Attack on Tabini’s Bujavid Residence

The attack on Tabini’s Bujavid residence was the coup’s first direct attempt to assassinate him and a decisive test of whether the legitimate Assassins’ Guild could protect the government without surrendering its own law. The attackers entered in Guild uniform and killed servants, but Tabini escaped. The Guild’s emergency response preserved key people and records even as the conspiracy continued, and the attack became the beginning of a longer conflict over the Guild’s legitimacy and control.

Causes and the Attack

The coup’s move against Tabini did not come without warning: the Assassins’ Guild Council had known since early the previous year that he was a target. Yet when the attack took place, the Council was taken by surprise. The operation was unusually disciplined. Algini described the attackers as high-level operatives, meaning people of extreme skill, whose plan had suffered no leaks. Their expertise did not secure its central aim: they missed Tabini.

The reason for his escape remained uncertain. His bodyguard may have acted on a sudden feeling of unease, or Tabini may have left by chance; the available account does not settle which. What is known is that Tabini and his consort had been taken to the maternal clan territory of Taiben. The assault on the residence was therefore not the end of the threat: the conspirators mounted a second strike there, which the legitimate Guild was too late to prevent.

The immediate human cost at Bujavid was severe: the attackers killed servants, including other senior Guild members. Their use of Guild uniform made the violence look like an act of the institution itself, while the precision of the operation suggested that the conspirators had access to highly capable personnel. For the legitimate Guild, the attack made clear that waiting for further news would leave both the aiji and the government exposed.

The Guild’s Emergency Response

The legitimate Guild moved at once to protect key people and networks and to keep the government from collapsing into disorder. It could not prevent the follow-up strike at Taiben, but its response made people, records, and access points unexpectedly unavailable to the conspirators. The resistance thus began not only with armed protection but with the removal of tools that could make a coup more effective.

Among the assets kept from the conspirators were shuttle manuals, access codes for state archives and records, and the aiji’s official seal. These were not incidental losses: together they represented practical means of controlling transportation, information, and government authority. The Guild’s actions limited what the new administration could do, even while the conspirators were pursuing more immediate objectives.

When the legitimate Guild began questioning orders from the new administration, senior officers retired in a rapid, hour-by-hour cascade. The conspirators first mistook these departures for acquiescence. Some officers may have been targeted; the account leaves open whether the coup’s forces tried to kill them and lost teams in the attempt. In those first days, the retired officers also had to discover what had happened to Tabini without allowing their search to lead the enemy to him.

Their effort reached beyond the mainland Guild: they established contact with people on Mospheira. The covert linkup required several men and a small boat loaded with explosives in case the navy, acting under the new aiji’s orders, intercepted them. That choice shows how the attack widened the crisis. Guild members who had to preserve the lawful government could not rely on the compromised political order, and sought help from humans despite the risks and divisions that relationship involved.

From Resistance to the Guild Crisis

The later account of the coup explains why the attack’s consequences outlasted the immediate attempt on Tabini’s life. Senior Guild members went underground when Murini took power; some were listed as dead while still alive, and others maintained the appearance of retirement. Members of this hidden network had operated the effort to bring Tabini back. Their concealment protected them, but it also left the institution divided between the sitting leadership and former officers who had refused to return to duty.

After the coup ended, the dispute became a contest over authority inside the Guild. The current Council repeatedly ordered the retired officers back, but they did not come in. The exiles questioned the actions of two of the three Council members, including the rapid approval of assignments recommended by the Office of Assignments and the Guild’s delay in sending aid during western troubles. At a critical point, the Guild had also diverted a mission from supporting Tabini’s actions in the south to arresting two senior retirees. The Bujavid attack had exposed the Guild’s vulnerability to the coup; the subsequent resistance revealed that restoring order would require resolving whether the Guild’s own Council had broken the law.

The Restoration and Its Costs

The exiled Guild members were not described as naturally favorable to humans, and they had not favored Tabini because of his association with them. Their stated commitment was instead to the law and to restoring the Guild to its former character. They gave their word to return, leaving their identities for a second time, along with families and marriages, to retake the Guild, examine its records, and restore lawful practice. Their return offered a route to institutional repair, but not an easy one: a direct assault on Guild Headquarters could cost innocent members their lives and destroy the assignment records needed to prove the case.

The reckoning was costly. Shishogi died in an incendiary fire described as an apparent suicide; the records were damaged but not destroyed, and a man was intercepted carrying several notebooks from the office. The resistance reported two of its members out of action, counting Banichi, and three dead, counting the target. Fourteen people in the building were wounded, 147 voluntarily stood down pending a resolution, and sixteen were arrested for sorting and testimony. These figures register both the scale of the confrontation and the attempt to distinguish suspects from those who would simply obey institutional orders.

Afterward, Tabini reported that the old Guildmaster was back and that the dead, missing, and retired had in effect returned to public life. The restored leadership began interviewing members, starting with assignments to the Bujavid, and examining man’chi, kinship, past service, references, and other testimony. The attack had begun as an attempt to remove Tabini; its larger consequence was to force a struggle over evidence and lawful authority, because the Guild could not credibly enforce the law if it restored itself by decree alone.