“They thoroughly detest me.”
“The heir, their grandson, is a critical matter. They wish to see him with their own eyes, to establish his man’chi, where it lies and may lie in future. He departed as a child. He returns having been under your influence and the dowager’s for two formative years. He speaks fluent Mosphei’. This fact will shock them immeasureably.”
“His fondness for pizza and ice cream will not help us either,”
Bren said wryly, so great was his confidence in his staff that he had not questioned Algini discussing these things aloud with him, in this lowest of voices, but now his heart gave a thump and he remembered where they were. “Dare we say these things, Gini-ji?”
“One knows now exactly who is doing the monitoring and why,”
Algini said.“We have established ourselves. We have installations in several rooms. We are secure.”
The black box. The monitoring. And “installations.” God knew how installations had gotten into other rooms.
“Downstairs, too?”
Algini’s face became incredibly hard to read, and Bren broke off, assuming his staff’s secrets were not for him to penetrate.
“So must we approach the Ajuri in a conciliatory way?” he asked, and seemed to have startled Algini for once in their association. It was as if he had hit a nerve.
“One should not, by no means,” Algini said, “but rather trust that they will swing to the prevailing wind. They are not a ruling clan.
They have not the heredity. Yet.”
“They need Cajeiri.”
“They need his good will,” Algini said, “if they have any hope of prominence. They are ours because it is not in their interest the heir should perish.”
Cajeiri being their only claim to power and prominence.
Politics made strange bedfellows indeed. And Tatiseigi let the Ajuri under his roof and into his hospitality when other, higher ranking claimants to that hospitality were likely to sleep on bare ground or in their buses tonight. The Ajuri lord had certainly been caught off guard, meeting him and Cajeiri on the steps, as if they were there solely to confront him and prevent him reaching that goal. The old man had not recognized the heir, in his borrowed coat, but he had certainly recognized and affronted the paidhi—only to be set straight by an eight-year-old. Ajuri had been thoroughly discommoded, and hit Tatiseigi’s hall not in smooth advance, but in a fit of embarrassed outrage.
A delicious moment, if he had had the hand in planning it that the Ajuri must have thought he hadc no wonder the old lord had been put out with him, and now thought him more cunning than he was.
“Interesting,” he said. The member of his staff that had been sitting here at a table all afternoon proved to be a fount of information on everything in the house, while Banichi and Jago had been busy keeping him safe and Tano had been back and forth in the room, running clandestine errands, one had a slight suspicion, on the backstairs servants’ routes and wherever else he could reach within the secret ways of the building. Unlike Banichi and Jago, who had gone to deep space with him, Tano and Algini had spent the last two years at the station, hearing all the reports of disaster from the world below their feet, developing their own picture of politics as all order fell apart. Trust Algini to have a very good grasp of where lines of power ran.
“Interesting indeed, the position the Ajuri now find themselves in,” Algini said, “and their staff is making very cautious approaches to Tatiseigi’s and to the dowager’s staff.”
“To the dowager’s?”
“She is respected,” Algini said, which was no secret from anyone, “and feared. You are the unadded sum in many equations, nandi.
We have received approaches from out on the lawn. So has Lord Keimi of the Taibeni, at no few points. Now that you and the dowager are back in the numbers, there is some feeling of familiarity in the structure of the world, as certain people see it.
This restores a sort of balance of tensions which some find comfortable.”
“One can see that,” he murmured. Certain ones might oppose him, but he was a known quantity. “The heir, however, is a new quantity.”
“Indeed,” Algini said, “and he is young, nandi. Youth is always a cipher, when it comes to what his influence may become. You are the fixed point. No one believes you will break man’chi.”
“I?”
“You will not leave the aiji,” Algini said.
“Or the heir,” he said. “Or the dowager.”
Algini nodded. “A point of certainty. You are stability in these matters. More than the dowager herself, you represent a simple, sure number in all calculations. This reassures even your enemies, nandi.”
He was startled into a grim, soft laugh. “One is glad to perform a service.”
“A vital service, at a time when the aiji has issued a call.”
His heart sped. “Has he, Gini-ji?”
“As of this morning,” Algini said. “But certain people were already coming.”
“The Kadagidi have issued a call, on their side.”
“Momentum. Momentum and the will of the people. One wonders where the summons will bring a muster.”
“Well,” Bren said, “I shall not leave him, and he will not leave the people out there, and you for some reason a human can never understand will not leave me, so here we sit, one supposes, until the sun goes down, deeply appreciative of your analysis, Gini-ji, ever so appreciative.”
“Salads,” Algini said.
He had to laugh. He had to laugh aloud, touched to the heart.
“Extraordinary salads, Gini-ji.”
Algini was a grim fellow. But he smiled, all the same. “Aiji-ma,”
he said, not nandi. Not nand’ paidhi, not even Bren-ji. And one could hardly believe one had just heard that word. He supposed he stared at Algini for a second.
“Nand’ Bren.” Cajeiri bumped the other side of his chair. “Antaro says she and Jegari can go downstairs and get us food for tonight, if we are not going to great-uncle’s dinner. They will ask,” he added, as if to dispel any notion of theft.
“One might accompany the youngsters,” Algini said wryly, “and lay hands on a bottle of brandy.”
As if he and Cajeiri had not eaten their fill of teacakes. But in all the arrangements for getting staff fed, staff had had much more opportunity to drop belowstairs and take advantage of the offerings.
If there was a buffet laid out, the two Taibeni youngsters, otherwise without useful employment, might carry a basket up here in reasonable safety. “Go with them, Gini-ji. But not,” he added, and got only that far before Cajeiri dropped crosslegged onto the floor at his side.
“Not me,” Cajeiri said glumly. “Never me.”
4
The sun sank. It grew dark out, or dark in that last stage of twilight. A human eye might take it for full night. Not an atevi eye.
And the hammering went on downstairs, incessant, which argued either workmen driven by Lord Tatiseigi’s fraying temper (unimproved by the family discussion, one might guess) or workmen on a project on which security depended. Presumably dinner was in the offing down there.
Jegari and Antaro, with Algini, missing for the better part of an hour, attended Adaro and Timani up from downstairs, a party loaded with paper-wrapped packets and baskets redolent of savory meats—and clinking with bottles far in excess of the promised brandy.
“Ah,” Banichi said, diverted from his small wiring project. Bren would have sworn he could have no appetite of his own after all that sugar and tea, but his appetite perked up at that wonderful smell.
“The lords have gone to supper, nand’ Bren,” Algini reported.
“And it seems at least that all parties have gone to the dining hall.