anticipated, bringing down three human children who would entertain the heir preceding his official birthday in the Bujavid—and by now the public probably knew that Jase Graham, one of the four Phoenix captains, had accompanied the children on their flight—a perfectly understandable arrangement. Jase had spent no little time on the planet and had a previous appointment in the aiji’s court. It was perfectly logical he should come down for a visit, and perfectly reasonable, too, that he and the human children would bring human security with them . . . so if that had been reported, it was no serious issue.

And as for where Bren-paidhi had entered the picture, the paidhi-aiji would quite logically have stayed behind the dowager’s party and met that shuttle to assist the foreign guests . . . and escort them across the continent to Malguri.

If the news services had reported, however, that the foreign guests and the paidhi-aiji had not flown east at all, but had been conveyed to Lord Tatiseigi’s estate at Tirnamardi, to meet the dowager and Lord Tatiseigi there, people would have said the news services had gone slightly mad. Of course it was a ruse, and not a very clever one. Of course the visiting humans and the paidhi-aiji had gone on to Malguri, most probably by plane, since the transcontinental journey by rail was brutal.