“Shbit no Lgoth?”
“He will want to challenge.”
“He has. His agent is on the way.”
Duun smiled softly. “This will be a ghota, I suspect.”
“You know this person?”
“Likely we’ve met.”
“You’re managing Shbit, then. How well?”
“I could do better. My hours have been occupied. So this man is a danger. I would have removed him arbitrarily but I was crippled by too much power. I could have done too much. So I could do nothing.”
“I predicted this.”
“I predicted Shbit but I didn’t know what his name would be. There was too much money being made. And I was in Sheon wiping noses. Master, you know an answer, maybe: was there another way?”
Long silence. Tangan laced his hands and studied them and looked up. “I saw where you might put us. I thought back over all my years and all the years of the Guild and wondered where the crux was. I think it was when walls were raised. Everything led to this. You put us in a hard place; if we deny him protection we light the fire that will destroy us; if we take him we loose a firestorm. I don’t want to contemplate this choice. I’m being frank with you: I ask myself at night how I taught my student that you find yourself capable of this. A hatani ought to have a flaw. A hatani ought to doubt himself enough to have a little guilt of his own. You have none. You burn with too much light, Duun-hatani. You blind me. I can’t see whether you’re right or wrong. Perhaps it will stop mattering. Perhaps the dark comes next. I confess to trusting you in one thing; I confess to cowardice in this. I didn’t believe you’d come here, even when I knew you were training him. Free-hatani would have been my solution.”
Duun contemplated a long while. “Master, you say in one breath you predicted my powerlessness; in the next you say you couldn’t predict my coming here at the last.”
“To infect us with your powerlessness?”
Duun looked up. “Tangan-hatani, in many respects he’s a boy like other boys. Remember that.”
“Is that your wisdom?”
“Tangan-hatani, if I’m a fire I’m the safer for having had a hearth to burn in.”
“Do we make a lamp out of this one and set him on a shelf?”
“You might, but I’d hope it’s a damn steady one.”
“Keep him here?”
“Set him where you choose. The guild itself is a principal in this solution. So am I. I let you judge.”
“We have another choice.”
“The guild won’t abdicate this.”
“Do you predict what the Guild will do?”
“Is that anger, master Tangan?”
“Of course not. It’s overweening pride. My student has set us all in a trap. Angmen must have felt pride like that when Chena pulled the guild gates down.”
Duun folded his hands in his lap. “You’ll handle it.”
“Do the scars ache, Duun-hatani? You were such an agile student.”
(Strike and draw.) “I have my ways of compensating, Tangan-hatani. You taught me patience, after all.”
Thorn searched the room they gave him: it was a comfortable one, all bare wood and aged stone. A fire of real wood burned in the hearth: he had not had that comfort since Sheon, and it might have lured him at once to warm himself there. They gave him water with the assurance it was safe; they gave his meat and cheese with a confection of preserved beanberries. They gave him a bed of furs, and the sand on the floor was white and fine and deep, newly baked and arranged in meticulous spirals. In the next room a hot bath was waiting, milky with aromatics and soothing oils. They smiled at him, hatani smiles, neither false nor true.
And he searched the place, hunting pebbles. There were none. He was thirsty after the long flight and the running. His limbs were chafed and sweaty from the flight suit. He had set their baggage on the wooden riser that was also the bureau. “Is that gray cloak yours?” a hatani had asked, watching while he unfolded these things. “No,” Thorn had said with a clear-eyed stare, knowing that they knew whose it was. “It must be Duun’s,” that hatani said. “It is,” Thorn said back. “Give me his belongings,” the hatani said then; “I’ll put them in his room.”