“Clearly it misses very little,” he said, and decided to consult Algini, who rarely talked but who seemed communicative at the moment. “The aiji has men about him who seem commendably protective of him, Gini-ji. But Cenedi is not pleased. What would his former guard have said?”
“We are meeting obstacles in communication,” Algini said bluntly. “One cannot speak for the dead. But these men are different.”
“Their man’chi?”
“One detects very faint ties to the hills, and perhaps to the south.”
“To the south.” Alarming. “And the aiji has accepted that knowingly?”
“Certain of us question, Bren-nandi, how much the aiji knows of those ties.”
Twice alarming. “Who truly knows these men, Gini-ji?”
A very slight hesitation, half a breath, if that. Algini’s gold eyes flicked into rare direct contact at so blunt a question. “Various of us have formed independent impressions of the situation. Certainly the aiji and the consort have slept safely under their guard.”
“So their objective, whatever it may be, is consonant with the aiji recovering Shejidan.”
“One believes they do oppose Murini, and the aiji has continually been the strongest opposition available. Your return and the dowager’s have created somewhat of a stir: Your renewed influence challenges them.”
Clearer and clearer. “There is no likelihood this opinion of me will improve.”
“The paidhi and the dowager represent an arrangement of new numbers,” Algini said, “bringing in Lord Geigi and the establishment in space, as well as other coastal folk, who are now arriving here in considerable number to add their voice to the discussion.”
The coast and the hills had never been united before the aishidi’tat. There was still conflict of interest. The middle south and Lord Geigi, up on the station, had never been allies in policy except, again, as the aisihdi’tat united them.
“It would seem then,” he paraphrased the subtext, “that the elements of the aishidi’tat who are against the Kadagidi, but who have not been favorable to me or the dowager, have been the primary refuge of the aiji in this time of need, and they are greatly dismayed to see us returning easily and moving back into our former position, snatching away the influence they feel they have justly earned.”
Algini’s gaze flickered just slightly. “That would be one theory, nandi, and generously phrased.”
“Would they ultimately mean the aiji ill?”
“The elements we suspect have never favored the aishidi’tat’s establishment, and may use it now only as a convenience. To see all central organization fall apart would well suit some of the hill lords, and some of the south.”
“Disaster, in dealing with the ship-humans.”
“Your staff thinks so. The dowager thinks so. But the aiji’s staff is limiting what information reaches him.”
“Painting a picture in which their advice is wise and politically safer.”
“Exactly so, nandi. And the Ajuri themselves are seeking a position of more importance through their connections. They may be northerners, but they represent a certain discontent up to the north, a minority—they have been a minor force throughout, but the news that the aiji is here, again, under Lord Tatiseigi’s roof—and that you and the dowager are back—has galvanized them and filled their eyes with great expectations. They are a hinge-point, on which other borderline elements may base their reactions.”
“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.”