“She is loyal to my father!”
“Certainly she has proved that. But at the time, young aiji, we asked that question. We thought perhaps the assassins aimed to rescue her. But some thought not. Several of us who had never trusted each other got together and asked that question—asked, again, why Lord Tatiseigi had stayed in power, when other lords supporting your father had fallen. And we began to look for answers in the lines of inheritance, in the favored, and the unfavored, and the deaths that had led, one after the other, to Kadiyi, and to Geidaro.”
“My aunt?”
“Great-aunt, yes. She had a contract marriage with one Aiechi, whose line has roots in the Marid. Aiechi’s cousin was Murini, and their son was being groomed to high office. Caradi. Perhaps you have met him.”
“Once. I think.” The days after his father’s return to Shejidan were a haze. Ajuri relatives had come and gone in a blur, and only his grandfather had stayed long, his grandfather, his aunt Meisi, and his cousin Dejaja, who had actually been nice.
He could not say that of his grandfather Komaji, his mother’s father, who had become lord of Ajuri, and who had tried to put himself closer and closer to them, the more his mother tried to push him out. It had not been pleasant. It had gotten downright scary, before his father had banished Grandfather Komaji from court. His mother had been upset over it and glad of it at the same time . . . his mother, he had to remember, having been stolen away by her father once.
She had left Ajuri when she found a chance—she had lived with Uncle Tatiseigi and then run back to her father again when she had quarreled with Uncle. Ajuri was like that, so far as he had observed: people changed sides. Nobody trusted anybody. Years and years ago Shishogi moved into that little office in Assassins’ Guild Headquarters and started managing things not just to favor his little clan—but to use it on a path leading to power.
And that was before his mother was born.
“When several of us sat down together to try to understand,” Nomari said, “we put all those names together and nothing made sense. Murini ought not to have risen—he could not have risen—without backing. It was a puzzle to us, how certain pieces remained in place on the board, and others did not. It was as if the world had turned as confusing to our view as Ajuri had been—as it should not have been if things operated the way we had always believed. Then, though Murini had gone down, though your father was back—word filtered through the guilds that the first of guilds had splintered, that the part that supported Murini was refusing to stand down, and undermining all the peace and reform was this moving cluster of problems, east, and south, and west and north again. Your great-grandfather Kadiyi died and your grandfather took the lordship, and then bolted from the house. He wanted to be anywhere but Ajuri. He feared for his life . . . and he feared Ajuri more than anybody.”
“Do you know that?” Cajeiri asked sharply. “How do you know that?”
“Because we have contacts—many contacts—inside Ajuri. And from the moment Shishogi himself went down—we have begun hearing from them. Secrets long held have begun to slip out. Ajuri secrets are finally making sense—how the lords of Ajuri either found ways to move as Shishogi wished—or they died. Your grandfather was only the latest.” Nomari folded his arms and looked toward Rieni and Uncle’s bodyguards. “So I know deep secrets of your guild, nadiin, and if you do not know them I will tell them to you, but I think you know—that there was a faction, and may be a faction, so convinced that humans will change us, that they changed us. Shishogi may not have been the only one, or even the main one at the start of everything, but he was in a place to move all the pieces, and he made a nightmare of Ajuri and Kadagidi. I know very little about humans, but I care very little about them, too. They are not the monsters. The monsters were the ones who killed their own brothers and sisters so we could then go kill the humans. And the monsters may have failed to move the aishidi’tat, or to replace the aiji, but they are still alive in Ajuri.”
“Have you names?” Rieni asked, in such a tone it sent chills down Cajeiri’s arms.
“I will not damn anyone without knowing more than I do, more surely than I know,” Nomari said. “I was not educated to be a lord, I am not trained in economy and philosophy, I have nothing to recommend me, except I know names, I know contacts, I have a network of individuals who can fish information out of that well, and move other individuals on nothing more than kinship. That is all I have. But I believe in Ajuri. I believe in what it was, and what it could be, if enough people got together to say we cannot go on killing each other, and that we owe the merchants and the trades and people trying to bring up children something better than the lords of Ajuri have been dealing out. I do not know that I can do this. But I have a claim on the lordship. I may not be educated to be a lord. But the people who are scattered out across the aishidi’tat, that want to go home—we do not want to see Ajuri broken. And we know the trades, and we know the merchants and we have people in those guilds. If I become a target and then back down to save my life—well, then I will be an old man knowing I could have done something, and despising myself.”
Not trained for a lordship, but he could talk. He could argue. One could only wish to argue as well as that.
“You will not trust us with the names of your enemies,” Rieni said. “Will you give us the names of your allies?”
There was a long silence. Then Nomari said, “I will give you those. At least a few. If I cannot trust the Guild now, if I cannot trust the young gentleman’s guards, then we are out of hope. Check the names out. I only ask you to tell me if you find anything in them—that I should have known. That those in authority need to know.”
