Peacemaker (3 page)

Until it turned out someone had killed his grandfather, and the Kadagidi had tried to assassinate Great-uncle.

The sun sent a tantalizing shadow of something flickering across the shades.

“Don't,” he said in ship-speak, as Irene glanced toward that window shade right beside her. She looked at him, a little startled, then embarrassed.

“I forgot.”

“One regrets,” he said in Ragi, in deliberate anger, in the most perfect court accent, “that we cannot open the shades. One regrets that we shall probably be indoors from now on. One very much regrets, nadiin-ji, that there is a
stupid
old man in the Guild.”

Probably they missed half of that. He had not been thinking about simple words. He had only felt he had to say it or explode. And he was sorry now he had let his voice be sharp.

“We're fine,” Gene said in ship-speak. “We're fine, Jeri-ji. We're
here.
We're on a planet. It's ordinary to you. But we've never even
seen
a planet in our whole lives. Now we've seen trees. And we've been on mecheita. And we've seen all sorts of things. Just riding the train is exciting. We're all right. We want
you
to have a good time. It's
your
birthday.”

“That's right,” Artur said. “Isn't it, Irene?”

“We're all fine,” Irene said. “We're happy.”

They were very generous. He hoped they were enjoying at least what they could see. Everything had been different for them. And there would always be rules—there had been rules about manners at Great-uncle's house, when what they all had most wanted was to remake the association they had had in the tunnels of the ship, when they had broken all the rules they ran into with no fear at all.

But it was all different, now. Here he was not Jeri-ji, the youngest of them. He was “young gentleman” and “young sir,” and they were, well, his
guests,
and he was in charge of them, and he had to protect them. He had tried to explain about the Kadagidi. But they had no idea even yet what was really going on, and how bad it could get if enemies were trying to attack his father and overthrow the government again.

Last night had not upset them that badly. They had not panicked. They had not asked to go back to the spaceport or wished they were back on the space station. They said were sorry about his grandfather—but they did not understand. They knew he was upset about his grandfather dying—but they thought it was from missing his grandfather. He thought about explaining the truth, that he was worried about whether his mother or father had ordered it, and how that would affect whether they stayed married.

But he was too embarrassed to explain
that
to them.

They could not be two years younger, and back on the ship. Then, they had all been strangers, and bored, and amused themselves by dodging the guards and doing things they were told not to do, harmless things, but forbidden things—like even seeing one another, and meeting in secret places. They were all of them older, now—smarter, more suspicious. They were all more political: that, too.
Far
more political.

And it was just a year that had passed. But so very much had gone on.

And if he understood what his guests had told him—most of the grown-ups that had let them come down to the planet had done it only in the hopes they would no longer get along, and that that would end the association for good.

He was sure that was why his parents had said yes to the idea.

He had figured that out early, without any help from anybody, the night after he had heard from his father that his associates from the ship were really going to be allowed to come.

His mother, who was really not in favor of humans at all, really,
really
hoped he and they would not get along. His mother already accused him of getting his ideas from nand' Bren, as if that was bad—his
father
asked nand' Bren's opinion on a lot of things, so was that wrong?

He thought it was not.

His father might not
quite
be planning on them falling out with each other—but with his father,
everything
was politics, and maybe his father had notions of playing politics with the ship-captains, eventually, if it did work. At very least he was sure his father was just waiting to use the association, if it worked, or end the notion, if it failed.

But he had thought entirely enough about politics for one day. He just wanted his guests to
want
to come back again.

“Are you scared?” he asked, the old question they had used to ask each other, when they had been about to do something dangerous in the ship tunnels. “Are you scared?”

“Hell, no,” Gene laughed, the light-hearted old answer.

“Is it true, Gene-ji?” That was
not
the old question.
“Are
you scared? There was danger at Tirnamardi. There will be danger where I am, in Shejidan. Are you scared?”

“Are we
stupid?
” Gene asked with a little laugh. “We were scared when we got on the shuttle to come down here! Irene was so scared she threw up.”

“Don't tell that!” Irene protested.

“But then she said,” Gene added, “‘It's all right. I'm going!' And here she is!”

“We're all
scared,
” Artur said. “But Reunion Station was more scary. The kyo blew up half the station and we didn't know when they were coming back to blow up the rest of it. We've got Captain Jase, we've got his guards with us, we've got your great-grandmother and nand' Bren and Lord Tatiseigi, and all their bodyguards—not to
mention
your bodyguards.
They're
scary, all on their own.”

Cajeiri had not quite thought of Antaro and Jegari, Lucasi and Veijico as scary, but he did think they looked impressive and official, now that they all wore black leather uniforms and carried sidearms.

