Filing of Intent

The Filing of Intent is the Assassins’ Guild’s required legal process for authorizing an assassination against a person or institution. Rather than treating a grievance as immediate license for violence, it makes a proposed killing a public, documented, and reviewable matter: the complaint must be recorded, considered by the Guild, and allowed time for a remedy before action may proceed. The procedure is both a practical restraint on bloodshed and a foundation of the Guild’s authority, a distinction put under severe pressure when the Shadow Guild breaks the rules during the coup.

Filing and Review

The process begins with a Document of Intent entered in the official state registry. It identifies the dispute between the parties and becomes a permanent record, sealed, ribboned, and kept in an archive; an answer to the complaint is filed in the same way. This paper trail makes the case more than a private accusation. It preserves what each side has formally claimed and gives later decisions an official basis.

Filing alone does not authorize an attack. The Guild Council must publicly advise that it is considering action and provide an opportunity to obtain depositions from both sides. It first decides whether there may be adequate cause for a Filing; only then does it debate the merits and consider whether the dispute can be remedied without lethal action. At its discretion, the Council may hear testimony from Guild members employed by either side about the prospects for settlement. It may also impose a further delay while the Guild presses the parties to resolve the issue short of violence.

If those measures fail, the Council approves the Filing by vote and sets a date after which action may be possible. The Filing is then published and all parties are notified. The procedure therefore separates the existence of a complaint from permission to act: deliberation, a formal decision, and notice must intervene before an attack can be lawful.

Notice, Bodyguards, and Time Limits

Publication gives the targeted party’s bodyguard an opportunity to prepare. After the specified date and hour, the complainant’s bodyguard may initiate offensive action and enter whatever premises are necessary to reach the target. For lords or officials with permanent bodyguards, both sides’ units remain in contact with the central Guild throughout the process. Neither side is to receive an informational advantage, and either unit may ask the Guild to suspend action and mediate a mutually acceptable settlement.

Smaller cases, especially disputes over property or divorce, are generally handled by an office of the Council rather than by a full Council debate. Witnesses still give depositions. Once such a Filing is approved, a time limit is usually imposed: after ninety-nine days, attempts to carry out the assassination must stop and the Filing is set aside. The limit makes authorization temporary rather than an indefinite threat hanging over the defendant.

The procedure also gives Guild units room to prevent a doomed defense from becoming a needless death. A unit may request a truce so that it can advise its lord that the defense has failed and that he must yield the disputed matter if he and the unit are to survive. Few lords press a case against the advice of their own bodyguards. A unit that abandons its lord or surrenders him may itself face prosecution, except where the lord made a false statement in the Filing or was judged incapable of sound judgment for mental or physical reasons. Relatives and servants have often supported claims of incapacity, making that exception a consequential qualification rather than a merely theoretical one.

Private Citizens and the Limits of Force

A private citizen without a regular bodyguard faces a different practical burden. From the date of the Filing, the complainant must hire the Assassins’ Guild. Once notified, the defendant must either concede a property or divorce case, or hire Guild protection for the usual ninety-nine days. That protection is expensive for an ordinary person to maintain, so the rules place a heavier burden of time on the complainant; occasional pro bono Filings provide an exception to the cost barrier.

The system recognizes that lethal force may be contemplated in civil disputes while insisting that it is much less common in practice. Its cooling-off period, depositions, and official acknowledgment at some level that a wrong may exist all restrain immediate action. At each stage, the Guild can attempt to secure a negotiated settlement. The procedure’s purpose is thus not simply to regulate how an assassination is carried out, but to make a lawful resolution possible before anyone carries it out.

A Filing is absolutely required before action may be taken against a person or institution, except in defense against an illicit attack. In that case, the defender may use whatever force can be mustered on the spot. An attack is defined as movement within arm’s length of the defender, or the first use of a distance weapon or a weapon of stealth, including poison. The exception allows immediate defense without making preemptive violence lawful by default.

