But there was a far more immediate item on his agenda.
“We have a problem,” he said to Banichi as they walked toward the lift, and as the junior security held the curious at bay, out of ordinary hearing. “I don’t know how that information on Jase’s private business got to them, I don’t know whether there’s a leak somewhere, but my own thought was that either there’s a leak on the aiji’s staff—or ours—or that they’re broadcasting that on the news on Mospheira and somebody on the mainland follows enough of the language to pick it out.”
“Such persons who know Mosphei’ that fluently are all official,” Banichi said under his breath, informing him of something he’d wanted to know, and now did.
“There is,” Banichi added, “nand’ Deana.” One was respectful in a public venue, and accorded a name its honorifics, even when one proposed cutting the individual into fish-bait. “And I can tell you, Bren-ji, there has been illicit radio traffic.”
They’d reached the lift. He gave Banichi a sharp, alarmed look.
“How much else don’t I know?”
“Oh, much,” Banichi said. The door opened. “The names of my remote cousins, the—”
“Banichi, my salad, the truth.”
Banichi escorted him inside and delivered an advisement to hall security above that they were coming up. And Banichi grinned, not looking at him after the salad remark.
“The paidhi is still alive,” Banichi said, “and we keep him that way. But the details are his security’s concern.”
“Not where it regards Hanks!”
“Ah. Humans doproceed to feud.”
“With this woman? Damned right.” The door spat them out into the upper corridor, that with the porcelain bouquets. “Unfortunately the Guild has no offices on Mospheira.—And I need to know this, Banichi-ji.”
“It seemed at the time to involve only atevi, on this side of the strait,” Banichi said, “and Tano and Algini didn’t know. Had Jago and I been here, our rank would have obtained that information for you. Yes, there has been such traffic between Mospheira and the coast, in Ragi, definitively her voice.”
“Nand’ Deana.” Deana, who had had such widespread contact with all the wrong people, until someone had kidnapped her from Shejidan, someone whose identity both Ilisidi and lord Geigi had to this day declined to reveal, nor had he ventured to ask his own staff too closely. The embarrassments of the great houses were a volatile subject.
And when a rival paidhi was at issue, perhaps, he’d decided last of all, they were uncertain how he’d react and whether he’d be able to, in human shorthand, forgivethe atevi responsible.
“Where wasmy female colleague lodged when she was not in the Bu-javid?” he asked Banichi as they walked. “May we now ask officially, and for the record?”
“With lady Direiso.”
He was not utterly surprised. To say the least. “And Geigi simply walked in there?”
“Guns were involved, but not seriously. Direiso-daja had launched her greater hope without guns, simply in her acquisition of Hanks-paidhi.”
“ Shetook her away.”
“Without serious resistance.”
“One thought so. And getting Deana back—was there bloodshed?” That defined a level of seriousness in most quarrels. Not in this, he thought. “Did Direiso resist?”
“No bloodshed,” Banichi said. “Against fear of her own harm, she saw there was nothing left but graceful acquiescence to the aiji-dowager and the hope that Tabini would soon be a dead man. And that you would be. That would leave Deana Hanks as paidhi. And if Direiso’s wishes had proved to have stronger legs, it would have led to herin possession of the ship-paidhiin—which again would have made her powerful. Hence her easy capitulation on the day in question.”
Thatwas a plateful of information. Direiso had folded when Ilisidi, whom Direiso had regarded perhaps as rival andas ally, had walked in at gunpoint and demanded Hanks be turned over to her. Direiso had still hoped to reach the descending capsule and get her hands on Jase and Mercheson-paidhi.
But she hadn’t won that race. Theyhad.
So Direiso had lost Ilisidi’s support (realizing perhaps at the last that Ilisidi would have cheerfully put a dagger in her back, perhaps not even figuratively, rather than see her as aiji.) And now it was possible Direiso was courting the Atageini after an assault on Atageini pride last year, which had destroyed the lilies, perhaps by accident or perhaps not.
“Was not Direiso’s son withTatiseigi of the Atageini at that moment?” he asked Banichi. He recalled hearing that.
“That he was, Bren-ji.”
“You exceed my human imagination. Why?”
“If I knew that for certain, Bren-ji, Damiri might be lord of the Atageini at this hour.”
Serious news. Banichi suspected Tatiseigi of existing on the fringes of Direiso’s conspiracy, and the son’s presence there as not without Direiso’s approval. “You suspect Tatiseigi was withDireiso, at least in the attack against us in Jase’s landing?”
“We suspect everything.” They had reached the doors. “We act on what we know.”
“And she’s still plotting against the aiji. Hence the business in the peninsula.”
“True.”
“And its timing?”
“One can only guess, Bren-ji.”
He was talking to the entity both best and least informed on the matter, the one who’d most likely carried out the strike against Direiso’s ally Saigimi.
While heguested with lord Geigi, who’d seemed Direiso’s ally and then Tabini’s.
One needed a flow-chart. One truly did.
But probably the atevi thought that about humans.
There were things they had never admitted to one another. Radios belonging to the atevi government listening to transmissions. Jamming. On both sides of the strait. Phone lines that went down every time a stray cloud appeared. Banichi had said it once: an old man in a rowboat could invade the island. Or the mainland.
If Hanks had been transmitting to Direiso, there were atevi working for Tabini who would intercept those messages—and Deana and those behind her were just clever enough to plant what they wanted planted: poison, no matter the recipient, poison, whether in the hands of Tabini’s people or Direiso’s.
“Damn,” he said, envisioning listening posts up and down the coast, on which atevi could pick up whatever short-range transmissions the conservative faction on Mospheira wanted to send. It wasn’t just Direiso’s cause such hateful broadcasts might incite, if Deana and her supporters wanted to see bloodshed.
The fact that such conservative humans hated atevi was in no way skin off Direiso’s nose. The fact that Direiso hated her was no skin off Deana’s. Both the conservative atevi that wanted Tabini dead and human technology restricted—and the conservative humans whose varied agendas just wanted humans to stay technologically superior to atevi—shared the same agenda: restrict technology getting to Tabini. Tabini inpower and Bren Cameron inoffice meant a rapid flow of tech into atevi hands. So get rid of one or both.