Murini Coup and Tabini’s Restoration

Murini Coup and Tabini’s Restoration was both a change of ruler and a test of whether institutions damaged by the coup could recover without becoming instruments of reprisal. Tabini returned through a network that included senior Assassins’ Guild members living underground; afterward, those exiles helped reclaim the Guild, investigate its compromised leadership, and insist that authority be restored through evidence and law rather than decree alone.

Coup and a divided Guild

The coup left the Assassins’ Guild politically divided. Some of its most senior members had gone underground when Murini took power. People recorded as dead had survived, and some had helped operate the network that brought Tabini back. After the coup, the Guild’s current leadership repeatedly ordered these retirees to return to duty, but they refused. They had watched the Guild purge itself more than once and did not trust its new leaders. Some claimed retirement; others remained officially dead. Their resistance became a prolonged conflict over who could speak for the Guild and whether its leadership still upheld its rules.

The exiles were not uncomplicated allies. They had opposed the space program and feared Lord Geigi; they had also rejected computers as a human gift, a decision they later recognized as a serious mistake. Their doubts about Tabini’s association with humans had not disappeared. What brought them into cooperation was their commitment to restoring the law and the Guild’s former standards. During Murini’s rule, they had worked with humans on Mospheira; after Tabini’s return, they pledged to support both him and the effort to reclaim the Guild. To do so, they again abandoned their assumed identities, families, and marriages.

The covert return and its evidence

Jago explained that the exiles would not deal with Cenedi in this operation because he belonged to the Eastern Guild and they wanted to avoid even the appearance of relying on it. Instead, Jago’s group had maintained contact with them since returning from Najida and after the Guild Council’s attempt to arrest them. A coded message sent before the group went dark requested a boat to Najida; a later face-to-face contact in the lower corridors confirmed that the exiles were prepared to act. Their support was conditional on the Guild’s own law and evidence, not simply on loyalty to Tabini.

Their information helped explain why Banichi and Algini had expected danger at the Kadagidi estate. The exiles had reconstructed how decisions and appointments placed particular people in offices connected to the coup, and they had identified Haikuti’s involvement in the attack on Tabini at Taiben. Guild records had kept Haikuti’s history secret, and Tabini’s ban on the Kadagidi lord had left Haikuti shielded from arrest. The exiles supplied names for scrutiny, and Jago’s group checked them. Banichi had withheld what he knew while balancing the chance to build a clear case against the need to protect the source and the absence, at that point, of conclusive proof. Jago later said the new information left her with no doubt about Haikuti’s involvement.

The exiles’ account also sharpened the case against the sitting Guild Council. Of its three members, Jago described one as compliant with the other two and ineffective, while questioning the conduct of the remaining pair. They had pushed through recommendations from the Office of Assignments without debate, including appointments of chief officers in Dojisigin Marid. During trouble in the west, the Guild had moved so slowly that Tabini took the field himself. At another critical moment, instead of assisting Tabini and Jago’s group in the south, the Guild sent a mission to arrest the two most senior retirees. The mission cost a unit member’s life and ended with the exiles officially outlawed. That declaration had little practical reach where no other Guild was present, but it could give the Shadow Guild grounds to pursue them if it reached them.

Reclaiming the Guild

A direct assault on Guild Headquarters risked killing innocent members who could not safely be contacted, while warning the Office of Assignments and giving it time to destroy records. Those files documented personnel appointments and were essential to establishing how the coup had been enabled. The exiles’ return offered a way to take the Guild back while preserving both people and proof. Their objective was not merely to remove the current Council: they wanted to demonstrate before the membership that the Council itself had broken the law. Without that demonstration, Tabini might have had to uphold their case by decree and the power of the aijinate, leaving the Guild unable to regain its authority as an impartial institution.

The struggle included the threatened destruction of the records. When Bren and Banichi later received Nawari’s report, Shishogi was dead after an incendiary fire at the office; his death appeared to be suicide. The records had suffered damage but survived, and one man had been intercepted carrying several notebooks from the office. The surviving material gave the investigators something more substantial than accusation to take into the Guild’s proceedings.

The cost of the operation was considerable. Two members of Nawari’s side were out of action, including Banichi. Two resistance members were dead, and the target brought the resistance death count to three. Fourteen people in the building were wounded; 147 voluntarily stood down pending a resolution, while sixteen were arrested and sent for sorting and testimony. A new Council was preparing to meet, establish a quorum, record the change, and close its meeting. These figures mark the restoration as an armed institutional confrontation, but also as an effort to separate those suspected of wrongdoing from the much larger membership.

Restoration and political legitimacy

After the confrontation, Tabini reported that the old Guildmaster was back: the dead had risen, the missing had returned, and retirees had rescinded their retirement. Some high officials installed during the preceding year could not be found. The restored leadership began interviewing members, starting with assignments to Bujavid, and checking man’chi, kinship, prior service, references, and other testimony. Restoration therefore meant more than replacing officeholders. It required examining how people had entered positions of authority and rebuilding trust through review.

The episode’s insistence on procedure echoes the Guild’s older political role. In the history Bren recounts, eleven regional associations agreed to build a railroad from Shejidan westward without going to war. The project empowered aijiin to coordinate the guilds, clans, and sub-clans, while the Assassins’ Guild protected them from rival assassins. When three powerful lords later threatened to break up the railroad agreement, the Guild backed the aiji in holding them to their promises. The account presents common purpose, enforced through institutions, as a basis for peace beyond clan boundaries. The post-coup restoration returns to the same question in a more dangerous form: whether the Guild can uphold law when its own leaders have violated it.

Political life continued around that unsettled repair. After Bren’s group had been without outside news at Lord Tatiseigi’s estate, a Bujavid notice revealed that Cajeiri’s birthday celebration had grown into a continent-wide Festivity. The reception had been moved from the Green Hall to the larger Audience Hall, with a private dinner and a museum tour of Lord Tatiseigi’s porcelain collection planned beforehand. The legislature’s vote on the tribal bill was postponed until after the celebration. Later, at Cajeiri’s public investiture, the oldest number-counter declared the gathering felicitous and the time right; Tabini named his son as heir before witnesses, calling on his kin and associates to give him their man’chi. The ceremony, followed by the signing and sealing of cards, made succession visible in public even as the Guild’s own restoration depended on its ability to establish legitimacy through records, testimony, and law.