Kadagidi clan

The Kadagidi clan moves through the political history of the Aishidi’tat as both a participant in regional coalitions and a name bound to conspiracy against Tabini. Its changing standing is visible in the contrast between its place in the coalition that helped elect him and its later absence from a major public ceremony, when its leaders were treated as proven traitors. The record concerns particular lords and conspirators, not every member of the clan; its importance lies in how clan ties, regional alliances, and control of political institutions become entangled.

Regional Position and Clan Politics

The clan appears within a political system in which clan lords made temporary associations around regional alliances and trade interests. Such arrangements could be useful but were also liable to dissolve into conflict. Against that background, the Kadagidi were involved in a dispute with the neighboring Atageini. The account does not reduce the conflict to a single cause: it places the quarrel among the shifting interests of powerful houses and the efforts of rulers to manage relations between them.

A marriage arranged by the lord of the Ajuri clan connected these political tensions to family succession. Under pressure from a struggle within his own clan, the Ajuri lord arranged for his young relative Komaji to marry an older Atageini woman. The Atageini lord, Lord Tatiseigi, was a close ally of Ilisidi and was then engaged in politics with Valasi-aiji, including a dispute with the Kadagidi. The marriage therefore promised to strengthen Ajuri’s standing through a connection to the influential Atageini house, while placing a family alliance within a wider contest among clans.

The arrangement ended badly. The Atageini woman died soon after giving birth to Damiri, in circumstances some considered suspicious. In a heated confrontation, Lord Tatiseigi handed the baby to Komaji, ending the association between the two houses and frustrating Ajuri’s hope of maintaining a relative in a position of influence within the Atageini. Valasi-aiji subsequently patched the quarrel between the Atageini and the Kadagidi and prevented Lord Tatiseigi from filing intent against Komaji. The episode shows how marriage, inheritance, and the possibility of formal violence could all turn a clan dispute into a matter requiring intervention at the highest political level.

Coalition and Changing Standing

The Kadagidi later joined an unlikely, temporary coalition that helped elect Tabini as aiji in his own right. The coalition also included the Taibeni, the Marid, the mountain clans, and the Northern Association. Ajuri was prepared to support almost anyone opposed to Ilisidi, Tatiseigi’s political patron, giving the election its shifting and uneasy character. The Kadagidi’s presence in this alliance matters because it complicates any simple division between the clan and Tabini’s political order: at one point its leaders stood within the coalition that brought him to power.

That coalition did not resolve the conflict over who should wield authority. Many feared that Ilisidi might refuse to relinquish power, raising the prospect of armed confrontation and even the breakup of the Aishidi’tat. Tabini and Ilisidi instead appeared together on television and radio, where she congratulated him. The Kadagidi’s later role in opposing Tabini thus belongs to a political landscape already shaped by temporary alliances, contested succession, and efforts to keep regional rivalries from breaking the larger association apart.

Conspiracy and the Coup

The clan’s standing deteriorated as a Kadagidi with southern ties became associated with a conspiracy to take the aijinate. Bren later tells Damiri that her great-uncle supported this effort with others, and that his subsequent subversion of the Assassins’ Guild helped create disorder across the Aishidi’tat. The political campaign involved repeated efforts to hunt Tabini and attempts to seize Cajeiri. It also reached the western coast: its aims included removing Bren and Ilisidi, although the people involved did not initially understand the full connection between those actions and the Guild’s internal crisis.

The conspiracy’s consequences reached Damiri’s household directly. When Komaji had become lord of the Ajuri after his uncle’s death, questions arose about the replacement. The Guild was withholding information from Tabini’s bodyguard, in part on the grounds that Tabini had appointed them outside the Guild system; Bren later suspected that information was also deliberately withheld from his own guards. He concluded that Guild leaders had put Damiri’s household at risk through their politics and that her great-uncle had been involved. Some of the great-uncle’s agents might still be active after his death, so the danger could not be dismissed as a completed family scandal.

By the time of Cajeiri’s investiture, the Kadagidi were described as proven traitors, and their banner was not displayed in the hall. The Ajuri banner, by contrast, was permitted to appear despite Lord Komaji’s banishment; Tabini was the one who could have authorized its presence. The difference in banners marks a distinction between a clan still being accommodated within public political life and one whose association with treason had made its absence conspicuous.

The crisis deepened when Murini of the Kadagidi proclaimed himself aiji while Tabini was still alive. The conspirators moved against several means of communication and access to space at once: they attacked Tabini’s residence, seized shuttles undergoing service, and took the radio station. They also targeted the airport at Shejidan and the communications dish at Mogari-nai, seeking to control routes between the mainland and the heavens. Their plan relied on the mistaken belief that no mines existed in the heavens and that control of Mogari-nai would prevent communication. Tabini and Damiri escaped from Taiben, though their bodyguards did not; rather than risk drawing Lord Tatiseigi into danger, they crossed Kadagidi territory and remained out of contact for a year.

Lordship, Succession, and Legacy

The coup left the question of Kadagidi leadership unsettled. After Komaji’s death, Damiri observed that both Ajuri and Kadagidi needed new lords and anticipated further trouble in the north. She herself was a possible candidate for Ajuri, but Tabini did not want her to take that often-vacant office. He had reason to distinguish her from her relatives’ political actions: he rejected proposals to dissolve his marriage to her for political convenience, maintaining that she had not been complicit in her great-uncle’s conspiracy.

The Kadagidi clan’s arc is therefore not simply a rise and fall of a single house. Its history records the instability of temporary alliances, the political weight of marriages and succession, and the danger of a clan identity being implicated in the ambitions of particular leaders. The clan could participate in a coalition that elected Tabini and later provide the name under which Murini claimed rule against him. By the time the clan required new lords, that political reversal had made its succession a source of further uncertainty rather than a routine transfer of authority.