Not mentioning there was no particular reluctance to commit assassination under one’s own roof.
Right now they had only Taiben’s advice, predicated on Taiben’s devotedly favorable opinion of the fallen regime. This… this would be the less pleasing side of the matter. Especially as regarded the paidhi-aiji and his influence.
Tatiseigi had gotten in. The car awkwardly executed a turn, mangling a shrub in the process, and lumbered off down the road.
“I wish to try to convince this gentleman, Jago-ji. I wonder if I can do it.”
“Easier to move a mountain,” was Jago’s grim judgement. The man was notorious in the senate and elsewhere as the stiffest-necked, most hidebound lord in the west.
“We shall get the truth from this lord at least,” he said. “And if it should be a hard truth, so much the better for my pursuing it here, under the dowager’s auspices. I doubt he will poison me in her company.”
“One believes she would take strong offense,” Jago said, not at her happiest. “One hopes this is the case, Bren-ji.”
“Be easy, nadi, no matter what he says to me. I shall be glad to hear anything the lord wants to say to me, no matter how insulting, no matter how wrong. How else shall I understand what people think?”
“Indeed,” Jago muttered, not happy with the notion. “The same with his staff, nandi. We shall learn what we can, and politely tolerate what we would never tolerate. Shall we tell others of our Guild, if they ask, the things we have seen, the reasons for our actions?”
It was worth not a moment of consideration. “Yes,” he said. It was what they had to do, ultimately, and the Guild on Tatiseigi’s staff would ask those who had dealt with them. The Guild in Shejidan would need to know, above all else, and they would gather information on a situation—they would constantly gather information, and it needed to be consistent at every level.
They followed the car, no more rapidly than they had formerly ridden, and over the second hill the house itself came into view, lights gleaming through the rain.
House: fortress, rather, not quite in the sense that Malguri was a fortress, of a much older origin, but the Atageini stronghold, Tirnamardi, was a white limestone sprawl of wings and towers, some of which might have snipers at the windows, in such anxious times. The building dated from the age of gunpowder, and even had a cannon or two about the premises, which, he had heard, still fired on festive occasions, and once in the last thirty years, in a territorial dispute with Taiben, making a point, if doing harm only to a tree or two.
The old lord, disdaining modernity, had probably laid in a supply of cannonballs for the current crisis.
The place showed yellow lights from ornate windows, lights that cast rectangles on formally pruned shrubbery and, yes, a cobblestone approach, which the mechieti intensely disliked under their pads. They protested, and Cajeiri’s tended off toward the topiary hedge, intending to cross onto the clipped lawn. Jegari and Antaro rode between, and forestalled it quite deftly.
The car pulled up ahead of them. The great double doors of the house opened wide, and servants poured out onto the steps carrying electric lanterns, no floodlights installed, nothing to scar that historic facade. Gas lights had been the rule here until ten years ago, and the lord had, ever so reluctantly, modernized, only because the gas pipes had gotten too old to be safe, and electrification had been, the deciding point, cheaper to install than new gas pipes.
The lilies of the Atageini ran along the carved stone frame of the doorway atop those steps, tall, leafy stems in bas relief and graceful nodding blooms at the corners, fully defined. Lilies figured at intervals across the facade, and were—he had not noticed it—emblazoned on the black door of the car from which Tatiseigi emerged… parsimonious on technology, profligate with artists, so the reputation of the house was.
Damiri’s ancestral home. But there was no news of her, the old man had said. Has been, but not. Like a will of the wisp, Tabini’s progress through the countryside.
Servants hurried to take charge of the mechieti, who had generally formed predatory intentions against the lush, low topiary hedge. After one mistake, the servants singled out the leader as, not Ilisidi’s, but Cenedi’s. Once they had that increasingly cantankerous mechieti adequately under control from the ground, it was time for all the riders to secure the reins and get down.
Bren’s mechieti had its own ambitions toward the nearby hedge. He whacked it hard with his quirt. His blow might have been a stray breeze, the tug at the rein a mere nuisance. Its mind was set; it was dark, it was thundering and raining, the mechieti knew they were stopping and there should be food in the offing. And with the servants starting to lead the herd off, if he did not get down before they led the leader away, he would be swept ignominiously away, unable to get down before they stopped at the stables, which was not the entry to Lord Tatiseigi’s house he wanted. He slipped his leg across the bow of the serpentine neck, grasped the saddle for safety, and slid down the towering side, holding onto the leathers as he went.
He at least kept his footing on the wet cobbles. Annoyed, his mechieti swung its head back toward him with a dangerous pass of those formidable lower-jaw tusks, then, seeing the herd moving, ignored him for a stolen mouthful of carefully-pruned hedge on the way. He defended the foliage with a whack of the quirt, risking his life and swatting it twice. It moved on.
Jago came hurrying back belatedly to rescue him from the responsibility, the house servants trying to shy other mechieti off the hedges and only adding to the chaos. But the herd leader was clearly being quirted off into the dark, now. Bren got out of the path of two others, forced his legs to bear him, and felt Jago’s hand on his arm, firm and steady.
Thunder echoed off the walls.
“Dry lodgings,” Bren said breathlessly, attempting good cheer, but, God, he was done in. When he asked his limbs to walk, his knees and ankles were entirely unreliable under him. Too much sitting. Too much space travel. And earth’s gravity, reminding him what he did weigh.
Ahead of them, Tatiseigi had gone up the lily-bordered steps with Ilisidi, into the warm electric lamplight inside. Staff had followed. So had Cajeiri, and his two. He climbed, Banichi and the rest of his staff ahead of him, Jago steering him, where no one would notice.
They were, thank God, shallow steps. He reached the top, followed the dowager and her bodyguard, and the three youngsters into a lighted foyer, so warm it stole his breath. The walls had a lily fresco that jogged a dazed memory hard—they were exactly, he realized, like the lilies of the Atageini in their apartment in the Bu-javid. Lilies were prominent everywhere, in bronze on a cabinet, worked into the sconces, rendered in marble around the border of the floor. A visitor was to be aware at every instant under what roof he had come, and know how rich, how powerful this ancient clan was.
Inside, under the many-shadowed lights of the chandelier, there were the necessary greetings, Ilisidi to their host, the formal presentation of her great-grandson—and a scowl on Tatiseigi’s face as he looked over the two young people attending the heir, young people not, evidently to his taste.
“Taibeni,” he said.
“In man’chi to the young lord, nandi,” Ilisidi said sharply—if she and Tatiseigi had had fur, it would have bristled. “And under my protection.”
“They will stay with the young lord,” Tatiseigi said, “and only under those conditions, is it clear, nephew?”
“Yes, great-uncle.”
None of them were fit for polite company, except the two Taibeni, who were at least clean. As for the rest of them, no amount of small fussing could order their clothing into anything like good grace. They, and their baggage, were dripping unto the marble. There were the traces of the dirty, oily truck, fishy ice, of slobbering mechieti, sweat, stove soot, forest leaves, and God knew what else, all tracked into this immaculate hall, along with mud from the rain. But Tatiseigi’s mood had been, for him, warm, even cordial—until he spotted the two Taibeni. Encouraging, Bren said to himself, and noted that there was, unlike their bodyguards’ martial look in this hall, no sign of weapons among the staff, some of which were uniformed Guild. House servants had arrived, too, looking at them from the inside stairs, sizing up the job in some dismay, one might imagine, though nothing showed on their faces.