The hell they’d let him. Trust was a word you couldn’t translate. But atevi had fourteen words for betrayal.
He expected the guards would come back, maybe shoot him, maybe take him somewhere else, to the less reasonable people the man had talked about. If you had a potential informer, you didn’t turn him over to rival factions. No. It was all Cenedi. It was all the dowager. All the same game, no matter the strategy. It just got rougher. Cenedi had warned him that people didn’t hold out.
He heard someone go out of the room down the hall, heard the doors shut, and in the long, long silence asked himself how bad it could get—and had ugly, ugly answers out of the machimi. He didn’t like to think about that. Breathing hurt, now, but he couldn’t feel his legs.
A long while later the outer room door opened. Again the footsteps, descending the stone steps—he listened to them, drawing quick, shallow breaths that didn’t give him enough oxygen, watched the shadows come down the darker corridor, and tried to keep his wits about him—find a point of negotiation, he said to himself. Engage the bastards, just to get them talking—stall for time in which Hanks or Tabini or somebody could do something.
The guards walked in.—Cenedi’s, he was damned sure, now.
“Tell Cenedi I’ve decided,” he said, as matter of factly as if it was his office and they’d shown up to collect the message. “Maybe we can find an agreement. I need to talk to him. I’d rather talk to him.”
“That’s not our business,” one said—and he recognized the attitude, the official hand-washing, the atevi official who’d taken a position, broken off negotiations, and told his subordinates to stonewall attempts, officially. Cenedi might have given orders not to hear about the methods.
He didn’t take Cenedi for that sort. He thought Cenedi would insist to know what his subordinates did.
“There’s an intermediate position,” he said. “Tell him there’s a way to solve this.” Anything to get Cenedi to send for him.
But the guards had other orders. They started untying his arms. Going to take him somewhere else, then. Inside Malguri, please God.
Four of them to handle him. Ludicrous. But his legs weren’t working well. One foot was asleep. His hands wouldn’t work. He tried to get up before they found a way of their own, and two of them dragged him up and locked arms behind him to hold him on his feet, although one of them could have carried him. “Sorry,” he said, with the foot collapsing at every other step as they took him out the door, and he felt the fool for opening his mouth—he was so damned used to courtesies, and they seemed so damned useless now. “Just tell Cenedi,” he said as they were going down the corridor. “Where are we going?”
“Nand’ paidhi, just walk. We’re ordered not to answer you.”
Which meant they wouldn’t. They owed him nothing. That they gave him back courtesy was comforting, at least indicating that they didn’t personally hold a grudge, but it didn’t mean a thing beyond that. Man’chi was everything—wherever theirs was, you couldn’t argue that.
At least they took him up the steps, into the hall. He held out a hope they might pass Cenedi’s office, and they did—but that door was shut, and no light showed under it. Damn, he thought, one more hope gone to nothing—it shook him, ever so small a shaking of his remaining understanding, but the thoughts kept wanting to scatter to what was happening, what might happen, whose these men were—and that wasn’t important, because he couldn’t do anything about it. He could sort through the questions they’d asked, and try to figure what they would ask—that… that was the only thing that would do any good; and he couldn’t trust that the persistent question about the gun was even the important one—it might be what they wanted him to focus on while they chipped away at what he did know… while they figured out where the limits of his knowledge were and how useful he was likely to be to them.
There wasn’t any damned launch facility—that was the scariest question, and they were wrong about that, they had to be wrong about that: he couldn’t make it true by any stretch of the imagination. But the stockpiling—they had the trade figures. He couldn’t lie about that. Atevi had finally gotten the lesson humans had taught, knew they were accumulating materials useful in certain kinds of development, and he could tell them far too much, if they asked the right questions and used the right drugs. Cenedi had said the same thing his own administrators had said: he wasn’t going to be any hero, unless he could think of a better lie than he’d thought of, impromptu, already… and build on what he’d said.