“An excellent notion.” It truly was. He knew the area, a set of terraces and hot springs, natural and beautiful, but almost inaccessible. They only had to get a rail line through Tatiseigi’s estate—and he began to see that Tabini had another motive in mind besides gratitude: they had tried to get that line through for the last fifty years. Putting it through near Comei—that was brilliant. Tabini hadn’t dropped a stitch.

“Beyond this,” Ilisidi said, “the recovery of one bus from the Taiben woodsc that will mollify the transit authority. Recompense to various districts for wear, tear, and damage to the trucks and buses: my staff is making a list. The monetary damages will be dealt with.”

She was a force of nature.

And she would be leaving the capital soon, to find her own way back east, to her own holdings, after her sojourn with Tatiseigi. So he imagined. He would miss Ilisidi. He had lived so closely with her and her staff and Cajeiri during the voyage that he had, yes, dammit, regarded her as family—he had lost his own mother in parting with the world, and it had been too natural during those two years to fall into Ilisidi’s orbit. It was an emotional attachment that would shock and amaze the dowager.

Time, he thought, to cut those bonds. Might it be his own too-frequent presumptions on her society that had driven her to take refuge elsewhere?

But she knew what was right to do, and she was self-protective, and protective of the boy. She had the right instincts. She surely saw that those bonds needed to be cut, and national politics as well as the welfare of the boy himself was the urgent reason for doing it now, as painlessly as possible.

Wise Ilisidi, he said to himself. Wise. Even kind. Ilisidi had found so delicate a way to manage, had arranged all the details, and set up a plausible situation which would help the boy through it and wean them all apart, their little family that could only have existed in the human geometries of shipboard living. That this departure to Tirnamardi was just the natural, convenient progress of thingsc he by no means believed it.

The breakfast invitation was the last he would have of her company for a while, he became sure.

“Well, well,” she said, pushing back her dish, “best break this up before you freeze, nandi.”

“Then I must say good-bye to you, aiji-ma.”

“Oh, indeed, not quite good-bye, paidhi. Join me for dinner this evening.”

He might have stopped in rising, ever so slightly, but he covered his dismay with a bow—or thought he had.

The dowager smiled beneficently.

The party, he well knew, was a company of Easterners arrived yesterday, to meet the dowager, to felicitate her on her return, and probably to deplore her recent associationsc meaning humans, shipboard and current.

And she wanted him there tonight, when he had intended to have supper in his rooms, troubling the staff as little as possible and giving no intimation of his presence in her household.

“I shall, then,” he said, his heart beating just a little faster. He searched her face, the flick of a glance, for motive, or hint, or warning, and gained nothing at all. “Honored, aiji-ma. Indeed, I am honored.”

“There was no place on the ship we could not go,” Cajeiri said.

“Well, except onto the captains’ deck, or into a few such places, but we knew every passage, even between decks, even the dark, cold places, where you could almost float when you walked.”

His audience followed everything with rapt attention— gratifying. Jegari and Antaro were older and taller and stronger than he was. It was hard to feel in charge when one had to look up constantly. But at the moment, he felt embraced, and felt their loyalty about him, solid and good and steady.

He could hardly help it. Wicked ambition took over. His next sentence was: “We need to know this place that well.”

A spark leaped up in that placid, absolute devotion, the same little spark he had seen leap up under fire in Tirnamardi— in two young bodyguards who by no means knew this place, this huge single building. Was ignorance and fear of this great house the reason they had been so subdued, so absolutely, deadly earnest and spooked by every noise? They had known their deep forest. This stone place had different rules, and they must be more lost than he was.

“Yes,” they said, almost as one, seizing on what he said. And he immediately had second thoughts: he knew the hazards of what he proposed, and knew, too, what these two were not—Guild, for one: Assassins’ Guild, the way bodyguards were supposed to be, and their pretending to be would not sit well with those who were.

Pretense was no longer a game. Not in the Bu-javid’s nervous corridors—where there might well be people bent on killing. It might get them into dangerous trouble.

But neither was it a game, that he needed to have his freedom, and he needed to have knowledge of his surroundings, in case some intruder got into Great-grandmother’s apartments, or met them in the halls. They had to know the escapes and the secret ways, and these existed: he knew they did—they had used some of them to get into the Bu-javid alive.

“There are wires,” he said. These two had seen the effect of wires, that could be set ankle-high, nearly invisible, that could take a foot off. It was one of the deadliest traps the Guild used, and there were wires guarding the aiji his father, and guarding lords, and various other sensitive places throughout the building. He knew that just on a reasonable guess, because he knew the resources of the Guild that defended them.

“We know wires,” Jegari said cheerfully. “Taiben has them.”

They would know other things, then. That was good. His father’s hunting lodge had been a major security installation in Taiben province, and the Taibeni had maintained it until the coupc so they were not ignorant in that regard.

And after Murini took over, the Taibeni had served to protect his father, as woodland rangersc and they had shuffled here and there about the province, eluding Kadagidi attacks and returning attack only when they picked the ground and the odds. They might be wide-eyed and quiet, these two, and spooked by shadows, but that was because they did notice things. They were quick and they might be clever—once they knew facts to work on.

They had to find out how things were set up, that was what, and that included even the Guild’s security precautions, so they could move in safety. If they were his substitute for Gene and Artur, and this was where he had to live, well, freedom to come and go would fix a great many things. On the ship, he had had the computers on which to look things up, and they had had the intercoms at every turn, and the back passages and service accesses and crawlways to enable quick movement and secret meetings. The Bu-javid was absolutely riddled with passages on its lower levels, and had no few above. During the fighting, at the very time he had been running for his life and climbing stairs until his stomach hurt, he had seen the pipes and the conduits that ran right along overhead and all around them on the walls, and he knew that where those conduits and pipes disappeared and appeared again for water lines and vents, there would be access panels, valves, and interrupts of some kind. That was the way plumbing and electricity worked. There had always been access panels on the ship, and there had to be such here, unless one wanted to chisel through a wall to get at something stuck in the plumbing. And that was just too stupid. It was not the way clever builders would do things.

“We need maps, nadiin-ji,” he said. “And we can draw them, for all the servants’ halls.”

“We can indeed do that, nandi,” Antaro said.

“But no one should see you at it.”

Jegari touched a finger to his head. “We remember forest paths.

There is no difference, nandi. All we have to do is walk through and then draw the map when we get to the room.”