Pretender

  Cajeiri moved to rise as he did, oversetting a water glass, which Jago’s lightning reflexes rescued as the boy scrambled for his feet. His bodyguard jumped up with him.

  “At this moment,” Bren said, “my company is not the most auspicious for your own introduction to the Guild, young sir. First impressions are difficult to overcome.”

  The jaw halfway set. But there was a sensible worry on that brow, too. “So the Guild is the paidhi’s enemy, like my great-grandfather?”

  “Now, you must not speak ill of your Ajuri relations or the Guild either, young sir.”

  “You rescued the kyo! You saved all the humans! You brought us home!”

  “That we did, young sir, but we have to have their confidence to tell them those things.”

  “Then they are fools!” Cajeiri said. “And if they can speak to my father, so can I.”

  Dared one say the paidhi felt control of the situation slipping though his fingers? It was not only history and diction the boy had learned from his great-grandmother.

  “Patience, patience,” he said. “Reconnoiter. Has Banichi taught you that word?”

  “Cenedi did. We are quite cognizant of the word.”

  “One very much advises meekness and modesty in front of the Guild,” Bren said, hoping to nip that pert attitude in the bud. “Leave policy to your father and do not limit his resources by presenting him with a difficult situation.”

  A deep sigh. “I am not aiji yet.” Clearly another Ilisidi quote. “But one will not permit them to lie. Timani and Adaro are my mother’s servants. And they can tell her things.”

  That can tell was a drop of caution in a burgeoning sea of regal indignation: Cajeiri had not blurted everything out, not about the problem with Tabini’s guards; he had not taken his usual tack and made things irrevocable—a breathtaking prudence, when one considered what damning things the boy could blurt out.

  “One doubts they will have time to do so, young sir, nor may they wish to be put in that position. But you are not aiji. Nor will you ever be, nor perhaps will your father be by morning, if this encounter with the Guild goes wrong. Caution and prudence, one begs you. Information is life, here.” Timani, whose ears were doubtless burning, was utterly deadpan through this—he had brought a change of coats, a considerable finery that had likely been cloth on a bolt as late as this afternoon, and stood with it in his hands, distressed. “Thank you, nadi,” Bren said, and put one arm in, then the other, while Cajeiri stood silent and brimming over with things bubbling up inside him.

  The coat was deepest purple shading to red in a serpentine, shining brocade, a finer coat than the lace on his shirt could possibly do justice, and he could only wonder how the servants had put this together in a handful of hours, or whether Tatiseigi might recognize the fabric as not a very petty theft.

  “Extraordinary,” he murmured, by way of appreciation as Timani brushed down the sleeves.

  “It fits, nandi?”

  “Very well, nadi.” With a little adjustment of the cuffs, while the maidservant, Adaro, adjusted his queue past the collar. “Excellent.” He was shaken by the boy’s little outburst, knowing what a desperate pass they had come to down there, and how he was going to have to defy Tabini’s dismissal, at least to appear in the vicinity. But he felt, at least, the equal of any lord down there, as flashy, in this mode, as Tabini was deliberately martial. The aiji was completely out of the fashion wars that meant psychological advantage, and remarkable in the statement he did make—but for his part, no ateva wanted to give way in argument to a peer who looked like a rag-bin. It was core of the court mentality. It was like a suit of armor, this purple-red coat.

  He drew in a deep breath. “And the young gentleman?” he asked Timani.

  “Mani-ma has my best clothes in her closet, nand’ paidhi,” Cajeiri said, unasked. One saw the boy was upset, that rash behavior was very near the surface and wanted calming.

  “Then we had better find them, had we not, and get you down to your great-grandmother?”

  Pointed remark. Cajeiri’s pupils widened, a little jolt of comprehension that this was a very adult game from which he was not excluded.

  “Nandi.” From Algini, a sober look.

  “Is there a difficulty?” he asked.

  “One has heard a name,” Algini said, with reference to that com device in his ear. “Gegini.”

  Jago shot Banichi a look, a decided look.

