Aftermath of Murini’s coup

The aftermath of Murini’s coup begins with a mistaken explanation and becomes a test of whether political order can be restored without sacrificing the law that is supposed to sustain it. When Tabini, Ilisidi, and Cajeiri returned from a two-year voyage into deep space, the government had passed into enemy hands; Tabini was restored with public support, but the origins of the seizure remained obscure. The later investigation overturned the belief that a discontented lord and popular anger had brought him down: the coup had begun inside the Assassins’ Guild itself.

The Coup Reconsidered

Tabini’s absence had been part of a mission to test what humans had said about their refugee situation. The voyage lasted two years, one year outward and one year back, and the returning party brought thousands of colonists forcibly removed from their station to be relocated on the space station above Earth. At the same time, the government at home had fallen into the hands of Tabini’s enemies. The travellers initially did not have to lead the restoration: with some encouragement, the people returned Tabini to power.

For a time, the explanation seemed to be a conventional political conspiracy. The account believed even a few weeks before the later revelations blamed a discontented Kadagidi lord with Marid backing, joined by malcontent lords and their bodyguards. They were supposed to have penetrated the aiji’s security, seized the grounded shuttles, and exploited Tabini’s low public approval. The investigation established that this was wrong: neither public dissatisfaction with the economy nor discontent with Tabini’s government had caused his overthrow, and Murini had not actually devised the plot.

The decisive discovery placed the origin within the Assassins’ Guild. The Guild, which served as a law-enforcement institution, had fractured, and part of it had seized the government, putting power into the hands of a man who should never have held office. The revelation changed the character of the crisis. Restoring Tabini’s position could not by itself repair a Guild that had helped make the seizure possible.

The struggle after Murini’s defeat further complicated the assignment of responsibility. Tabini and Ilisidi had first hunted down Murini, then found themselves fighting a Guild splinter they had taken for Murini’s most committed supporters. Some of those fighters had received forged orders, attributed to names that could not be verified. Their actions were not thereby made innocent: they had followed orders they should not have followed. But the false orders showed that Murini’s name did not explain every wrong within the Aishidi’tat, and that the inquiry had to reach beyond the former ruler and his immediate adherents.

Public Support and the Continuing Cleanup

During Murini’s two years in power, he and his supporters lost public confidence. Across the continent, ordinary citizens organized in small groups and considered how they might remove him. When Tabini reappeared alive with Ilisidi and Cajeiri beside him, and they reported success in the heavens, he encountered broad public support. That support helped make his return more than a settlement imposed from above.

The Shadow Guild nevertheless made an attempt on Tabini, Ilisidi, and Lord Tatiseigi. The attack was stopped, though Lord Tatiseigi’s grounds and a bedroom were damaged. After it failed and the situation began to collapse, Murini and his closest staff fled toward the Marid, and his government disintegrated. The end of that government did not end the work of identifying its networks or repairing their effects.

Over the year following Tabini’s restoration, Tabini and Ilisidi systematically investigated what remained of the crisis. They forgave some people, placed others on notice, and pursued the leaders; Murini was among the first dealt with. Other cases were harder. The Shadow Guild had also made enemies among potential allies: in trying to secure an arrangement with northern Marid interests, it targeted Machigi, lord of the southern Marid, and met resistance from his locally trained bodyguard. Machigi subsequently signed a trade agreement with Ilisidi, an initial step toward agreement with the Aishidi’tat, conditional on his keeping away from the west coast. The aftermath thus included shifting political alignments as well as the pursuit of those responsible.

The Exiled Guild and the Need for Proof

Some senior Guild members had gone underground when Murini took power. Some listed as dead were still alive; some of them had operated the network that helped restore Tabini. The most senior had claimed retirement, while others remained dead in the official record. After watching the Guild purge itself twice, these former members had not returned despite repeated orders from the current leadership. Their conflict with that leadership had continued since the coup ended, and personal grievances formed part of the standoff.

Jago warned Bren that the Guild in exile did not favor humans, but had always been loyal to the law. During Murini’s rule, its members had worked with humans on Mospheira to restore the Guild. They had not favored Tabini because of his association with humans; they were now prepared to support him because they wanted the Guild returned to what it had been. They gave their word to come back, despite again abandoning their identities, families, and marriages, in order to retake the institution, examine its records, and restore the law.

