But there were conventions exempting domestic staff—if there was any staff in that establishment that wasn’t Guild.
“Granted,” Tabini said. “Set a guard on their door and outside their windows.”
And monitor all communications. That went without saying.
Even a human from the Island knew that would happen. He drew two relieved, shaky breaths in succession, knowing where Jago and Tano were, wishing he had a notion where Banichi and Algini had gotten to, or what was going on downstairs.
Then a report came in—he heard half of it—that the buses had reached the heart of the city, and that they were coming toward the hill.
“Mother is coming,” Cajeiri said confidently, in his higher voice.
Mother, and perhaps, if the business downstairs had gone well, great-grandmother and great-uncle would come upstairs and help Tabini restore order. The Guild around them was taking a more relaxed stance, as if what was flowing in electronic communications was reassuring. Bren took the leisure to cast a worried look at Jago, to be sure she had told him the truth: Her face showed a little pain, but she occupied herself entirely with reloading, her dark face utterly concentrating on that, and perhaps on what reached her by the communications unit she had in her ear.
The lift worked. The racket in the shafts near them reported the cars in motion, and Bren had thought they had shut that down.
Bren cast a worried glance in that direction, and at Tabini, who had spared no glance at all for the noise and the sporadic gunfire somewhere downstairs, as if he knew very well what was going on.
The lift passed them, stopped somewhere on the floors above.
“Secure the audience hall,” Tabini said, and that hall was on this floor, the main floor, which communicated with the outside via broad, public stairs, down to the U-shaped road—the road by which the arriving buses might most logically attempt to come in and discharge their passengers.
A pair of Guildsmen moved off in that direction, and vanished around the corner.
Silence then. For several whole breaths there was no racket, no sound of combat. Bren counted off his heartbeats, about the time it would take the Guildsmen—a man and a woman—to reach the public areas.
A door boomed open in a great vacancy, in the empty audience hall, a place ordinarily crowded with petitioners and favor-seekers, and noisy as a train station. It sounded lonely and hopeful now, the beginning of a new authority, the civil government opening its doors again for businessc And doubtless, in the prudent atevi way, any domestic staff or clericals still in the building had taken cover in their own areas, shut doors, locked them, and sat waiting for the Guild to sort out the business of statec sat waiting to be summoned by whoever won the contest and opened such doors.
Tabini gave a wave of his hand. Forward, that gesture said; and it was no time to lag behind. They moved on quickly around the next corner, into the broad public corridor.
The outer doors of the Bu-javid were still shut—the doors that at all hours and in every weather stood open for any citizen to visit the lower halls, to deliver petitions to the offices, to visit bureaus and secretaries, and most of all to deal face to face with their aiji in the public sessions.
“Open the doors,” Tabini said, first of all orders after the opening of the audience hall, and security moved at a run to go unlock those huge doors and shove them open wide—not without a certain readiness of weapons and a cautious look outside.
What came in was the dark of night, and a breeze came with it, a breeze that would clear away the stench of gunfire and smoke, a breeze that stirred the priceless hangings and ran away into the farthest reaches of the floor.
The audience hall stood open and safe. Tabini sent Guildsmen in to join the others, and then walked in himself, the rest of them trailing after. The place was in decent order, give or take a stack of petition documents, heavy with seals and ribbons, that had scattered across the steps of the dais.
“Those will be collected,” Tabini declared, treading a path among them, up the few steps to his proper seat. He would by no means ask Guild staff to do that secretarial business. Petitions were the province of the clerks, who had not yet appeared.
Tabini took his accustomed place. Beckoned, then.
“Go, young sir,” Bren said, urging Cajeiri with a little push, and Cajeiri drew up his shoulders, straightened his rumpled, borrowed coat, and walked the same path as his father, to stand by his chair.
A second time Tabini beckoned, and Bren had the overwhelming urge to look behind him, to see if Tabini meant some other person of note—Tabini would not be so foolish or so downright defiant of criticism as to want him to mount those stairs. He should not. He had to find a way to advise Tabini against it, but could think of none.
Tabini said, definitively, “Nand’ paidhi. Join us.”
There was nothing for it. Bren walked forward, as far as the steps, and there sat down, as he had, oh, so many years ago, when he was only Bren-paidhi, and had represented Mospheira, not the aiji, in Sheijidan. A divorce case, Tabini had been hearing then; and he had been a different man, in that quiet perspective— A man who had had to defend his bedroom against assassins. Or rather, Banichi had had to, that night.
Banichi was not with him now. Jago hung back near the door. He had never felt so publicly exposed and entirely vulnerable.
And he hoped to have done the right thing—not to stand by Tabini on the dais, but to resume his former post. He hoped people reported that. He hoped Tabini would understand what he advised, a restoration of the paidhi’s former status—most of all that he would take that advice, and not shipwreck himself on old policy.
There was a little murmur in the hall. It fell away into a hush.
He could not see Tabini’s face, not at all; but he could see the faces of the crowd. He could see Jago and Tano, and saw that Algini had slipped in by the door to join Tano. He began to worry about Banichi—began to be desperately worried about him. Banichi had never left him so long, in such a moment of danger. He tried to catch a hint from Jago’s face, whether she knew where Banichi was, or whether she was in contact, and he couldn’t read a thing.
Her impassivity far from settled his sense of dread.
“Let them come,” Tabini said. Someone had just said that the bus caravan had passed onto the grand processional way, and that crowds were in the streets, welcoming them and joining them on their route. “The hall will be open, no exceptions.”
It was an incredibly dangerous gesture. It exposed the aiji and his son to potential attack, not necessarily from Guild Assassins, but from some mentally unbalanced person, some furiously angry person who had lost fortune or family. The Presidenta of Mospheira would never dare do such a thing, despite all the Mospheiran tradition of democracy and access to institutions. But that the aiji of Shejidan made that gesture— He was not on the ship, or the station. One thing overrode all questions of security, among atevi, and that was the sense of choice in man’chi. It was the absolute necessity for stable power, that rule not be imposed. There had to be that moment of equilibrium, that choice, baji-naji, life or death; and in that realization of how things must be, Bren felt a certain chill.
People began to trickle into the hall, lords of the aishidi’tat, heads of clan, officials, clericals who had kept the state running while Murini claimed to rule. In each case, they came and bowed and proclaimed their man’chi, and in each case Tabini nodded, asking a secretary, who had quietly appeared among the others, and another diffidently come forward to gather the scattered documents from the steps, to write down the names.
A paper of formal size and thickness was found, a desk was drawn up to its position near the dais, and the second young man, a junior clerical, placed there the petitions that he had gathered from the steps, a formidable stack of parchment, heavy with the ribbons and metal seals that proclaimed the house or district of origin.