Peacemaker (2 page)

N
one 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.

Humans—visit Tatiseigi's estate at Tirnamardi? Impossible. Lord Tatiseigi was head of the Conservative Caucus, which routinely deplored human influence and supported traditional ways against the encroachment of human technology and mores. It was barely conceivable that that elderly and conservative lord would be joining the dowager and meeting a collection of human guests at remote Malguri. Host them at his ancient estate? No.

The news services
might
have found out by now that there
was
news happening at Lord Tatiseigi's estate. Taibeni clansmen with their mecheita cavalry and with trucks and supplies, had moved into the estate's extensive grounds some days ago, while Lord Tatiseigi was still in the capital.
That
strange report might foretell another skirmish in an ancient war, since Tatiseigi's Atageini clan and the neighboring Taibeni clan had been technically at war from before the foundation of the aishidi'tat.

Mere days ago, however, in the capital, Lord Tatiseigi had signed a formal peace with the Taibeni lord by proxy. If the news services had phoned either Lord Keimi of the Taibeni or either of Lord Tatiseigi's residences, neither source would have confirmed it.

And
if
the news services had by now gotten wind of the treaty, they would still be astonished to see that Taibeni had been allowed within the ancient hedges and onto Tirnamardi's well-kept grounds. Lord Tatiseigi might have maintained two hundred years of technical unity with his
other
neighbor, the Kadagidi, while shooting at them on occasion, and vice versa, in periodic clan warfare—and one might be brought to believe that, after all this time, Lord Tatiseigi might finally have admitted the Taibeni clan to the same status as the Kadagidi, creating a framework within which business between the clans could occasionally be arranged . . . but . . . on the estate grounds?

Was there possibly more to it? Could there be an Atageini move in concert with Taiben, against the lately-disgraced Kadagidi?

Considering the Taibeni were blood-relatives of the aiji, signing a peace treaty with Taiben was a politic move for the Atageini, if a few centuries belated.

And the secrecy of it, or at least Tatiseigi's keeping the matter low-key? Oh, well, the Conservatives never liked to change their mind in public.

But Taibeni campfires making two columns of smoke inside the famous Tirnamardi hedges? Was
that
permitted? Had Lord Tatiseigi, who was supposed to be off across the continent at Malguri,
any
inkling there were Taibeni camping on his grounds, with mecheiti? Was there some sort of double-cross in progress?

Taibeni guards would not have let the news services disembark at the local rail station, not yesterday, not today, nor would they on any day in the foreseeable future. If any news services were ever to get to Tirnamardi, they would have to bring their equipment in from some other stop, such as the first Kadagidi station, taking a truck overland—and likely the Taibeni would stop them on that approach, too—betraying another puzzling situation, since the Taibeni were
still
technically at war with the Kadagidi, and should not be keeping track of traffic on Kadagidi land.

But perhaps the news services had not yet noticed the two—now three—Taibeni camps, despite the campfires.

Perhaps the news services had sent all their personnel buzzing around the airport in Malguri district, clear across the continent, trying to find out the truth of what was going on up at Malguri fortress—in a township without many modern conveniences, let alone good restaurants or hotels, in a town a day's flight removed from Shejidan.

This morning, however,
another
column of smoke had gone up in the green midlands, this one from Tatiseigi's neighbor, the Kadagidi estate. And since early this morning there could be no question the Kadagidi township was upset, and no more concealing the reports that the Kadagidi lands had been invaded.

Oh, there would be protests flying far and fast . . . quiet, at first, but passionate. And those
would
reach the news.

By now one could assume the news services would be frantic for answers, increasingly suspecting they had been diverted off a major news event that had nothing to do with the young heir's birthday party. And by this hour, they would likely begin to get their answers . . . not from the Kadagidi estate itself, which was under Taibeni occupation at the moment, but from the aggrieved household staff, who had been sent down to the Kadagidi township after being ejected from the manor house at Asien'dalun.

Within hours, that situation would surely overshadow not only the heir's birthday preparations, but the assassination of the heir's grandfather, and the impending birth of another child to the aiji in Shejidan.

