But now they knew it was not that the infiltration was pervasive through the Guild, no. It was that it was that high up. It was not the rank and file who could no longer be trusted, and it was not a widespread disaffection within Guild ranks. It was a problem in the upper levels that had been able to set a handful of people in convenient places, that had sown a little disinformation in more than one operation—and done an immense lot of damage over a very long period of time.
Now they knew names. The dowager’s bodyguard, and his own, were increasingly sure they knew names, both good and bad. And the dowager intended a fix for the problem—granted they got to Shejidan in one piece, granted they could muster the right people in the next critical hours, and granted they did not muster up one wrong name among the others, or bet their lives and the aiji’s safety on a piece of misdirection.
They finally knew the Name behind the other names. They knew how he had worked. He was not an extraordinarily adept agent in the field, but a little old man at a desk.
His bodyguard months ago had reported the problem of tarnished names that deserved clearing—some living, some dead. A large number of senior Guild had retired two years ago, some of whom had dereliction of duty, medically unfit, and, in some cases, he was informed, even the word treason attached to their records. Some notations had landed there as a result of their resignations during Murini’s investigation, some had been added as a result of Tabini’s investigation into the coup and their refusal to be contacted. It had been disturbing—but credible—that persons who had never felt attached to Tabini and who were approaching retirement might just neglect to report back and go through the paperwork and the process after his return to power. Perhaps, the thought had been, these individuals had never appealed the matter or shown up in Shejidan to answer questions and have their records cleared . . . because they were just disaffected from the Guild itself, disillusioned and still angry over the handling of the whole matter.
Senior officers of the Guild had deserted in droves when Murini had taken over the government; they remained, his bodyguard had said, disaffected from current Guild leadership, opposing changes in policy. There was also old business, a lengthy list of Missing still on the Requests for Action which pertained to every Guildsman in the field: if one happened to find such a person, one was to report the location, ascertain the status if possible, request the individual to contact Guild Headquarters and fill out the paperwork—so Algini said. But there was, since Tabini’s return, no urgency on that item, Algini also said, and in the feeling that there might be some faults some of these members were worried about, there was a tacit understanding that nobody was really going to carry out that order. Some junior might, if he was a fool, but otherwise that list just existed, and nobody was going to knock on a door and insist a former member report himself and accept what might be disciplinary action. Certain members had left to pursue private lives under changed names.
A message had come from two former Guild Council members, stating that, in a new age of cooperation with humans and atevi presence on the space station, the old senior leadership felt themselves at the end of their usefulness. It was a new world. Let the young ones sit in council. With marks against their names, with records tainted, who knew what was true, or which of them to trust? They were not anxious to come back to hunt down other Guild. The idea disgusted them. They disapproved of the investigation and refused to submit to a Guild inquiry.
That was the only quasi-official answer to the demands of the infamous list that the Guild referred to as the Missing and the Dead.
The stalemate still continued. Those on the list would not answer a summons or account for their movements during the coup. The list was a farce and an insult. The reconstituted records, they said, were corrupt. They would not divulge information that might reveal contacts or the location of fellow Missing.
And, no, they would not come back. And they would not ask Tabini to be included in the amnesty afforded other guilds and given on a case-by-case basis to the Assassins. They maintained the executive branch had no authority to intervene in the guilds and that the list violated that principle. It was principle.
There had been a few resignations since the events out at Najida. The list had grown a bit.
Angry resignations, his aishid said.
And his aishid, and the dowager’s, had kept investigating . . . month after month. Tabini’s aishid, however, couldn’t. The current Guild Council refused to grant those four, who were Taibeni clan, Tabini’s remote cousins, any higher rank or a security clearance, because Tabini, of the executive of the aishidi’tat, had ignored the Guild’s recommendation for his bodyguard, and chosen his own, who were not classified as having a security clearance, or even advanced training.
It had been more than inconvenient. It had been damned dangerous . . . so much so that the aiji-dowager had finally ordered part of her own bodyguard to go into Tabini’s service and back up and train the four Tabini had appointed. The Guild knew about the four new bodyguards: nobody had officially mentioned the training part of the arrangement, which was, under Guild rules, illegal.
Things had gotten that bad.
Then, even as they’d sent Geigi aloft and into safety—Algini had come to him with information that made it all make sense.
So he knew things that no outsider to the Guild was supposed to know: he knew, the dowager knew, and Lord Tatiseigi knew. Young Cajeiri also knew—at least on his level—since his bodyguard meshed with theirs, and they all were under fire, so to speak, all of them and Tabini-aiji at once . . .
Because they knew exactly where the origin of the coup was, now. It had been no conspiracy of the lords, no dissent among the people. It was within the Assassins’ Guild. In effect, the guild that served as the law enforcement agency had fractured, and part of it had seized the government, setting it in the hands of a man who never should have held office.
The aiji-dowager and Tabini-aiji had started to correct matters by hunting down Murini; but after they’d taken down Murini, the problems had continued. They’d found themselves fighting against a splinter of the Guild they had naturally taken for Murini’s die-hard supporters. But defeating the Shadow Guild in the field had turned up a simple fact: the majority of those fighting Tabini in that action had been lied to, misled, and deceived. They might not have been innocent of wrongdoing, perhaps—there were orders they never should have followed. But their attack against the aiji’s forces had been under orders which turned out to have been forgeries, with no name that proved accurate, or that could be proven accurate.
That was when the dowager had known for certain that not everything wrong in the aishidi’tat had Murini’s name on it.
The legitimate Assassins’ Guild held its own secrets close as always—and, apart from its problem with disaffected senior officers refusing to debrief, or even to report in, their relations with the aiji had gone along at standoff regarding his personal bodyguard. It had seemed business as usual with the Guild.
And to this very hour Tabini-aiji was having to get his high-level information from his grandmother, who had the most senior team in the Guild—and Tabini still had to inform his own young bodyguard of what they should have been able to tell him.