To this hour, even a year after Tabini had regained power, they were still working to reconstruct what had happened the day of the coup, hour by hour, inside Guild headquarters and down their lines of communication . . . trying to find out where the problems still might be entrenched.
They had gathered information, they hoped, without triggering alarms.
This much they had been able to find out, and to stamp as true and reliable.
The day of the coup, a quarter hour after the attack on Tabini’s Bujavid residence, an odd gathering. . . . the lord of the Senjin Marid, the lord of little Bura clan from the west coast, the head of Tosuri clan, from the southern mountains, and four elderly Conservatives who should have known better . . . had officially declared man’chi to Murini and set him in Tabini’s place. It was exactly that sequence of events, that particular assemblage of individuals, and the rapid flow of information that had gotten them to the point of declaring Tabini dead, that had begun to provide their own investigation the first clues, the first chink in the monolith of non-information.
Those individuals—three scoundrels and four well-intentioned old men of the traditional persuasion—had probably all believed what they were told by a certain Assassins’ Guild officer, who had gotten his information from a source who credibly denied he had given it. These seven were told, the Conservative lords all swore to it, that Tabini was dead and that a widespread conspiracy was underway, a cabal of Liberal lords that would throw the continent into chaos and expose them to whatever mischief humans up in space intended.
These gentlemen were told that they had to subscribe to the new regime quickly and publicly, and make a statement backing Murini of the Kadagidi as aiji, in order to forestall a total collapse of the government.
It had certainly been a little embarrassing to them when the announcement had turned out to be premature: Tabini was alive. But the second attack, out in forested Taiben, was supposed to have taken care of that problem within the hour. That attack cost Tabini his original bodyguard, but it failed to kill him—and no one had told the honest elderly gentlemen who had backed Murini that fact, either.
Where did anyone later check out the facts of an event like . . . who was behind an assassination? One naturally asked the Assassins’ Guild.
The splinter group that they had come to call the Shadow Guild—to distinguish it from the legitimate Assassins’ Guild—had violated every one of those centuries-old rules of procedure and law that Wilson had written about in his essay. And down to this hour of the coup, the legitimate Guild, trying to preserve the lives of the lords who were the backbone and structure of the aishidi’tat, were still devoutly following the rulebook, as a case of—as Mospheirans would put it: if we violate the rules trying to take down the violators—what do we have left?
So at the start of it all—in those critical hours when Tabini was first supposed to have been killed in an attack on his Bujavid residence—the legitimate Assassins’ Guild had mistakenly taken its orders from the conspirators.
On news that, no, Tabini was alive, then, an hour later, killed in Taiben, they had again taken orders from their superiors and from Murini—not even yet understanding the whole architecture of the problem, or realizing that among these people whose orders they trusted were the very conspirators who were hunting Tabini and Damiri.
Within three more hours, however, legitimate Guild who suspected something was seriously amiss in their own ranks had begun gathering in the shadows, not approving of the new aiji’s initial orders or the conduct of the Guild as it was being run. They had evidently had particularly bad feelings about which units were being sent to search the Taibeni woods, and which were being held back.
They had had bad feelings about the recklessness with which the space shuttles and facilities on the ground were seized.
Then the units that had gone in so heavy-handedly to seize the spaceport were withdrawn in favor of more junior units who knew absolutely nothing about the technology, which made no sense to these senior officers, either.
These officers had taken even greater alarm when, that evening, assassinations were ordered without due process or proof of guilt, and senior Guild objections were not only ruled out of order—several were arrested, and their records marked for it.
The hell of it still was—the leadership of the conspiracy in that moment, even Murini himself, did not appear to have had a clear-cut program, or any particular reason for overthrowing the government, except a general discontent with the world as it had come to be and the fact that the leadership of the coup wished humans had never existed. A committee of scoundrels and confused elder lords had appointed Murini to be aiji—as a way, they said, to secure the consent of the influential and ancient Kadagidi clan to govern, and to spread a sense of legitimacy on the government. But they had not actually chosen Murini. Murini had been set before them as the choice—by a message from somewhere inside the Guild, the origin of which no one now could trace.
Murini had been, in fact, a very bad choice for the conspirators. He was a man mostly defined by his ambition, by his animosities, by his jealousies and suspicions. He’d come into office with a sense of entitlement and a set of private feuds he had immediately set about satisfying, under the illusion that he was the supreme power . . . and to make matters worse, the Shadow Guild under his authority hadn’t questioned his orders.
The Shadow Guild above Murini’s authority hadn’t apparently seen any urgency about stopping his personal vendettas, either—except to restrain him from attacking his two neighbors in the Padi Valley, the Taibeni and Lord Tatiseigi. Attacks on those two lords most loyal to Tabini would have raised questions about Murini’s motives as the defender of order and the savior of the Conservatives of the aishidi’tat: so the Guild serving Murini had kept him from that folly.
But his handlers seemed otherwise resolved to let him run his course and do in any people who argued with him.
Then once the legislature was filled with new and frightened faces, with a handful of Tabini’s longtime political opponents—and once the rest of the continent was too shattered to raise a real threat—one could surmise the people really in charge would quietly do in Murini and replace the villain everyone loathed with someone a bit more—personable.
Maybe that had been the overall plan. Or maybe there had never been a plan. Now that one had an idea of the personality at the core of it all, one wondered if the architect of the plot, the hidden Strategist of the Shadow Guild, had had any clear idea what the outcome could be, with all the myriad changes that had come on the world. The Strategist, a little old clerical officer named Shishogi, had probably had an idea and a design in the beginning of his decades-long maneuvers, but one wasn’t sure that it hadn’t all fallen by the wayside, as the world changed and the heavens became far more complicated than a bright blue shell with obedient clockwork stars.
Shishogi of Ajuri clan, in a clerical office of the Assassins’ Guild—a genius, perhaps—had started plotting and arranging to change the direction of the government forty-two years ago—and the situation he’d envisioned had long since ceased to be possible, let alone practical. Shishogi was not of a disposition to rule. The number of people Shishogi could trust had gradually diminished to none.