Shishogi’s elevation of Murini and manipulation of his rule

Shishogi’s elevation of Murini and manipulation of his rule made the coup a meeting of two failures of control: Murini pursued his own ambitions and feuds, while Shishogi’s decades-long design collided with a world that had changed beyond the strategist’s ability to command. Their relationship helped bring down the government, but it also exposed how little either the coup’s nominal ruler or its hidden architect could master the forces they had unleashed.

The choice behind Murini’s elevation

The conspirators did not appear to share a clear program for overthrowing the government. Their common ground was a broad discontent with the world as it had become and a wish that humans had never existed. A committee of elder lords and other conspirators appointed Murini as aiji in the name of securing the consent of the influential, ancient Kadagidi clan and giving the new government legitimacy. Yet Murini was not truly their choice: a message from somewhere within the Guild had put him forward, and its origin could no longer be traced.

The account places Shishogi behind the plot as its hidden Strategist. A clerical officer of the Assassins’ Guild and a member of the Ajuri clan, he had begun maneuvers to redirect the government forty-two years earlier. That history makes Murini’s elevation part of a long political design, but the surviving evidence does not identify Shishogi as the sender of the untraceable message. The connection is one of strategic authorship and consequence, not a fully documented personal exchange.

A ruler the plotters could not safely use

Murini proved a poor choice for the conspirators. Ambition, jealousies, suspicions, and private animosities shaped his conduct after he took office; he acted as though he were supreme power and set about settling old scores. The Shadow Guild under his authority did not question his orders. Those who handled him otherwise let him pursue his vendettas and destroy people who opposed him, restraining him chiefly from attacking the Taibeni and Lord Tatiseigi. They feared that assaults on two of Tabini’s most loyal supporters would undermine Murini’s claim to be defending order and saving the Conservatives of the aishidi’tat.

One possible design was to let Murini exhaust himself against his opponents, then remove him once the legislature had been filled with frightened newcomers and the wider continent was too shattered to pose a serious threat. A more agreeable replacement could then take his place. But the narrative leaves open whether this was ever a coherent plan. Shishogi may once have had a deliberate design; by the time of the coup, the political and technological world had changed so extensively that the circumstances he had imagined were no longer possible or practical.

The architect caught in his own design

Shishogi was not disposed to rule, and the number of people he could trust had dwindled to none. Yet he could not simply dismount from the political force he had guided. He could not emotionally accept the present world or physically recreate the one in which he had been born. Resignation offered no safe exit: the apparatus he had created might turn on him, pursue him for what he knew, and expose his past actions. His relation to Murini thus carried a central irony. Shishogi could help install a ruler, but the resulting power did not give him a reliable means of directing, replacing, or escaping that ruler’s regime.

The crisis that followed tested the institutions Shishogi had worked to redirect. Long before the coup, eleven regional associations had agreed to build a railway from Shejidan westward without going to war. During construction, guilds such as the Transportation Guild and the Builders’ Guild crossed the boundaries of both clan and regional association. The railway project depended on aijiin elected to coordinate clans, guilds, and sub-clans; the early Assassins’ Guild, in turn, protected those aijiin from assassins serving individual lords. Later, the Assassins’ Guild backed an aiji against three powerful lords who sought to break up the railway agreement. This history made the coup-era use of Guild power against lawful government a reversal of the institution’s earlier role.

After the war, guilds had been authorized to recruit and assign members according to qualification rather than clan, kinship, or regional affiliation. The Assassins’ Guild also accepted a ban on its members holding political office, in exchange for protections against political pressure, including limits on who could access its records and investigate its members. Those arrangements gave the Guild independence, but they also made its internal adherence to law crucial. Under Murini’s rule, senior Guild officers objected when assassinations were ordered without due process or proof; some objections were ruled out of order, and several officers were arrested and marked in Guild records.

The Guild’s return and the cost of the coup

Senior Guild members had gone underground when Murini came to power. Some people recorded as dead were still alive; others remained dead on paper, while the most senior claimed retirement. Members of this exiled network had helped restore Tabini, but they refused repeated orders from the current leadership to return to duty. Their conflict with the sitting Assassins’ Guild governing committee continued after the coup ended. When asked to act again, they left their identities for a second time, separated from families, and broke off marriages. Though they did not favor humans and had never favored Tabini because of his association with them, they were described as unwaveringly loyal to the law. They had worked with humans on Mospheira to restore the Guild and now pledged to return, examine records, and restore lawful authority.

The returning members feared that a direct assault on Guild Headquarters would cost innocent lives and destroy records needed to prove the case against the governing committee. That danger was immediate: if Shishogi believed he was about to be dismissed, he might destroy the records, leaving the law dependent on a ruler’s decree rather than evidence presented before the Guild. The struggle was therefore not simply to remove compromised leaders. It was to establish the Guild’s own legitimacy by demonstrating that its governing body had broken the law.

Shishogi died amid the effort to reclaim the institution: an incendiary caused a fire, and he was found dead, apparently by suicide, badly burned but recognizable. The records were damaged but not destroyed, and one man was intercepted with several notebooks from the office. Shishogi could no longer be questioned, but the surviving material offered a possible means of recovering evidence. The immediate human cost was substantial: two members of the resistance died, including the target, fourteen people in the building were wounded, 147 voluntarily stood down pending resolution, and sixteen were arrested for examination and testimony. A new governing committee was about to convene to record the change of authority.

The restored leadership returned to work rather than treating the takeover as a finished settlement. The old Guildmaster was back; people listed as dead or missing returned, retirees rescinded their retirement, and officials installed during the previous year were sought. Five remained unaccounted for at the meeting. The restored leadership began reviewing members assigned to Bujavid, assessing man’chi, kinship, previous service, references, and other testimony. In this aftermath, Shishogi’s elevation of Murini stands as more than the installation of a compromised ruler: it helped produce a crisis in which the Guild had to recover its records, examine its own membership, and reclaim the legal principles that once gave its authority meaning.