He bumped Jago hard when, at a landing, they reached an abrupt stop. He couldn’t see, couldn’t catch his breath, everything gone to tunnel vision. He heard Cajeiri ask him was he all right, and he couldn’t get breath enough to answer, only bent, leaning on a safety rail, the computer a leaden weight on his shoulder, but he had it, he had the heavy pistol in his pocket—that had not fallen out; and Cajeiri patted his back, exhorting him to breathe.
Then Jago’s free arm came around him, warm leather, great strength, absolute concern. He managed to straighten his back, then to get the edges of a real breath and center his haze of vision on an open door.
Tabini and his guard occupied that doorway. There were figured carpets in clear light. Paneled walls. He didn’t know precisely what floor it was, but maybe the first of the residential levels, above that of the courts and the legislature. He heard shots, somewhere down that hall, thought incongruously, hazily, of that fragile paneling.
“We are in, Bren-ji,” Jago said, heaving at him. “One is sure the aiji’s forces are ahead of us.”
Beat and beat and beat. The heart had survived it. Cajeiri was safe. Bren flung his other arm around Cajeiri’s shoulders, and Cajeiri’s came about his heaving ribcage, and there was nothing for it but to walk, Jago with her rifle at the ready.
They passed the door. And there, blessed sight, Banichi stood, rifle in hand, and Algini next to him, giving directions, waving them down what was, yes, the first level corridor, a place of priceless handwoven runners, carved plinths supporting ancient porcelains.
“We are clearing the upper floors, nandi,” Banichi said. “The adherents of the Kadagidi have not generally stayed to meet us.”
Bren wanted to sit down on the spot. His legs all but tried to do so on their own, but he locked his knees and kept his feet under him. “Very good,” he managed to say, the first thing he had gotten out of his throat. He had no sight of Tabini or his guard at the moment. Jago drew him on down the hall, with Cajeiri, until they reached a small conversational area, with an incongruous bouquet of flowers in a low vase on a table, everything kabiu, everything in meticulous order, as a rattle of shots went off somewhere down the hall.
He didn’t sit down. He thought if he should sit down, he wouldn’t get up. He stood leaning against the paneled wall, his eyes darting in the direction of the gunfire, which had ceased.
Jago watched that direction, too, and all others, until a Guild Assassin trotted down the corridor toward them, with no hostile intent evident.
“We have the lifts,” that woman said, and Jago made a move with her rifle, signaling they should go now.
They jogged back the way the woman had come, down past the door they had used, and on around the corner. The majority of their party was there, Tabini in the lead.
And shots exploded off the wall in a shower of plaster and stone fragments. Bren began to reach for his gun, but a body hit him and Cajeiri at once, a black leather jacket up against his face, his back against the wall, Cajeiri next to him: Jago had covered them both, and he felt her body jolt hard, heard an intake of breath.
“Jago-ji!”
She spun about against them and let off a burst of fire, her muscles jumping to the recoil of the gun she held one-handed. Then the pressure of her weight let up. She stood rock-solid, facing back down the corridor, and now, Bren was able to see, other Guildsmen had taken off back the way they had come, to secure it against any advance.
“Jago, you were hit.”
“Bruised, nandi.” She swung about and herded them both into a position sheltered from the corners. Tabini had moved to cover them. The armor inside the jackets, Bren thought. Thank God.
Then Tano showed up in the hall from which they had come, waving an all-clear, and stances relaxed all around. Tabini came back to see to his son, to offer Jago a nod of appreciation which she received tight-lipped, with a bow.
“The Kadagidi staff has asked to remain in their premises, aiji-ma,” one of the Guild reported. “They will admit our personnel as far as the foyer, and plead they have had no contact with their authority and cannot withdraw.”
An unenviable position. Bren feared for his own people.
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 business…
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 state…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. There were too many for the single desk. A second table was found, sufficient to hold the rest of them; and in all of this, the first secretary, writing furiously to catch up, made records of the names and house of everyone who had come to the audience, the hour, the date, the vital numbers.
An old man presented himself, a senior servant of the Bu-javid itself, who offered his devotion to the aiji and wished to restore a sense of kabiu to the place, and wished to move the skewed carpet in the middle of the hall, of all things, its pattern again to run toward the steps, as it had tended.
“No, nadi, with all appreciation,” Tabini said from above. It was as if the old servant had wanted to build a wall at the base of the steps. “But place it about. Full about, if you will.”