  “Who is he?” Bren asked, and Banichi, with a glance at Algini and back, grimaced. “One can hardly name names,” Banichi said, “but if the Guild has moved from neutrality, clearly this visitation is not one according to your wishes, Bren-ji, or in response to your letter.”

  That was three times around the same corner and no direct information. “Are you saying this arrival could be a Kadagidi expedition, brazening it into the house? A lie, nadiin-ji?”

  “Oh, they would be official, at highest level, under Guild seal,” Banichi said.

  “The question is, always,” Algini said, “what is the state of affairs within the Guild, and does Gegini have a right to that seal?”

  “Would this be notice of a Filing, do you think?”

  “Or outright illegal conduct,” Algini said. “Such action is a possibility, Bren-ji. This is not a man the Guildmaster we know would send. We are by no means sure the Guildmaster we know is alive. This man is acting and speaking as if he were Guildmaster.”

  Looks passed among his security. Timani and Adaro had left or, one thought, that name Algini had named and the details Algini referred to might never have come out; the name itself, Gegini, meant nothing to his ears, except it was a name not that uncommon in the Padi Valley.

  A new power within the Assassins’ Guild, someone his staff knew, and did not favor? Someone Tano and Algini had been tracking in their absence from the world?

  The Guild, in new hands?

  He had been accustomed to thinking of that Guild above all others as unassailable in its integrity and unmatched in its outright power. It operated inside every great house on the continent, though its individual members had man’chi to the houses and their lords.

  But with power over half the civilized world at issue, clearly anything could change if the side favoring Murini had quietly slipped poison into a teacup. His staff, hedging the secrecy of their own Guild, was giving him strong hints about an entity his space-based staff particularly knew from the inside, in all its hidden parts…a name, moreover, that meant something to Banichi and Jago.

  “Maybe you should not go down there at all, young gentleman,” Bren said directly to Cajeiri, and saw the boy go from wide-eyed absorption of the situation, and a little confusion, to jut-lipped disapproval of the order in a heartbeat. “In the sense that you should preserve a politic distance from me and my doings, young sir, perhaps you should not be here, either.”

  “Then I should be sitting with mani-ma downstairs,” Cajeiri said, “and she will not tolerate bad behavior. My bodyguard can escort me down by myself. And no one will stop me at the door.”

  All eyes turned to the paidhi for the ultimate decision in this political arena. And the best advice seemed to come from the eight-year-old.

  At least moving Cajeiri downstairs while his staff moved his baggage back to Ilisidi’s suite would put him under Cenedi’s protection, not to mention Ilisidi’s, leaving no trace of the boy’s evening sojourn here. Ilisidi in particular was, it always had to be reckoned, an easterner, from that most tenuously attached half of the aishidi’tat, and the eastern half of the continent was a force that had to be reckoned with cautiously—very cautiously. In any general upheaval, Ilisidi stood a real chance of being among the few left standing, if her staff could move quickly enough.

  “Never mind your coat, young sir. Take mine. Go.”

  “But—”

  “I shall manage, young sir.” He shed it, and with his own hands held it out for the boy.

  The purple coat was a fair fit, even if Cajeiri was growing bro
ader in the shoulders. Bren took Cajeiri’s plain day-wear in its place, a fine coat, nonetheless, a pale green brocade that just happened to be in the Atageini shade, while the purple and red was very well in color key with the Ragi colors: It was dark, it was dramatic, and if the seams held up, it lent a handsome boy an extremely princely look in a time of crisis and threat.

  He straightened Cajeiri’s collar himself, the servant’s role, and looked the boy squarely in the eyes as he did so. “Be canny. Judge the room ever so carefully before you walk in. If Cenedi or Nawari is not at the door, or if things look wrong, come back up the stairs immediately. If things go very wrong down there, and you have to get away, figure to get outside and get back to the window here or upstairs to our door—do not use the servant passages if that has to be the choice: They will surely guard them first. But do not forget the knock. Do not for a moment forget the knock. Do you understand me clearly, young sir?”