The aiji-dowager and her great-grandson had been intended to carry on the birthday preparations quietly, out of the way of politics in the capital and out of reach of the news services—but, in truth, Bren now suspected, even
he
had been misled—distracted by all the preparations it had taken to set up the Malguri story and then to divert the entire birthday party to Tirnamardi. It was very possible the dowager's primary intention in setting up the Malguri story and visiting Lord Tatiseigi instead, had not been so much to deceive the news services, as to separate the Shadow Guild's two prime targets: herself—and Tabini-aiji—and get good intelligence on the Kadagidi.

Their Shadow Guild enemies, lately pressed to prove they could still reach out and commit acts of terror against the aiji's authority, had been on the move, too—but they had clearly been running behind. They'd launched a complex assassination attempt based on their estimation of where Tatiseigi would be, in their absolutely correct estimation of the effect the loss of Tatiseigi would have on the dowager's influence with the Conservatives.

As happened, the two efforts, the Shadow Guild assassination plot and the dowager's several-pronged plot to confuse her enemies, had bumped into one another . . . purely by accident, the kind of accident that might befall two opponents circling one another in the dark.

Inevitable, under the circumstances, that they would collide—but one could suspect that the dowager still knew more than she was saying.

T
he curtains were not supposed to be up, because the train was supposed to be empty, so Cajeiri and his guests could not even sneak a look outside.

And it was not a rule to hedge on or cheat. Cajeiri was still only infelicitous eight, but he had the part about no cheating very clear, because people were dead this morning—nobody on their side, but a few on the other side, people who had been shooting at nand' Bren and nand' Jase; and they still had enemies loose. It had been a long night, and that was why even Guild who ordinarily would be on duty were almost all sleeping on the train. It was because they were exhausted and there might be more fighting once they got to Shejidan. It was certainly not because everybody felt safe.

Mani, Great-grandmother, had ordered a regular train to come to Tirnamardi's rail station to pick them up, and it was interesting to see what an ordinary passenger car looked like inside—brown mostly, mostly enameled metal, and the seats were not nearly as comfortable as the red car his father kept. There were sets of seats, too, with tables between; he and his guests had one such set; his bodyguards, across the aisle, had another such set. But none of the seats had cushions.

The car was not armored, either, which was another reason they had to keep the shades down.

And while mani had told him they would all just go back to the Bujavid and go upstairs and have dinner in Great-uncle Tatiseigi's apartment tonight—things were far from normal. Every promise was subject to change, and though they were trying to pretend things were normal, his three guests all knew there was trouble.

It was almost his birthday, he was almost nine, he should have had two more days at Tirnamardi, riding mecheiti and doing whatever he liked; and that had lasted about one whole day. He didn't know exactly
what
danger was out beyond those window shades—except that Kadagidi clan was definitely upset, except that Banichi was hurt and some of Great-grandmother's young men were, and except that they had the Kadagidi lord a prisoner in the next car, along with two Dojisigi Assassins, who had come to kill Great-uncle and had apparently ended up turning on the Kadagidi lord instead.

It was all about the Shadow Guild, which was scary bad news. He had so much rather it was
just
two lords fighting.

Mani had said everything was going very well—and he
almost
believed that, considering that they had apparently won, but mani had been very grim when she said it. And she had not wanted to wait for the safer, armored Red Train to travel out from the Bujavid—because speed was apparently more important than security. Or speed
was
security. The adults had not told him which. He
almost
had the feeling it was speed his great-grandmother wanted right now, not because she was running, but because she had somebody specific in her sights. She had that look she took on when she had a target. But he had no idea who that might be.

He,
meanwhile, was in charge of his birthday guests, while the grown-ups did their grown-up business and laid plans and kept secrets.
He
had to explain the situation to his associates from the space station, and
he
—and his bodyguard—had to be very sure they didn't sneak a look out past the window shades. Going out to Tirnamardi they had been more relaxed and they had done a lot of looking from the bus—but on the Red Train, they had had no windows to look out once they were aboard: its walls had only fake windows. In this car, there were just woven fabric shades between them and outside, and the temptation even for him was extreme. His guests were missing a chance to look at trees and the whole world that they had come down to see.

