Foreigner: (10th Anniversary Edition) (46 page)

And maybe to a meeting with help from Tabini, if Tabini had any idea what was happening here … and trust
Banichi that Tabini did know, in specifics, if Banichi could get to a phone, or if the radio could reach someone who could get the word across half a continent.

“We’re heading south,” he said to Cenedi, when they came close enough together. “Nadi, are we going to Maidingi?”

“We’ve a rendezvous point on the west road,” Cenedi said. “Just past a place called the Spires. We’ll pick up your staff there, assuming they make it.”

That was a relief. And a negation of some of his suspicions. “And from there?”

“West and north, to a man we think is safe. Watch out, nand’ paidhi!”

They’d run out of space. Cenedi’s mecheita, Tali, forged ahead, making Nokhada throw up her head and back-step. Nokhada gave a snap at Tali’s departing rump, but there was no overtaking her in that narrow space between two room-sized boulders.

Pick up his staff, Cenedi said. He was decidedly relieved on that score. The rest, avoiding the airport, getting to someone who
might
have motorized transport, sounded much more sane than he’d feared Cenedi was up to. Rather than a mapless void, their course began to lie toward points he could guess, toward provinces the other side of the mountains, westward, ultimately—he knew his geography. And firmer than borders could ever be among atevi, where individual towns and houses hazed from one
man’chi
to another, even on the same street—Cenedi knew a definite name, a specific
man’chi
Cenedi said was safe.

Cenedi, in his profession, wasn’t going to make that judgment on a guess. Ilisidi might be double-crossing her associates—but aijiin
hadn’t
a
man’chi
to anyone higher, that was the nature of what they were: her associates knew it and knew they had to keep her satisfied.

Which they hadn’t, evidently. Tabini had made his play, a wide and even a desperate one, sending the paidhi to Malguri, and letting Ilisidi satisfy her curiosity, ask her
questions—running the risk that Ilisidi might in fact deliver him to the opposition. Tabini had evidently been sure of something—perhaps (thinking as atevi and not as a human being) knowing that the rebels
couldn’t
satisfy Ilisidi, or meant to double-cross her: never count that Ilisidi wouldn’t smell it in the wind. The woman was too sharp, too astute to be taken in by the number-counters and the fear-merchants … and if he was, personally, the overture Tabini made to her, Ilisidi might have found Tabini’s subtle hint that he foreknew her slippage toward the rebels quite disturbing; and found his tacit offer of peace more attractive at her age than a chancier deal with some ambitious cabal of provincial lords who meant to challenge a human power Tabini might deal with.

A deal with conspirators who might well, in the way of atevi lords, end up attacking each other.

He wasn’t in a position with Ilisidi or Cenedi to ask those critical questions. Things felt touchy as they were. He tried now to keep the company’s hierarchy of importance, always Babs first, Cenedi’s mecheita mostly second, and Nokhada politicking with Cenedi’s Tali for number two spot every time they took to a run, politics that hadn’t anything to do with the motives of their riders, but dangerous if their riders’ personal politics got into it, he had sopped that fact up from the machimi, and knew that he shouldn’t let Nokhada push into that dual association ahead of him, not with the fighting-brass on the tusks. Cenedi wouldn’t thank him, Tali wouldn’t tolerate it, and he had enough to do with the bad arm, just to hold on to Nokhada.

He’d recovered from his insanity, at least by the measure he now had some idea where they were going.

But he daren’t push. He’d gotten Ilisidi’s help, but it was a chancy, conditional support for him and for Tabini that he still daren’t be sure of … never trust that the woman Tabini called ‘Sidi-ji wasn’t pursuing some course toward her own advantage, and toward her own power in the Western Association, if not in some other venue.

From one giddy moment to the next, he trusted none of them.

Fourteen words, the language had for betrayal, and one of them doubled for ‘taking the obvious course.’

I
f Ilisidi was following any established trail at all, Bren couldn’t see it even when Nokhada was in Babs’ very tracks. He spotted Ilisidi high up among towering boulders, Babs moving like one of Malguri’s flitting ghosts past gaps in the rocks.

He didn’t see the crest of the hill—he only lost track of Ilisidi and Cenedi at the same moment, and, following them, at the head of their column of twenty-odd riders, came out on a windy, boulder-littered hillside above a shallow brook and a set of brush-impeded wheel-ruts.

