Pretender

“From Shejidan?” he was obliged to ask the stupid but necessary question.

“They are expected,” Algini said, di

But withholding the knowledge of Guild official presence would not be in their interest. The Kadagidi would hardly attack with Guild officials in the house. All sense of that seemed off.

“Perhaps the Guildmaster received my letter,” Bren said quietly, hopefully, while Cajeiri positively had his lip bitten in his teeth, restraining questions. His eyes were taking in everything.

“Perhaps he has,” Banichi said.

Bren moved his napkin from his lap. “I should go downstairs.”

Cajeiri moved to rise as he did, oversetting a water glass, which Jago’s lightning reflexes rescued as the boy scrambled for his feet.

His bodyguard jumped up with him.

“At this moment,” Bren said, “my company is not the most auspicious for your own introduction to the Guild, young sir. First impressions are difficult to overcome.”

The jaw halfway set. But there was a sensible worry on that brow, too. “So the Guild is the paidhi’s enemy, like my greatgrandfather?”

“Now, you must not speak ill of your Ajuri relations or the Guild either, young sir.”

“You rescued the kyo! You saved all the humans! You brought us home!”

“That we did, young sir, but we have to have their confidence to tell them those things.”

“Then they are fools!” Cajeiri said. “And if they can speak to my father, so can I.”

Dared one say the paidhi felt control of the situation slipping though his fingers? It was not only history and diction the boy had learned from his great-grandmother.

“Patience, patience,” he said. “Reco

“Cenedi did. We are quite cognizant of the word.”

“One very much advises meekness and modesty in front of the Guild,” Bren said, hoping to nip that pert attitude in the bud.

“Leave policy to your father and do not limit his resources by presenting him with a difficult situation.”

A deep sigh. “I am not aiji yet.” Clearly another Ilisidi quote. “But one will not permit them to lie. Timani and Adaro are my mother’s servants. And they can tell her things.”

That can tell was a drop of caution in a burgeoning sea of regal indignation: Cajeiri had not blurted everything out, not about the problem with Tabini’s guards; he had not taken his usual tack and made things irrevocable—a breathtaking prudence, when one considered what damning things the boy could blurt out.

“One doubts they will have time to do so, young sir, nor may they wish to be put in that position. But you are not aiji. Nor will you ever be, nor perhaps will your father be by morning, if this encounter with the Guild goes wrong. Caution and prudence, one begs you. Information is life, here.” Timani, whose ears were doubtless burning, was utterly deadpan through this—he had brought a change of coats, a considerable finery that had likely been cloth on a bolt as late as this afternoon, and stood with it in his hands, distressed. “Thank you, nadi,” Bren said, and put one arm in, then the other, while Cajeiri stood silent and brimming over with things bubbling up inside him.

The coat was deepest purple shading to red in a serpentine, shining brocade, a finer coat than the lace on his shirt could possibly do justice, and he could only wonder how the servants had put this together in a handful of hours, or whether Tatiseigi might recognize the fabric as not a very petty theft.

“Extraordinary,” he murmured, by way of appreciation as Timani brushed down the sleeves.

“It fits, nandi?”

“Very well, nadi.” With a little adjustment of the cuffs, while the maidservant, Adaro, adjusted his queue past the collar. “Excellent.”

He was shaken by the boy’s little outburst, knowing what a desperate pass they had come to down there, and how he was going to have to defy Tabini’s dismissal, at least to appear in the vicinity.

But he felt, at least, the equal of any lord down there, as flashy, in this mode, as Tabini was deliberately martial. The aiji was completely out of the fashion wars that meant psychological advantage, and remarkable in the statement he did make—but for his part, no ateva wanted to give way in argument to a peer who looked like a rag-bin. It was core of the court mentality. It was like a suit of armor, this purple-red coat.

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.”