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He thought honesty was probably a good thing, because his mother was going to blame him for everything.
Honored Great-uncle, my mother is particularly angry because of a parid’ja in an antique cage, who escaped and damaged the nursery. My father said I might have him. My mother calls him a filthy beast and she says keeping animals is Great-grandmother’s idea, when I know you also have very fine mechieti, like Great-grandmother, so one knows you understand my situation. Please, esteemed Great-uncle, I do not want to ask Great-grandmother to come rescue me, because if my mother said such things to her, one does not know what might happen. But, Great-uncle, you are very brave and very powerful. You have co
He read it once, for good measure.
Uncle Tatiseigi had alwayswanted custody of him, well, except the time he had ruined the driveway. But Uncle Tatiseigi had always been extremely jealous of influences on him, even mani. And Uncle Tatiseigi was not at all on good terms with Grandfather. He was afraid, but he was not going to admit that. SurelyGreat-uncle would come.
He folded the letter, he sealed it very properly—he used a little ring he had, which was not a proper seal, but he had a small waxjack at his desk, and it served.
“Take this,” he said, “one of you. Get to the servants’ passage, get downstairs, and get down to my great-uncle.”
“If he is in the meeting, still,” Jegari said.
“You can give it to his bodyguard.” Everybody would be standing around the door of the meeting-room, including his father’s bodyguard, and they had tried that, and Father was still not here. But Uncle might get a message.
Uncle could at least move his father. Bothof them might come up here. That would be the best thing—if only they agreed with him.
It was a terrible situation to be in.
And he had not asked for it. More than Boji, he had done no wrong. He really had not done anything wrong. That was the puzzling thing. Always before, if he was in trouble, he had done something really, really wrong.
But right now, things just seemed to be happening that were not all his fault.
17
It was absolutely necessary for the paidhi-aiji, and Lord Geigi, to show up at the event in full court dress. That was first and foremost. They had to appear, they had to give the right impression, and they had to be protected against the very real possibility that some attendee might not be on the up and up.
That meant bulletproof vests all around and a last-moment fitting. Narani was determined to have a good fit on persons he sent out the paidhi’s door—stylish, entirely unremarkable as what they were, and compatible with court style—and the poor tailor had shown up at the door with his case just about on the hour, every hour since supper. Bren had suffered three fittings, Geigi two—since Geigi’s security had gotten together with Bren’s and agreed that, indeed, bulletproof and pale silk was the latest fashion.
But lords were dressing for di
And if the gossip of tailors and flower arrangers and number-counters hadn’t let the secret out to the building staff by now—its intermediate step on the way to full press coverage—if all of that failed, there was a conservative caucus, and they could always be counted on to blow any secrecy wide open.
Neither the liberal nor the conservative caucus was a meeting politic for the paidhi-aiji to attend. Nor were they apt for the aiji-dowager’s attendance—by a long shot—though she occasionally did meet with the aristocratic side of the conservative caucus, where it regarded her passion for the environment.
Tatiseigi, however, was reportedly down there—he was in his element. In very fact, Tatiseigi had convoked the meeting and asked Tabini to be there, an attendance nearly unprecedented. One understood the Merchants’ Guild had also been invited to appear, and almost certainly the porcelain trade would come under discussion, if only as a gloss.
The Assassins’ Guild was naturally there—not officially on the speakers’ list—they didn’t come to committee meetings and the like. But they were standing by every aristocratic member in that meeting.
Which was how information was flowing to his staff. So either the Guild leadership approved of that leak going to certain staffs—or his staff was getting it second-hand from the dowager’s or Tabini’s.
There had been the usual conservative viewings-with-alarm for openers. There was plenty of viewing-human-influence-with-suspicion. That was traditional, like the counting of numbers for felicity.
That had, predictibly, occupied the entire front of the meeting. It had not made the paidhi’s cold supper happier. But the execration of human influence was the establishment of bona fides for certain speakers, so it was understandable; the usual speakers were the Old Money of the aishidi’tat, in the main. Ragi clan ruled the aishidi’tat, some said, only because the Old Money could not abide one of their own lording it over the rest.
And then, wonder of wonders—Lord Tatiseigi had taken charge of the meeting and opened his statement with the accurate observation that there was no region of the aishidi’tat moreconservative than the Marid.
He had further stated that if the conservative caucus wished to find kindred opinions in political debates and in the legislature in the future, they should work to stabilize that region of the continent, put power in hands with but one neck, as Jago so colorfully quoted Tatiseigi—and insist that everybody listen to the Assassins’ Guild’s new establishment there and operate through them in the old traditional way.
That last suggestion, Jago reported, had occasioned another furor. Whyhad the Assassins’ Guild, that bastion of conservative opinion, recently run amok, one asked, if not the ascendancy of liberal elements within it?
Because, Tatiseigi had retorted shrewdly, his lifelong neighbors, the Padi Valley Kadagidi, who had disowned Murini as a failure and supported Tabini’s return to the aijinate, had been lying: It was all designed to put the clan back into a position of great influence.
The Kadagidi, Tatiseigi had gone on to say, had publicized an enemies’ list that only beganwith the liberals of the legislature. But, Tatiseigi proposed, the real rivals of the Kadagidi were not at all the liberals. They were the other Old Money clans, whose leaders were in jeopardy from Kadagidi aspirations. The Kadagidi sat at the very heart of the aishidi’tat, assisting and backing the renegades of the Guild in districts south of Shejidan. The Kadagidi could not be in favor of the Guild action which had removed the Shadow Guild from the Marid.
And they had not deigned to show up yet in the legislature.
“Clever man,” Bren said, hearing that. “How was it received?”
“With the usual objections from Lord Diogi,” Jago said wryly. Diogi was not one of the brightest lights in the legislature. Nor that influential. Tatiseigi, notoriously noton the cutting edge of technological developments, was equally famously no fool and weighed far more in debate than Diogi.
“But no other objections,” he said.
“There is debate on mechanisms,” Jago reported, “to assure that there will be no competition to the detriment of certain regional interests. That these matters be referred to the Merchants and reports received.”