Tabini said, right off, “Do you know who it was, Bren? Do you have any idea?”
“None, aiji-ma, nothing. I shot at him. I missed. Banichi said I should say he fired the shot.”
A look went past him, to Banichi. Tabini’s yellow eyes were very pale, ghostly in certain lights—frightening, when he was angry. But he didn’t seem to be angry, or assigning blame to either of them.
Banichi said, “It removed questions.”
“No idea the nature of the intrusion.”
“A burglar would be a fool. Assignations…”
“No,” Bren said, uncomfortable in the suggestion, but Tabini knew him, knew that atevi women had a certain curiosity about him, and it was a joke at his expense.
“Not a feminine admirer.”
“No, aiji-ma.” He certainly hoped not, recalling the blood Jago had found in the first of the rain, out on the terrace.
Tabini-aiji reached out and touched his arm, apology for the levity. “No one has filed. It’s a serious matter. I take it seriously. Be careful with your locks.”
“The garden door is only glass,” Banichi said. “Alterations would be conspicuous.”
“A wire isn’t,” Tabini said,
Bren was dismayed. The aiji’s doors and windows might have such lethal protections. He had extreme reservations about the matter.
“I’ll see to it,” Banichi said.
“I might walk into it,” Bren said.
“You won’t,” Tabini said. And to Banichi: “See to it. This morning. One on either door. His key to disarm. Change the locks.”
“Aiji,” Bren began to say.
“I have a long list today,” Tabini said, meaning shut up and sit down, and when Tabini-aiji took that tone about a matter, there was no quarrel with it. They left the top of the dais. Bren stopped at the fourth step, which was his ordinary post.
“You stay here,” Banichi said. “I’ll bring you the new key.”
“Banichi, is anybody after me?”
“It would seem so, wouldn’t it? I do doubt it was a lover.”
“Do you know anything I don’t?”
“Many things. Which interests you?”
“My life.”
“Watch the wire. The garden side will activate with a key, too. I’m moving your bed from in front of the door.”
“It’s summer. It’s hot.”
“We all have our inconveniences.”
“I wish someone would tell me what’s going on!”
“You shouldn’t turn down the ladies. Some take it badly.”
“You’re not serious.”
No, Banichi wasn’t. Banichi was evading the question again. Banichi damned well knew something. He stood in frustration as Banichi went cheerfully to turn his room into a death-trap, mats in front of doors, lethal wires to complete the circuit if a foolish, sleepy human forgot and hurried to shut his own garden door in a sudden rainstorm.
He had been scared of the events last night. Now he was mad, furiously angry at the disruption of his life, his quarters, his freedom to come and go in the city—he foresaw guards, restrictions, threats… without a damned reason, except some lunatic who possibly, for whatever reason, didn’t like humans. That was the only conclusion he could come to.
He sat down on the step where the paidhi-aiji was entitled to sit, and listened through the last pre-audience audience with the notion that he might hear something to give him a clue, at least, whether there was some wider, more political reason to worry, but the way Banichi seemed to be holding information from him, and Tabini’s silence, when Tabini himself probably knew something he wasn’t saying, all began to add up to him to an atevi with a grudge.
No licensed assassin was going to file on a human who was an essential, treatied presence in the aiji’s household—a presence without the right to carry arms, but all the same, a court official and a personal intimate of the aiji of the Western Association. No professional in his right mind would take that on.
Which left some random fool attacking him as a symbol, perhaps, or someone mad at technology or at some equally remote grievance, who could know? Who could track such a thing?
The only comforting thought was that, if it wasn’t a licensed assassin, it was the lunatic himself or an amateur who couldn’t get a license—the sort that might mow down bystanders by mistake, true, dangerous in that regard.