Town officials and local Transportation Guild were likely out of their own beds in the adjacent town and asking questions, none of them answerable, either. Lord Topari and his household would be in the dark—literally, since the loss of the transformer had taken out that part of the town—and Lord Topari tended to brim over with anxieties and doubts. There was no prospect of information for him tonight. Ilisidi’s bodyguard might opt to communicate with the local officials, or vice versa, but that only as a formality. No, they would have to say. We have no idea. No one aboard knows where it came from or what it intends. Yes, one sincerely hopes it will brake before it reaches the descent, but no one can currently swear to that. . . .
It was not the sort of observation the Assassins’ Guild ever liked to give to local officials. But that was the state of affairs.
As far as he knew.
Meanwhile his feet were no longer freezing; not, he feared, a good thing. He could hear the pinging of the small forced-air heater that served the car, now turned on, and trying to take the chill off, but it would take time.
Clearly information was not yet forthcoming, nor appearing to be likely any time soon. Bren sat down on the edge of his bed, and worked the blanket over his lap. In the slight light afforded by his staff’s activity at the far end of the car, he thought he spied his slippers. Once he could feel his feet again, he would fetch them. His clothes, court dress and fussy, were not the sort of clothing one could hang on a hook. They were in the closet, and trying to dress himself in the narrow aisle was probably not helpful to anyone.
He caught no sense of further alarm in his bodyguard, more a determination to get at information which no one seemed to have, not even, evidently, the dowager’s staff.
And the dowager did not like to be surprised. She liked even less to have significant events unfold which she did not control.
Which is how they came to be waking in the dark, in the Red Train, at the top of a mountain pass, surrounded by snow.
Not too many days before, comfortably sitting in her Eastern estate of Malguri, she had been mightily annoyed by the news of her grandson’s apparent settlement of northern issues in her absence, issues involving a candidate for a contested lordship—a candidate she had neither approved nor endorsed—and precarious events involving her precious great-grandson—whose endorsement the candidate had won.
Not that Ilisidi was emotionally fraught, oh, no. That was not the way Ilisidi expressed her deeper grievances. So what had Ilisidi done in that mood of displeasure? She had gone to Bren’s estate on the west coast, ostensibly to welcome the paidhi-aiji back from his mission to the human island of Mospheira.
Curiously, she had not been the only one waiting to surprise him, a coincidence he still suspected her of engineering. That night, as she sat in his estate, sipping his brandy in his sitting room, and while he was still getting his land legs back from the sea crossing—Lord Machigi had turned up, a putative ally of hers, the strongest lord on the western shore of the Marid, with neither an invitation nor a forewarning. They had shared brandy. She had listened, in apparent ignorance, to Machigi’s sudden desire for a railroad to link his capital to the rail system in the middle of Lord Bregani’s province, just to his north. Machigi had claimed that Bregani’s alliance with his eastern neighbor, Tiajo, was in trouble. That there was an opportunity. That time was of the essence.
Ilisidi had promised to think about it.
Think about it? Ilisidi had come to that meeting in Najida with a towering lot of completely unrelated things on her mind, and at the top of that tower was the midlands, where her old ally Tatiseigi sat with vacant lordships on his east and his west, both gone down in a bloody sorting-out that had rattled the aishidi’tat to its core. The lordship of Kadagidi would remain vacant; but a young man had lately shown up claiming to be the heir of Ajuri. And Tatiseigi had believed him. Backed him. And had not consulted Ilisidi. That was the crux of matters.
Central to that bloody sorting-out years back, the outlawed splinter of the Assassins’ Guild that was known as the Shadow Guild had found refuge in service to Lord Tiajo in the Dojisigin Marid—the same province that was now, according to Machigi, causing Bregani so much trouble.
Was it coincidence that Machigi arrived with an open invitation to Ilisidi to deal a major blow to that festering wound in the south, just when she had been summarily dealt out of the Northern solution? Possibly.
But that Ilisidi, whose endorsement of a candidate for the lordship of Ajuri had not even been requested—given an opening to deal a major blow to a target the Guild had long wanted to take down—would merely think about it . . .
No. In retrospect and considering how rapidly it had all come to pass, Bren would wager she had left his estate with the current mission fully planned and ready to implement.
Now . . . a train passed them in the middle of the night. A train not a part of that plan. And very likely coming from the capital, where the choice of agency was her grandson, the Assassins’ Guild, or both.
No, Ilisidi would not be pleased.
Keep her safe, had been the sum of Tabini-aiji’s instruction to him, when he had informed Bren of this trip into the mountain province of Hasjuran, to discuss Machigi’s rail link with Hasjuran’s minor lord, Topari. Keep her safe, Tabini had said, when she’d demanded Bren’s presence as well as that of Nomari, the disputed candidate for Ajuri, and ordered the Red Train to be made ready.
Keep her safe . . . said to him, since the aiji-dowager was not currently speaking to her grandson—the hot issue being Nomari’s pending appointment.
In point of fact, Tabini had not opposed the move she was making in the Marid, and he had not prevented her taking Nomari with her. Not even Tabini would ratify that lordship without Ilisidi’s acceptance, if not wholehearted endorsement of the candidate. Ilisidi was fully capable of making such a young lord’s life intolerable—and possibly short—and the aishidi’tat needed unity, not division, where it came to this appointment. A breach between Ilisidi and her old ally Lord Tatiseigi was likewise unthinkable. It needed to be resolved—particularly as Tabini’s wife, the aiji-consort, was herself Ajuri, and Lord Tatiseigi’s niece: Nomari was, among other things, family.
So Nomari was swept up without explanation, apparently with no relationship to the railroad issue—except that he had been, in his years of exile, a worker on the selfsame railroad. A switchman, without higher education, without courtly graces. And Ilisidi was going to consult Nomari on technicalities of railway construction? Hardly likely.
That Ilisidi would take the opportunity to grill the unfortunate candidate for Ajuri about his identity and his suitability for connection to the family all the way to Hasjuran and back—provided she let him return—was a foregone conclusion. And recalling his own encounter with Ilisidi’s investigative process years ago, Bren had thought his own moderating presence might be a good idea.
If a visit to snowy Hasjuran and a diplomatic contact were all that was at issue. The Red Train, awaiting them in the Bujavid station, had turned out to be, not the usual two cars, not even the four or five entailed in a transcontinental trip, but a long string consisting of five luxury sleeping cars, windowless, armored, for security; two baggage cars, the antique luxury of the Red Car itself, and three state of the art Guild mobile command cars, as well as one well-worn boxcar tagging oddly behind the Red Car.