To Tabini: One regrets very much, aiji-ma, that I was not able to come back. Rely on Jase-aiji and on Lord Geigi. I have arranged everything to get you and your household to safety and for you to accomplish the defeat of your enemies, the restoration of the Guilds, and the preservation of the aishidi’tat with as little loss of life as possible. I have absolute confidence in your leadership of the aishidi’tat, and I say freely that you have been the great leader that I have hoped for.
God, he hoped that letter never had to be delivered while he was living. Tabini’s ego was large enough.
Rely on my brother-of-the-same-parents, Toby. Rely on all the ship-aijiin, who view you as a very valuable and trustworthy ally; and especially rely on Jase-aiji—he is a good ally, a human who will not change sides, and an authority with great power in the heavens. Do not, however, trust Yolanda-paidhi: she has changed.
Believe that you have earned the confidence and good will of humans and atevi alike. Rely on your grandmother and on her allies. She has always favored you and your son above all other answers for the world.
To Ilisidi:
If you are reading this at least my own part of it has not gone well. I am therefore doubly glad and honored to have replaced you in this venture, and regret only missing the actions you will take next, which I hope will be initially down the paths to safety and power that I have spent these last hours securing for you.
Rely on Jase-aiji, on Geigi, on Lord Tatiseigi, my brother Toby, and know that I have watched over you in these last hours. Thank you for many actions which you know and which I will not mention. If any of my aishid survive, take them to your service, as I also hope you will look favorably on my staff on station and my major domo and my senior staff once you return to the world.
To you and to your great-grandson I leave my estate at Najida, and I also put Najida Peninsula and its people in your care.
To Geigi:
I have undertaken a mission against enemies of the aiji. Please take care of those closest to me, guard those I would guard, and remember me as someone who wished atevi and humans to live in peace. I have every confidence you will find a path between the ship-aijiin and the Mospheirans, between humans and atevi, and from the old ways into the new. I have complete confidence in your management of affairs in the heavens. I believe you will bring about a good solution, and I only regret that I must leave you with so much yet to do.
To Tatiseigi:
I am honored by the generous hospitality you have shown me over many years. I am particularly honored by your acts of trust and support for me personally despite our differences of degree and birth. With every year I have understood more and more why the aiji-dowager favors you so highly, and I have every confidence in her recommendations. I have asked her to care for my staff, and hope that you may assist her with that matter, as I hope you will look favorably on my people. Go with her and keep her safe. Trust Jase-aiji. He will not understand every custom, but he will do everything for your protection.
To Narani himself:
Accept my deep gratitude for your extraordinary service, your courage, and your inventiveness. I have asked the aiji-dowager to make provision for you and for senior staff, and I have bequeathed Najida to her and to her great-grandson, where you also may have a place should you wish it. I ask you see to the disposition of my clerical staff, and to the execution of my more detailed will, which you will find in the back center of my desk, under my seal. No one could have a more faithful manager than you have been, here and on the station.
It was a somewhat depressing set of notes to have to write, but curiously—it left him feeling he wanted his favorite dessert as lunch today, just in case; and he felt an amazing lack of stress about the idea of not having breakfast the next morning. He usually conducted his affairs in a tangled mess of this obligation and that, with overlapping scheduling, priorities jostling each other and changing by the hour—and he usually managed most of them.
But—regarding tomorrow—he discovered not one thing that he really had to do. The peripheral objectives were, for once in his career, all bundled up and handled fairly neatly.
Oh, he had things he wanted to do, or should do—he always had; but there was absolutely nothing weighing on his shoulders as impending catastrophe if he didn’t. The people he’d written the notes to would handle everything as well as it could be handled.
Protection? Safety? He was going to be with the people who made him feel safe, come what might.
It was, contrarily, their guild he was trying to rescue, and for once he could help them.
They were, meanwhile, setting things up with all the skill and professional ability anyone could ask.
He was certainly not going into the situation planning his own demise—but there was satisfaction in the plan. Any strike at him would give Tabini and their allies plenty of moral righteousness, and the absolute right to send heads rolling, politically speaking—or literally. The assassination of his messenger to the Assassins’ Guild would also justify Tabini taking to the skies and settling matters from orbit.
Disband two clans of the aishidi’tat, the Kadagidi and the Ajuri? That could certainly be the outcome, given the documentation and the witnesses the aiji-dowager now had in hand.
And in a time of major upheaval and a threat to the Guild system itself—and with Ilisidi stirring up her own factions to vengeance—Tabini might just take out two clans that had been a perpetual thorn in his side, at the same time he brought in the two tribal peoples.
The paidhi-aiji’s demise under such circumstances would, politically, unify several factions, not that he was the favorite of several of them—but that the whole concept of the Assassins’ Guild, enforcers of the law and keepers of the peace, violating its own rules to strike at a court official with the aiji’s document in hand would not sit at all well with the Conservatives, the very people who were usually most opposed to the paidhi-aiji’s programs. His enemies among the Conservatives were not wicked, unprincipled people—they just happened to be absolutely wrong about certain things. They would far rather support the rights of a dead paidhi than the live one who had so often upset the world.
And the prospect of the arch-conservatives avenging him . . . afforded him a very strange amusement.
He was, perhaps, a little light-headed after that spate of pre-posthumous letter-writing, but he honestly could not readily recall a time when there was so little remaining on the docket that the paidhi-aiji could reasonably be responsible for.