Destroyer (37 page)

“Very good,” he murmured. “Ever so good, Banichi-ji.” And he went straight to sleep.

 

There were, indeed, clothes in the morning. The staff had even darned a small rip and drawn in the pulled threads where thorns and brush had snagged his coat. The shirt was bleached white, the modest lace was immaculately starched, his boots were polished, and even the white ribbon for his queue was washed and pressed despite its frays and snags, not to mention there were clean stockings and linen. Bren dressed himself as far as the shirt, but getting the hair braided properly and ribboned was a difficult operation even if he were less stiff.

“Here,” Tano said. “Let me do it, nandi.”

“Bren,” he said decisively. “One wishes the staff would always call me more familiarly, in private, Tano-ji, if it would not distress you.”

“It would by no means distress us,” Tano said. And quick, deft plaiting secured the braid, with its ribbon. With a pat on his shoulder, Tano pronounced him fit for public appearance.

Staff’s uniforms were fit, everything done to perfection, everyone feeling very much better, it was certain, after a night’s sleep and clean clothing. Even the stiffness was somewhat abated this morning—it still warranted sitting a little gingerly, but not so much as before.

A servant appeared, with a formal message scroll, an invitation to breakfast on the terrace.

“I have no means to reply in kind,” Bren answered the servant, “but advise your lord I shall be there, and I thank him for his gracious invitation.”

Message cylinder. One small item he had neglected to pack. He’d left it—the mind jolted between worlds—in the bowl on the table in his quarters aboard
Phoenix.
Staff had packed it. It must be in his apartment on station. He was very loath to lose it.

And if he was taking up brain cells mourning lost personal items, he knew he was dodging thinking about what he was going to do downstairs. Nervous about the meeting? Oh, not a little. He had had no report yet from Jago. He caught himself pacing while Banichi restored a number of arcane items to his jacket’s inner pockets and then to the hollow seam of his right boot.

Odd, he thought, as the small pile of strange objects diminished. As long as they’d been together, he’d never seen the whole array. It was curious, some of the pieces, though the uses for almost invisible wire were disturbing to think of.

A rap at the door. Jago’s signal. Thank God. Algini let her in, and she had fared as well, clean and polished, as immaculate as she might walk the halls of the Bujavid.

“Nandi.” A bow. “Nadiin.”

“How did it go, Jago-ji?”

A slight glance at the ceiling, warning they might be overheard, far from surprising in a modern great house, and not, reasonably, in this one. “The conference last night was interesting,” Jago said, her eyes sparkling. “Lord Tatiseigi, nadiin-ji, firmly believes the aiji is alive.”

Indeed astonishing that Tatiseigi should say so, when he had everything to gain by hiding that belief—if he entertained personal ambitions of supplanting Tabini with a young and pliant Cajeiri. Maybe the old reprobate was in fact on the up and up. Maybe Ilisidi had gotten good behavior out of him.

Maybe there were motives he hadn’t thought of.

Damn, it was altogether what he’d tried to avoid doing, immersing himself in possibilities before listening to what might be going on at the breakfast table.

“What did the dowager say to that supposition, Jago-ji?”

“That she would not tell Cajeiri until there is something certain.”

“Cajeiri did not attend last night?”

“No. He dined in, with his staff, and Nawari.”

He approved of Ilisidi’s caution. Atevi or human, the boy had feelings for his father and mother, and sending them soaring and then crashing on every tidbit of news was not good, not at all good for an adult, let alone an eight-year-old.

“Does our host say where Tabini-aiji is?” Banichi asked.

Jago put her hands in her jacket pockets, with another cautionary glance at the ceiling. “Nand’ Tatiseigi maintains that the aiji sent Mercheson-paidhi ahead of him to Mogari-nai. He followed her route as far as the coast, then when it was attacked, returned to Taiben, then here.”

Exactly as the Taibeni had said—except the detail about Tabini coming back to Tirnamardi.

“He and Damiri-daja stayed here three days, with certain staff, and then two staffers left, and all the rest of them left shortly after. There has been no word since. The aiji did not say where he was going, nadiin.”

“One would not expect it,” Banichi said. “Nor should we discuss our opinions of his whereabouts under this roof.”