Not keeping the presence that had come in from departing, nor yet lying as a barrier, but reversing the flow of the room, allowing what came in from the door to flow up to the dais, the reverse of what had always existed there. Even the paidhi had no trouble understanding that gesture. The crowd moved back and even lordly hands applied themselves to straightening that ancient, priceless runner, aiming its knotted-silk patterns from the door toward the dais.
In a moment more, a handful of other servants had brought in bare branches of the season, and vases of seasonal pattern, and tables stolen from the halls. Two more servants, from some deep and untouched storeroom, had found Ragi banners, red and black, and brought them to stand in their places, while others took down the Kadagidi colors.
“Unstaff and fold them,” was the aiji’s declaration. “They are the Kadagidi’s banners, not Murini’s. Send them to the Kadagidi. They may bring them back to this hall again.”
A little stunned silence followed that quiet statement, like the shock after an explosion, and Bren did not so much as blink, though his mind raced, and he wondered if the Kadagidi would accept that gift—their banners returned to them without remark and undamaged. That not Murini’s declared, seemingly, that if the Kadagidi could free themselves of Murini’s leadership, they would find their way back to the grace of the Ragi aiji.
No reprisals. No general purge of clan leadership.
Nothing, either, so gracious or politically convenient for the Kadagidi as the aiji himself executing the culprit and taking on the onus of a feud. The Kadagidi clan itself had a choice: To take measures, or find itself at extreme disadvantage in the restored aijinate—even at war with the aiji’s growing authority, which looked to be more solid than before the trouble.
No, it was not as gentle as it sounded at first blush. It forced a very, very uncomfortable decision on the Kadagidi.
Would they kill their own kinsman? Exile him? Break man’chi? The little silence that had followed that remark had perhaps understood that situation at gut level, a good deal faster than a human brain could reason its way through the matter, but likely enough, Bren thought, even atevi had had to think about it a heartbeat or two.
And the reaction among the Kadagidi would be split—split right down the dividing line of factions that surrounded any provincial power, those favoring this and that policy, this and that way of managing clan affairs. There was always another side to any clan-aiji’s rule, and this little statement reached right in with a scalpel and cut certain taut threads within the Kadagidi clan itself.
Not gentle, no. Likely to have bloodshed, not all over the country, but specifically right within the very halls to which Murini’s flight might now be taking him. Let that statement go out over the airwaves, as it surely had gone through Guildsmen present, to the Guild authority, whatever it was at the moment—Tabini-aiji, reputed for sharp decisions, was back in business.
And something had clearly happened inside the Guild, among all those delicate threads of man’chi held in precise tension, among Guild of various houses and districts. Guild black was prominent here, weapons in hands, weapons supporting Tabini-aiji.
From general paralysis of the Guild, change had happ
ened catastrophically, from the moment Guild authority had moved in on Tatiseigi’s estate—drawing a lethal reaction from high-up Assassins in Tabini’s company, possibly in Ilisidi’s guard, and—a fact which still stunned him, but which was very logical—possibly a very high one inserted into the paidhi’s household. Assassins continually in the field, his, and Tabini’s, and Ilisidi’s—met a company of Guild officers who must have thought themselves the best, the most elite, likely equipped with the latest in surveillance and weaponry on the planet, arrived to carry out a very surgical strike—and they just hadn’t moved as outrageously, as fast, as the field agents. Arrogance had expected Tatiseigi was underequipped, and hadn’t reckoned on the heavy weapons and explosives Tatiseigi’s house had accumulated over the years, in its proximity to Kadagidi provocations. Tatiseigi’s antique equipage and old-fashioned notions had doubtless occasioned scorn and derision in the Guild, and despair in his own staff. But a shed full of explosives, as one could easily imagine existed in a rural, forest-edge estate, where the occasional stump had to be removed. (Had the aiji not wanted such caches registered, in those early, innocent years, when they were blasting roadway for the rail? And had not the lords turned very secretive about what they had, what they insisted they needed for themselves?) Lord Tatiseigi’s store, had been, perhaps, just a little excessive for stumps…
One could certainly imagine that train of events, at least, creating a very shockingly effective resource to deploy in general defense—God knew, Tatiseigi could understand blunt-force explosives. And his own staff had brought in items the planet-bound Guild had never seen. Arrogance met spaceborn technology, was what.
And met Guild members who hadn’t been present for whatever underhanded maneuver had set Gegini in a position of authority.
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