Their return offered an alternative to an assault on Guild Headquarters. A direct attack risked killing important members who might join the effort if they learned the truth, and could destroy the personnel-assignment records needed to establish what had happened. The stakes were institutional as well as evidentiary: if the case against the Council could not be proved to Guild members, Tabini might have to uphold the reform by decree and by the power of the aijinate. That could restore control without restoring legitimacy. The opposing members therefore needed to demonstrate their case before the Council and show that the Council itself had broken the law.

Records, Accountability, and Restoration

The effort to recover evidence was urgent because Shishogi could destroy records if he believed he was about to be dismissed. The fire at his office did cause damage, but the records survived. Shishogi was found dead, apparently by suicide and badly burned but recognizable, and one man was intercepted carrying several notebooks from the office. The surviving documents and notebooks offered a possibility of establishing responsibility through evidence rather than relying only on political authority.

The immediate human cost was substantial. Two members of the resistance were out of action, including Banichi, and two were dead; counting Shishogi, the target, the death toll was three. Fourteen people in the building were wounded. One hundred forty-seven voluntarily stood down pending resolution, while sixteen were arrested and held for sorting and testimony because they remained under suspicion. A new Council was preparing to establish a quorum, record the change, and close its meeting. These figures convey the scale of the institutional confrontation without making every person caught in it equivalent to its leaders.

After the confrontation, Tabini reported that everyone had come out alive. The old Guildmaster had returned; people recorded as dead reappeared, missing members came back, and retirees rescinded their retirements. Some high officials installed during the preceding year were difficult to locate, and five people had been absent from the Council meeting. The restored leadership began interviewing Guild members, starting with assignments to Bujavid. It examined man’chi, kinship, past service, references, and other testimony. The process joined personnel review to fact-finding: it sought to understand members’ loyalties and histories rather than treat the organization as a single guilty body.

The Institutional Stakes

The Guild’s post-coup crisis has deeper roots in the political order it had once helped create. Before the Foreign Star appeared, the atevi had reached the age of steam and begun to move beyond a clan structure associated with ruinous wars. Eleven regional associations agreed to build a railroad from Shejidan to the west without going to war over it. During construction, the Transportation Guild and the Builders crossed not only clan boundaries but regional ones, becoming early political organizations that operated across those divisions.

The railroad continued despite a year of argument over whether the Foreign Star was an omen of change. Aijiin, formerly elected as war leaders, were chosen to manage the project: their authority applied to the coordination of guilds, clans, and sub-clans, and to keeping promises made by clan lords whose territories the railroad crossed. A small group that became the Assassins’ Guild protected these aijiin from attacks by assassins serving individual lords. When three powerful lords later sought to change the agreement and divide the railroad into administrative districts, the Guild backed the aiji in upholding the compact. The railway’s success helped enlarge and overlap regional associations, demonstrating the political force of cooperation across inherited boundaries.

The later settlement formalized a related principle for the guilds of the expanded Aishidi’tat: membership and assignments were to depend on qualification, not clan origin, kinship, or regional association. Guild masters held authority over membership, while the Assassins’ Guild accepted an additional restriction against members seeking political office or lordship. In exchange, it received statutory protections from political pressure, including limits on who could demand its records and investigate its members. The post-coup struggle therefore concerned an institution both empowered and insulated by the order it served. Restoring its leadership required confronting abuses within that autonomy while preserving the evidence and procedures on which its legitimacy depended.

That institutional history also frames the decisions that preceded Tabini’s return. As the shuttle fleet was being built, wealth flowed into poorer areas and mainland society became more unstable; excluding atevi from decisions made in the heavens was considered unacceptable. After learning that the ship-folk had confessed to deception, Tabini doubted whether either atevi or Mospheirans had been told the truth. He sent Bren, who knew humans, and Ilisidi, whom he believed could not be put off with lies, to investigate conditions in space. He also sent Cajeiri to learn about humans and the new knowledge, and to be taught by Ilisidi. The expedition that removed these figures from the mainland formed the immediate setting for the political collapse they later had to investigate. The aftermath is consequently both an account of recovery from a coup and a warning that political institutions cannot be trusted merely because they once helped build a durable order.