Read Online Foreigner: (10th Anniversary Edition) by C. J. Cherryh - Free Book Online Page B

is
my
gun,” Banichi said forcefully. “Can there be any question this is my gun? A noise waked you. I lay in wait for the assassin.
I
fired. What did you see?”
    “A shadow. A shadow coming in through the curtains.” Another shiver took him. He knew how foolish he had been, firing straight across and through the doors. The bullet might have kept going across the garden, into the kitchens. It could have ricocheted off a wall and hit someone asleep in another apartment. The shock persisted in his hands and in his ears, strong as the smell of gunpowder in the air, that didn’t belong with him, in his room. …
    The rain started with a vengeance. Banichi used his pocket-com to talk to the searchers, and to headquarters, lying to them, saying he’d fired the shot, seeing the intruder headed for the paidhi’s room, and, no, the paidhi hadn’t been hurt, only frightened, and the aiji shouldn’t be wakened, if he hadn’t heard the shots. But the guard should be doubled, and the search taken to the south gates, before, Banichi said, the rain wiped out the tracks.
    Banichi signed off.
    “Why did they come
here?
” Bren asked. Assassins, he understood; but that any ordinary assassin should come into the residential compound, where there were guards throughout, where the aiji slept surrounded by hundredsof willing defenders—nobody in their right mind would do that.
    And to assassinate
him
, Bren Cameron, with the aiji at the height of all power and with the nai’aijiin all confirmed in their houses and supportive—where was the sense in it? Where was the gain to anyone at all sane?
    “Nadi Bren.” Banichi stood over him with his huge arms folded, looking down at him as if he were dealing with some feckless child.
“What
did you see?”
    “I told you. Just a shadow, coming through the curtain.” The emphasis of the question scared him. He might have been dreaming. He might have roused the whole household and alarmed the guards all for a nightmare. In the way of things at the edge of sleep, he no longer knew for sure what he had seen.
    But there had been blood. Jago said so. He
had
shot someone.
    “
I
discharged the gun,” Banichi said. “Get up and wash your hands, nadi. Wash them twice and three times. And keep the garden doors locked.”
    “They’re only glass,” he protested. He had felt safe until now. The aiji had given him the gun two weeks ago. The aiji had taught him to use it, the aiji’s doing alone, in the country-house at Taiben, and no one could have known about it, not even Banichi, least of all, surely, the assassin—if he had not dreamed the intrusion through the curtains, if he had not just shot some innocent neighbor, out for air on a stifling night.
    “Nadi,” Banichi said, “go wash your hands.”
    He couldn’t move, couldn’t deal with mundane things, or comprehend what had happened—or why, for the gods’ sake,
why
the aiji had given him such an unprecedented and disturbing present, except a general foreboding, and the guards taking stricter account of passes and rules …
    Except Tabini-aiji had said—’Keep it close.’ And he had been afraid of his servants finding it in his room.
    “Nadi.”
    Banichi was angry with him. He got up, naked andshaky as he was, and went across the carpet to the bath, with a queasier and queasier stomach.
    The last steps were a desperate, calculated rush for the toilet, scarcely in time to lose everything in his stomach, humiliating himself, but there was nothing he could do—it was three painful spasms before he could get a breath and flush the toilet.
    He was ashamed, disgusted with himself. He ran water in the sink and washed and scrubbed and washed, until he no longer smelled the gunpowder on his hands, only the pungency of the soap and astringents. He thought Banichi must have left, or maybe called the night-servants to clean the bath.
    But as he straightened and reached for the towel, he found Banichi’s reflection in the mirror.
    “Nadi