The road? he asked himself.

Was
that
track the west road Cenedi had talked about, where they were to meet the rest of their party?

Other riders arrived at the crest of the hill behind him, and Cenedi sent a rider down to, as he heard Cenedi say, see whether they saw any recent tracks.

Machine-tracks, that specific word implied.

A truck could possibly survive that road, given a good suspension and heavy tires.

And if service trucks were all the opposition had at their disposal, and they didn’t take a plane out of Maidingi Airport, God, Ilisidi could lead them back over the ridge mecheita-back and outrun any pursuit afoot.

So their means of transport out of Malguri wasn’t crazy. This
wasn’t
Mospheira’s well-developed back country. There wasn’t a phone line or a power line or a paved road or a rail track for days.

They sat up on their mountainside and waited, while the man Cenedi had sent rode down, had his look, and rode uphill again, with a hand signal that meant negative.

Bren let go a breath, and his heart sank in suppositions and suspicions too ready to leap up. He was ready to object that, considering the fight back at Malguri, they couldn’t hold Banichi to any tight schedule, and they shouldn’t go on without waiting.

But Cenedi said, before he had a chance to object, that they should get down and wait.

That bettered his opinion of Cenedi. He felt a hundredfold happier with present company
and
their priorities, in that light, whatever motivated them. He began to get down, the way Cenedi had said, attempted with kicks to get Nokhada to drop a shoulder, but that wasn’t a proposition Nokhada seemed to favor. Nokhada ripped the rein forward with an easy toss of her head, sent pain knifing through his sprained shoulder and circled perversely on the slope until her head was uphill and he
couldn’t
get down over the increased height, in the condition his legs were in, damn the creature.

He kicked Nokhada. They made one more embarrassing and vainly contested three-sixty on the hillside.

At which point one of the other riders took pity on him and got down to take Nokhada’s rein.

“Nand’ paidhi.” It was the same man, he realized by the voice, who’d beaten hell out of him in the restroom, who faced Nokhada sideways, with the dismount-side to the upslope of the hill, then stood waiting to steady him as he slid down.

He wasn’t damned well ready to forgive anyone who’d helped in that charade last night.

But he wasn’t among enemies, either, that was the whole point of what Cenedi had been trying to determine; and the man hadn’t in point of fact beaten him unnecessarily, only dissuaded him from further contest.

So he gave up his quarrel and surrendered his grudge
with a quiet, “Thank you, nadi,” and slid down and dropped.

He’d thought he could at least stand up. The knees went—he’d have been down the slope
under
Nokhada, except for Cenedi’s man keeping him upright, and sensation arrived in his lower body about the same moment his legs straightened.

He managed to take Nokhada’s rein into his own hand and, with a mumbled thanks for the rescue, to limp aside to a place to be alone and to sit down. It was a very odd pain, he thought—not quite bad, at one moment, blood getting back where it belonged, or flesh figuring out there was supposed to be more of it over certain previously undiscovered bones in the human anatomy.

But he decided he didn’t want to sit down at the moment. His eyes watered in the chill wind, and he wiped them, using the arm he hadn’t just wrenched getting down. For a moment he was temporally lost—flashed on the cellar and on remembered anger and went dizzy and uncertain of time-sense as he looked down the slope. He settled for shifting from one foot to the other as a way to rest, holding Nokhada’s rein while Nokhada lowered her head and rooted with metal-capped tusks after a small woody shrub until it gave up its grip on the hillside. Nokhada manipulated it in her muscular upper lip and happily destroyed it.

Cold helped the pain. He just wanted to stand there mindlessly and watch Nokhada kill shrubs, but conscious thought kept creeping in—about the road down there, and the chance Banichi and Jago might not have made it away from Malguri.

The chance also that Ilisidi’s position
wasn’t
a simple or even a settled question. She was absolutely a wild card, dangerous to everyone with the Association trying, as it was, to fragment. It was only the fact that they were waiting for Banichi and waiting with a great deal of patience, for atevi, that persuaded him that he was in safe hands at all. Being atevi, Cenedi could return to his project
of last night and peel another layer of truth out of him without a qualm if he needed to, at any moment, because, being atevi, Cenedi held his morality was Ilisidi’s welfare—consideration of which could shift any time the wind shifted.

