Deep breath. He straightened his own queue, which had gotten crushed under his collar. He was, he decided, as dressed as he could get. “Time for us to go,” he said, and cast a look at Jago, at Banichi, then at Tano and Algini. “The boy,” he said, “nadiin, should anything happen that seems to require it, any one of you take him somewhere, and the rest of us do not ask to know where that would be. We will find one another.”
“Yes,” Tano said, agreeing to back up Algini, that partnership working together, and that was that, as Bren headed out the door with Banichi and Jago.
Out into an otherwise quiet hallway. The boy had gone downstairs, and at least there was no uproar from below. Bren walked calmly, quietly toward the stairs, with Banichi and Jago, one on each side of him—walked toward what he had asked for, in one sense, with his letter to the Guild—but he very much doubted now that it was what had brought this mission to Tirnamardi.
He took his cue from Banichi and Jago and kept his brain entirely in present tense, in the moment, his eyes scanning recesses and alert to any move. He had one fleeting inner imagination of the Guild officers, inbound, diverting attention with a small dispute at the front door while a different, more stealthy approach came up through the scattered camps— everyone out there, however nervous, would tend to assume that a stranger walking through their camp was just some stranger from an allied village or that an inbound bus weaving its way across the lawn was part of the Dur contingent, never mind that it unloaded heavy weapons among its baggage.
Was he scared at that moment? Oh, not half.
Down the steps next to the foyer, where the workmen who had been hammering away at the doors stood idle amid lumber and their scaffolding, looking confused and doubtful as to whether they ought to take up their work again.
“Have you seen strangers from the Guild, nadiin?” Banichi asked them.
Several hands pointed silently and solemnly toward the drawing room. Bodyguards were no longer in evidence at the door. They had all drawn into the room, it seemed, indicating a prudent move to protect the lords who held their man’chi not from some external threat, this time, but from the high officers of the Guild itself, and some shift in policy that immediately concerned them.
“Come in with me,” Bren said, “nadiin-ji.”
He started to touch the door, hesitated, just that heartbeat of doubt, but Banichi and Jago, who were wired and doubtless reading those devices and signals they had not used in two years, simultaneously put out hands and opened both the double doors.
It was a dramatic, two-door entrance, to be sure. Every eye turned. The weapon hand of every bodyguard in the room moved.
And stayed and relaxed, as they recognized him.
Cajeiri had gotten a seat next to his mother. New arrivals stood in the middle of the half arc of chairs, men and women in Guild black and silver, a grim, tall old man who did not look at him, and his two bodyguards, whose gold eyes locked on the intrusion for one paralytic moment. Smooth as a well-oiled machine and deadly: The older Guild, rarely seen, was like that.
“Nandi,” Bren said, as the old man slowly swung a look toward him and as one of the old man’s guard looked, machinelike, toward the assembled lords. That was the address appropriate for a newly arrived Guild official, and Bren gave a careful, measured bow to the old man.
“Paidhi-aiji,” Tabini said. “Come sit.”
That shocked him. Scared him, in fact. Tabini made a point, made a defiant statement in that invitation, in fact, in a morass of political quicksand, and with his guard behind him and these Guild strangers in front. Bren felt his heart skip, covered his shock as smoothly as he could, and went to sit where Tabini pointed, as servants managed to insert a chair between Tabini and the dowager.
Don’t do this, he would have fervently advised Tabini. Don’t make statements that you might have to deny before sunrise. But one did not hesitate at the aiji’s order, not when it was so deliberately, so knowingly given.
Cajeiri, he noted, kept a stone face to the whole proceedings. The boy’s chair was on his mother’s left, between her and the Ajuri, and Cajeiri’s two young guards stood behind his chair as if they were Guild—if there was anyone in the room whose position was less enviable than the paidhi-aiji’s, it had to be those two brave youngsters, facing senior Guild who would take a dim view of anyone intruding on Guild prerogatives.
Bren sat. He did not turn his head to see, but a faint sound declared Banichi and Jago were taking their positions behind his chair.
A minor disruption. “We have begun inquiry into the Ragi clan request,” the old Guildsman resumed his statement. “We have come here to gather evidence.”
“One comes damned late, nandi.” From Tabini. And in no conciliatory tone. “Honest members of your own guild are dead in this delay.”
“We are here at the right time,” the old man said in a soft voice, and his golden eyes shifted subtly until they stared straight at Bren, cold and terrible. That gaze went on to Ilisidi, and last of all to Tatiseigi, on Ilisidi’s far side. “You have called Council, nandi,”
the old man said at last, directly to Tatiseigi. “You claim a complaint against a neighboring clan. You have appealed to the Guild. We are here.”
“I have a justified complaint!” Tatiseigi said, rising with more alacrity than the old gentleman usually managed. “Damage to these premises, a national treasure. Kadagidi have attacked non-Guild on our land, when we have done them no injury at all!
You have seen the ruin of our foyer!”
“The Kadagidi likewise have a complaint against the Atageini,”
the Guildsman said, “in your fomenting rebellion and dissent against the aiji who now sits in Shejidan.”
“They dare say so!” Tatiseigi fairly frothed at the mouth. “There was absolutely no cause for this assault, less for the damage to a historic house! We were at no time involved in any political cause, nor has our clan!”
“You host the former aiji. This is provocative.”
“Think twice,” Tabini said ominously. “Murini does not exist.
And we visit this house in the name of the aishidi’tat, which is not dissolved, and which does not release the Guild from its contract.
Show me any signing to the contrary.”
The Guildsman’s mouth opened, his brows contracted, and then, perhaps, perhaps—what he would have said failed to find exit. “We do not carry such papers about. And the Ragi lord’s claim to Sheijidan has been judged by the citizenry of Shejidan, judged and dismissed.”
“We have no need for debate,” Tabini said. “But while this house keeps records, we will state our position. Kadagidi have attacked my underage son, tried to visit murder on this house, of another clan, and we intervened while the Guild sat paralyzed and debating in Shejidan over decrees from a Kadagidi who has no authority, no man’chi, and lacks the mandate.”
“He has the mandate,” the answer snapped back.
“He has called the legislature. Have they assembled?”
The Ajuri’s information. Tabini committed them all on a dice roll.
And Guild silence met that question, for at least three heartbeats.
“Equal evidence exists on either side,” the Guildsman said, lines deepening around his mouth. “No one will move from current positions tonight. No attack, no retreat. We are here officially to make Guild judgment, in response to a request from the Atageini lord, and we demand lodgings.” This, swinging his gaze from Tabini to Tatiseigi. “This is a demand, nand’ Tatiseigi.”
“You are our guests,” Tatiseigi said, not happily, and waved a hand at the desperate servant staff, namely the major domo standing by the inner door. “The green suite,” he said.
The old major domo came close and bent down to his lord’s ear to whisper a protest, but he managed perhaps two words before Tatiseigi cut him off with, “The Ajuri will still take the east.” In a furious not-quite-whisper, and with a wave of his hand at a second, anguished protest. “Move my grandson somewhere, beneficent gods!