So he hardly knew what to tell the good people of Dur about the dinner.
He passed through his little sitting room, designed for a guest, not a full-fledged office, on his way to the bedroom, and rang for the servants. Jago had gone on to her own quarters, adjacent and down the short inner corridor. This was a safe place. There was hardly any safer in the entire continent.
That fact did not, however, protect him from the towering stacks out there. At the very least he had to answer his hourly-growing backlog of letters and queries, some of them from very serious people with very difficult questions.
And in the meantime, he had to prepare for a series of legislative hearings on the restoration of the regime and the distribution of appointments. He would sit on several of those legislative committees, whose work was waiting, pending location of various people who had fled the capital to save their lives.
He had another set of inquiries of lesser import, including requests for interviews, and several requests for commemorative notecards from well-meaning individuals.
And meanwhile various people ambitious to gain space within the Bu-javid saw no reason to allot any precious room to a human official.
He had sent a desperate request in for proper offices downstairs in the Bu-javid, and if he could locate enough of his old staff to start sweeping up the debris of data and records, he might start his own work with skilled help—he hoped the specific office space he requested would be a reasonable balance between security and modesty.
Top priority on his agenda—he had, sometime in the next day or so, to get a call through to the island, to the President of Mospheira, who, thank God, happened to be his old bureau chief, Shawn Tyers. The atevi Messengers’ Guild, in charge of all mainland communications, had concentrated its repair efforts on land lines and claimed the big dish at Mogari-nai was near resuming service.
Once that was up, the continent would have communication with the station in orbit—and calls could be relayed with a great deal more reliability to the island. But there had been, all along the coast during the troubles, a perfectly adequate unofficial radio network. He had, yesterday, sent a report to the Messengers’ Guild and requested the transmission of the bare facts to Shawn by means less publicly known: we’re alive, we’re safe, Tabini’s back in power. It was the sort of wide-open communication that anyone could read—and he was sure that spies of every sort had; the Messengers’ Guild was a little looser in its membership than was the Assassins’ Guild—but if Shawn failed to know they were back in power, Mospheiran agencies were completely asleep at the switch.
For formality’s sake, he had said: We’re alive and safe. The aiji is back in authority over the mainland. And then the key part of the message: Tell Jase and Yolanda that the shuttles on the mainland are in fairly good condition, and the pilots and crews have survived —they’re going to have to catch up in training and service, but we are in far better shape than we dared hopec Maybe Shawn knew, being in communication with the station.
Maybe not. So they proceded a lot in the dark about what this side and that knew. It had been five days since the shooting stopped.
They had had time to do a bit of mopping-up, some of it bloody, and they had done a bit of repair—and now messages flowed. Air service resumed, though it was sporadic. The trains ran. True, the Assassins’ Guild had its own wireless network—and that functionedc but one did not ask to send even official messages through those channels. One just did not. The Guild did what the Guild did.
The dowager’s servants arrived to take his coat. He assumed a lighter one, and went back to his makeshift office. The servants offered tea, which he declined, having had tea up to his eyeballs. He sat down at his desk, shifted papers into stacks he mentally tagged “critical,” “dire,” and “maybe in a few days.”
Jago returned, and stood, immaculate in Assassins’ black and silver, looking particularly inscrutable at the moment.
“These visitors of the dowager’s tonight will certainly be spying on us,” he remarked, making a slight guess as to what occupied her mind.
“One assumes so, nandi.” She would have heard every word that passed between him and the dowager, so there was absolutely nothing he needed to tell her about the invitation, or about the impending move. She would be with him tonight, at that table, parsing every lifted eyebrow and watching every dish that came and went—even in this household.
But she had been alone this morning, extraordinary as that was.
Her partner had not been with her; nor had Tano or Algini.
“What is Banichi’s business this morning, Jago-ji?” he asked. He had not had time to ask before now, at a place and in a privacy from the dowager’s servants. He had kept assuming Banichi would turn up, but he had not, and when he had reached the dowager’s vicinity, the numbers of the dowager’s guards had turned up compensatory. That was mildly troubling. But asking what Jago had not volunteered seemed to require some little space for communication, a commodity which had not been available yet this morning, nor on the walk back. Now the servants left. In those diminishing footsteps, they had perhaps five minutes of sure privacy.
“He was called to the Guild, nandi. Tano and Algini are with him.”
He had somewhat concluded that. And more footsteps passed the open door, and diminished in the distance.
“They may not be back this evening,” Jago added, entirely gratis, once those footsteps were gone.
He returned a worried stare, wondering what she was trying to tell him in that further, unsolicited information. It was unusual that Banichi stay that long at a Guild meeting, but at this juncture his Guild was in turmoil, Guildsmen had died, and one suspected there was a thorough shake-up going on, even yet. His own staff, particularly Algini, as it turned out, was very high up in that secretive guild—so if Tano and Algini were with Banichi, he felt a little better about the situation, but he hoped Banichi was not in some difficulty for actions he had recently taken in the paidhi’s causec and he hoped that Algini himself had not seen his position weaken. Guild infighting was scary beyond all comfort. “If Banichi needs your support,” he began.
“I am not to leave you, nandi-ji,” she said.
“Neverthelessc one could promise to lock oneself into the bedroom and not come out until you get back. If Banichi needs you, Jago-ji, that is my priority.”
Solemn as she was, a ghost of a smile crossed her lips. “And what would you do about the dowager’s dinner party?”
“Hell,” he said in Mosphei’, which she also understood perfectly well. “But I personally value Banichi’s safety, nadi-ji, and yours, above any protocols.”
“I am assuring that safety, Bren-ji, by staying here. I by no means trust these dinner guests.”
The dinner and the dowager’s motives for asking him were not the main area of his concern. But it was certainly a valid concern.
The guests had come from the eastern half of the continent, Ilisidi’s home territory—and come in a time of unrest. He very vividly remembered a broken arm and a very rough few days, early in his tenure, both thanks to Easterner politics, not to mention having been deliberately poisoned by the great lady who was his host. “I shall stay as close as I can to plain tea and bread tonight, Jago-ji. I shall be extremely discreet and stay entirely out of trouble, I promise you. I do remain extremely worried about Banichi.”