A separate prohibition bars anyone other than a Guild Assassin from using violence against a fellow citizen, except in defense of self, employer, household, clan property, or national treasure. A person who violates that law is outlawed and becomes subject to lethal Guild action without a time limit. Even then, surrender remains possible: the outlaw may submit to the Aiji’s judgment in consultation with the Guild. Together, these provisions distinguish authorized Guild action, immediate defense, and unlawful private violence, rather than treating all force as interchangeable.

Procedure Under Political Pressure

The coup exposes the difference between having rules and knowing who is using them. The Shadow Guild, the splinter group distinguished from the legitimate Assassins’ Guild, violates the Guild’s longstanding procedures and laws. Yet in the first critical hours, when Tabini is believed to have been killed at his Bujavid residence, the legitimate Guild mistakenly takes orders from conspirators. After hearing that Tabini is alive and then that he has been killed in Taiben, it again follows its superiors and Murini, still unaware that trusted authorities are among those hunting Tabini and Damiri. The rulebook cannot by itself reveal that command has been captured.

That failure creates a deeper institutional dilemma. The legitimate Guild is described as trying to preserve the lives of the lords who sustain the aishidi’tat, even as it follows orders issued within a compromised structure. Its later effort to restore the law cannot simply reproduce the Shadow Guild’s disregard for procedure in the opposite direction. If lawful institutions break their own rules to defeat lawbreakers, they risk losing the basis on which their authority rests.

After the coup, that problem becomes concrete in the conflict over Guild leadership and records. Senior Guild members had gone underground under Murini; some were listed as dead despite being alive, and some had helped build the network that restored Tabini. The current Council repeatedly called them back, but they stayed away, amid personal disputes and distrust. The exiled members eventually agreed to return, leave their assumed identities again, and help take back the Guild, investigate its records, and restore the law. Their loyalty to the law did not mean they favored humans or had previously favored Tabini, whose association with humans they disliked; their support was directed toward restoring the Guild itself.

The return could not safely be reduced to a head-on assault on Guild Headquarters. Jago warns that such an attack would endanger personnel who might join the effort if they learned what had happened but would otherwise continue obeying Council orders. It could also cost the lives of innocent Guild members and destroy the assignment records needed to prove the case. Shishogi might destroy records if he believed he was about to be dismissed. Because the Guild enforces the law, and because the case against the Council depends on proof that the Council itself broke the law, a victory imposed only by Tabini’s decree would not restore the Guild’s legitimacy. The Council Chamber and a case established before Guild members matter precisely because authority must be demonstrated under the rules, not merely exercised by superior force.

Restoration and Institutional Meaning

The subsequent takeover carries a real cost as well as a legal result. An incendiary fire occurs; Shishogi is found dead, apparently by suicide, and burned but recognizable. The records are damaged but survive, and an intercepted man is carrying several notebooks from the Office of Assignments. The Guild’s information survives in incomplete but usable form rather than being erased altogether.

The reported aftermath records two of the restoring side’s people out of action, including Banichi; two resistance members dead, or three counting the target; fourteen people wounded inside the building; 147 voluntarily standing down pending resolution; and sixteen under arrest for sorting and testimony. These figures distinguish surrender, injury, death, and detention instead of collapsing the outcome into a simple victory. A new Council is about to meet to declare a quorum, record the change, and close the meeting, giving the transfer of authority a formal institutional shape.

The restored leadership then interviews members, beginning with assignments to the Bujavid. It examines man’chi, kinship, past service, references, and other testimony; five high officials installed in the previous year are missing from the expected gathering. This scrutiny shows that restoring the rulebook also requires determining whom the institution can trust and on what evidence. The Filing of Intent is therefore more than a precondition for a lawful killing. Its emphasis on records, notice, impartial review, settlement, and proof expresses the standard by which the Assassins’ Guild claims to govern violence—and by which its own conduct can be judged.