The hall at the end of the open colonnade smelled of recent rain and flowers, and rang with voices—atevi meeting one another, or falling into line to register with the secretaries, on whose desks, set up in the vast lower foyer, the stacks of documents and petitions were growing.
For the courtiers, a human on his way to court business through this milling chaos was an ordinary sight—a pale, smallish figure head and shoulders shorter than the crowds through which he passed, a presence conservative in his simple, unribboned braid and leather trim—the police escort was uncommon, but no one stared, except the country folk and private petitioners.
“Look!” a child cried, and pointed at him.
A mortified parent batted the offending hand down while the echoes rang, high and clear, in the vaulted ceilings. Atevi looked. And pretended not to have seen either him or his guard.
A lord of the provinces went through the halls attended by his own aides and by his own guards and the aiji’s as well, and provoked no rude stares. Bren went with his police escort, in the same pretense of invisibility, a little anxious, since the child’s shout, but confident in the visible presence of the aiji’s guards at every doorway and every turn, ordinary precaution on audience day.
In that near presence, he bade a courteous farewell to his police escort at the small Whispering Port, which, a small section of one of the great ceremonial doors, led discreetly and without official recognition into the back of the audience hall. He slipped through it and softly closed it again, so as not to disturb the advance meetings in progress.
Late, he feared. Moni and Taigi hadn’t advanced the hour of his wake-up at all, simply shown up at their usual time, lacking other orders and perhaps fearing to do anything unusual, with a police guard standing at his door. He hoped Tabini hadn’t wanted otherwise, and started over to the reception desk to see where he fitted in the hearings.
Banichi was there. Banichi, in the metal-studded black of the aiji’s personal guard, intercepted him with a touch on his arm.
“Nadi Bren. Did you sleep last night?”
“No,” he confessed. And hoping: “Did you catch him?”
“No, nadi. There was the storm. We were not so fortunate.”
“Does Tabini know what happened?” He cast a glance toward the dais, where Tabini-aiji was talking to governor Brominandi, one of the invitational private hearings. “I think I’m on the agenda. Does he want to talk with me? What shall I tell him?”
“The truth, only in private. It was his gun—was it not?”
He threw Banichi a worried look. If Banichi doubted his story, he hadn’t left him with that impression last night. “I told you the truth, Banichi.”
“I’m sure you did,” Banichi said, and when he would have gone on to the reception desk, as he had purposed, to give his name to the secretary, Banichi caught his sleeve and held him back. “Nothing official.” Banichi nodded toward the dais, still holding his sleeve, and brought him to the foot of the dais instead.
Brominandi of Entaillan province was finishing his business. Brominandi, whose black hair was shot through with white, whose hands sparkled with rings both ornamental and official, would lull a stone to boredom, and the bystanding guards had as yet found no gracious way to edge the governor off.
Tabini nodded to what Brominandi was saying, nodded a second time, and finally said, “I’ll take it before council.” It sounded dreadfully like the Alujis river rights business again, two upstream provinces against three downstream which relied on its water for irrigation. For fifty years, that pot had been boiling, with suit and counter-suit. Bren folded his hands in front of him and stood with Banichi, head ducked, making himself as inconspicuous as a human possibly could in the court.
Finally Tabini-aiji accepted the inevitable petition (or was it counter-petition?) from Brominandi, a weighty thing of many seals and ribbons, and passed it to his legislative aides.
At which time Bren slid a glance up to Tabini, and received one back, which was the summons to him and to Banichi, up the several steps to the side of the aiji’s chair, in the lull in which the favored early petitioners could mill about and gossip, a dull, echoing murmur in the vaulted, white and gilt hall.