It was a beautiful lake. It was a glorious view, when it wasn’t gray.
He could be inspired, if his breakfast wasn’t lying like lead on his stomach.
Hell if he wanted to go on being patient. The paidhi’s job might demand it. The paidhi’s job might be to sit still and figure out how to keep the peace, and maybe he hadn’t done that very well by discharging firearms in the aiji’s household. But…
He hadn’t looked for the gun. He hadn’t even thought about it. Tano and Algini and Jago had done the actual packing and unpacking of his belongings.
He blazed a straight course back to the bedroom, got down on his knees and felt under the mattress.
His fingers met hard metal. Two pieces of hard metal, one a gun and one a clip of shells.
He pulled them out, sitting on the floor as he was, in his dressing robe, with the gun in his hands and a sudden dread of someone walking in on him. He shoved the gun and the clip back where they belonged, and sat there asking himself—what in hell is this about?
Nothing but that the paidhi’s in cold storage. And armed. And guarded. And his guards won’t tell him a cursed thing.
Well, damn, he thought.
And gathered himself up off the floor in a sudden fit of resolution, intending to push it as far as he had latitude and find out where the boundaries (however nebulous) might be. He went to the armoire and pulled out a good pair of pants; a sweater, obstinately human and impossible for atevi to judge for status statements; and his good brown hunting boots, that being the style of this country house.
His favorite casual coat, the leather one.
Then he walked out the impressive front doors of his suite and down the hall, an easy, idle stroll, down the stairs to the stone-floored main floor, making no attempt whatsoever at stealth, and along the hall to the grand central room, where a fire burned wastefully in the hearth, where the lights were all candles, and the massive front doors were shut.
He walked about, idly examined the bric-a-brac, and objects on tables that might be functional and might be purely decorative—he didn’t know. He didn’t know what to call a good many of the objects on the walls, particularly the lethal ones. He didn’t recognize the odder heads and hides—he determined to find out the species and the status of those species, and add them to the data files for Mospheira, with illustrations, if he could get a book… or a copy machine…
… or plug in the computer.
His frustration hit new levels, at the latter thoughts. He thought about trying the front doors to see if they were locked, taking a walk out in the front courtyard, if they weren’t—maybe having a close up look at the cannon, and maybe at the gates and the road.
Then he decided that that was probably pushing Banichi’s good humor much too far; possibly, too, and more to the point, risking Banichi’s carefully laid security arrangements… which might catch him instead of an assassin.
So he opted to take a stroll back into the rest of the building instead, down an ornate corridor, and into plain ones, past doors he didn’t venture to open. If assassins might venture in here looking for him, especially in the dark, he wanted a mental map of the halls and the rooms and the stairways that might become escape routes.
He located the kitchens. And the storerooms.
And a hall at a right angle, which offered slit windows and a view out toward the mountains. He took that turn, having discovered, he supposed, the outside wall, and he walked the long corridor to the end, where he found a choice: one hallway tending off to the left and another to the right.
The left must be another wing of the building, he decided, and, seeing double doors down that direction, and those doors shut, he had a sudden chilling thought of personal residence areas, wires, and security systems.
He reasoned then that the more prudent direction for him to take, if he had come to private apartments of some sort, where security arrangements might be far more modern than the lighting, was back toward the front of the building, boxing the square toward the front hall and the foyer.