“Indeed,” Jago said. They were speaking for eaves-droppers’ consumption. Listening devices. Jago had confirmed it, and she might well be the one of the team carrying electronic means of knowing for sure. Tatiseigi favored antiquated lighting—but this said nothing about Guild members in the household, who, one reasonably presumed, would not use centuries-old equipment.

But this news—this news, if it was true and even if Tatiseigi only believed it to be true—this affected how they dealt with the old man, and the turns things might now take. He was keenly aware that he himself had become an issue, because of his advice to Tabini, and that it was likely a very hot issue under this roof. He personally had two choices, as he saw it—personally absorb the blame for everything Tabini had done, which left Tabini looking weak and reliant on bad advice—or vindicate himself, and thereby vindicate Tabini in the eyes of a lord who had voted against the space program, decried the shift in economy, hated modern technology, human culture, foreigners in general, and had taken a position in those regards, publicly and loudly, for years.

“Would it be possible,” he said to his staff, putting the final touches on his lace cuffs, “rather than us trying to go personally to Shejidan, for us to urge members of nand’ Tatiseigi’s staff to go for us, and notify the Guild that we are intent on reaching them—even ask them to put a hold on Guild actions until we can arrive?”

It was a legal question, on one side of the coin. It was a question of lordly opinion on the other, as to whether Tatiseigi would honestly cooperate with an effort on Tabini’s behalf—and, presumably, Damiri’s.

“It would be technically possible,” Banichi said, “legally possible. Tatiseigi certainly has standing in the question, as a relative.”

“It might save lives,” Tano said. “Through them, we might obtain a safe conduct for the paidhi. If he asked that, it might work.”

“Saving our own lives, among others,” Jago said.

“The Guild, debating its course of action,” Banichi said, “is only doing so as a subterfuge. They wish not to support Murini as legitimate, not to support Tabini-aiji either, until questions are resolved. They will debate, at all hours of session, if someone has to stand and recite poetry to continue the flow of words—as I imagine they must have read several volumes in by now. All this is a way of remaining neutral, and it will be impossible for them to dissolve the session until they can vote one way or the other, if the question has been put—they will be reasonably anxious to find some resolution. The traitors have not persuaded them to end debate, and one suspects that now the Kadigidi themselves are urgently raising their offers and making promises they would not make otherwise, ceding portions of their authority to the Guild—which the Guild seems to have been wise enough to ignore. If we convince them to send for the paidhi to testify, this would represent a break of a sort ominous for the other side. They might try to do something about it, at very, very great risk of offending the Guild.”

Bren asked, out of his own musings: “Might Tabini himself have asked them to stalemate, knowing he could not carry the vote until we came back?”

Banichi thought about that. So did all his staff. “It would certainly be a canny move,” Banichi said. “His own staff has evidently taken a heavy strike. It would have impaired his ability to take direct action. Worse, he may have suspected treachery from the inside.”

Who, possibly, would be a traitor on Tabini’s staff? Bren asked himself, and dared not ask aloud, nor did Banichi’s glance at the peripheries of the room encourage another question—not in the very house that was most suspect. If there had been treachery, he would lay odds it would never be one of the men who’d been with Tabini forever, not those Guild members born into his man’chi. No. It had to be someone who’d come into the household from outside. Staff acquisitions were rare.

Except—except most of Tabini’s own original staff were male. A lady needed female staff; Ilisidi’s preference for ‘her young men’ was the scandalous exception, since her husband’s death, since she had achieved the status of aiji-dowager, and moved in staff from Malguri, and gave not a damn for propriety.

Damiri’s staff, on the other hand, was Atageini and, proper to a lady, female. Staff from her own home, persons close to her, had come with her when she married Tabini . . . Bindanda, of his own staff, was one of the handful Tatiseigi had sent, and he knew it, and by now he was sure Bindanda knew he knew . . .

And, God, if only, he thought, if only the dish at Mogari-nai were up, and Bindanda were able to report to Tatiseigi his experiences directly—things might be much easier.

