Assassins’ Guild Headquarters Takeover and Return of the Old Guild

The Assassins’ Guild Headquarters Takeover and Return of the Old Guild begins with a claim of lawful authority and becomes a violent transfer of control. Acting for Tabini, Bren Cameron confronts the Guild leadership inside its own headquarters, where the arrival of returning former officers exposes the sitting leadership’s isolation and forces the guards to choose whom they serve.

The Aiji’s Authority at the Door

Bren and his aishid cross the plaza to the Guild’s iron-bound doors. At the last moment, Banichi touches his locator bracelet and Jago knocks; the door opens outward, a defensive design, to reveal Guild guards. Banichi identifies the visitors as representatives of Tabini, and Bren answers not with a bow but by displaying the aiji’s seal ring. The guards let them pass, but entry does not mean acceptance: inside, a senior guard reports that the Council is sitting on another matter and asks Bren to wait.

Bren refuses to let the request be treated as an ordinary appointment. He presents the ring as Tabini’s presence and the briefcase as the aiji’s explicit orders, insisting that neither can be held in the public hall. When the guards offer to take him to the Guildmaster’s office, he presses the deeper question of allegiance: whether their man’chi is owed to the Guildmaster or to the aishidi’tat, institutions he insists are not the same. He tells them that the Guild leadership has betrayed them and orders them to stand down in the aiji’s name.

The challenge gives the guards a choice before force decides the matter. As alarm spreads among them, Banichi discreetly wedges expanding plastic into the latch-hole to prevent the door from closing. Guards at the Council doorway raise four rifles. Banichi answers by naming the returning force: retired Guild members, the Missing and the Dead, returning at Tabini’s order. When one guard recognizes Banichi, the unit’s senior officer orders his people to retreat. The confrontation at the threshold has shifted the balance: the aiji’s seal and the returning officers’ presence have made obedience to the sitting leadership uncertain.

The Assault and Its Cost

The pause at the Council doors ended in a blast from the far end of the hall. The massive exterior doors tore backward against their mountings; one stood upright, the other hung askew before crashing down. Bren flattened himself against the wall with Banichi and Tano as smoke and sunset light filled the passage. Figures poured in through the ruined entrance and moved through the offices, opening doors in search of routes through the building. The Guild’s headquarters, like other buildings in the aishidi’tat, was threaded with secondary passages, so the breach did not leave its defenders with a single front to hold.

A burst of fire came from the ruined Council-area doorway, followed by a concentrated volley from the opposing side. The shooting from within stopped. In the alarm’s flashing lights and continuing din, Bren tried to determine whether the force entering the hall was theirs; when he put a hand to the stone floor, it slipped in blood. Banichi was upright but badly wounded, and blood spread across the floor around him. A wall-shaking blast had already suggested that Cenedi might be attacking from an intersecting administrative corridor; now the assault had opened the building from the outside as well. The sudden arrival of armed allies turned the standoff at the Council doors into a fight across the headquarters.

Afterward, Nawari reported that the office fire had been caused by an incendiary device. The man found there was dead, apparently by suicide, and badly burned but still recognizable; the records had suffered damage without being destroyed. One man had been intercepted carrying several notebooks from the office, a potentially important recovery when the attack had evidently included an attempt to burn records. Shishogi was dead and could no longer be questioned, but the notebooks survived as a possible source of evidence.

The takeover left a precise and uneven toll. Two of the returning force were out of action, including Banichi; two members of the resistance were dead, or three if the target was counted. Fourteen people in the building were wounded. One hundred forty-seven had voluntarily stood down pending a resolution, while sixteen were under arrest and being sorted for testimony because they were suspected. A new Council was about to meet to declare a quorum, record the change in leadership, and close the sitting. The fighting had therefore not settled the Guild’s future by itself: the new authority still had to be entered into the Council’s proceedings, and Bren was urgently needed to present the aiji’s documents.

The Council Reconstituted

The armed gathering did not simply disperse after the fighting. As Bren and his aishid reached the bottom of the Council chamber’s aisle, the returning Guild members began filling its tiers of desks. The room had thirty-three seats, though only twenty-nine were councillors’ places; at the long desk, a gray-haired man took the central seat, set down a pistol, and leaned a rifle beside him. A senior woman laid her rifle on the desk’s right-hand seat, and a third person occupied the left. The arrangement made authority visible but not yet certain: Guild leadership had changed its seating when outsiders were present, and even those taking Council seats might not know who would assume command. Some of the returning officers resumed old places; others claimed seats in what amounted to a wholesale replacement of the Council formed during the previous year.

Bren approached the desk with Tabini’s ring still bloodied and the briefcase in his other hand. He formally presented himself as the paidhi-aiji speaking for Tabini and bearing his seal, then identified the documents as Tabini’s request for an investigation into orders given in the Dojisigin Marid, supported by corroborating documents from Ilisidi. The ring, the seals, and the formal record now carried the authority that had first been asserted at the entrance. Bren’s hands were too filthy to open the briefcase cleanly; his fingers stuck to its bloodied handle, and he needed the recorder’s assistance to expose the documents inside. The disorder of the takeover could not be kept separate from its legal work: the new leadership had to receive and record the aiji’s orders through the Guild’s own proceedings.

The Council voted to recess for three hours and reconvene to hear the documents read. No one dissented. That silence marked a procedural beginning rather than a completed settlement: the Council had accepted the pause and the record, while the investigation and the new leadership’s position still awaited formal consideration.

Later that night, the change reached Cajeiri and the human children in their guest suite. They had been roused from sleep by Veijico and Lucasi, and the news drew Antaro, Jegari, Gene, Artur, and Irene from their rooms in oversized adult robes. Veijico explained that many Guild officers had not returned to Shejidan since the Troubles, and that Tabini and Ilisidi had brought them back that night. The Guildmaster who had held power since Tabini’s restoration had been overthrown; the Director of Assignments was dead; senior Council figures had stepped down, with two under arrest; and the old officers were again in charge. For Cajeiri, the report supplied a blunt measure of the upheaval: the capture of the Director was confirmation that the leadership’s fall had reached the person at its center, while the return of the older officers gave the night’s violence a political outcome beyond the headquarters walls.

A Restoration with Unsettled Alliances

The return of the old officers did not guarantee that the Guild’s restored leadership would welcome the humans or their influence. Bren’s bodyguards had warned him that the returning cadre opposed humans and what they brought, and that some might have preferred him dead so they could settle the Guild’s affairs without him. He nevertheless entered as Tabini’s representative and put the aiji’s documents before the Council. That tension complicates the takeover’s meaning: the old officers’ return challenged the leadership implicated in the crisis, but their restoration was not itself a promise of political agreement with Bren. His presence among them made the aiji’s authority consequential while leaving the Guild’s attitude toward human involvement uncertain.