At this point a man wanted to grab a notepad and tell them to repeat it while he took notes. But it was too late. His head was buzzing. He at least had the critical names to ask them.
“ And,” Jago said, “certain of the Guild who have served Saigimi may now find man’chi lying elsewhere, rather than serve the daughter, who is suspected by some to be a fool and by others to be a mere figurehead for Tiburi, who is noteven Hagrani and who cannot go back to her own clan.”
“It should be an interesting summer in the peninsula,” Banichi said.
“Direiso may attract those Guild members,” Jago added. “And lose a few of her own, who will begin to think it towering folly to have so many targets move in under one roof.”
Bren’s ears pricked up. He wanted to ask, Can one chooseman’chi logically? He had thought it, like love, to be unaffected by common sense considerations of survival during such machimi play sort-outs. Not evidently so.
But if he interrupted the flow of information, he could lose what they were trying, in their bewildering way, to tell him.
“One thinks,” Jago had gone on, “that the Kadigidi themselves—” That was Direiso’s house. “—will spend some time in rearranging loyalties. The son and likeliest heir to Direiso herself is an Atageini on his maternal grandfather’s side—”
“Direiso’s father never sitting as house-head,” Banichi interjected, “due to a dish of infelicitous berries.”
Berries. The paidhi, feeling the effects of alcohol, all but lost the threads.
“Last fall,” Jago continued unflapped, “Direiso’s son, Murini, was a guest in the Atageini house at the same time we have reason to believe Deana Hanks was a guest in Direiso’s house. Mark that, Bren-ji.”
Tag and point. Definitely in Direiso’s house, then. It certainly deserved remembrance. He hadn’t known thatdetail, either, that this son of Direiso’s had been—what, hiding among Atageini withTatiseigi, for fear of his mother’s rash actions? Or had he been go-between, in Atageini complicity in the Deana Hanks affair?
That would mean aiming at overthrowing Tabini, while Tabini was sleeping with lady Damiri, heir of the Atageini.
If there were clear proof of that, he was sure Banichi or Jago would have told him.
It was only certain in what he did know that the Padi Valley nobles, of whom Tabini himself was one, had old, old and very tangled associations. It was the central association of the Ragi, which had produced all the aijiin ever to rule from Shejidan; a little nest of occasionally warring rivals, in plain fact.
None other than lord Geigi and Tabini’s hard-riding grandmother had walked into a house the identity of which was clearly now the Kadigidi house, and taken Deana Hanks away with them, apparently to Direiso’s vast discomfiture and no little breakage of fragile objects in Direiso’s parlor, by what he had later heard about a fracas and the overturning of a cabinet of antiques wherever the event had taken place.
Add to that now the knowledge that Direiso’s son had been in that very moment at the Atageini home, while the Atageini daughter was in bed with Tabini.
Definitely headache-producing. But among atevi, things could be very simple, too.
To find out who was the most likely person to start trouble, and the one toward whom all other atevi players would gravitate, look for the strongest.
Yesterday he might have said, regarding Tabini’s known opposition, that the strongest players were Tatiseigi of the Atageini, Saigimi of the Marid Tasigin, and Direiso of the Kadigidi.
Now with Saigimi dead, he would say it was up in the air between Direiso of the Kadigidi and Tatiseigi of the Atageini, and, hardly thinking about it, that Direiso was more likely to act against Tabini—he didn’t know why he thought so, but Tatiseigi had dropped back from threatening Tabini the moment Saigimi, remote from him geographically, had dropped out of the picture.
Why did he think so? Tatiseigi’s ancestral lands were in the Padi Valley, next door to the other survivor in that group, Direiso of the Kadigidi, his next door neighbor. Direiso had used Saigimias front man for her rasher, more extreme moves.
But it wasn’t loss of courage that would cause him to put Tatiseigi second to Direiso, in his bemused and shibei-overwhelmed subconscious, if Tatiseigi allied with that lady.
No, because Tatiseigi’s niece Damiri was sleeping with Tabini, and might provide Tabini’s heir. IfTatiseigi could recover his dignity as head of clan and ifTatiseigi’s battered pride could be patched up—and bolstered instead of diminished by Damiri’s alliance—that could make Tatiseigi very important in the Western Association, though not aiji, which due to her own ambitions Direiso would not let him become, anyway.
Ah. And ah-ha.
Direisowould see Tatiseigi at that point as threatening her bid to be aiji as much as helping her, because Tatiseigi would see the same set of facts: he would never be aiji; he was elderly; he had notproduced an heir of his own line. That was why Damiri, Tatiseigi’s sister’s daughter, was the acknowledged heir; and Tatiseigi could not be thinking in terms of his own genetic or political continuance if he wereaiji—that was what the subconscious was raking up. Tatiseigi had to reach a truce with Damiri, since he was less and less likely to bring her into line by replacing her. And Damiri was likelier and likelier to produce the next aiji.
Right now, a thorn in Tatiseigi’s flesh, Tatiseigi’s ancestral apartment in the Bu-javid was tainted by unwanted humans, his niece was, to all public perception defying him in bedding down with Tabini—and last year some excessive fool in attempting to state opposition to humans orto embarrass the Atageini had sprayed bullets across the breakfast room and taken out a frieze of elegant porcelain lilies…
Lilies which even now were being restored, angrily, defiantly, by Atageini-hired workmen: the breakfast room secured off from the rest of the apartment by a steel wall installed with screw-bolts, a barrier that let those workmen come and go without compromising the aiji’s security.
The lilies had been broken by someone who’d authorized an attack on the paidhi.
By someone, he was relatively sure, who’d had no idea what he was shooting at, someone blindly bent on shooting up premises which held a human, and possibly bent on compelling an Atageini break with Tabini.
It was an unthinkable botch-up of a job if some Atageini had done it, because those bullets were not just sprayed into anapartment favored by the Atageini, they’d been sent into an apartment filled with priceless Atageini art treasures, and had hit the lilies which were the symbolof the Atageini.
The fact was public. The shame was public. And no Atageini would have been so stupid. Tabini wouldn’t have done it—he had Damiri already and nothing to gain. No, an Atageini ally had done it—someone either wanting to push Tatiseigi into action or (the whisper was) chastise him for inaction in the matter of human influence.
But the result had embarrassed him instead of angering him.
One hellof a dangerous situation was what was left. Either Saigimi had attacked the lilies—or Direiso had, the two likeliest suspects.
And if Saigimi had, and was dead, Tabini had removed a man Tatiseigi now could not get vengeance from. Now, in the aftermath of Saigimi’s assassination, Direiso would have to move against Tabini soon—or die next.