He had recommended, too, the assignment, temporary or permanent, of plain-clothes Assassins, who took the positions of servants—valets, cooks, doorkeepers—who served the lords, and who were supposed to be on strictly defensive assignments.
He even appointed the investigators who served the Guild Council, who approved the other assignments, investigators who delved into the truth or lack thereof in a Filing.
Shishogi. The Guild never released the names of its officers, but they knew that name now. One old man from Ajuri, the same minor clan as Haikuti, the same minor clan as Cajeiri’s mother—and the same clan that Cajeiri’s lately-deceased grandfather, Komaji, had ruled—until his assassination.
Shishogi was the tenth individual to have held the Office of Assignments in the entire history of the modern Guild. He had outlived his clerks and secretaries and not replaced them. His office, Algini said, was a cramped little space, massively untidy, with towering stacks of files and records. The filing system might have become a mess, but Shishogi had always been so efficient and so senior, a walking encyclopedia of personnel information, that the Council had never had a pressing reason to replace him. His antiquated, pre-computer operation had been, Algini said, a joke within the Guild.
No one was laughing, now. And one had no idea—because Algini had not said—how many of the current Guild administration thought they owed personal favors to this man.
One had no idea what resources Shishogi might still have. There were pockets of Shadow Guild activity in the world, potentially able to carry out assassinations—last night had proven that—and there were people whose actions during Murini’s rule left them very, very afraid of what Tabini’s investigators might find in the records. Increasingly, honest people who had lived in fear under Murini’s administration were coming forward and talking. But a few people who had things to hide were very anxious about what they knew that the Shadow Guild might want buried.
The little old man in Assignments had had the whole atevi world in his hands just a year ago.
But as of this morning, the Tactician was gone.
Now, on this train, headed back to the capital in secret, the aiji-dowager was taking direct aim at the Strategist.
5
Cajeiri waked, straightened in his seat, smoothed his coat, and saw that Jegari was awake, too, across the aisle. Nobody else was. Gene, Irene, and Artur had nodded off, Irene and Artur leaning against the wall of the car, Gene with his head on his arms on the table. Antaro, Lucasi, and Veijico were asleep, arms folded, heads down . . . one thought they were asleep.
The train had begun slowing down. That was a little scary . . . since that could mean all sorts of things, and they still could not raise the window shades to see what was outside.
“Where are we, Gari-ji?” he asked Jegari.
“One believes we are actually entering Shejidan, nandi. We should switch tracks soon.”
Shejidan. He had not thought he had possibly slept that long. “Is there any news?”
“We are still running dark, nandi, not communicating with anyone, not even using the locators. We have no news.”
“But we are still going to the Bujavid.”
“One believes that we are, yes.”
Others in the car were waking up, too, having felt the change in speed, and he saw no distress among the senior Guild. The rest of his aishid woke up calmly, and had a quiet word with Jegari.
Gene lifted his head, blinked, raked his hair back. “God,” Gene said in a low voice. “I’m sorry. I fell asleep.”
“So did everybody for a while. Jegari thinks we are coming into the city now. We definitely should not touch the shades.”
The others were stirring, Irene, then Artur, who wanted the accommodation, and got up and went to the back of the car.
“We are in the city now,” Cajeiri said. “Any moment now, we will switch tracks. Rene-ji, lend me your book and I shall show you where we are.”
She turned to a blank page and handed her notebook to him. He leaned forward to draw so they could see. He drew the hill of the Bujavid, and the Bujavid at the top, and he showed how the tunnel went through the hill, turning as it went.
“We will go slowly here,” he said, pointing at the hill itself. “And we shall climb to the train station. And then we shall take lifts up into the Bujavid itself.” There was a gap in his explanation, there, a big one, because he had no idea where they were going once they got into the Bujavid. But how to explain it did occur to him. “The Bujavid is a place like the ship. Like the station. Hallways. Passages. Quarters.”
“A ship on a mountain,” Gene said with a little laugh.
“A hill,” he said, measuring with his fingers. “Little mountain.”
“Hill,” Gene said, and everybody said it.
“With passages all inside,” Irene said.
“Indeed,” Cajeiri said. And then he thought he should explain other things. “There are a lot of storage rooms below.” He pointed on the diagram between the circle that was the train station and the Bujavid’s ground floor. “Here, stairs come up to the Bujavid from the bottom of the hill, on the street outside. Everybody can go on the first level of the Bujavid—they used to have to climb all those steps, but now there’s a tram from the street—a kind of train, very short track. Upper levels are restricted residency. Third level is us. Me. My parents. My great-grandmother, my great-uncle. Nand’ Bren, too.” He hesitated to promise them anything, when an order from his father could change every arrangement, so there was no good even thinking where they would end up, or even if they would be together. He was never to draw how the rooms in the Bujavid were laid out, anyway, his father had told him, because of security. So he just said, “I think we shall probably stay with nand’ Bren.” There was adult business going on and he decided his great-grandmother was likely not going to want children underfoot, hearing things they should not. He could not think his great-grandmother would send him and his guests to his father’s residence—with his mother on edge, about to have the baby. It was why his father had sent him out to Tirnamardi in the first place.
Though maybe he should send Boji and his cage to his own rooms, along with his servants. Boji’s cage was huge and he did not know how nand’ Bren was going to deal with all of them and nand’ Jase and Kaplan and Polano.
But that was a bad plan. He really did not want Boji shrieking out as he sometimes did, and disturbing his mother . . . which was why he had taken Boji with him.
He by no means wanted Boji disturbing Great-grandmother or Great-uncle, either. Nand’ Bren would probably take Boji in, because nand’ Bren tried to do everything he asked—but Boji was just a problem.
He had no idea what to do. His life was suddenly surrounded with problems. They were all little problems that he was supposed to be able to deal with himself, true, but they were big ones to his guests, who could not be happy locked in a room, however comfortable. The Bujavid could be miserably dull, if one were locked in a room with nothing to do.
“We shall at least have a lot of time to talk,” he said, trying to find something cheerful about their situation. “And at least we shall not have to go down to the basement if we have a security alert.”