Peacemaker

Within three more hours, however, legitimate Guild who suspected something was seriously amiss in their own ranks had begun gathering in the shadows, not approving of the new aiji’s initial orders or the conduct of the Guild as it was being run. They had evidently had particularly bad feelings about which units were being sent to search the Taibeni woods, and which were being held back.

They had had bad feelings about the recklessness with which the space shuttles and facilities on the ground were seized.

Then the units that had gone in so heavy-handedly to seize the spaceport were withdrawn in favor of more junior units who knew absolutely nothing about the technology, which made no sense to these senior officers, either.

These officers had taken even greater alarm when, that evening, assassinations were ordered without due process or proof of guilt, and senior Guild objections were not only ruled out of order—several were arrested, and their records marked for it.

The hell of it still was—the leadership of the conspiracy in that moment, even Murini himself, did not appear to have had a clear-cut program, or any particular reason for overthrowing the government, except a general discontent with the world as it had come to be and the fact that the leadership of the coup wished humans had never existed. A committee of scoundrels and confused elder lords had appointed Murini to be aiji—as a way, they said, to secure the consent of the influential and ancient Kadagidi clan to govern, and to spread a sense of legitimacy on the government. But they had not actually chosen Murini. Murini had been set before them as the choice—by a message from somewhere inside the Guild, the origin of which no one now could trace.

Murini had been, in fact, a very bad choice for the conspirators. He was a man mostly defined by his ambition, by his animosities, by his jealousies and suspicions. He’d come into office with a sense of entitlement and a set of private feuds he had immediately set about satisfying, under the illusion that he was the supreme power . . . and to make matters worse, the Shadow Guild under his authority hadn’t questioned his orders.

The Shadow Guild above Murini’s authority hadn’t apparently seen any urgency about stopping his personal vendettas, either—except to restrain him from attacking his two neighbors in the Padi Valley, the Taibeni and Lord Tatiseigi. Attacks on those two lords most loyal to Tabini would have raised questions about Murini’s motives as the defender of order and the savior of the Conservatives of the aishidi’tat: so the Guild serving Murini had kept him from that folly.

But his handlers seemed otherwise resolved to let him run his course and do in any people who argued with him.

Then once the legislature was filled with new and frightened faces, with a handful of Tabini’s longtime political opponents—and once the rest of the continent was too shattered to raise a real threat—one could surmise the people really in charge would quietly do in Murini and replace the villain everyone loathed with someone a bit more—personable.

Maybe that had been the overall plan. Or maybe there had never been a plan. Now that one had an idea of the personality at the core of it all, one wondered if the architect of the plot, the hidden Strategist of the Shadow Guild, had had any clear idea what the outcome could be, with all the myriad changes that had come on the world. The Strategist, a little old clerical officer named Shishogi, had probably had an idea and a design in the begi

Shishogi of Ajuri clan, in a clerical office of the Assassins’ Guild—a genius, perhaps—had started plotting and arranging to change the direction of the government forty-two years ago—and the situation he’d envisioned had long since ceased to be possible, let alone practical. Shishogi was not of a disposition to rule. The number of people Shishogi could trust had gradually diminished to none.

But now he couldn’t dismount the beast he’d guided for so long. He couldn’t emotionally accept the world as it was now. He couldn’t physically recreate the world he’d been born to. And if he let go, even if he resigned at this hour—the beast he’d created would turn on him and hunt him down for what he knew, and expose all he had ever done.

What did a man like that do—when the heavens proved so much larger than his world?

Where had all that cleverness deviated off any sensible track?

Shishogi had found a few individuals he could carefully move into position. And a few more. And a few more, all people who shared his views . . . or who were closely tied to those who did. Certain people found their way to power easy. Certain others—didn’t. Bit by bit, there was structure, there was a hierarchy, a chain of command that could get things done—things Shishogi approved.

This—this network—was the Shadow Guild.

Legitimate Assassins took years in training, spent long years of study of rules and law, years of weapons training, training in negotiation skills—and legitimate Guildsmen came out of that training with a sense of high honor about it all. The Guild didn’t just arm a three-month recruit and shove him out to shoot an honest town magistrate in the public street because somebody ordered him to.

The Shadow Guild had taken care enough in choosing its upper echelons. It had some very skilled, very intelligent people at the top. But all its recruits couldn’t be elite. And once the Guild tried to run the aishidi’tat, it lacked manpower. The handlers behind Murini, with a continent to rule, suddenly needed enough hands to carry out their orders. Legitimate Guild having retired and deserted the headquarters in droves, refusing to do the things the new Guild Council ordered—the Shadow Guild was suddenly in a bind. Controlling Guild Headquarters was one thing. Controlling the membership had proved something else altogether. Controlling the whole country had finally depended on misleading the membership.

And how had this shadowy splinter of the Guild proceeded, then—this old man, these officers, suddenly in charge of everything, building a structure of lies? A small group of their elite had a shared conservative philosophy. Its middle tiers weren’t so theoretical—or as skilled. Perhaps in their general recruitment, they’d given a little pass to those about to fail the next level, let certain people through one higher wicket, and then told them they were making mistakes and they would take certain orders or have their deficiency made known. That was one theory that Algini held. It had yet to be proved.

Early on, for the four decades before the coup, the nascent Shadow Guild had taken very small actions, carrying on a clever and quiet agenda, exacerbating regional quarrels, objecting to any approach to humans, constantly trying to gain political ground. The Assassins’ Guild, bodyguards to almost every person of note in the aishidi’tat, knew what went on behind closed doors.

But when a second human presence had arrived in the heavens, when Tabini had named the paidhi-aiji a lord of the aishidi’tat, claimed half the space station, and let the aiji-dowager take over operations in the heavens—that had not only scared the whole world, it had upset a long, slow agenda. Technological change had poured down from the heavens. There was suddenly a working agreement with the ship-humans. Atevi had become allies with the humans on Mospheira. And from very little change—change suddenly proliferated, while the world wondered what was happening up there and who really was in charge?

Tabini had fortified himself, anticipating opposition to his embracing human alliance: he’d set his key people into the space station, out of reach of assassination, and then sent the aiji-dowager, his heir, and the paidhi-aiji—as far as the world could conceptualize it—off the edge of the universe.