Tabini-aiji and Murini: rival claims to rule

Tabini-aiji and Murini: rival claims to rule Tabini-aiji and Murini stand at the center of a struggle whose apparent political explanation proves false. Murini held power for two years after Tabini-aiji was driven from office, but the coup was not, as many initially believed, a popular rejection of Tabini’s government or a conspiracy organized by discontented lords. Its origin lay within the Assassins’ Guild. That discovery changes the rivalry from a simple contest between rulers into a crisis over who had seized the institutions meant to uphold law—and how their legitimacy could be restored without repeating the breach.

The Misreading of the Coup

The first account seemed plausible. Economic upheaval accompanied the push to reach space, and Tabini-aiji’s public approval had fallen. The prevailing belief was that a Kadagidi lord, backed by Marid interests, gathered dissatisfied lords and bodyguards, breached the ruler’s security, and seized the shuttles. In that version, Murini’s rise followed from widespread discontent with Tabini-aiji’s governance. The investigation that unfolded in the year after Tabini-aiji’s restoration overturned this account: the public dissatisfaction was real, but it had not launched the attack.

The distinction matters to their rivalry. Murini occupied the office that Tabini-aiji had lost, yet the explanation that made Murini’s ascent seem like the expression of a popular movement was wrong. The coup had not been a groundswell led by ambitious lords. It had originated inside the Assassins’ Guild, where a faction seized the government and placed power in the hands of a ruler who, the retrospective account makes clear, should never have held office.

Murini’s Rule and Tabini-aiji’s Return

Murini was not even the coup’s principal planner. A committee of elder lords and other conspirators appointed him, saying that his selection would secure the influential Kadagidi clan’s consent and lend the new government legitimacy. But the committee had not independently chosen him: a message from an unknown source within the Guild had presented him as the candidate. The source could no longer be traced. Thus Murini’s accession depended on a hidden intervention by the very organization whose fracture had made the coup possible.

Once in office, Murini proved a poor instrument for whoever had elevated him. Driven by ambition, animosity, jealousy, and suspicion, he treated power as personal entitlement and moved quickly to pursue private feuds. The Shadow Guild under his authority did not challenge his orders. His handlers restrained him from attacking the Taibeni clan and Lord Tatiseigi, whose loyalty to Tabini-aiji meant an assault on them might expose the weakness of Murini’s pose as a defender of order. Otherwise, they seemed willing to let him proceed against those who opposed him.

During Murini’s two years of rule, citizens across the continent began organizing in small groups to consider how to remove him. When Tabini-aiji returned alive, with Ilisidi and Cajeiri at his side, public support proved broad. At first, Tabini-aiji and his allies understood the crowds as a vote for normalcy after Murini’s failures; they also believed that people had recognized the humans’ honesty and fair dealings despite warnings to the contrary. The return had popular backing, but it did not validate the original theory that popular discontent had caused the coup.

The Shadow Guild made one attempt against Tabini-aiji, Ilisidi, and Lord Tatiseigi. The attack failed, though it damaged Lord Tatiseigi’s grounds and a bedroom. As events began to unravel, Murini and his closest staff fled toward the Marid, and his government disintegrated. In the subsequent reckoning, Murini was among the first leaders Tabini-aiji and Ilisidi pursued; the wider inquiry proved harder, because responsibility extended beyond the man who had occupied the throne.

A Rivalry Inside an Institutional Crisis

The Assassins’ Guild’s history sharpens the meaning of the coup. Its origins lay in the political cooperation that grew around the railroad from Shejidan: regional associations agreed to build it without going to war, and the Guild emerged to protect the project’s leaders from rival assassins. Later, when powerful lords sought to break up the railroad agreement, the Guild backed the aiji in holding them to their commitments. It had become an authority that could work across clan and regional boundaries, not merely a weapon belonging to one lord.

That institutional inheritance makes the Guild’s seizure of government a profound reversal. Under the arrangements of the expanded Aishidi’tat, guilds were to recruit and assign members without regard to clan, kinship, or regional origin, while the Assassins’ Guild was barred from political office and granted protections against political pressure. The coup’s origin within the Guild therefore compromised both its political neutrality and its role as an enforcer of law. Tabini-aiji’s conflict with Murini could not be settled simply by restoring the former ruler: the institution that had helped make government possible had itself become a source of unlawful power.

After Murini’s overthrow, Tabini-aiji and Ilisidi initially fought the Guild faction as if it were made up of Murini’s committed supporters. Defeat in the field revealed a more complicated truth: many of those who had fought Tabini-aiji’s forces had been misled by forged orders. That discovery widened the inquiry beyond Murini’s personal rule and showed why the identities and authority behind commands mattered. The Guild’s own divided membership had become part of the contest over whose orders could legitimately bind the state.

Restoration, Evidence, and the Limits of Victory

Senior Guild members had gone underground when Murini came to power. Some people recorded as dead were alive; others remained dead in the records, and some of those hidden members had operated the network that brought Tabini-aiji back. They had watched the Guild purge itself twice and refused repeated calls from its current leadership to return. Their opposition was not simply support for Tabini-aiji: they had never favored him because of his association with humans. They did, however, prize the law, and had worked with humans on Mospheira during Murini’s rule to restore the Guild to what it had been.

Their return offered a path beyond a direct assault on Guild Headquarters. A forced entry risked killing members who might have joined the effort if they understood the facts, destroying crucial assignment records, and leaving the remaining case dependent on Tabini-aiji’s decree rather than proof. The exiled members agreed to come back, leaving identities behind for a second time and breaking family ties and marriages. Their purpose was to retake the Guild, examine its records, and restore the law. Their conditional loyalty—to lawful procedure rather than to Tabini-aiji personally—distinguishes this restoration from a simple victory by one ruler over another.

The confrontation nevertheless exacted a cost. An incendiary fire left Shishogi dead, apparently by suicide, but the records survived; one person was intercepted carrying several notebooks from the office. Two members of the resistance were dead, three including the target, and fourteen people in the building were wounded. One hundred forty-seven voluntarily stood down pending resolution, while sixteen were arrested for sorting and testimony. The numbers register how much of the Guild remained caught between the old order and its attempted repair.

After the Guild’s Council meeting, the old Guildmaster had returned, previously missing and supposedly dead members had reappeared, and retired members had rescinded their retirement. Some officials installed during the prior year remained unaccounted for. The restored leadership began interviewing members, checking assignments to Bujavid, man’chi, kinship, past service, references, and other testimony. Tabini-aiji’s restoration thus closes neither the investigation nor the consequences of his rivalry with Murini. It establishes a different basis for authority: the returned ruler and the restored Guild must make the case through evidence, procedure, and renewed institutional trust.