  “One understands, nand’ paidhi.” Cajeiri was entirely sober and attentive, young eyes wide and, for the first time, truly frightened.

  “If you have to run outdoors,” Jago said, “remember there will be other Guild with night-scopes. They can see you in the dark.”

  “If you must escape, Bren-ji,” Banichi said, “escape outside. Never mind the baggage. We will stay by you and the young gentleman.”

  If things went wrong down there, getting the heir away became a goal worth any risk, any sacrifice, not just for the continuity of Ragi rule on the continent, but for the stability of government that had to deal with the kyo when they arrived—everything hung on either Tabini or his son surviving. “You have no other job, if things go badly, young sir, except to use your head and to get yourself to safety. That is how you help your staff, by helping them help you. Go. Quickly now.”

  The boy cast a look at his own young staff and headed for the door.

  And stopped, with a scared look back.

  “Defenses are down now,” Tano said. “Go.”

  A quick study. Bren never doubted that. It was why he placed his hopes in the boy.

  And if the boy came running hellbent back up here, with Cenedi not where he was supposed to be—all of them might have to take the window route.

  “The Guild will have made more than one approach to the house,” Banichi said. “There will be the delegation, and observers that we will not see, Jago is quite right. They will likely have been here before the delegation. And possibly within the house.”

  “As simply so as contacting an amenable Guild agent on a given staff,” Jago added, leading one to wonder, not for the first time during the years he had dealt with these particular Guild members, if there were agents who worked directly for the Guild planted in key houses throughout the aishidi’tat.

  He didn’t ask. He had become privy to enough Guild secrets as it was, information that didn’t make him confident of their situation at the moment. If, as Banichi hinted, the Guild had just become a player in this game, if the old Guildmaster had gone down, and if rules were all suspended, then what the Guild could do was extensive, and extreme, and bloody.

  And not on their side. Not even neutral any longer. They could be walking down there to hear a Filing against Tabini. And if that was the case, they had to listen and let these people walk out safely.

  Deep breath. He straightened his own queue, which had gotten crushed under his collar. He was, he decided, as dressed as he could get. “Time for us to go,” he said, and cast a look at Jago, at Banichi, then at Tano and Algini. “The boy,” he said, “nadiin, should anything happen that seems to require it, any one of you take him somewhere, and the rest of us do not ask to know where that would be. We will find one another.”

  “Yes,” Tano said, agreeing to back up Algini, that partnership working together, and that was that, as Bren headed out the door with Banichi and Jago.

  Out into an otherwise quiet hallway. The boy had gone downstairs, and at least there was no uproar from below. Bren walked calmly, quietly toward the stairs, with Banichi and Jago, one on each side of him—walked toward what he had asked for, in one sense, with his letter to the Guild—but he very much doubted now that it was what had brought this mission to Tirnamardi.

  He took his cue from Banichi and Jago and kept his brain entirely in present tense, in the moment, his eyes scanning recesses and alert to any move. He had one fleeting inner imagination of the Guild officers, inbound, diverting attention with a small dispute at the front door while a different, more stealthy approach came up through the scattered camps—everyone out there, however nervous, would tend to assume that a stranger walking through their camp was just some stranger from an allied village or that an inbound bus weaving its way across the lawn was part of the Dur contingent, never mind that it unloaded heavy weapons among its baggage.

  Was he scared at that moment? Oh, not half.

  Down the steps next to the foyer, where the workmen who had been hammering away at the doors stood idle amid lumber and their scaffolding, looking confused and doubtful as to whether they ought to take up their work again.

  “Have you seen strangers from the Guild, nadiin?” Banichi asked them.

  Several hands pointed silently and solemnly toward the drawing room. Bodyguards were no longer in evidence at the door. They had all drawn into the room, it seemed, indicating a prudent move to protect the lords who held their man’chi not from some external threat, this time, but from the high officers of the Guild itself, and some shift in policy that immediately concerned them.

  “Come in with me,” Bren said, “nadiin-ji.”

  He started to touch the door, hesitated, just that heartbeat of doubt, but Banichi and Jago, who were wired and doubtless reading those devices and signals they had not used in two years, simultaneously put out hands and opened both the double doors.

