Search Worlds Without End

The nineteenth book in C.J. Cherryh's beloved Foreigner space opera series begins a new era for diplomat Bren Cameron, as he navigates the tenuous peace he has struck between human refugees and the alien atevi.

Alpha Station, orbiting the world of the atevi, has taken aboard five thousand human refugees from a destroyed station in a distant sector of space. With supplies and housing stretched to the breaking point, it is clear that the refugees must be relocated down to the planet, and soon. But not to the atevi mainland: rather to the territory reserved for human, the island of Mospheira.

Tabini-aiji, the powerful political head of the atevi, tasks his brilliant human diplomat, Bren Cameron, to negotiate with the Mospheiran government. For the Alpha Station refugees represent a political faction that the people of Mospheira broke from two centuries ago, and these Mospheirans are not enthusiastic about welcoming these immigrants from space.

Bren Cameron, diplomat in residence, usually represents the ruler of the atevistate. But Ilisidi, the dowager, has been known to borrow his services from time to time--and she has her own notions how to solve the simmering hostilities in the south of the atevi continent, playing one problem against another.

This time, she is betting the hard-won northern peace--and the lives of the people--on being right. She has commandeered the Red Train, taken aboard what passengers she chooses, and headed for the snowy roof of the world, where a hard-scrabble town and its minor lord are the first pieces she intends to use.

The overthrow of the atevi head of state, Tabini-aiji, and the several moves of enemies even since his restoration, have prompted major changes in the Assassins' Guild, which has since worked to root out its seditious elements - a clandestine group they call the Shadow Guild. With the Assassins now rid of internal corruption, with the birth of Tabini's second child, and with the appointment of an heir, stability seems to have returned to the atevi world. Humans and atevi share the space station in peaceful cooperation, humans and atevi share the planet as they have for centuries, and the humans' island enclave is preparing to welcome 5000 human refugees from a remote station now dismantled, and to do that in unprecedented cooperation with the atevi mainland.

In general Bren Cameron, Tabini-aiji's personal representative, returning home to the atevi capital after securing that critical agreement, was ready to take a well-earned rest - until Tabini's grandmother claimed his services on a train trip to the smallest, most remote and least significant of the provinces, snowy Hasjuran - a move concerning which Tabini-aiji gave Bren a private instruction: protect her. Advise her.

Advise her - perhaps. As for protection, she has a trainload of high-level Guild. But since the aiji-dowager has also invited a dangerously independent young warlord, Machigi, and a young man who may be the heir to Ajuri, a key northern province - the natural question is why the dowager is taking this ill-assorted pair to Hasjuran and what on this earth she may be up to.

With a Shadow Guild attack on the train station, it has become clear that others have questions, too. Hasjuran, on its mountain height, overlooks the Marid, a district that is part of the atevi nation only in name - a district in which Machigi is one major player, and where the Shadow Guild retains a major stronghold.

Protect her? Ilisidi is hellbent on settling scores with the Shadow Guild, and her reasons for this trip and this company now become clear. One human diplomat and his own bodyguard suddenly seem a very small force to defend her from what she is setting in motion.