“A good lunch at home,” Bren said quietly, and started the three walking toward the main hall and the lifts.
The dispersing committee had long since moved on, thank God.
And attitudes toward humans had shifted to the positive during his tenure. Attitudes were still shifting, penetrating areas they had never reached. And change was now reaching the mountains, or Topari would not be dealing with him in the first place. Attitudes would change. A moderation of the language would follow. Excellent creature was already relatively benign as a description.
“I have concluded,” he remarked to his aishid in the privacy of the lift, “that Topari is, whatever his faults, an honest fellow.”
“But he is still a fool,” Banichi said, which was, unfortunately, true. And because he was a fool, unfortunate things would continue to happen in Lord Topari’s dealings with the great and powerful of the aishidi’tat.
The best they could do for Topari as a political ally was to insulate him, keep him safe in his mountains, between small experiences of the larger world, and keep him happy to be in his mountains. Of all the several mountain lords who could rise to head that association—Topari, who had the exploitable advantage of that tiny wide spot in the mountains, was also the most adventurous, the most willing to brave the modern world and its ways, and equally likely, Bren surmised, he was the one lord the others agreed couldn’t tell them a lie.
It was a time of opportunity in the aishidi’tat, a time of opportunity that a brave few were beginning to recognize. The shakeup in the Assassins’ Guild was proliferating scarily fast through other guilds, which had felt the pressure regarding regional guilds for decades and staved it off, saying there was no way to change the system. Things were suddenly possible that had not been possible since the foundation of the aishidi’tat.
Which was all the more reason to couple the Assassins’ move to space with his trip up to the station, and give that ancient guild a little peaceful time to settle in and learn the environment, so they could advise and temper the guilds that would come up behind them.
The new Guild office on the space station—which would quickly have to understand an array of technical issues and precautions—was part of a very large picture indeed.
Change was coming, and if they could just achieve internal peace long enough to see it all work, they were going to knit the Marid, the East, and the southern coast into the Western Association—and now the station—in a way that Tabini’s predecessors had only dreamed of doing.
Boundaries had always been vague in the atevi world. A common language across the continent, local trade and intermarriages and leaders based on that biological determiner, man’chi, worked against such absolutes. The formation of the aishidi’tat had fundamentally shifted that balance with a vast number of independent clans recognizing a central authority, the aiji. Man’chi, yes, was involved, but laws and the new guild systems reinforced that union, providing regularized commerce, communication—and peacekeeping based on efficiency and surgical precision, not numbers and brute force.
The aishidi’tat became a thing apart . . . until the marriage contract between Tabini’s grandfather and Ilisidi brought the Eastern Association into an uneasy alliance, and the boundaries began to blur once more. Thanks to recent efforts, those boundaries might soon all but disappear, as the political leaders of these four highly independent regions recognized the benefits of cooperation, and sought a compromise of Guild structure that would enhance their strengths and minimize their vulnerabilities.
The real change wrought since Tabini’s return to power was not in boundaries. It was in the lines of control that had, from the outset of the Western Association, centered so rigidly in the capital, in the form of the Assassin’s Guild. In the earliest days of the aishidi’tat, clan loyalty had made unity impossible. But arising from, of all things, the building of a railroad, guilds arose that transcended clan interests, that demanded man’chi to themselves, to the aishidi’tat, and ultimately to the aijinate. The Assassins were the first, the oldest of guilds—taking in applicants from any clan, but insisting on man’chi to itself and renunciation of any other loyalty. The Assassins assigned bodyguards to various leaders they wanted to protect . . . and removed those they wanted out. And the aiji in Shejidan, by one move and another, sheltered them, used them, bestowed their services on those he wanted to survive.
It had, in effect, built the aishidi’tat. But it could only build it so far—among clans of the midlands culture, the Ragi, who spread their power as far as the mountains and the sea.
Beyond that, in the generations since, other associations created their own such forces, and other guilds, paying allegiance, for reasons of politics, to the Shejidani guilds, but always excluded from the highest offices, and from power.
But the oldest of guilds, the Assassins’ Guild, retained the notion that it had created the aijinate and the aishidi’tat—and held that it could re-create it, should an aiji lose the Assassins’ man’chi.
And when Tabini had allied himself with humans, and began to site industry in some provinces and not in others, when he pressed ambitious building programs, some elements within the Assassins’ Guild began to move assets on their own, bent on setting another aiji in power, one who would take their orders, follow their programs, and purge anyone who opposed them.
When it was clear that Tabini-aiji had positioned his heir and the aiji-dowager out of their reach, the shadow elements within the Assassins’ Guild moved to kill him and set their own man in office.
Several things saved the aishidi’tat: the move Tabini had made, getting important people out of reach; the loyalty of senior Guild who quickly retired or disappeared, who began to work with the Mospheirans and with Geigi, up on the station; and the independence of the stepchild guilds, the regional guilds, whose attachment to clan and region, hitherto viewed as unfitness—held them steady in their opposition to the coup and their refusal to accept the new aiji.
The scattered edges of power had fought to get control of the Guild back into their hands, and to restore Tabini to office.
And now the Guild, restored, looked far more kindly on the regional branches—which served both Geigi and Ilisidi, which had just rescued the government. Now a third region asserted itself, the Marid, whose principle reason for rebelling from the aishidi’tat was the matter of regional guilds.
The rules changes the Assassins’ Guild were working on would beget a hierarchy of subordinate field offices, still controlled from the capital, but each with a certain local latitude for the unique issues the local office understood.
And they were going, according to Ilisidi, to Cenedi for advice.
Cenedi, notoriously regional, and backing, in the aiji-dowager, the second greatest power in the aishidi’tat.
And the Shadow Guild, that rogue splinter group off the Assassins, which had directed the coup against Tabini, was, one hoped, no longer able to have its way in anything.
If it had leaders still alive.
As for the issue of too much modernity and the space program, the new Guild leadership was, Jago said, computerizing Assignments and records-keeping, so that one clerk could not control a system his superiors could not access. That was a revolution in itself.
Other guilds were making similar changes.