“We don't know that much about what's going on,” Gene said, “but it doesn't look like
you're
scared.
Are
you?”

Cajeiri gave a little laugh, and measured a tiny little space with his fingers. Old joke, among them. “This much.”

They laughed out loud. All of a sudden, on this train full of trouble, they laughed the way they had used to laugh when things had gone wrong and then, for no good reason, gone right again.

It was the first time he had felt what he had been trying all along to feel about them, all the way through the visit to Great-uncle's house.

They were
his.
They were together. They were
all
feeling what he felt.

He drew a deep breath and ducked his head a little, because mani and Lord Tatiseigi would not approve of an outburst of laughter from young fools. “Shh.” Most everybody was asleep, and no one used loud voices around his great-grandmother. Especially no one laughed when things were serious.

So they immediately tried to be quiet. Artur leaned his mouth against his fist and tried not to laugh. A breath escaped. Then a snort. Like a mecheita. Exactly like a mecheita. It was too much.

Cajeiri propped his elbows on their little table, joined his hands in front of his mouth and nose and tried not to make any sound at all approximating that snort. Gene and Irene were all but strangling.

They had not laughed like this since they had escaped the security sweep in the tunnels.

He was sure one of the grown-up Guild was going to come back to them and want to know what was going on.

Which only set his eyes to watering and made breathing difficult.

He tried to bring it under control. They all did. It only made it worse.

They were that tired. Nobody had gotten any sleep last night. And they laughed in little wheezes until their eyes watered.

It was a kindness when nand' Bren's two valets brought them tea and crackers. They were finally able, with moments of fracture, to quiet down, in the reverent silence of tea service.

“Sorry,” Gene said, and that almost started it all over, but deep breaths and hot sweet tea restored calm, finally.

There was a small silence, the wheels thumping along the iron track, unchanging.

“I want to do everything there is to do,” Irene said. “I want to see everything, taste everything, touch everything. I get dizzy sometimes, looking at the sky. But vids don't do it, Jeri-ji. You have to feel the wind. You have to smell the green. It's like hydroponics, only it's everywhere, just growing where it wants to.”

“It was great,” Gene said.

“It's going to
be
great,” Artur said. “It
all
is. Irene's got it right. God, when Boji came climbing up that wall . . .”

“The Taibeni riding through,” Gene said.

“The
storm,
” Irene said on a deep breath. “The lightning was amazing. That was just amazing!”

B
ren poured himself another half cup of tea, timing it to the gentle rock of the rails. The clack and rumble, that sound that was bringing them closer and closer to the capital, should be soporific. His body-servants were dozing, like almost everybody else on the train. The tea, however, didn't in the least help him toward sleep.

But sleep had thus far eluded him, and he wanted warmth against a slight inner chill, and an exhaustion that, this afternoon, seemed to have no cure.

They'd
killed
people, this morning.

He'd set up the attack. He, Bren Cameron, clearly no longer working for the Mospheiran State Department, no longer
just
the aiji's translator—he'd presided over a scene of devastation.

It wasn't the first time he'd been in a firefight. But never one that so unexpectedly shook the ground, still reverberated in his bones, so out of place, so alien, in a place that never ought to have seen violence at all.

Lord Bren of Najida, it was, now. Paidhi-aiji, the aiji's mediator. Lord of the Najida Peninsula. Lord of the Heavens—Tabini had had only the vaguest idea what was above the atmosphere when he'd conferred that title, but he'd sent the paidhi-aiji up there to deal with humans and he'd wanted to make damned sure the paidhi had whatever power it took to put him in charge of whatever he could lay claim to—in Tabini's name, of course.

In one sense the title only amounted to a name, a piece of starry black ribbon on the rare occasions he chose to wear it; but in another sense it was Tabini-aiji's declaration that atevi were a permanent presence up there in space, that they meant to have a say in what went on up there, and that their representative was going to have all the respect and backing Tabini could throw behind him.

Three some years ago, that had turned out to mean Tabini's presence was going to go with humans out to deep space and back and find out whether what humans had told them about their situation as refugees was true—or not.

It had been a two-year voyage, one year out, one year back—and in their return they had brought thousands of colonists forcibly removed from their station, to be relocated on the space station above the Earth of the atevi. That was one problem.

And during their absence from the world, his, the heir's, and the aiji-dowager's—they had immediately met a bigger one: the situation back home had completely gone to hell and the government had come into the hands of Tabini's enemies.

They hadn't really
had
to right that situation at the outset: with a little encouragement, the
people
had set Tabini back in power.

