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.
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.