“—And I’m very angry, aiji-ma.”

“Angry?”

“That I can’t go where I like and do what I like.”

“But can the paidhi ever do that? You never go to the City without an escort. You don’t travel, you don’t hold entertainments, which, surely, accounts for what Banichi would counsel you as habits of the greatest hazard.”

“This is my home, aiji-ma. I’m not accustomed to slinking past my own doors or wondering if some poor servant’s going to walk through the door on my old key… I do hope someone’s warned them.”

“Someone has,” Banichi said.

“I worry,” he said, across the teacup. “Forgive me, aiji-ma.”

“No, no, no, I did ask. These are legitimate concerns and legitimate complaints. And no need for you to suffer them. I think it would be a good thing for you to go to Malguri for a little while.”

“Malguri?” That was the lake estate, at Lake Maidingi—Tabini’s retreat in early autumn, when the legislature was out of session, when he was regularly on vacation himself. He had never been so far into the interior of the continent. When he thought of it—no human had. “Are yougoing, aiji-ma?”

“No.” Tabini’s cup was empty. A servant poured another. Tabini studiously dropped in two sugar lumps and stirred. “My grandmother is in residence. You’ve not encountered her, personally, have you? I don’t recall you’ve had that adventure.”

“No.” He held the prospect of the aiji-dowager more unnerving than assassins. Ilisidi hadn’t won election in the successions. Thank God. “Aren’t you—forgive me—sending me to a zone of somewhat more hazard?”

Tabini laughed, a wrinkling of his nose. “She does enjoy an argument. But she’s quite retiring now. She says she’s dying.”

“She’s said so for five years,” Banichi muttered. “Aiji-ma.”

“You’ll do fine,” Tabini said. “You’re a diplomat. You can deal with it.”

“I could just as easily go to Mospheira and absent myself from the situation, if that’s what’s useful. A great deal more useful, actually, to me. There’s a load of personal business I’ve had waiting. My mother has a cabin on the north coast…”

Tabini’s yellow stare was completely void, completely implacable. “But I can’t guarantee her security. I’d be extremely remiss to bring danger on your relatives.”

“No ateva can get onto Mospheira without a visa.”

“An old man in a rowboat can get onto Mospheira,” Banichi muttered. “And ask meif I could find your mother’s cabin.”

The old man in a rowboat would notget onto Mospheira unnoticed. He was willing to challenge Banichi on that. But he wasn’t willing to own that fact to Tabini or Banichi for free.

“You’ll be far better off,” Banichi said, “at Malguri.”

“A fool tried my bedroom door! For all I know it was my next door neighbor coming home drunk through the garden, probably terrified he could be named an attempted assassin, and now we have wires on my doors!” One didn’t shout in Tabini’s presence. And Tabini had supported Banichi in the matter of the wires. He remembered his place and hid his consternation behind his teacup.

Tabini sipped his own and set the cup down as Banichi set his aside. “Still,” Tabini said. “The investigation is making progress which doesn’t need your help. Rely on my judgment in this. Have I ever done anything to your harm?”

“No, aiji-ma.”

Tabini rose and reached out his hand, not an atevi custom. Tabini had done it the first time ever they met, and at rare moments since. He stood up and took it, and shook it solemnly.

“I hold you as a major asset to my administration,” Tabini said. “Please believe that what I do is out of that estimation, even this exile.”

“What have I done?” he asked, his hand still prisoner in Tabini’s larger one. “Have I, personally, done something I should have done differently? How can I do better, if no one advises me?”

“We’re pursuing the investigation,” Tabini said quietly. “My private plane is fueling at this moment. Pleasedon’t cross my grandmother.”

“How can I escape it? I don’t know what I did to bring this about, Tabini-aiji. How can I behave any more wisely than I have?”

A pressure of Tabini’s fingers, and a release of his hand. “Did one say it was your fault, Bren-paidhi? Give my respects to my grandmother.”

“Aiji-ma.” Surrender was all Tabini left him. He only dared the most indirect rebellion. “May I have my mail routed there?”

“There should be no difficulty,” Banichi said, “if it’s sent through the security office.”

“We don’t want to announce your destination,” Tabini said. “But, yes, security does have to know. Take care. Take every precaution. You’ll go straight to the airport. Is it taken care of, Banichi?”

“No difficulty,” Banichi said. What ‘it’ was, Bren had no idea. But there was nothing left him but to take his formal leave.

‘Straight to the airport,’ meant exactly that, evidently, straight downstairs, in the Bu-javid, to the lowest, inner level, where a rail station connected with the rail systems all over the continent.

It was a well-securitied place, this station deep in the Bu-javid’s heart, a station which only the mai’aijiin and the aiji himself and his staff might use—there was another for common traffic, a little down the hill.

Guards were everywhere, nothing unusual in any time he’d been down here. He supposed they maintained a constant watch over the tracks and the cars that rested here—the authorities in charge could have no idea when someone might take the notion to use them, or when someone else might take the notion to compromise them.

What looked like a freight car was waiting. The inbound tram would sweep it up on its way below—and it would travel looking exactly like a freight car, mixed in with the ordinary traffic, down to its painted and, one understood, constantly changed, numbers.

It was Tabini’s—cushioned luxury inside, a council-room on wheels. That was where Banichi took him.

“Someone haschecked it out,” he said to Banichi. He’d used this particular car himself—but only once annually on his own business, on his regular departure to the airport, and never when there was any active feud in question. The whole proceedings had a surreal feeling.

“Destined for the airport,” Banichi said, checking papers, “no question. Don’t be nervous, nadi Bren. I assure you we won’t misplace you with the luggage.”

Banichi was joking with him. Hewas scared. He’d been nervous walking down here, was nervous on the platform, but he walked to the back of the windowless car and sat down on the soft cushions of a chair, unable to see anything but the luxury around him, and a single televised image of the stationside with its hurrying workers. He was overwhelmed with the feeling of being swallowed alive, swept away to where no one human would ever hear of him. He hadn’t advised anyone where he was going, he hadn’t gotten off that phone call to Hanks or a letter home—he had no absolute confidence now that Banichi would deliver it if he wrote it this instant and entrusted it to him to take outside.

“Are you going with me?” he asked Banichi.

“Of course.” Banichi was standing, looking at the monitor. “Ah. There she is.”

A cart had appeared from a lift, a cart piled high with white plastic boxes. Jago was behind it, pushing it toward the car. It arrived, real and stuck on the uneven threshold, and Jago shoved and swore as Banichi moved to lend a hand. Bren got up to offer his efforts, but at that moment it came across, as Tano turned up, shoving from the other side, bound inside, too.

The cart and the baggage had to mass everything he had had in the apartment, Bren thought in dismay, unless three-quarters of that was Banichi’s and Jago’s luggage. They didn’t take the luggage from the cart: they secured the whole cart against the forward wall, with webbing belts.

Protests did no good. Questions at this point only annoyed those trying to launch them with critical things they needed. Bren sat down and stayed still while Banichi and Jago went outside, never entirely leaving the threshold, and signed something or talked with other guards.