Their investigation in the year since Tabini had resumed his place as aiji was only now uncovering what had
really
happened, and it hadn't been what they had first thought—what he and most people had believed as fact as late as a few weeks ago: that the coup which had driven Tabini from power for two years had involved a discontented Kadagidi lord with Marid backing, who had somehow gotten together a band of malcontent lords and their bodyguards, penetrated the aiji's security, seized the shuttles on the ground, and been able to throw the government into chaos, all because Tabini's sliding public approval had hit rock bottom.

Wrong. Completely wrong. It hadn't been in any sense public discontent with the economy—or with Tabini's governance—that had overthrown his government and set Murini in charge.

It hadn't even been Murini who'd actually plotted Tabini's overthrow.

They'd assumed it had been Murini. There had indeed been a public approval crisis, in the economic upheaval of the push to get to space.

But none of these problems had really launched the attack on Tabini.

He'd been surprised, really shocked, how bravely and in what numbers ordinary people had turned out in droves to support Tabini's return to power. Evidently, he'd thought at the time, the populace had had their fill of Murini. They'd changed their minds. They'd seen the dowager and the heir come back from space and they'd understood that humans had been telling the truth and dealing fairly with atevi, against all doomsaying opinions to the contrary.

That
had brought the people out to support Tabini's return. Mostly, he'd thought then—it had been a return to normalcy the crowds had cheered for, after things under Murini had gone so massively wrong.

There'd been discontent before Tabini's fall, but no, it had
not
been lords riding a popular movement that had organized the coup.

It had not even been a small group of malcontent lords acting on their own, though one of them had been glad to take over, not understanding, himself, that he was only a figurehead.

No, it hadn't been Murini who'd done it.

He and his bodyguard had gradually understood that, and begun to look for what
was
behind the coup.

His own bodyguard and the dowager's, working together, had been pulling in intelligence very quietly, intelligence that required careful sifting—old associates making contact from retirement, giving them, as he now knew, a story completely at variance with the account they were still getting from other sources. Some individuals that they might have wanted to consult—Tabini's bodyguard—were dead, replaced twice since. And every inquiry they made had, he knew now, run up against rules of procedure—within the closely held secrecy of the Assassins, the most secretive of Guilds.

His bodyguard, and the dowager's, had protected him, protected the aiji, and protected the heir through some very dicey situations, including misinformation that had nearly gotten him killed out on the peninsula.

They'd survived that. They'd tested their channels. They'd quietly worked to ascertain who
could
be trusted . . . and who, either because they were following the rules, or because they were part of the problem . . . could not be relied on.

Geigi coming down to the world had been a major break. Geigi, resident on the space station during the whole interval, observing from orbit, had filled in some informational gaps; and he was sure Geigi had gotten an earful of information from his own bodyguard when he'd gone back up there.

So now Geigi had sent them the three children, a ship-captain, and two ship's security with a bagful of gear they weren't supposed to have, and in which his own bodyguard had to take rapid instruction.

It was a good thing. Their opposition, finding pieces of their organization being stripped away, was making moves of their own.

The Kadagidi setup—was major.

Done was done, now. The lid was off, or was coming off, even while this train rolled across the landscape. Those of them that opposed the Shadow Guild dared not rely on orders going only where they were intended. They could not rely on discretion. They could not trust Guild communications, or rely on any personnel whose man'chi his bodyguard or the dowager's didn't know and believe. The matter at the Kadagidi estate this morning had been Guild against Guild—they'd exposed the Shadow Guild's plot to assassinate Lord Tatiseigi. But they'd also hit right at the heart of Shadow Guild operations
inside
Assassins' Guild Headquarters.

The Shadow Guild, wounded, might think it was blind luck and an old feud that had guided the strike. It wasn't. And whatever the Shadow Guild believed, it could figure their enemies had just gotten their hands on records. Whether or not the Shadow Guild believed they'd delivered an intentional blow straight at them—it was time for the rest of the Shadow Guild operation to move. Fast.

From their own view—the Assassins' Guild might have seemed on the verge of fatal fracture, infiltrated at its highest levels, still shaken by fighting in the field against Southern Guild forces. People who guarded the aiji already felt themselves unable to rely on Guild lines of communication . . .

One assessing the aiji's chances of survival might think that the infiltration might be pervasive, and fatal.

But now they knew it was
not
that the infiltration was pervasive through the Guild, no. It was that it was that high
up.
It was not the rank and file who could no longer be trusted, and it was not a widespread disaffection within Guild ranks. It was a problem in the upper levels that had been able to set a handful of people in convenient places, that had sown a little disinformation in more than one operation—and done an immense lot of damage over a very long period of time.

