That had to be troubling Banichi and every other Guild member on the continent. What in hell was going on at Guild Headquarters?
Ordinarily, lords didn’t undertake wildcat operations against one another, precisely because the Guild and the aiji in Shejidan would alike take a dim, lethal view of that behavior. But had it become clear to the Kadagidi that the Guild was not going to act, that there was no argument or Filing that was going to protect Tabini at all?
That would encourage actions far more profitable to the Kadagidi than a frontal assault on a neighbor’s land.
That indicated one action that began to make sense in this situation, one delicate, surgical action that would fragment this gathering and bring down the hopes of restoring the Ragi clan to power. And all the fire and fury might be intended only to mask the process of getting an Assassin into position.
And these various people who had assembled to protect Tabini by their presence and position had incidentally brought an impressive attendance of Guild Assassins as their own bodyguards. The Guild might be neutral, deadlocked, and stuck in Shejidan, but local man’chi was healthy and thriving, and, at the moment, armed to the teeth and sitting on Tatiseigi’s lawn, and probably on the Kadagidi’s front porch, at the same time, if they could get a view of what was happening beyond the hills. Both sides were furnished with Guild enough to spend some time infiltrating and manuevering at this stage— but in the nature of things, Tabini, for his part, had, at every reception, to bet his life that none of these arrivals of other villages, towns, clans, masked some Assassin whose man’chi was secretly to the Kadagidi.
That was surely what the conference outside the door was dealing with, among other things Bren wished he had a clear picture of. They were screening every Guild member who came through the door, and seeking information on every Guild member who might be on the grounds: “Do you know that man, nadi? Did he come with the lord’s wife’s clan?”
He had been in space too long, Bren said to himself. As long as he’d been in atevi society, he had encountered such blind spots in his vision, dark spots, situations where he just didn’t automatically draw the obvious conclusion without asking Banichi or Jago—and even then their plain answer didn’t always evoke all it should. But he had known that very certainly staff was vetting everyone who got past that door: they always did. The Guild in some respects was a sort of exclusive lodge, and the senior members, the really dangerous ones, knew each other by sight, in and out of uniform.
That was why Tabini’s loss of the staff who had protected him so long was such a heavy blow—not alone the emotional loss at their murder, but the practical consequences of new staff not knowing things that had gone to the grave with the previous holders of their offices. The well-oiled machine that had operated so smoothly to protect and inform Tabini was suddenly gone—replaced by new people who had attached themselves to him during his exile, and one only hoped the current chief of Tabini’s personal bodyguard, Ismini, knew his men as well, and that information flowed through that staff with something like the old efficiency. Banichi and Jago had had ties in the aiji’s old household, but they were at least two years out of the loop, and perhaps underinformed and unconnected for much longer than that: they couldn’t reconstitute it.
Ismini—Bren had no idea where he had come from, or who these men were who surrounded Tabini these days.
The whole situation conjured all the machimi he had ever seen, disasters which involved breakdowns of Guild actions, the sort of thing that laid bodies in heaps on the stage, when what should have been a neat, kabiu action, or a sure deflection of an attempted assassination—turned out a real damn mess thanks to new men filling positions they ill understood or outright pursuing divided loyalties, their ties to other agencies imperfectly severed.
The whole train of thought upset his stomach, as if the encounter on the steps wasn’t enough. But the dust around the Ajuri arrival settled in a round of courtesies and sips of tea, never mind the rural Ajuri were themselves a wild card—bringing in a collection of somewhat lower-level Guild that weren’t necessarily as well known to the aiji’s men, or to other staffs. They got in. It would have been a major incident, if Ismini and his men had not let Ajuri in to protect their lord—but bet that they were asking questions out there, and sending runners out to ask among those who might have connections to the Ajuri.
Meanwhile, in the general easing of courtly tensions, at least, Tatiseigi began, inanely enough, to propose a formal supper— trying to put a patch on the fact that, no, the house didn’t have any suitable room for the Ajuri, who were going to have to lodge downstairs in what Tatiseigi extravagantly called the Pearl Room, which one understood would be cleared of records and desks and provided with beds. The Ajuri were not happy. And Tabini meanwhile took the chance to request a special buffet for the staffs, allowing the individual bodyguards the chance to eat on duty and discuss, discussion which would never do at table, oh, no, never, ever discuss business at a proper table, even when the lawn was full of impromptu militiac but most of all, find out what the Ajuri had brought in, and try to resurrect some of the knowledge which had died with Tabini’s original head of staff, investigating, too, the connections the Atageini might know about—since the marriage that had produced Lady Damiri herself, under this roof.
Meanwhile Tatiseigi rattled on, went on to propose the menu, God help them, in meticulous detail, and to recommend a special game delicacy of the region, with a glowing description of the pepper sauce.
Bren laced his hands together across his middle and tried to look appreciative and relaxed instead of grim, desperate, and increasingly anxious about the proceedings—an attack of human nerves, he said to himself, and meanwhile he knew Tatiseigi himself was no doddering fool, and that this performance was purposeful. The dinner in question was going to be one of those formal affairs where meaning ran under every syllable, and where, granted no one was poisoned at the table, atevi felt one another’s intentions out. But he himself wasn’t up to it. He didn’t want to attend a formal supper with the Ajuri. He didn’t want to sit there eating custard and sauce and wondering what was going on in the woodwork, while staffs were just as energetically trying to parse loyalties and connections running back decades if not centuries.
Most of all he wanted, dammit, just five short minutes, in all this expenditure of valuable time, one short chance to talk to Tabini privately for a single interview outside this carefully monitored gathering. He wanted to turn in the report he had risked his life developing, and he thought he deserved that chancec never mind Ilisidi’s staff had doubtless done their briefing, not an unfavorable one, he was sure, and never mind his own report, coming from a human mind when all was said and done, had probably become superfluous in the press of time and threat, at least in Tabini’s estimation. Tabini probably thought it a headache he didn’t need at this point, raising questions he wasn’t ready to deal with—but it wasn’t, dammit, superfluous. He wasn’t sure by any means that Ilisidi would have covered all the essentials the way he would have wanted: He wanted the’t‘s crossed and the i’s dotted with Tabini, he had spent two years picking his words carefully, choosing very precise ways he wanted to set out certain facts of the outside universe to Tabini, and dammit, he was going to have that report riding his mind and weighing down his conscience until he could offload it and say he had done his best.