“Do you have associates inside Kadagidi?” Janachi asked.
“I do not,” Nomari said. “I have avoided Kadagidi associations—of any nature. The troubles there—one has no idea. I have met individuals in Transportation. I know one in the Physicians. But any personal entanglement—no. I have not had any but working relationships, nothing beyond it.”
“Personal attachments?” Haniri asked bluntly, which meant, well, sex. Cajeiri felt his face go warm.
“None at all,” Nomari said, and added: “The risk—to either—no. Not even inside our circle.”
It seemed very lonely. One knew a little something about associations—and being aiji. And everything Nomari said added up to that. His own father and his mother had made a permanent contract, and when he looked at his father’s father, and a string of relationships all of which had been simple contracts, and not even that—he knew why Father had insisted on a life marriage. Being aiji was complicated enough.
He listened while Nomari provided seven names, a fortunate number, and the guilds they belonged to, two within Transportation, two within the Merchants, one in the Physicians, one in the Messengers and one in the Treasurers. And Rieni said that was enough for now, and they would take Nomari back to his room, and see that he had a good lunch.
Nomari stood up, and bowed. Cajeiri stood up and returned the courtesy, and watched as his senior aishid took Nomari back to be locked up and guarded again.
Uncle’s bodyguard had a recorder going. So did Rieni. He knew that. He knew that Uncle would want to hear it, and Father would.
He really hoped Nomari was what he said he was. Nomari looked weary, and sometimes sad, and could go hard as ice for a moment, but it was Rieni and Janachi who had been scary—Rieni when he had asked for names of enemies, and Janachi when he had asked about Kadagidi. Which Janachi was, if he could believe what his senior aishid had told him.
He looked across the room at his younger aishid, who had not left him. The servants had left. Uncle’s bodyguards had gone out with the seniors. “Do you believe him?” he asked.
“He had answers,” Jegari said. “I think the seniors are going to dig deeper than the seven names he gave. And there was one guild where he named no associates.”
“The Assassins,” he said. He had marked that, too.
“I doubt he should trust Ajuri in our Guild,” Lucasi said, “and there are some, but none in Headquarters. They have all been assigned out.” Lucasi clamped his lips together. It was probably information regulations said he was not supposed to give out, but it did matter, now, to what Nomari had said. “There were some juniors, too,” Lucasi added, “but they have all been put back into training, until the new Guild Council decides they should go into assignment. And that probably will not happen until Ajuri has a clan lord and he has their man’chi. Until then, no one trusts them.”
Down the hall a door closed. And his younger bodyguards said nothing further.
12
Tom Lund and Ben Feldman came thorough front door security with no advance warning but a phoned, “Mr. Lund and Mr. Feldman are on their way up, Mr. Cameron.”
Depend on it, neither of them came in a cast or carried a cake and a knife. Business suits—in which Tom Lund, stout and graying, looked like a banker on business—he always did; and Ben Feldman, slender to the point of gauntness, looked like an accountant on deadline. He was much happier in tees and short pants.
They worked, if not together, at least in harmony. Tom, whose only request was never to have to fly in the shuttle again, was thoroughly familiar with the station’s architecture, inside and out, familiar with the power structure of every company that had worked on it, depended on it, or hoped to profit from it, and knew who dealt with whom in the legislature. Ben Feldman was the man to go after data, find it out, and find out the secrets or open the most stubborn doors—figuratively, of course. Ben had logistical skills, figuring out what had to be done and lining up the materials and companies to do it by hook, crook, or Tom’s persuasion.
They hadn’t been up to the station since they’d come down in Tillington’s restructuring of Mospheiran admin up there. They’d been glad to come down, excepting the shuttle ride in Tom’s case, so Gin had said. Tom had drunk way too much on the way down and it was not an experience Tom wanted to repeat.
“I don’t have to go up to the station,” had been one of Tom’s first questions when Bren had called him, and “You absolutely promise me no shuttle flight,” had been his last.
No shuttle flight, Bren had assured Tom, and meant to hold to that. Tom having a heart attack was not in the program.
Tom using his considerable pull with certain contacts in the legislature and industry would be a major asset in getting the Asgard roadblock out of the way and dealt with—fairly, reasonably, and to the good of innocent parties.
And Ben—doing the groundwork on the Reunioner flights and the cargo drops—was a second major asset. Ben would make things work, down to the fine numbers.
“So,” Bren said, with the two of them in his sitting room, “you think you’ve got the thing tied down.”
“This is the essence of it,” Tom said. “I’ve talked to Asgard. They have two major concerns: their company’s reputation, and the financial commitment they’ve already made to that materials project. They’d like to recover their reputation regarding the deal. Their on-station manager is expendable in that context, but they think he offered fairly what the Reunioner asked for, in a hostile legal environment—namely Tillington’s administration—and if they’d done more than that, their manager believed it would have drawn attention to the man, put the papers in Tillington’s hands, and gotten the Reunioner nothing.”