But as for spies in Tabini’s house, and ways information might have flowed, and those by whom a lethal strike might have been organized—-This house, this province, had bordered the Kadigidi since medieval times. And who knew how many and how deep the cross-connections of all sorts that had grown between Atageini and Kadigidi, over centuries?

That certainly wasn’t a topic he wanted to raise where they might be overheard.

It could mean Tatiseigi himself was in danger, a life the Kadigidi could take at any time, a life preserved from assassination in the specific hope he would serve as a magnet for intrigue, and maybe in the hope he might be a lure to draw Tabini in. Their coming here, their welcome, could tilt a delicate balance.

Tatseigi had not apparently suffered any Kadigidi attack here, even when Tabini had been here—if he had, it would surely have made conversation last night, in Jago’s hearing. Which could also mean that the conspirators had not been able to get a spy back into this house from Shejidan in time to advise them of Tabini’s presence here, before he was gone again.

Or—it could mean that the initial coup that took Tabini from power had Atageini fingerprints somewhere around the edges of it, and things were not so safe here as they seemed. He could not believe that Tatiseigi would have ceded political control to an upstart like Murini. He could not believe Lady Damiri herself would ever have betrayed Tabini—in the machimi, betrayal from a previously well-disposed spouse was absolutely classic, but she had no motive, and her man’chi to her great-uncle had always been more a case of exasperated tolerance—her parents were dead, her great-uncle was her clan head, and she had been his ward, which had put her in constant contention with the old man as she reached her majority—and her own more modern opinions.

Besides, Damiri being the mother of the heir, and factually outstripping her uncle in power in the nation at large, she had no motive to strike at the very power she shared with Tabini . . .

No motive, that was, unless she had taken violent offense at Tabini shipping their child out on a starship, to be thoroughly taught and indoctrinated by his conservative great-grandmother Ilisidi on the way.

Had Tabini even consulted her in that move? He would have believed Tabini would not act without her, on that matter, but—

Tatiseigi, on the other hand—dismissing treachery originating from Cajeiri’s mother—Tatiseigi had a massive array of unsatisfied ambitions, and a family history of desire for rule. His surest path to power logically involved setting Cajeiri in power in Shejidan, and that was already the appointed succession, if Tabini only stayed in power, and it was nowhere in the picture if Murini established his own line. Tatiseigi’s other concerns must involve keeping Damiri from supplanting him inside the clan—which she had never pressed to do, likely having no wish to be encumbered by clan affairs and a populace which shared its lord’s attitudes toward technology.

As to whether Tabini’s sending the boy off to space would have particularly alienated Tatiseigi, one had to consider that Tatiseigi had far rather see the boy under Ilisidi’s conservative tutelage than in Tabini’s, Tabini-aiji notoriously promoting one Bren Cameron to extravagant office, and accepting everything modern, with sudden extra-terrestrial ambitions.

But . . . but . . . but. Tatiseigi had hosted Tabini here since the overthrow, and hadn’t killed him, or Damiri.

Which circled back to Damiri’s reasons.

Atevi didn’t marry for life, not often; but those two had always seemed so apt, so close and permanent a pair—and to have relinquished their son for a particularly formative couple of years . . .

Never mind that the paidhi, who was now persona non grata most everywhere that had once approved him, if he read the signs, had also had a hand in the boy’s teaching. Tatiseigi would have been happy enough believing Ilisidi was in charge of the boy—but not at all happy considering the boy was also under the paidhi’s instruction.

Damn it. His stomach was upset. He didn’t want to consider Cajeiri’s mother among the suspects, but had to, for self-preservation, because it
was
absolutely classic; and considering where they lodged at the moment, he didn’t want to suspect Tatiseigi of being in on it, or of lying when he said Tabini was alive.

Most likely suspect in any treason, Atageini servants: he certainly couldn’t rule out one of Damiri’s maids as the infiltrator, likely someone who was secretly Guild, and likely someone with some still more secret man’chi to the Kadigidi that had somehow deceived first Tatiseigi’s, then Tabini’s very canny staff, for years and years. That would have meant there had been a traitor on Tatiseigi’s staff even before Murini, even back before the traitor Direiso’s tenure over the Kadigidi . . . because assuredly nobody with a taint could get in afterward.