1
A deep-voiced wail came from up the track: the warning howl of a train’s imminent arrival.
Bren waked in utter dark, aware of a violent tremor in the rails—aware that Jago, who had slept next to him, was not in the bed.
A train coming straight for Hasjuran station and their own—stationary—train. Another wail. The train was coming fast and showing no sign of slowing down.
Something was insanely wrong. Will it hit us? was the immediate thought, but no, surely not. Their train was sitting on a siding, safe—one hoped—with the switch-lever locked and chained in place. Bren rolled out and onto his feet on ice-cold decking, fumbling in the dark for his nightrobe. His slippers eluded a brief, heart-pounding search. He saw a tiny red flash in the darkness of the windowless sleeping car: Jago’s bracelet flashing an urgent signal. She was by the door, and dimmer flashes, partially obscured and reflected, resolved as other staff gathered mid-car, seeking and exchanging what information they could get through the coded Guild system.
The train was on them. The rumbling of the track and the scream of its warning drowned everything. Air-shock rocked them as it passed, roaring by at full throttle on the neighboring track. Its warning dopplered off and died in its passage into the night.
The usual warning signals for track conditions were all dead, taken out with the station transformer. A replacement was on its way, but had some train failed to realize that lack—and was it possibly hellbent past the town with absolutely no awareness that it was headed for the steepest grade on the planet?
Impossible. Every train with any reason to be on this remote route had to know that there was only one station and one town, Hasjuran, and that beyond it lay a nasty set of switchbacks. Impossible that the engineer wouldn’t know . . . unless . . . unless that train had no legitimate reason to be here.
That racket would have waked the whole town to alarm, but even if some train had been hijacked and was headed full tilt for that descent in an act of sabotage—there was absolutely nothing anyone could do about it from here but advise the authorities in the distant capital and report a train wreck imminent on the Hasjuran grade.
Bren shivered, standing barefoot on the numbing cold of the decking, with the shock of that passage still reverberating in the air. He waited. If there was news from the rail system—or anyone else—his bodyguard, with him in the dark, would get it and pass it to him.
In the meanwhile, they had electrical power aboard the train, as the station and much of the town did not. That neither his bodyguard nor his staff had turned on the lights said either that they were too busy right now to bother with it or that they were purposely keeping things dark inside the compartment and the passage corridor outside—not because of the windows, because there were none to speak of in this whole train—but because they might have trouble aboard.
Which begged the question—could any outsider have forced a door and gotten aboard in the confusion and the racket? Doors on the Guild cars were all secure far beyond ordinary and currently set to open only from the inside. But they had one man aboard this train under firm arrest, with three partners they were not sure of.
They had no assurance, either, that those were the only problems they had, even granted that all the other personnel on the train were Assassins’ Guild, units either absolutely and lifelong attached to specific persons, or teams certified reliable by the central Guild in Shejidan. They had posted sentries outside the train tonight despite the cold. Security around the stationary train was beyond tight, but their sentries might be vulnerable, and there was a whole town out there, with mountain trails leading in and out to the villages of the district, a complexity they could not secure.
This tiny province, Halrun, the town of Hasjuran, was the highest point and the southernmost that could be counted on as loyal to the aishidi’tat, the Western Association, which in fact had grown to span the continent. The hostile territory of the Dojisigin, the northeastern province of the Marid, lay at the foot of the pass, where that other train was headed at such ungodly speed. So did the northwestern Marid, Senjin district, with which they had just yesterday arranged an alliance.
“No information as yet,” Jago said. The aiji-dowager, Ilisidi, with her high-level bodyguard, was rearward of their car, and Ilisidi’s several units of bodyguards occupied the car between them. Bren’s bodyguard and the dowager’s young men, as she called them, were constantly in close contact, and communicated with others further up the train, units on loan from Assassins’ Guild Headquarters in the capital.
If they collectively had no idea what was going on, Ilisidi’s Guild-senior Cenedi would be asking coded questions of that distant headquarters, and if they had no idea, Cenedi would very possibly be rousing Tabini-aiji himself out of bed with news of a burgeoning situation involving the Marid, the Shadow Guild, an attempted assassination, sabotage, and possibly a destabilization of the whole district.
With the aiji-dowager, Tabini-aiji’s grandmother, sitting on a train in the middle of it all.
Keep her safe. Tabini’s final order to him, hours before he boarded the train.
Safe. God.
Whatever had passed them—quiet returned. The other train was gone, whether to slow down for the grade—or not.
One dim light now came on at the end of the compartment, two dark figures, Narani and Jeladi, domestic staff beginning to dress for duty, as Jago also began to do in haste, snatching clothes from wall hooks near the bed: Guild uniform, in her case—trousers, black tee, boots, holstered pistol and a heavy leather jacket. Her hair was still loose. So was Bren’s. And his two staffers being also plainclothes Guild and taking their immediate orders from his four-person bodyguard, Bren decided that their minds were best occupied with security this morning, not his wardrobe or his comfort. He hugged his nightrobe about him, endured bare feet on the icy floor, and kept out of Jago’s way as she moved further back to confer with Banichi, Guild-senior in this unit, and with Tano and Algini, the unit’s second team. There was no information yet, and one just had to wait and let one’s protectors all do what they needed to do.
He was, in fact, the sole human on the whole mega-continent, an official protected by his staff and his guard, who were atevi—native to the world, as humans were not. Atevi were head and shoulders taller than he was, dark-skinned, golden-eyed, seeing far better in the dark, and far less bothered by the cold. He was blond, pale-skinned, and at the moment, his feet were going quite numb. But it was not a moment or a situation in which the whereabouts of his slippers seemed a pertinent question.
His bodyguard, his aishid, ranked higher than any but Ilisidi’s own on this train, so the discussion going on in low tones and coded flashes of light was not only information-seeking, he suspected, but decision-making, the issuance of orders in consultation with Cenedi’s team. Sentries, wherever they were posted in this bitter cold night, were likely the only ones in position to have had a wide view of what had passed them—likely no more than a black shape and a headlamp arriving out of the dark and then disappearing into the night. With the station lights out, there might not have been a chance to read a number. If it had communicated with anyone in its passage, the Guild units aboard should have gotten a message by now. The conclusion was, it had not hailed them or passed a message, and up and down their own chain of command, they had no idea what its business was.