C. Cherryh - Cuckoo's Egg

Tangan had caught a certain rebel and oft-warned novice in that game, among others. And Duun had rued it. Four ten-days of cleaning the sand by hand. It shocked him, how much this man had aged.

"I've gotten used to his looks," Duun said.

"Have you?"

Duun met Tangan's guarded stare. "I've had near twenty years."

"Twenty years of power beyond any precedent."

"Sixteen hiding on a mountain, in a woods. Five performing unmentionable tasks which teach any man humility. So does dealing with Dsonan."

"Ah. How is the capital?"

"Carrying news to you is like bringing water to the well."

"How is the capital?"

"There are more ways to cheat on an agreement than they teach here, Tangan-hatani."

"Paradoxically prosperous times. Money. Is that what you see?"

"A lot of new money-paid out in the least educated provinces, to elect fools who'll take orders, who can only see ways to entrench themselves and make sure contracts go to the right companies. Some of these fools are evident, and shrewd country-folk keep voting them in because the powers in their districts might buy one ten times worse and far more subtle. I tell you we should send one of the novices walking in Elsnuunan and Yoth. Some herder might be passionate enough on some given day to pose us a question. But some of these fools have passed for astute councillors, and protect themselves so well they make and break young politicians on their own."

"Shbit no Lgoth?"

"He will want to challenge."

"He has. His agent is on the way."

Duun smiled softly. "This will be a ghota, I suspect."

"You know this person?"

"Likely we've met."

"You're managing Shbit, then. How well?"

"I could do better. My hours have been occupied. So this man is a danger. I would have removed him arbitrarily but I was crippled by too much power. I could have done too much. So I could do nothing."

"I predicted this."

"I predicted Shbit but I didn't know what his name would be. There was too much money being made. And I was in Sheon wiping noses. Master, you know an answer, maybe: was there another way?"

Long silence. Tangan laced his hands and studied them and looked up. "I saw where you might put us. I thought back over all my years and all the years of the Guild and wondered where the crux was. I think it was when walls were raised. Everything led to this. You put us in a hard place; if we deny him protection we light the fire that will destroy us; if we take him we loose a firestorm. I don't want to contemplate this choice. I'm being frank with you: I ask myself at night how I taught my student that you find yourself capable of this. A hatani ought to have a flaw. A hatani ought to doubt himself enough to have a little guilt of his own. You have none. You burn with too much light, Duun-hatani. You blind me. I can't see whether you're right or wrong. Perhaps it will stop mattering. Perhaps the dark comes next. I confess to trusting you in one thing; I confess to cowardice in this. I didn't believe you'd come here, even when I knew you were training him. Free-hatani would have been my solution."

Duun contemplated a long while. "Master, you say in one breath you predicted my powerlessness; in the next you say you couldn't predict my coming here at the last."

"To infect us with your powerlessness?"

Duun looked up. "Tangan-hatani, in many respects he's a boy like other boys. Remember that."

"Is that your wisdom?"

"Tangan-hatani, if I'm a fire I'm the safer for having had a hearth to burn in."

"Do we make a lamp out of this one and set him on a shelf?"

"You might, but I'd hope it's a damn steady one."

"Keep him here?"

"Set him where you choose. The guild itself is a principal in this solution. So am I. I let you judge."

"We have another choice."

"The guild won't abdicate this."

"Do you predict what the Guild will do?"

"Is that anger, master Tangan?"

"Of course not. It's overweening pride. My student has set us all in a trap. Angmen must have felt pride like that when Chena pulled the guild gates down."

Duun folded his hands in his lap. "You'll handle it."

"Do the scars ache, Duun-hatani? You were such an agile student."

(Strike and draw.) "I have my ways of compensating, Tangan-hatani. You taught me patience, after all."

Thorn searched the room they gave him: it was a comfortable one, all bare wood and aged stone. A fire of real wood burned in the hearth: he had not had that comfort since Sheon, and it might have lured him at once to warm himself there. They gave him water with the assurance it was safe; they gave his meat and cheese with a confection of preserved beanberries. They gave him a bed of furs, and the sand on the floor was white and fine and deep, newly baked and arranged in meticulous spirals. In the next room a hot bath was waiting, milky with aromatics and soothing oils. They smiled at him, hatani smiles, neither false nor true.

And he searched the place, hunting pebbles. There were none. He was thirsty after the long flight and the running. His limbs were chafed and sweaty from the flight suit. He had set their baggage on the wooden riser that was also the bureau. "Is that gray cloak yours?" a hatani had asked, watching while he unfolded these things. "No," Thorn had said with a clear-eyed stare, knowing that they knew whose it was. "It must be Duun's," that hatani said. "It is," Thorn said back. "Give me his belongings," the hatani said then; "I'll put them in his room."

Thorn had smiled then, as certainly as he could. "I'd be a fool to disobey him; forgive me, hatani: when he blames you, tell him it was my fault. In my inexperience I couldn't tell what to do, so I followed his orders."

Another hatani had come up beside him then and reached out his hand. "Please, visitor: let me at least put these things away for you."

"No," Thorn had said, turning the hand with a slow move of his own. "No, hatani. Forgive me."

That hatani drew back. "No one will trouble you till morning, visitor," the other said. They closed the door behind them.

(It can't be that easy. There's another trick.)

Thorn searched for it. He stripped off the suit, down to his small-kilt. He investigated the food, breaking up the cheese and tearing the meat apart. He drained the tub. He turned out the bed. He searched the closet and pulled out the bureau drawer to look at the space behind it. He racked his brain then. (Even the furniture could hide something.) So he probed the boards of the closet, he investigated the toilet and the bathtub riser, and the sink.

The faucet was dry. That was one thing amiss.

He felt into it and found nothing. (Damn. Something's wrong there. Maybe it's to prevent my drinking that and not the pitcher.) He tried to move even the tub and the bed and the big riser near it. He investigated the walls.

And finally, he knelt down in the corner near the door and began to move the deep sand.

He found the small panel in the stone beneath when he had shifted half the sand in the room. He was panting by then. He wiped at his face with a dry and dusty arm. (No.) He remembered Sagot's fish and the bird. Duun laying his pebble on the table beside the teapot. (Trust nothing.)

He got his dress kilt and pried up the panel with his thumbnail through the cloth. He laid it back. There was a pebble in a small recess. He went to the bureau, got his razor from his kit and a square of tissue. And with that he raked the pebble out and wrapped it in tissue, replaced the lid and contemplated the long wave of sand which wanted redistributing.

("Be polite.") Perhaps it extended to leaving the room in order.

And then another thought came creeping into his mind. ("Snap. No bird. See what assumptions do?")

(Fish and bird. Pebble and pot.)