Fuss—was a lord’s job.
He shot up his fist, with the ring in clear evidence. “This, nadiin, is the aiji’s presence, and my case contains his explicit orders. Tabini-aiji sends to the Guildmaster, demanding urgent attention, and he will not be pleased to be stalled or given excuses about agendas. Advise the Guildmaster! There is no delay about this!”
“The Guildmaster is in Council, paidhi-aiji,” the senior nearest said in a quiet, urgent voice, “and the Council is in session. We will send word into the chamber and we will take you to his office to wait. He will see you and receive the orders there.”
Double or nothing. Bren pitched his voice low, where only the immediate four might hear him—for what good it did, if electronics was sending voices elsewhere. “I, speaking for the aiji, ask you now, nadiin, where is your man’chi? Is it to the Guildmaster, or to the aishidi’tat? They are not one and the same. Is it to the Guildmaster, or to the Guild? They are not one and the same.”
“Paidhi, this is neither here nor there. We are not refusing the aiji’s request. Even the aiji—”
He kept his voice down. “You are betrayed by the Guild leadership, nadiin. Stand down now! This is the aiji’s order! Obey it!”
Faces were no longer disciplined or impassive. Eyes darted in alarm, one to the other, and, to the side, Banichi had just deftly bumped the door frame, and inserted a little wad of expanding plastic in the latch-hole.
“Close the doors!” the inside senior said, and suddenly they were facing four rifles, from the Council doorway.
“Retired Guild is returning,” Banichi said. “The Missing and the Dead are returning, at the aiji’s order and in his service. Will you shoot, and then face them? Assist us. Or stand down.”
“Banichi,” one said to the senior in a low voice. “That is Banichi.” And the unit senior inside said, “Nadi, we are under orders. Retreat. Retreat now. Quickly.”
Bren didn’t turn his head to see. The four behind them were Tano’s and Algini’s problem. The four immediately in front of them were trying to persuade them to retreat.
“He will not retreat,” Bren said. “Nor will this!” He held the ring in view.
“The aiji’s orders,” Banichi said quietly. “If your man’chi is not to the Shadow Guild, separate yourself from the Guildmaster, or stand in opposition. The Council leadership has committed treason.”
A bell began to ring. Hall overhead lights began to flash. The offices, Bren was thinking. If those offices back there were occupied . . . but the back accesses down that hall were in Cenedi’s territory.
“Shut down your equipment,” Banichi said to the units confronting them. “All of you. Now. Take the aiji’s orders, Daimano’s, Cenedi’s . . . and mine.” It wasn’t working. Not in the four in the background. “Paidhi!” Banichi said.
His job. He was ready for it, on Banichi’s wounded side—he spun around Banichi as Jago did the same with Algini. A flashbang sailed past him into the inner hall and blew as Tano hurled the massive door shut. It rebounded under rifle fire from the Council door guards—and opened again, splinters flying, everything in terrible slow motion.
Turn and duck when I call you, Banichi had told him, forewarning him about splinters, and something still caught him in the back of the head, so brain-jarring he was unaware of completing his turn to the door: he went down beside Banichi, leaning on him for an instant. Tano bumped into him and Banichi, getting into cover, as the door edge passed them on its next rebound—Tano had drawn his sidearm, covering the left-hand hall. The outer four door guards were down—lying over against the wall beside Jago and Algini as automatic fire over their heads continued to hammer the splintering door. The outbound volley and Jago and Algini’s move had likely thrown the outside guards to their present position a little down the corridor wall, pressed tight to avoid the fire that had the door swinging insanely open and shut under the shots and the rebound. Fire inside lagged—and Jago flung another flashbang skittering in on the polished floor. God, Bren thought—hope the guards inside weren’t equipped with worse to throw back.
The guards down by the front door were Banichi’s to watch, those two men, and all those office doors. But those guards were gone, vanished, likely into the offices. Bren moved over against the wall in the side hall and stayed quiet—while from the Council hallway bursts of automatic fire shredded the door and made retreat back down the outside hall impossible. One of the door guards had been hit. His comrades worked to stop the blood and treat the wound, under Jago’s implacable aim.
They were in possession of the doorway and the outer halls—and trapped there, with Tano aiming a pistol down the length of the short hall, Banichi watching the long hall, Jago with three problems and a wounded man at extremely close range, and Algini covering the door from an angle, to be sure nobody came at them from inside. The guards inside the Council hallway weren’t coming out—the four they had talked to close at hand had disappeared, somewhere out of the line of fire—and the four Council Chamber guards had progressively shredded the door, which, thanks to Banichi’s small plastic plug, hadn’t closed or locked, and made it a very bad idea for anybody to exit into the hallway. Right now there was a lull in fire. There was just the bell making an insane racket, and glass from ricochets into office doors and overhead lights lying all down the hall.
“Young fools,” Banichi remarked in a low voice. “They have finally come to their senses, waiting for orders, waiting for us to move. They are over-excited. Seniors will use gas, if they can reach the stores. That will be a problem.”
The service corridor communicating with all those offices was the weakness in their position. Defenders were bound to come at them via the offices, and when that happened, they were in trouble, be it gas or grenades. It was a cold stone floor, a cold wait—good company, Bren said to himself. He just had to do what his aishid needed him to do, keep quiet, keep out of the way, and not distract them.
Suddenly the wall at Bren’s back thumped, strongly—it made his heart jump; made his ears react. But then he thought: Cenedi. That intersecting administrative hallway, the other side of the wall. Something had just blown up. Cenedi might be giving the opposition worries from the other direction.
He snatched a glance at Banichi’s locator bracelet. Dead black. No signals at the moment. And nobody had moved, only shifted position a little, tense, waiting. The alarm bell kept up its deafening monotone ringing and the lights kept flashing.
Then the floor thumped under them, and a shock rolled in from the doors down the hall. The massive outside doors flew back, counter to their mountings, one upright, one of them askew and hanging, then falling in an echoing crash.
That wasn’t defense. It was inbound. Bren flattened himself to the wall with Banichi and Tano, as far from the inner door frame as they could get. Smoke obscured the street end of the hall, smoke and sunset-colored daylight, and two, three, five moving shadows in that smoky light. Three solid figures appeared out of it, flinging open office doors, and more shadows arrived up those three steps from the foyer, pouring into the hall from outside, opening office doors one after another, treading broken glass underfoot.
Secondary passages, secondary passages all over the place, in every office, in the Council chamber. It was the Assassins’ Guild. Of course there were secondary passages. Every building in the aishidi’tat had back passages. . . .
A burst of fire came out the ruined Council-area door, and a concentrated volley came back, right past the door frame. No more fire came out.