Peacemaker by C. J. Cherryh

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 beginning of his decades-long maneuvers, but one wasn’t sure that it hadn’t all fallen by the wayside, as the world changed and the heavens became far more complicated than a bright blue shell with obedient clockwork stars.
    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.