But along the way, among those trees, there could very well be Assassins waiting to shoot at them, because, as his bodyguard had told him, trains ran on tracks, and anybody could tell the route they were going to take.

Anybody could guess, too, that the Shadow Guild was going to be very upset about what had happened to some of their people this morning.

Had they left anybody behind who would be chasing them? His bodyguard said it was possible, but the senior Guild was not telling them that.

Officially, too, everybody acted as if he was still going to have his birthday party in the Bujavid, the way they had always planned. He was not entirely sure that was still the truth. But he was at least sure that the grown-ups were doing their best to keep them all alive, and he was not a baby, to think that his party mattered on that scale, even if the whole thing did make him mad.

Very mad.

He'd understood
last
year, when they'd arrived back on the world on his birthday and they had to sneak across country . . . he hadn't been happy about it, but that was the way it had had to be.

So here they were sneaking across country this year, too. He had gotten his guests down from the space station. But their parents might not ever let them come back again, the way things were going. They might not
want
to come back, the way things were going.

Now his grandfather was dead, just north of Great-uncle's estate . . . and nobody knew why.

He was sure that if anything had happened to his parents in Shejidan, his great-grandmother and everybody else would be a great deal more upset than they were, so everything was probably all right in the Bujavid—assuming the Bujavid was really where they were going, and it was not another trick for their enemies.

And if Great-grandmother was talking about dinner plans for him and his guests—it was even possible they were going to carry on just exactly as they had at Tirnamardi, with him keeping his guests happy, while Great-grandmother and all the adults were sending out people to do things that were going to make somebody else very
un
happy.

All he and his guests had seen of the trouble so far was smoke on the horizon, and flakes of ash wafting down on the driveway at Tirnamardi. Well, that, and riders going back and forth in the night. And all of the goings-on with the Dojisigi Assassins.

It did seem odd to him that Great-uncle was not that mad at the two Dojisigi who had tried to kill him. Dojisigi clan had made trouble for everybody in the north for a hundred years at least, so they had been a problem for a long time, and the Atageini and the Dojisigi had never had any good dealings between them that he knew of.

But then so had the Dojisigi clan's neighbors, the Taisigi, been a problem just as long, and now Lord Machigi of the Taisigi was Great-grandmother's official ally.

And he did know that Dojisigi clan had had the Shadow Guild running their district for a long time, and then the regular Guild had come in and replaced the Dojisigi lord with a girl who was, his great-grandmother said, not fit to rule. So maybe Dojisigi clan as a whole had figured out that things were going to change, and wanted to ally with his great-grandmother just like Lord Machigi, before Lord Machigi got all the advantage and all the trade.

That was politics. One could just not say a thing would never happen or that somebody would be a problem forever. He had watched all sorts of really strange changes happen, almost all of them in his eighth year.

So one had to be ready for any sort of thing to change.

The hard part was,
he
was going to have to explain to his guests the politics of what was going on, without scaring them or mentioning things that could be his great-grandmother's secrets. He was sure the fighting over on Kadagidi land was not going to be secret from the ship-folk, since Jase-aiji had been right in the middle of it. So the ship-aijiin were going to know a lot more about that situation than he could tell to anybody, since he had
not
been there.

And secondly—his three guests were not stupid, and they had seen most everything that had gone on over on Great-uncle's estate, including the ashes falling on the driveway, and the smoke beyond the hedges and the bullet holes in the bus that had taken them to meet the train.

“So are we going to meet your parents when we get there?” Artur asked him.

Gene, Irene, and red-headed Artur—his three associates from the starship where he and Great-grandmother had lived for two years . . . well . . . his three associates whose home was now on the space station.

His three associates who were full of questions and who did not have enough Ragi words even to ask him what was going on.

They were not used to the way atevi lived, or what it meant to be Tabini-aiji's son.

But they
did
understand politics and double-crosses. He knew that. Their own politics was trying to send all of them that had come back on the starship out to a new station over a dead planet, far away from the Earth, for a lot of really underhanded reasons, like people wanting political power and people not trusting one each other. That was one thing.