Now they knew names. The dowager's bodyguard, and his own, were increasingly sure they knew names, both good and bad. And the dowager intended a fix for the problem—granted they got to Shejidan in one piece, granted they could muster the right people in the next critical hours, and granted they did
not
muster up one wrong name among the others, or bet their lives and the aiji's safety on a piece of misdirection.

They finally knew the Name behind the other names. They knew how he had worked. He was not an extraordinarily adept agent in the field, but a little old man at a desk.

His bodyguard months ago had reported the problem of tarnished names that deserved clearing—some living, some dead. A large number of senior Guild had retired two years ago, some of whom had
dereliction of duty, medically unfit,
and, in some cases, he was informed, even the word
treason
attached to their records. Some notations had landed there as a result of their resignations during Murini's investigation, some had been added as a result of Tabini's investigation into the coup and their refusal to be contacted. It had been disturbing—but credible—that persons who had never felt attached to Tabini and who were approaching retirement might just neglect to report back and go through the paperwork and the process after his return to power. Perhaps, the thought had been, these individuals had never appealed the matter or shown up in Shejidan to answer questions and have their records cleared . . . because they were just disaffected from the Guild itself, disillusioned and still angry over the handling of the whole matter.

Senior officers of the Guild had deserted in droves when Murini had taken over the government; they remained, his bodyguard had said, disaffected from current Guild leadership, opposing changes in policy. There was also old business, a lengthy list of Missing still on the Requests for Action which pertained to every Guildsman in the field: if one happened to find such a person, one was to report the location, ascertain the status if possible, request the individual to contact Guild Headquarters and fill out the paperwork—so Algini said. But there was, since Tabini's return, no urgency on that item, Algini also said, and in the feeling that there might be some faults some of these members were worried about, there was a tacit understanding that nobody was really going to carry out that order. Some junior might, if he was a fool, but otherwise that list just existed, and nobody was going to knock on a door and insist a former member report himself and accept what might be disciplinary action. Certain members had left to pursue private lives under changed names.

A message had come from two former Guild Council members, stating that, in a new age of cooperation with humans and atevi presence on the space station, the old senior leadership felt themselves at the end of their usefulness. It was a new world. Let the young ones sit in council. With marks against their names, with records tainted, who knew what was true, or which of them to trust? They were not anxious to come back to hunt down other Guild. The idea disgusted them. They disapproved of the investigation and refused to submit to a Guild inquiry.

That was the only quasi-official answer to the demands of the infamous list that the Guild referred to as the Missing and the Dead.

The stalemate still continued. Those on the list would not answer a summons or account for their movements during the coup. The list was a farce and an insult. The reconstituted records, they said, were corrupt. They would not divulge information that might reveal contacts or the location of fellow Missing.

And, no, they would not come back. And they would not ask Tabini to be included in the amnesty afforded other guilds and given on a case-by-case basis to the Assassins. They maintained the executive branch had no authority to intervene in the guilds and that the list violated that principle. It was principle.

There had been a few resignations
since
the events out at Najida. The list had grown a bit.

Angry resignations, his aishid said.

And his aishid, and the dowager's, had kept investigating . . . month after month.
Tabini's
aishid, however, couldn't. The current Guild Council refused to grant those four, who were Taibeni clan, Tabini's remote cousins, any higher rank or a security clearance, because
Tabini,
of the executive of the aishidi'tat, had ignored the Guild's recommendation for his bodyguard, and chosen his own, who were not classified as having a security clearance, or even advanced training.

It had been more than inconvenient. It had been damned dangerous . . . so much so that the aiji-dowager had finally ordered part of her own bodyguard to go into Tabini's service and back up
and train
the four Tabini had appointed. The Guild knew about the four new bodyguards: nobody had officially mentioned the
training
part of the arrangement, which was, under Guild rules, illegal.

Things had gotten that bad.

Then, even as they'd sent Geigi aloft and into safety—Algini had come to him with information that made it all make sense.

So he knew things that no outsider to the Guild was supposed to know: he knew, the dowager knew, and Lord Tatiseigi knew. Young Cajeiri also knew—at least on his level—since his bodyguard meshed with theirs, and they all were under fire, so to speak,
all
of them
and
Tabini-aiji at once . . .

Because they knew exactly where the origin of the coup was, now. It had been no conspiracy of the lords, no dissent among the people. It was within the
Assassins' Guild
. In effect, the guild that served as the law enforcement agency had fractured, and part of it had seized the government, setting it in the hands of a man who never should have held office.