Pretender

To honor. To proper behavior.

Kabiu, on this occasion, he divined as the reason otherwise sensible people, even the Ajuri, had to set themselves in a target zone, making their statement for this aiji over the other, declaring for civilized behavior, and most of all—maintaining the degree of civilization that underlay atevi culture even in conflict. Man’chi was driving it, an instinct as fatal and as basic an attraction as gravity.

And if, in a great ebbing tide, man’chi left a leader like Murini of the Kadagidi, he was done. He would have no prospect for long life, considering his numerous enemies, and he would find himself instead of well-received under many roofs, suddenly with nowhere in the world to go.

And what answer would Murini the man deliver to this passive attack on his rule? Fatalistic acceptance? Tame surrender?

One didn’t think so. No. He had been a man of subterfuge and co

Would the Kadagidi clan, seeing the tide starting to turn against Murini, itself make some redemptive gesture, and fall away from their own lord, who was absent in Shejidan, to keep armed struggle away from their territory?

Murini, as aiji of the whole country, had to leave his own clan and go to Shejidan to rule, expecting the Kadagidi, ironically left leaderless, to stay steadfast in man’chi while the man who should be attending their interests was off claiming the whole continent—was that not the way Tabini-aiji and his predecessors had dealt with Taiben, leaving the clan loyalty behind and hoping for man’chi to survive?

The whole arrangement among the Kadagidi was still new enough that Murini had likely retained control of the Kadagidi in his own hands and not fully allotted clan authority to a strong subordinate. Such adjustments, such as Tabini had with Keimi of the Taibeni, took time, and one could imagine such relationships were sometimes troublesome, and fraught with second thoughts. It took time for reward to repay sacrifice of a clan’s own interests. But it all seemed queasy logic for him to follow, answers wired to buttons that didn’t truly exist in the paidhi’s instincts. He constantly made appeal to analogs and like-this and like-that-but-not, and, in the outcome, found himself utterly at sea, still trying to find the reason all these people were all sitting here waiting for dark and likely attack.

All right. All right. For a moment accept that all these well-dressed people weren’t crazy, accept that the Kadagidi wouldn’t bomb the grounds or attack a dozen clans at once for very practical reasons, like public opinion, or for moral reasons like kabiu, a virtue Bren didn’t for a moment believe Murini possessedc he’d shown damned little sense of it before now.

For a moment assume that the Kadagidi would be sane, middle-tier atevi and that they would make a rational atevi response. What would be a sane and kabiu response from their side of this contest?

Scaled response. Targeted and scaled response rather than a general assault with massive loss of life and subsequent blood-feuds. That was how the Assassins’ Guild was supposed to function, and that was what was anomalous in this whole upheaval.

The silence, the non-involvement of the Assassins’ Guild, the leadership of which was presently sitting in Shejidan deadlocked and refusing to take either aiji’s side, when it should have stepped in immediately to protect Tabini’s household and to prevent the coup in the first place. Now it categorically refused to budge. It had lawyerlike procedures, like a court. It had to hear evidence, receive petitions. An assassination to be obtained involved a Filing of Intent and might see counterfilings on the other side: There were Guild members just like Cenedi, or Banichi and Jago, or a hundred others under this roof and out on the drive—members whose man’chi was to a particular lord, a particular house, above all else. So Guild members would be on both sides of a Filing—but likewise they took a dim view of wildcat operations, movements without Filing and particularly movements that destabilized, rather than stabilized, the government of a region.

Could the Kadagidi, without Filing, move an Assassin into a neutral clan’s territory, and take Tabini out personally? Wipe out the ruling family, down to the youngest? They had tried— at Taiben, when they had hit the lodge and attacked the residency in Shejidan—and the Guild had taken no official action. It had been proven that Tabini had survived the move, and had gathered force, when he had gone out toward the coast, toward Yolanda Mercheson—and the Guild had done nothing to support him.

That had to be troubling Banichi and every other Guild member on the continent. What in hell was going on at Guild Headquarters?

Ordinarily, lords didn’t undertake wildcat operations against one another, precisely because the Guild and the aiji in Shejidan would alike take a dim, lethal view of that behavior. But had it become clear to the Kadagidi that the Guild was not going to act, that there was no argument or Filing that was going to protect Tabini at all?

That would encourage actions far more profitable to the Kadagidi than a frontal assault on a neighbor’s land.

That indicated one action that began to make sense in this situation, one delicate, surgical action that would fragment this gathering and bring down the hopes of restoring the Ragi clan to power. And all the fire and fury might be intended only to mask the process of getting an Assassin into position.

And these various people who had assembled to protect Tabini by their presence and position had incidentally brought an impressive attendance of Guild Assassins as their own bodyguards. The Guild might be neutral, deadlocked, and stuck in Shejidan, but local man’chi was healthy and thriving, and, at the moment, armed to the teeth and sitting on Tatiseigi’s lawn, and probably on the Kadagidi’s front porch, at the same time, if they could get a view of what was happening beyond the hills. Both sides were furnished with Guild enough to spend some time infiltrating and manuevering at this stage— but in the nature of things, Tabini, for his part, had, at every reception, to bet his life that none of these arrivals of other villages, towns, clans, masked some Assassin whose man’chi was secretly to the Kadagidi.

That was surely what the conference outside the door was dealing with, among other things Bren wished he had a clear picture of. They were screening every Guild member who came through the door, and seeking information on every Guild member who might be on the grounds: “Do you know that man, nadi? Did he come with the lord’s wife’s clan?”

He had been in space too long, Bren said to himself. As long as he’d been in atevi society, he had encountered such blind spots in his vision, dark spots, situations where he just didn’t automatically draw the obvious conclusion without asking Banichi or Jago—and even then their plain answer didn’t always evoke all it should. But he had known that very certainly staff was vetting everyone who got past that door: they always did. The Guild in some respects was a sort of exclusive lodge, and the senior members, the really dangerous ones, knew each other by sight, in and out of uniform.

That was why Tabini’s loss of the staff who had protected him so long was such a heavy blow—not alone the emotional loss at their murder, but the practical consequences of new staff not knowing things that had gone to the grave with the previous holders of their offices. The well-oiled machine that had operated so smoothly to protect and inform Tabini was suddenly gone—replaced by new people who had attached themselves to him during his exile, and one only hoped the current chief of Tabini’s personal bodyguard, Ismini, knew his men as well, and that information flowed through that staff with something like the old efficiency. Banichi and Jago had had ties in the aiji’s old household, but they were at least two years out of the loop, and perhaps underinformed and unco