  It was a dramatic, two-door entrance, to be sure. Every eye turned. The weapon hand of every bodyguard in the room moved.

  And stayed and relaxed, as they recognized him.

  Cajeiri had gotten a seat next to his mother. New arrivals stood in the middle of the half arc of chairs, men and women in Guild black and silver, a grim, tall old man who did not look at him, and his two bodyguards, whose gold eyes locked on the intrusion for one paralytic moment. Smooth as a well-oiled machine and deadly: The older Guild, rarely seen, was like that.

  “Nandi,” Bren said, as the old man slowly swung a look toward him and as one of the old man’s guard looked, machinelike, toward the assembled lords. That was the address appropriate for a newly arrived Guild official, and Bren gave a careful, measured bow to the old man.

  “Paidhi-aiji,” Tabini said. “Come sit.”

  That shocked him. Scared him, in fact. Tabini made a point, made a defiant statement in that invitation, in fact, in a morass of political quicksand, and with his guard behind him and these Guild strangers in front. Bren felt his heart skip, covered his shock as smoothly as he could, and went to sit where Tabini pointed, as servants managed to insert a chair between Tabini and the dowager.

  Don’t do this, he would have fervently advised Tabini. Don’t make statements that you might have to deny before sunrise. But one did not hesitate at the aiji’s order, not when it was so deliberately, so knowingly given.

  Cajeiri, he noted, kept a stone face to the whole proceedings. The boy’s chair was on his mother’s left, between her and the Ajuri, and Cajeiri’s two young guards stood behind his chair as if they were Guild—if there was anyone in the room whose position was less enviable than the paidhi-aiji’s, it had to be those two brave youngsters, facing senior Guild who would take a dim view of anyone intruding on Guild prerogatives.

  Bren sat. He did not turn his head to see, but a faint sound declared Banichi and Jago were taking their positions behind his chair.

  A minor disruption. “We have begun inquiry into the Ragi clan request,” the old Guildsman resumed his statement. “We have come here to gather evidence.”

  “One comes damned late,
nandi.” From Tabini. And in no conciliatory tone. “Honest members of your own guild are dead in this delay.”

  “We are here at the right time,” the old man said in a soft voice, and his golden eyes shifted subtly until they stared straight at Bren, cold and terrible. That gaze went on to Ilisidi, and last of all to Tatiseigi, on Ilisidi’s far side. “You have called Council, nandi,” the old man said at last, directly to Tatiseigi. “You claim a complaint against a neighboring clan. You have appealed to the Guild. We are here.”

  “I have a justified complaint!” Tatiseigi said, rising with more alacrity than the old gentleman usually managed. “Damage to these premises, a national treasure. Kadagidi have attacked non-Guild on our land, when we have done them no injury at all! You have seen the ruin of our foyer!”

  “The Kadagidi likewise have a complaint against the Atageini,” the Guildsman said, “in your fomenting rebellion and dissent against the aiji who now sits in Shejidan.”

  “They dare say so!” Tatiseigi fairly frothed at the mouth. “There was absolutely no cause for this assault, less for the damage to a historic house! We were at no time involved in any political cause, nor has our clan!”

  “You host the former aiji. This is provocative.”

  “Think twice,” Tabini said ominously. “Murini does not exist. And we visit this house in the name of the aishidi’tat, which is not dissolved, and which does not release the Guild from its contract. Show me any signing to the contrary.”

  The Guildsman’s mouth opened, his brows contracted, and then, perhaps, perhaps—what he would have said failed to find exit. “We do not carry such papers about. And the Ragi lord’s claim to Sheijidan has been judged by the citizenry of Shejidan, judged and dismissed.”

  “We have no need for debate,” Tabini said. “But while this house keeps records, we will state our position. Kadagidi have attacked my underage son, tried to visit murder on this house, of another clan, and we intervened while the Guild sat paralyzed and debating in Shejidan over decrees from a Kadagidi who has no authority, no man’chi, and lacks the mandate.”