Postwar Reorganization of the Aishidi’tat and Guilds

The postwar reorganization of the Aishidi’tat and its guilds turned wartime cooperation into a durable political settlement. Faced with the possibility of further human arrivals and the instability of a continent divided by clan interests, the Aiji preserved and enlarged the association rather than dissolving it. The resulting order gave outlying regions a voice, extended guild authority across clan boundaries, and made the Assassins’ Guild a central enforcer and check on lawful government. Its later crisis exposed the importance of the safeguards built into that arrangement: records, procedure, and legitimacy could not simply be replaced by force or decree.

From Regional Cooperation to Continental Order

The postwar settlement had a practical precedent in the railway project. Eleven regional associations had agreed to build a line from Shejidan westward without going to war over the undertaking. During construction, the Transportation Guild and the Builders outgrew both clan limits and regional associations, demonstrating that organizations formed around common work could connect communities that political boundaries kept apart. The railway continued despite ominous speculation about the Foreign Star, and its success encouraged further projects.

The Aiji and the Assassins’ Guild had already been tested by a dispute over that railway. When three powerful clan lords sought to alter the agreement and divide the line into administrative districts, the Guild backed the Aiji in holding them to their commitments. The episode established a consequential precedent: a shared undertaking could be protected against powerful regional interests, and the Guild could help enforce agreements beyond any one clan’s authority.

After the Landing, the Aiji argued that the alliance formed for defense should remain intact in case more humans came from the heavens. The Marid joined the Aishidi’tat at the last moment but retained its own guilds, while the East was not yet permanently incorporated. The Western Association, by then no longer merely western, also remained together so it could respond quickly to further difficulties involving humans on Mospheira. The expanded association was therefore not a simple erasure of regional arrangements; it built continental coordination out of existing, overlapping structures.

Representation and the Guild Settlement

The Aiji proposed that lords of outlying clans and regions sit equally in the legislature in Shejidan and have the same say in the laws of the Aishidi’tat as those born to the central region. He also divided the continent into defensive districts that became provinces, each with its own lord represented in the legislature. The additional provincial votes helped balance Shejidan’s dominance and made the arrangement acceptable to the lords whose regions might otherwise have been politically overshadowed.

The guild proposal addressed a different kind of division. Because guilds had worked across regional lines during the War, the Aiji urged them to continue doing so in peacetime. Membership and assignments were to depend on qualification, not clan origin, kinship, or regional association. Guild masters would control membership and placement. The principle extended beyond the Assassins’ Guild and Transport to guilds throughout the enlarged Aishidi’tat, although some regional associations that remained outside the guild system regarded it less favorably. It became binding chiefly through internal guild rules rather than statute, leaving the guilds with authority their members could exercise without the regional associations, provinces, or clan lords being able to compel a different arrangement if they wanted guild services.

For the Assassins’ Guild, the bargain included a specific political prohibition: no member could seek or hold political office or a lordship. In return, the Guild received statutory immunities from political pressure. A lord could not summon its records; Guild members would testify only before their own Guild Council; and the investigation and disposition of a member’s disappearance or death belonged to the Guild under its own rules. These provisions gave the Guild unusual independence, not as an incidental privilege but as the counterpart to its exclusion from political office.

A Check on Power, and a Source of Change

The arrangement redistributed substantial authority away from the Aiji. It also gave the Aiji the support of Shejidan and the guilds, enabling him to outvote any combination of several regional lords. More broadly, the Assassins’ Guild, freed from political pressure, became the Aishidi’tat’s law enforcement and a check on every legal system. Its independence was intended to make it an unassailable source of integrity at the heart of an Aiji’s rule, even as the settlement limited what the Aiji himself could control.

Cross-clan recruitment had consequences beyond formal politics. People from different clans, regions, and philosophies worked together in guilds and even in the domestic staffs of clan lords. The contact among ideas supported a flowering of arts, skills, invention, and innovation. As clan feuds became less frequent and more often bloodless, the new system offered a practical alternative to divisions that had repeatedly produced war: overlapping associations organized around shared purposes rather than fixed territorial separation.

The Guild’s Crisis and the Test of Its Charter

The later crisis within the Assassins’ Guild revealed the strain between its postwar independence and its responsibility to uphold law. During Murini’s rule, senior Guild members had gone underground; some who were officially listed as dead remained alive, and members of the covert network that helped restore Tabini-aiji had operated among them. After the coup, senior retirees refused repeated orders from the current leadership to return. They had seen the Guild purge itself twice and disagreed with the leadership, while personal issues also complicated the stand-off.

Jago described a current Council in which two of three leading members were suspected of pushing through Assignments recommendations without debate. She connected that pattern to delayed deployment of Guild forces during trouble in the west, when Tabini-aiji had to take the field, and to a later mission to arrest two senior retirees instead of assisting the Aiji and his allies in the south. The retired members’ earlier cooperation with humans on Mospheira did not mean they favored humans; Jago emphasized that they had always been loyal to the law. They had given their word to return, leave their assumed identities behind, and help take back the Guild, examine its records, and restore lawful practice.

The conflict could not safely be settled by simply storming Guild Headquarters. A direct assault risked harming members who might have joined the opposition if they understood the evidence, as well as destroying the assignment records needed to establish the case. The Guild’s charter required a Filing of Intent before action against a person or institution, followed by official notice, depositions, Council deliberation, consideration of a remedy short of lethal action, and a vote approving any eventual filing. The exception was defense against an illicit attack. These procedures made delay and documentation part of the Guild’s legal authority; bypassing them to punish suspected violations would have undermined the very distinction the Guild claimed to defend.

Restoration Through Records and Review

The attempt to prevent the loss of evidence did not save Shishogi. After an incendiary fire at the office, he was found dead, apparently by suicide, but the records were damaged rather than destroyed. A man intercepted with several notebooks from the office provided another potential source of evidence. The discovery mattered because the dispute was not only over who controlled the Guild, but whether violations could be proved and the institution’s members persuaded of the case. Jago warned that if the sitting Council’s opponents prevailed only through Tabini-aiji’s decree and the power of the Aijinate, the Guild would not recover its former standing.

The operation left two members of the Aiji’s side out of action, two resistance members dead including Shishogi, fourteen people wounded in the building, and 147 members voluntarily standing down pending resolution. Sixteen were arrested and sent for sorting and testimony because they were considered suspect. A new Council was to meet, establish a quorum, record the change, and close the meeting. The figures show a settlement in progress rather than an effortless return to the old order: members had to be accounted for, evidence preserved, and the institutional transition formally recorded.

Tabini-aiji later reported that the old Guildmaster had returned, that members listed as dead had reappeared, and that retirees had rescinded their retirements. Some high officials installed during the preceding year could not be found, and five people expected at the Council meeting were absent. The restored leadership began interviewing members, starting with assignments to the Bujavid, and assessing man’chi, kinship, past service, references, and other testimony. That review linked restoration to scrutiny of how members had been placed and what loyalties or histories they brought with them. The postwar system had made the Guild independent so it could uphold law; its recovery now depended on demonstrating that independence through evidence and internal accountability, rather than treating institutional power as proof of its own legitimacy.