Taiben Attack on Tabini

The Taiben Attack on Tabini was not only an assault on the aiji; it became evidence of a deeper breach within the Assassins’ Guild. The Guild in exile knew that Haikuti had been involved, yet he remained beyond arrest while the Guild kept his records secret. The effort to establish what had happened therefore became inseparable from the struggle to restore the law and credibility of the institution meant to enforce it.

The Attack and Its Hidden Evidence

The available account identifies the event as an attack on Tabini at Taiben and confirms Haikuti’s involvement, but does not describe how the assault unfolded. The Guild in exile had reconstructed a wider pattern of appointments and decisions connected to the coup that installed Murini, and knew that Haikuti had participated in the attack. Its members supplied names to watch; Banichi and Algini checked the information and reported back, in an exchange in which both sides gave and received information.

The serving Guild had not acted on what was known. Haikuti’s location was known, but he had remained untouched until the day before Jago disclosed the intelligence to Bren. The Guild had kept his records secret within its files, as it did the records of other units. The contrast between the exiles’ knowledge and the institution’s inaction turned the Taiben attack into part of a larger question: whether the Guild’s own procedures were protecting the law or shielding those who had violated it.

Why Haikuti Was Not Arrested

Tabini’s ban on the Kadagidi lord had a consequential effect: it also left Haikuti isolated in safety from arrest. Jago presented this alongside the secrecy surrounding his records as part of the explanation for why the Guild in exile knew what the serving organization had failed to confront publicly. The episode thus joined political protection, Guild record-keeping, and the handling of an implicated officer in a single unresolved case.

The intelligence also carried a personal complication. Banichi and Haikuti had previously come to blows. At the Kadagidi estate, Banichi and Algini expected trouble, but Banichi did not tell Bren what they had learned. He was balancing the chance to build a clear case against the Kadagidi against the need to protect the exiles’ source, while lacking absolute proof of the information received. Jago later said that, in her judgment, there was no longer any doubt about Haikuti’s involvement. The delay in disclosure was therefore presented not as indifference to the attack, but as a costly effort to preserve both evidence and the means of obtaining it.

The Guild’s Crisis of Legitimacy

For the exiled senior members, the Taiben attack belonged to a cascade of breaches: unFiled attacks on civilians, violations of code, and the Council’s refusal to bring charges in several cases, including Haikuti’s. They also believed that choices made before the coup had helped place individuals in offices that arranged Murini’s rise. Their objections extended to the Guild’s support for Shishogi’s demands and rejection of computers as a human gift, a decision they now regarded as a serious mistake.

The exiles had resisted repeated orders from the current leadership to return to duty. Some had gone underground when Murini took power; some listed as dead were alive, and some senior members claimed retirement or remained dead on the record. Even after helping operate the network that brought Tabini back, they had not resumed their former identities. Jago described the conflict with the sitting leadership as a continuing struggle since the coup ended, compounded by personal disagreements and the exiles’ resistance to the space program and to reliance on the Eastern Guild.

Despite their distrust of humans and their reservations about Tabini’s association with them, the exiles had worked with humans on Mospheira during Murini’s rule to restore the law. They now gave their word to return, leaving identities, families, and marriages behind for a second time, in order to take back the Guild, examine its records, and restore lawful conduct. Their return made the Taiben case part of a larger institutional reckoning rather than a matter to be settled by force alone.

Records, Accountability, and Restoration

Jago warned that an assault on the Assassins’ Guild Headquarters could kill innocent members, lose personnel who might join the opposition if safely informed, and destroy the records needed to prove the case. If the Office of Assignments received warning, she expected its records to disappear. The danger was especially acute because Shishogi might destroy records if he believed he was about to be dismissed. For Jago, proof mattered: if Tabini had to support the opposition to the Council only by decree and the power of the aijinate, the Guild would not recover its legitimacy.

In a later confrontation at the Guild office, there was a fire involving an incendiary. Shishogi was dead, apparently by suicide, and badly burned but recognizable; the records had suffered but survived. One man was intercepted carrying several notebooks from the office. The losses were substantial: two members of the resistance were dead, three counting the target, and fourteen people in the building were wounded. One hundred forty-seven voluntarily stood down pending a resolution, while sixteen were arrested for sorting and testimony. These figures belong to the Guild’s broader struggle to establish accountability, not to the attack at Taiben itself.

After the Council meeting, Tabini reported that the old Guildmaster was back and that missing and retired members had returned. The restored leadership began interviewing members, starting with assignments to the Bujavid, and assessing man’chi, kinship, past service, references, and other testimony. The Taiben attack’s institutional significance lies in this demand for a case that could be proved before the Guild’s membership: the response sought not merely to identify an attacker, but to recover records and authority from an organization whose own leadership had failed to act.