And his guests by no means wanted that to happen: they were scared to be shipped out to a lonely place where they could never come back again. So they had real reason to ignore anything bad about their visit and not mess things up.

And, he thought, they wanted to tie themselves to
him
as solidly as they could, not in a bad way, so far as he was concerned, even if it could be because they were afraid of being sent away to that other world. If they wanted favors, if they wanted
things,
that was all right. Giving them whatever they needed hardly hurt him. From his side—they were
associates.
His
associates. He was who he was because he had important associates, and maybe three young people from the space station were not as important as, say, nand' Bren or Lord Geigi, but he wanted as many good connections as he could get, and they made him feel—good—when he could give them things.

That was the way things were supposed to work, was it not? Humans called associates
friends,
which was the opposite of enemy, sort of, but in a disconnected sort of way, and he was not supposed to ask about that or use that word. Even nand' Bren said it would confuse him and it could hurt him. And that it was a little early for
trust,
but that if it got to trust, it had to be true both ways.

He just knew he had to protect them and keep them happy. And since they were going back to the Bujavid, that began to mean keeping his father happy, above everything else. His father—
and
his mother.

“Will we stay with Lord Tatiseigi in Shejidan?” Irene asked, across the little table, beside Artur. “Where shall we go?”

“I don't know,” he said. They were right to be worried.
He
was worried. His father could change directions very fast and his parents
might
want to talk to him, by himself, particularly to ask him what his great-grandmother was up to in all these things that had nothing to
do
with his guests—but as far as he knew, nobody had even told his parents yet that they were coming back early. “Probably we know soon. Definitely. Soon.” His mother was about to have a baby, his grandfather had just been assassinated for reasons nobody had quite figured out, and his father was not going to be in a good mood if his mother was out of sorts or if Great-grandmother had created a problem. And arresting the lord of the Kadagidi could be a problem. He was not sure he wanted his guests anywhere near his parents until that all settled down.

They might stay with nand' Bren, maybe.

Except nand' Bren might not have room. Nand' Bren's apartment was the smallest on the floor.

Great-grandmother's apartment was possible. It was huge.

Everything had to solve itself soon. Even if they had just run into a life-and-death emergency about assassins and the whole world was going to be upset—his birthday was a certain date they could not move, which meant
his birthday
was going to be in the middle of whatever was going on.

If he was really going to have his birthday at all. He hardly remembered his fifth, and his seventh had happened around when they had reached Reunion, and Great-grandmother had just had a nice dinner later with his favorite things, with no celebration, not even nand' Bren, and not even her attention, since she had spent the whole time planning something. And atevi did not celebrate the unlucky numbered birthdays at all. Humans did. They were reckless about numbers. But atevi never were.

So he really had no idea how his fortunate ninth birthday would turn out, except he was supposed to get good things, and he was supposed to have a good time. So far all the things about his birthday, like his present from Great-uncle, and having his three associates down from the station, and everybody being as nice to each other as could be—that had been enough to make him look forward to the real day . . . when he might, he understood, get new privileges. Being back in the Bujavid was going to be convenient, being where he could order things to
give
his guests—but not if Great-grandmother and his father and his mother were going to be fighting so they forgot all about his birthday.

But he could not go up to the adults and talk about his problems when people were hurt and when the adults were all talking about the Shadow Guild and the Kadagidi and serious troubles. No. He was supposed to be back here with his guests, pretending everything was normal.

It felt
just
like last year, when he had had his eighth birthday. His associates had told him he should get presents. He understood now it was polite to
give
them on his birthday, at least to special people; and that the really good thing on his birthday should be how people treated him, and what he was allowed to do. He liked that idea. It would be really good if what he got was permission to go about with just his guard . . . but he had not too much hope of that, with all that was going on.

Still, there might be something new he would be allowed to do. He hoped it was good.

His privilege-gift from Great-uncle was wonderful, and was an actual present, too—a mecheita descended from Great-grandmother's famous Babsidi. And the privilege part of it was Great-uncle and mani believing he was old enough now to handle her. He had gotten that gift in front of his guests. And it had been the best day of his whole life.