It had immensely increased his status in the eyes of certain staff. Tabini had seemed pleased that he took to the lessons, and giving him the gun as a present had seemed a moment of extravagant rebellion. Tabini had insisted he ‘keep it close,’ while his mind racketed wildly between the absolute, unprecedented, and possibly policy changing warmth of Tabini’s gesture toward a human, and an immediate guilty panic considering his official position and his obligation to report to his own superiors.
He’d immediately worried what he was going to do with it on the plane home, and how or if he was going to dispose of it—or report it, when it might be a test Tabini posed him, to see if he had a personal dimension, or personal discretion, in the rules his superiors imposed on him.
And then, after he was safely on the plane home, the gun and the ammunition a terrifying secret in the personal bag at his feet, he had sat watching the landscape pass and adding up how tight security had gotten around Tabini in the last few weeks.
Then he’d gotten scared. Then he’d known he had gotten himself into something he didn’t know how to get out of—that he ought to report, and didn’t, because nobody on Mospheira could read the situation in Tabini’s court the way he could on a realtime basis. He knew that some danger might be in the offing, but his assessment of the situation might not have critical bits of data, and he didn’t want orders from his superiors until he could figure out what the undercurrents were in the capital.
That was why he had put the gun under the mattress, which his servants didn’t ordinarily disturb, rather than hiding it in the drawers, which they sometimes did rearrange.
That was why, when a shadow came through his bedroom door, he hadn’t wasted a second going after it and not a second more in firing. He’d lived in the Bu-javid long enough to know at a very basic level that atevi didn’t walk through people’s doors uninvited, not in a society where everyone was armed and assassination was legal. The assassin had surely been confident the paidhi wouldn’t have a weapon—and gotten the surprise of his life.
If it hadn’t been a trial designed to catch him with the gun. Which didn’t say why—
He was woolgathering. They were proposing a vote next meeting. He had lost the minister’s last remarks. If the paidhi let something slip unchallenged through the council, he could end up losing a point two hundred years of his predecessors had battled to hold on to. There were points past which even Tabini couldn’t undo a council recommendation—points past which Tabini wouldn’t undertake a fight that might not be in Tabini’s interest, once he’d set Tabini in a convenient position to deny his advice, Tabini being, understandably, on the atevi side of any questionable call.
“I’ll want a transcript,” he said, as the meeting broke up, and gathered a roomful of shocked stares.
Which probably alarmed everyone unnecessarily—they might take his glum mood for anger and the postponement and request for a transcript as a forewarning that the paidhi was disposed to veto.
And against what interest? He saw the frown gather on the minister’s face, wondering if the paidhi was taking a position they didn’t understand—and confusion wasn’t a good thing to generate in an ateva. Action bred action. He had enough troubles without scaring anyone needlessly.
The Minister of Works could even conclude he blamed someone in his office for an attack that was surely reported coast to coast of the continent by now, in which case the minister and his interests might think they should protect themselves, or secure themselves allies they believed he would fear.
Say, I wasn’t listening during the speech? Insult the gentle and long-winded Minister of Works directly in the sorest point of his vanity? Insult the entire council, as if their business bored him?
Damn, damn, a little disturbance in atevi affairs led to so much consequence. Moving at all was so cursed delicate. And they didn’t understand people who let every passing emotion show on their faces. He took his computer. He walked out into the hall, remembering to bow and be polite to the atevi he might have distressed.