How many people on Mospheira, nand’ paidhi?

He earnestly wished he had the gun from his bedroom—but that hadn’t been in the kit Djinana gave him, he’d felt the weight of it, and he didn’t know where it had ultimately gone.

Back to Banichi, he hoped, before it turned up in evidence in some court case Tabini-aiji couldn’t prevent.

A scatter of pebbles came down the slope—a riderless mecheita was rooting after something up above. Nokhada hardly twitched an ear, busy chewing.

Then every mecheita’s ears came up, and the heads came up, the whole lot of them looking toward the bottom of the hill, where the curve of the slope hid the farther end of the road.

Men all around him ducked into cover behind the rocks. Cenedi arrived in two fast strides, jerked him away from Nokhada and jerked him down with him behind the shelter of a large lump of stone.

He
heard an engine then, in all that silence. At the first intimation of danger, the riderless mecheiti had tended together with Babs, and Ilisidi kept hold of Babs—holding the whole pack together on the slope above them.

The engine grew louder, nearer.

Cenedi signaled a query from another man with a hand motion to stay down.

Something rattled and popped and echoed, over the hills.

What was that? Bren wondered for half a heartbeat.

Then he heard the thump of an explosion. Muscles jerked, and his heart began to beat heavily in fright as Cenedi retreated from the post he had and moved rapidly from cover to cover, directing the company back uphill to the mecheiti.

They were leaving—pulling out. That rattle was gunfire; he knew it when that sound repeated itself. An exchange of fire. Cenedi had signaled him first of all. He felt a tremor in his legs he put down to sheer terror. He read Cenedi’s signal in retrospect, but he kept hoping for Banichi and Jago to appear from around the hill.

They couldn’t leave now, so close—if people were shooting, they were shooting at enemies, and that meant Banichi and Jago were
there
, just beyond the hill, that close to them. …

A veil of black smoke rolled along the road below, carried on a stiff wind. In it, from the edge of the hill, he saw someone running, a single black-uniformed figure—

Not an attack, only a single atevi headed around the rocks and then uphill toward them at a desperate, stumbling run—a lighter someone than the average atevi man.

Jago, he realized in a heartbeat; and sprang up and ran, loosing small landslides of gravel, slipping and sliding and losing skin on his hands. He met her halfway to the bottom, dusty, gasping for breath as she caught herself against a boulder.

“Ambush,” she breathed, “at the Spires. Get up there! Tell Cenedi go, get clear! Now!”

“Where’s Banichi?”

“
Go
, dammit! The tank’s blown, it’s afire, he can’t walk, he’ll
hold
them till you get a start—”

“Hell! What, hold them?
Is he coming?
”

“He can’t, dammit. Bren-ji,—”

He didn’t listen to atevi logic. He lit out running, down to the brush-choked road, down into the smoke. He heard Jago running behind him, swearing at him and telling him he was a fool, get back, don’t risk himself.

Then he heard riders following. He skidded in the pebbles on the last of the slope and ran, catching at a boulder to make the sudden turn onto the road, into the smoke, afraid of the mecheiti running him down, afraid most of all of Cenedi catching him, forcing a retreat and leaving Banichi behind for no damn reason.

He felt heat in the smoke, saw a hot red center in the black, rolling cloud that turned into the burning skeleton of a truck with the doors open. The rattle of gunfire echoed off the surrounding hills, and amid that, he heard the sharp report of gunfire close at hand, from the area around the truck.

“Banichi!” he yelled, rubbing tears and soot, trying to make out detail through the stinging smoke. He saw something dark against the gray of the rocks, off the road, a black figure aiming a pistol up at the hills. Dirt kicked up around him, an explosion of gravel—a shot hitting the ground—and he ran for that figure, with the smoke for his only cover. Chips exploded off the rocks ahead of him. One stung his leg as he ducked behind the rocks where Banichi sheltered.

“You damned
fool!
” Banichi yelled at him as he arrived, but he didn’t care. He grabbed Banichi’s sleeve and his arm, trying to pull him up, onto his feet. Banichi was clearly in pain, catching at the rocks and waving him off as pieces exploded off the boulders around them.