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To Tatiseigi:
I am honored by the generous hospitality you have shown me over many years. I am particularly honored by your acts of trust and support for me personally despite our differences of degree and birth. With every year I have understood more and more why the aiji-dowager favors you so highly, and I have every confidence in her recommendations. I have asked her to care for my staff, and hope that you may assist her with that matter, as I hope you will look favorably on my people. Go with her and keep her safe. Trust Jase-aiji. He will not understand every custom, but he will do everything for your protection.
To Narani himself:
Accept my deep gratitude for your extraordinary service, your courage, and your inventiveness. I have asked the aiji-dowager to make provision for you and for senior staff, and I have bequeathed Najida to her and to her great-grandson, where you also may have a place should you wish it. I ask you see to the disposition of my clerical staff, and to the execution of my more detailed will, which you will find in the back center of my desk, under my seal. No one could have a more faithful manager than you have been, here and on the station.
It was a somewhat depressing set of notes to have to write, but curiously—it left him feeling he wanted his favorite dessert as lunch today, just in case; and he felt an amazing lack of stress about the idea of not having breakfast the next morning. He usually conducted his affairs in a tangled mess of this obligation and that, with overlapping scheduling, priorities jostling each other and changing by the hour—and he usually managed most of them.
But—regarding tomorrow—he discovered not one thing that he really had to do. The peripheral objectives were, for once in his career, all bundled up and handled fairly neatly.
Oh, he had things he wanted to do, or should do—he always had; but there was absolutely nothing weighing on his shoulders as impending catastrophe if he didn’t. The people he’d written the notes to would handle everything as well as it could be handled.
Protection? Safety? He was going to be with the people who made him feel safe, come what might.
It was, contrarily, their guild he was trying to rescue, and for once he could help them.
They were, meanwhile, setting things up with all the skill and professional ability anyone could ask.
He was certainly not going into the situation pla
Disband two clans of the aishidi’tat, the Kadagidi and the Ajuri? That could certainly be the outcome, given the documentation and the witnesses the aiji-dowager now had in hand.
And in a time of major upheaval and a threat to the Guild system itself—and with Ilisidi stirring up her own factions to vengeance—Tabini might just take out two clans that had been a perpetual thorn in his side, at the same time he brought in the two tribal peoples.
The paidhi-aiji’s demise under such circumstances would, politically, unify several factions, not that he was the favorite of several of them—but that the whole concept of the Assassins’ Guild, enforcers of the law and keepers of the peace, violating its own rules to strike at a court official with the aiji’s document in hand would not sit at all well with the Conservatives, the very people who were usually most opposed to the paidhi-aiji’s programs. His enemies among the Conservatives were not wicked, unprincipled people—they just happened to be absolutely wrong about certain things. They would far rather support the rights of a dead paidhi than the live one who had so often upset the world.
And the prospect of the arch-conservatives avenging him . . . afforded him a very strange amusement.
He was, perhaps, a little light-headed after that spate of pre-posthumous letter-writing, but he honestly could not readily recall a time when there was so little remaining on the docket that the paidhi-aiji could reasonably be responsible for.
So. He did not deal with tactics. That was his aishid’s business.
It was not his worry what Ilisidi was doing about the Shadow Guild in the south or Lord Aseida’s future in the north.
He had no more now to do with entertaining Cajeiri’s young guests; and he certainly didn’t want to hint to the boy that there was anything so serious going on.
The one thing he did need to do right now, and urgently, was to get a meaningful document with Tabini’s seal on it . . . on some issue that would not be what the current Guild leadership feared it was.
He encased the collection of letters in one bundle, with Narani’s letter outermost, encased in a paper saying, To open only in event of my demise. Thank you, Rani-ji.
He tied it tightly with white ribbon. He sealed the knot with white wax, and imprinted it with the paidhi-aiji’s seal.
Then he wrote one additional letter, to Tabini:
One asks, aiji-ma, that you prepare a document with conspicuous seals, empowering the paidhi-aiji, as your proxy, to bring a complaint before the Assassins’ Guild Council this evening.
One asks, aiji-ma, that you complain not of the situation in the north, but that you bring to the Guild’s attention the situation in the Taisigin Marid, wherein units from the capital were dismissed into the country without their weapons or equipment and where the aiji-dowager has had to intervene to restore order. One asks that you strongly question that decision and do not mention the other.
One asks further, that I be sent under your order, to deliver this document, and file it with the Guild.
He didn’t seal it. He gave the first bundle to Narani, personally, saying, “Rani-ji, these letters should not be delivered unless it is likely that I am dead.”
“Nandi.” Narani bowed, with a rare expression of dismay.
“Which one does not intend should happen,” Bren added hastily, “and if it does not happen, I shall certainly, and in great embarrassment, ask for this bundle of letters back again and destroy them. But what must be delivered quickly and certainly is this letter.” He handed Narani the second letter, as yet unrolled. “Please take this letter first to my aishid and ask if this will serve their needs. Then, granted their approval of it, place the letter in my best cylinder and personally deliver it to the hands of the aiji, no other, not his major domo, not the head of his guard, and not the aiji-consort. To him alone. Await a response.”
“Nandi.” A deep bow, and the old man took both the bundle of letters and the letter to Tabini.
“Tell my aishid, too, I have ordered a light lunch, and a dessert,” he added. “With enough for them, whether at table, or in their quarters. They may modify that request at their need. And tell my valets I shall need court dress this evening, with the bulletproof vest.”
“Nandi,” Narani said a second time, bowed, and left with the letters and his instructions.
10
Narani did not come back. Jago did. She opened the office door quietly and closed it.
“We certainly approved the letter, Bren-ji,” she said. “And Narani is delivering it to the aiji.” There was, unusual for Jago, a distressed pause, as if she wanted to ask something, but refrained.
“Are you wondering whether I really understand what may happen? Yes, Jago-ji. I do entirely understand. That is why I am going.”