“They do have an argument. In that light, are they willing to give a deposition against Tillington?”
“They might be persuaded. And it might not take much. They could work with Tillington, in the sense of getting rules bent. They’re going to miss that freedom but they’re not going to miss entertaining Tillington, and do they have information they’d be willing to impart? Yes. They’d like to keep that program, they’d like to keep their manager, and they’ll keep their commitment to the Reunioner they dealt with. They’ll give him a small research division to pursue what he was pursuing on Reunion and provide a scholarship for his son. The boy’s extremely bright, and deserving, and his field of study is right along their track. What they want is legitimization of the patent they dealt for.”
“Having the patents tied up in litigation doesn’t benefit anybody but the lawyers.”
“That’s my view. And there is a precedent for this: the Brightwater decision, back at the founding of Mospheira. Then it regarded ownership of certain knowledge brought down from Alpha. In the absence of ownership or patent, unique processes emanating from the original are patentable. If there are living owners, their rights are considered to be creator rights and must be compensated. But so must the rescuer of said knowledge. We can handle this. The companies will be very happy we’re settling this fast. And one judicial decree will legitimize the Reunioners’ claims with a minimum of litigation. With the Reunioner and Asgard in essential agreement, we can invoke Brightwater and legitimize any agreements regarding other properties.”
“Excellent,” Bren said.
“Tillington, however,” Ben said, “has proved a very slippery character. Gin can easily get him off the station, but she’s keeping pressure on him and his staff. They’re starting to tell tales on each other. And if we can get Asgard’s cooperation, we have him. Once we have him, we have the others.”
“He started out well,” Bren said regretfully. Which was true. Tillington had been a good administrator . . . until the meltdown.
He’d started with monumental ambition, wanted to refurbish the residency areas of the station—he’d tried to negotiate a larger share of materials from Lord Geigi’s mining operation, and with Geigi’s cooperation he’d managed to do some major restructuring and building.
But he’d had still bigger plans, among them that there’d be a human shuttle built in orbit, though the original treaty with the aishidi’tat had emphasized that atevi would provide the shuttles until essential goals were met.
They hadn’t gotten to that, when the ship had left on its mission to Reunion.
And when the crisis had come in the aishidi’tat, while the ship was absent, when Tabini had been temporarily overthrown and the shuttles had been grounded, depriving the station of supply—Tillington demanded the one atevi shuttle that was still aloft go into service to Mospheira.
Geigi had refused on the grounds Mospheira had no ability to service it, and that refusal had been a breaking point of the cooperation. Lord Geigi refused to cede critical materials, being set on his own plan to rescue the aishidi’tat, restore the atevi shuttle flights in the process—and letting Mospheira build its own shuttle on the ground . . . while Tillington had wanted to build his in orbit.
In the midst of that, the ship, feared lost, had come back—with Reunioners. Lots of Reunioners. Unloading them to Mr. Tillington’s side of the station had doubled the human population overnight, stressed supply, and overcrowded Mr. Tillington’s new facilities.
Atevi on the ground, meanwhile, had taken back their government. Tabini-aiji had come back into power and sent shuttles up with goods to relieve the station, and Mospheira had pushed ahead with their plans to launch a ground-built shuttle, a move that would make Mr. Tillington again just an appointed official.
Tillington’s half of the station meanwhile had had to be reconfigured for the new residents. Atevi had been too busy with their own recovery to assist anybody beyond sending up food and needed parts—and that, unfortunately, had been the tipping point for all manner of ills. Tillington’s under-the-table deals with the companies continued, and to keep Mospheirans from complaining, he’d shorted the Reunioners on services, backing an ill-conceived plan to move the Reunioners off to a new station construction, about the barren rock called Maudit.
He’d kept the Mospheirans happy, at the cost of serious hardship for the Reunioners and increasingly bad feelings on the station.
And then the kyo had shown up.
But the meltdown Tillington had had then was not the fracture of an otherwise good administrator faced with crisis. No, the dealings Gin had begun to uncover—coercion, favor-trading, and outright bribery—traced not to the arrival of the refugees, but back to the beginning of the supply crises.
“He started as a good manager,” Tom said. “But that wasn’t how he finished.”
“My fear is the Heritage Party will be campaigning on his side the minute he sets foot on the ground. I don’t know his mental state, but they might find use for him.”
“Maybe not,” Ben said. “Gin’s got five people in detention, and one staffer doing nothing but taking truth-readers on complaints and building a case, bribery, coercion, physical threats and intimidation, improper grant of licenses and payoffs in material goods, not just with one company and not just in the last few months. He may become far too hot to be useful to the Heritage Party.”
“Devoutly to be wished,” Bren said. Filing Intent? Among atevi, human biology didn’t qualify him to make that call. But he had had that dark thought. He had indeed had it, in Tillington’s case, and, however briefly, up there, he’d been a position to do it. He hadn’t, for which he was glad—now.
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