He drew in a deep breath. “And the young gentleman?” he asked Timani.
“Mani-ma has my best clothes in her closet, nand’ paidhi,” Cajeiri said, unasked. One saw the boy was upset, that rash behavior was very near the surface and wanted calming.
“Then we had better find them, had we not, and get you down to your great-grandmother?”
Pointed remark. Cajeiri’s pupils widened, a little jolt of comprehension that this was a very adult game from which he was not excluded.
“Nandi.” From Algini, a sober look.
“Is there a difficulty?” he asked.
“One has heard a name,” Algini said, with reference to that com device in his ear. “Gegini.”
Jago shot Banichi a look, a decided look.
“Who is he?” Bren asked, and Banichi, with a glance at Algini and back, grimaced. “One can hardly name names,” Banichi said, “but if the Guild has moved from neutrality, clearly this visitation is not one according to your wishes, Bren-ji, or in response to your letter.”
That was three times around the same comer and no direct information. “Are you saying this arrival could be a Kadagidi expedition, brazening it into the house? A lie, nadiin-ji?”
“Oh, they would be official, at highest level, under Guild seal,”
Banichi said.
“The question is, always,” Algini said, “what is the state of affairs within the Guild, and does Gegini have a right to that seal?”
“Would this be notice of a Filing, do you think?”
“Or outright illegal conduct,” Algini said. “Such action is a possibility, Bren-ji. This is not a man the Guildmaster we know would send. We are by no means sure the Guildmaster we know is alive. This man is acting and speaking as if he were Guildmaster.”
Looks passed among his security. Timani and Adaro had left or, one thought, that name Algini had named and the details Algini referred to might never have come out; the name itself, Gegini, meant nothing to his ears, except it was a name not that uncommon in the Padi Valley.
A new power within the Assassins’ Guild, someone his staff knew, and did not favor? Someone Tano and Algini had been tracking in their absence from the world?
The Guild, in new hands?
He had been accustomed to thinking of that Guild above all others as unassailable in its integrity and unmatched in its outright power. It operated inside every great house on the continent, though its individual members had man’chi to the houses and their lords.
But with power over half the civilized world at issue, clearly anything could change if the side favoring Murini had quietly slipped poison into a teacup. His staff, hedging the secrecy of their own Guild, was giving him strong hints about an entity his space-based staff particularly knew from the inside, in all its hidden partsc a name, moreover, that meant something to Banichi and Jago.
“Maybe you should not go down there at all, young gentleman,”
Bren said directly to Cajeiri, and saw the boy go from wide-eyed absorption of the situation, and a little confusion, to jut-lipped disapproval of the order in a heartbeat. “In the sense that you should preserve a politic distance from me and my doings, young sir, perhaps you should not be here, either.”
“Then I should be sitting with mani-ma downstairs,” Cajeiri said, “and she will not tolerate bad behavior. My bodyguard can escort me down by myself. And no one will stop me at the door.”
All eyes turned to the paidhi for the ultimate decision in this political arena. And the best advice seemed to come from the eight-year-old.
At least moving Cajeiri downstairs while his staff moved his baggage back to Ilisidi’s suite would put him under Cenedi’s protection, not to mention Ilisidi’s, leaving no trace of the boy’s evening sojourn here. Ilisidi in particular was, it always had to be reckoned, an easterner, from that most tenuously attached half of the aishidi’tat, and the eastern half of the continent was a force that had to be reckoned with cautiously—very cautiously. In any general upheaval, Ilisidi stood a real chance of being among the few left standing, if her staff could move quickly enough.
“Never mind your coat, young sir. Take mine. Go.”
“But—”
“I shall manage, young sir.” He shed it, and with his own hands held it out for the boy.
The purple coat was a fair fit, even if Cajeiri was growing broader in the shoulders. Bren took Cajeiri’s plain day-wear in its place, a fine coat, nonetheless, a pale green brocade that just happened to be in the Atageini shade, while the purple and red was very well in color key with the Ragi colors: It was dark, it was dramatic, and if the seams held up, it lent a handsome boy an extremely princely look in a time of crisis and threat.
He straightened Cajeiri’s collar himself, the servant’s role, and looked the boy squarely in the eyes as he did so. “Be canny. Judge the room ever so carefully before you walk in. If Cenedi or Nawari is not at the door, or if things look wrong, come back up the stairs immediately. If things go very wrong down there, and you have to get away, figure to get outside and get back to the window here or upstairs to our door—do not use the servant passages if that has to be the choice: They will surely guard them first. But do not forget the knock. Do not for a moment forget the knock. Do you understand me clearly, young sir?”
“One understands, nand’ paidhi.” Cajeiri was entirely sober and attentive, young eyes wide and, for the first time, truly frightened.
“If you have to run outdoors,” Jago said, “remember there will be other Guild with night-scopes. They can see you in the dark.”
“If you must escape, Bren-ji,” Banichi said, “escape outside. Never mind the baggage. We will stay by you and the young gentleman.”
If things went wrong down there, getting the heir away became a goal worth any risk, any sacrifice, not just for the continuity of Ragi rule on the continent, but for the stability of government that had to deal with the kyo when they arrived— everything hung on either Tabini or his son surviving. “You have no other job, if things go badly, young sir, except to use your head and to get yourself to safety. That is how you help your staff, by helping them help you.
Go. Quickly now.”
The boy cast a look at his own young staff and headed for the door.
And stopped, with a scared look back.
“Defenses are down now,” Tano said. “Go.”
A quick study. Bren never doubted that. It was why he placed his hopes in the boy.
And if the boy came running hellbent back up here, with Cenedi not where he was supposed to be—all of them might have to take the window route.
“The Guild will have made more than one approach to the house,”
Banichi said. “There will be the delegation, and observers that we will not see, Jago is quite right. They will likely have been here before the delegation. And possibly within the house.”
“As simply so as contacting an amenable Guild agent on a given staff,” Jago added, leading one to wonder, not for the first time during the years he had dealt with these particular Guild members, if there were agents who worked directly for the Guild planted in key houses throughout the aishidi’tat.
He didn’t ask. He had become privy to enough Guild secrets as it was, information that didn’t make him confident of their situation at the moment. If, as Banichi hinted, the Guild had just become a player in this game, if the old Guildmaster had gone down, and if rules were all suspended, then what the Guild could do was extensive, and extreme, and bloody.
And not on their side. Not even neutral any longer. They could be walking down there to hear a Filing against Tabini. And if that was the case, they had to listen and let these people walk out safely.