Protector

And once, when Irene’s eyes grew wide and damp and she whispered How beautiful,in very careful Ragi, Great-uncle did a very strange thing and actually opened a case and took out a cup and let her hold it for a moment before putting it back behind glass.

They came to another door, and Great-uncle, his face very blank, ordered lamps brought and the lights turned off, and for a moment Cajeiri forgot all about nand’ Bren and the Kadagidi, as the great double door opened, and huge eyes glimmered in the flickering light. Claws reached. Fangs glistened. Irene gave a great squeal, and pressed up against Gene, who laughed and put his arm her and swore, quite loudly, that he would protect her.

More than that, Great-uncle . . . smiled.

That . . . was scarier than the taxidermied creatures.

But Great-uncle did not insist the tour continue in the dark for which Cajeiri was glad. It had been a surprise, and his guests had enjoyed it, but somehow ambush in the dark seemed just a little too real this morning.

So he was glad when Great-uncle ordered the main lights turned back on and proceeded to show them the ferocious taxidermied beasts in his father’s father’s collection, creatures Cajeiri had only seen in drawings. His guests were excited and amazed and so was he. There was a legless reptile as big as a man, all coiled up and threatening, almost as good as a dinosaur. There was ornate old armor that was real, not made for machimi. There were swords and spears that probably had killed people, which was a sobering thought.

There were lots and lots of really interesting things to see, aisles and aisles as crowded as the warehouses under the Bujavid, and he found himself going for whole periods of time without thinking about the people they had caught in the garage, and how they had been afraid there might be Assassins in the basement.

Besides, they had their bodyguards. And from here on they had the lights on, bright as day, where they were, though it was scary to look off through doorways into sections where they had been, that were dark now, or sections where they had not yet been, which were a little more ominous.

They came to dull spots: there were, in one nook, rows of plain brown pottery that looked like nothing at all—until Great-uncle said was the first pottery ever made in the Padi Valley—which, Great-uncle said showed that the Atageini ancestors had come from the south coast a long, long time ago, thousands of years ago, in fact. Uncle said the Scholars could tell all sorts of relationships because of the way the pots were made and the patterns on them, because the ancient peoples had particular ways of doing things, even particular ways to make a pot.

Cajeiri had not known that, himself, and for a moment he forgot about the trouble outside, in a flight of imagination about his own Atageini ancestry being from the coast where Lord Geigi and nand’ Bren had their estates. It was almost like being related.

Artur got right up close, not enough to touch, but staring at the details, and he asked questions about the differences he saw, which Cajeiri translated, and Uncle was quite pleased to talk about those differences . . . though Uncle had an amazing good sense about getting them back to collections of fierce fish, with amazing teeth.

But in the intervals, the grim thoughts came back: there was real danger coming near the house, which was neversupposed to happen in historic premises like Tirnamardi, with so many ancient, precious, fragilethings. Cajeiri knew, he was sure, why they were being kept down here—he had been through shelling. And he very much hoped mani was in some sort of a safe place, too, and especially he hoped that they were going to hear something from nand’ Bren soon—

He hoped that there would not, not,he hoped, be gunfire, or grenades or people sneaking up on the house to do mischief.

And that there were not accesses down here in the basement that could have ambush waiting in one of the rooms.

They went on to a different part of the basement, where lights went on, and there were cabinets and cabinets of record books. It was records going back hundreds of years, Great-uncle said, showing them books bound in leather so old it was flaking, and Irene said she wished she knew enough Ragi to read them.

Had they been scanned into a computer, she asked, in case something should happen to them?

He didn’t translate that part. He didn’t think Great-uncle would like that idea, not this morning. “I shall ask him that later,” he told Irene.

Beyond that place, in another room, a dimly lit display case held a skeleton of a person that Great-uncle said was thousands and thousands of years old. They had dug him up on the grounds, when they had built the house, and the broken pots around him were what he had been buried with.

That was a scary place. That was a real dead person. Cajeiri did not want to linger there.