Then Machigi himself had shown up at the train station. In Shejidan—which he had never visited. And boarded one of those extra cars.
Keep her safe . . .
Easier said. Far easier said.
They were here in Hasjuran to talk, Ilisidi indicated . . . before she sent the Red Train down to Koperna in Senjin, and invited Bregani to come up, at night, in secret, to join those talks.
Invited.
Bren shifted his feet, tucking the blanket against an insidious draft, and wondered what Bregani and his family were thinking at the moment, five cars away, far less informed than he was about that speeding train.
Bregani had found himself in a vise, no matter whether he boarded that train as the dowager asked, or refused the conference and stayed in Koperna—because either way his neighbor Tiajo would hear that the dowager was communicating with him. Either way, all hell would break loose. And being on the icy heights of Hasjuran when that news broke was the survivable choice.
So Bregani was trapped, snared, netted, and ruined, so far as his alliance with Tiajo was concerned, leaving Bregani only the dubious safety of the dowager’s whim. Bregani had chosen to board the Red Train, but such was his fear of Tiajo’s agents, he had left home with precautions. He had set a cousin in charge of his capital, and brought his wife and teenaged daughter with him, intending to put them under the dowager’s protection, no matter what happened to him, that being a far safer future for them than remaining in reach of Tiajo’s fits of temper.
Bregani certainly had not expected to face his old enemy Machigi in a meeting the night before last—or for Ilisidi and Machigi to propose not his ruin, but alliance, Guild protection, and association with the two of them in a rail link, with the promise of increased trade.
All Bregani had had to do was sign the agreement, officially break relations with Tiajo, in essence—and stay alive—in the interests of which, Ilisidi serenely informed him that the routine freight train currently undergoing service down in his capital was actually hers, a Guild operation, and that if he signed the agreement and asked for Guild protection, those cars would open and a Guild force would immediately deploy to defend his people from whatever elements Tiajo might send in reaction.
Bregani had signed. What choice had he? With the offer of a pen and an inkwell, Ilisidi had taken a province.
Now here they sat—Lord Bregani, his wife and daughter; Lord Machigi of the Taisigin; the aiji-dowager, lord of distant Malguri; himself, Bren Cameron, paidhi-aiji, the chief negotiator for Tabini-aiji or his grandmother over the last number of years . . .
And felicitous seventh, a young man who had not expected to be invited to an interview with the aiji-dowager, let alone take part in this historic meeting of lords. Nomari, a railway worker, favored candidate to take on the lordship of Ajuri, the aiji-consort’s clan, and become a neighbor to Tatiseigi and a cousin to Tabini-aiji’s wife.
That, it turned out, was not all he was. Nomari had worked not only for the railroad, but for Lord Machigi during a brief overthrow of Tabini-aiji’s government, spying on the activity in Lord Bregani’s railyard. Machigi, it turned out, knew him. By one source or another—hers were many—Ilisidi knew Machigi knew him, and characteristic of her dealings, had thrown these two together on this lengthy train trip and just watched the outcome.
Bren had tried to contact a source he knew, a former Shadow Guild operative, Homura, a man who, for a life-debt, had turned so far against the Shadow Guild as to swear man’chi to a human. The man had finally made contact with the train here, at Hasjuran, this tiny town on the inconvenient roof of the world. Tano and Algini had gone outside to meet with Homura, by no means trusting him. Homura had warned them specifically about Bregani’s bodyguard, told them his own partner Momichi was down in Koperna, warned them of changes in Shadow Guild tactics, then appeared suddenly ill at ease, and broke off the meeting.
Before Tano and Algini had quite gotten back onto the train, the station transformer had blown up, taking out power to the station, and to the great house of Hasjuran, and a section of homes and businesses in the town, while doing superficial damage to the train itself. Tano and Algini had caught the edge of the blast—Tano still suffered from it—and Homura had not been seen or heard from since.
Had Tiajo gotten Shadow Guild operatives up here that fast? Or had she gotten a message through to agents already ensconced in Hasjuran? If it was a Shadow Guild action, why had there been no further move? Had Homura then taken out their problem?
Or was he the problem?
Bregani’s wife’s bodyguard was indeed compromised. That much had proven true. One man of that unit had turned, not because he was Shadow Guild—but because the Shadow Guild had kidnapped the man’s family, exactly the situation and the tactic Homura had warned them about. Tiajo’s agents cared nothing about civilized standards, or honor. The threat used to control Homura’s unit, two partners held hostage to assure their performance, had now turned on others, and intended to have a man betray his own unit and kill the people he was sworn to protect.
The man had hesitated, and against high-level Guild, he had failed. So that had not happened. But the transformer had blown, they had lost track of a known, if former, Shadow Guild agent, and before all was done, Bregani had had to deal with an unthinkable breach of trust, poor man, all attending his signing an agreement with Ilisidi and Machigi. His guard was under detention, replaced with a four-man unit of Ilisidi’s choosing. He’d gone to bed in a train now running on internal power, and knew that, though he had authorized the Guild to deploy in Senjin, fighting had broken out down in Senjin and the port city. They had that information through Guild communications, routed God knew how, but likely the message had sped around the lowlands and up to the capital before it got to them.
That was yesterday evening.
And well before the night was done, Bregani, with the rest of them, had waked to that thundering presence in the dark, uninformed as to what had happened, or what might happen, or what worse threat was headed down toward his province.
Bren felt his own heart still recovering, and the memory of that passage still in his bones. He was sorely in want of a cup of strong tea. He had no idea what time it was. But it was unlikely anyone anywhere on the train had slept through that howling passage, and if there was action contemplated, there was no going back to bed. He should, he thought, at least send a reassuring message to Bregani and Nomari.
He wiggled his toes and finding them functional, stood up, walked the few paces to where Jago stood, in a lull in the flurry of communications.
“There is still no word,” Jago said, to his implied question. “It is still snowing, with a high wind. One can scarcely see, and the sentries have been on extreme alert. There was no warning of this train at all in the system. We have that from the Transportation Guild.”
That in itself was disturbing. The Transportation Guild ran the rail line. The Transportation Guild employed the engineers and mechanics and the people who kept the signals and the switches all over the system. Communications to and from Hasjuran were seasonally chancy, partly because of isolation, partly because of the surrounding peaks and weather. The Assassins’ Guild, in force on this train, he understood had communication with their own headquarters back in Shejidan, and they had not expected this train. The Assassins’ Guild as well as Transportation monitored the rails wherever the Red Train went, and that they might have been caught by surprise was almost unprecedented.