The Missing and the Dead

The Missing and the Dead is the Assassins’ Guild’s contentious roster of absent members, former officers, and people recorded as dead during the political upheaval surrounding Murini’s takeover. Conceived as a practical means of locating Guildsmen and requiring them to account for their status, it became an emblem of the Guild’s post-coup fracture: to the current Council, it was a list demanding answers; to many of those named, it was a corrupt and insulting instrument of inquiry. Its eventual reversal, when senior exiles returned to take control of the Guild, joined a dispute over records to the larger question of who had the authority to restore the institution’s law.

Purpose and Scope

The list was attached to the Guild’s Requests for Action, instructions relevant to Guildsmen working in the field. If a member encountered a person on it, the member was to report the person’s location, ascertain their status if possible, and ask them to contact Guild Headquarters and complete the required paperwork. Algini described the procedure as an established duty, but after Tabini’s return to power there was little urgency about enforcing it. Some members suspected that the named people might have faults to answer for, and the Guild’s tacit practice was generally not to send someone to their door and compel them to report for possible discipline.

The roster’s underlying problem was that absence did not have one clear explanation. Senior Guild officers had left in large numbers when Murini took over. Some had retired, some had resigned during investigations, and some simply had not returned to Shejidan to complete the procedures that could clear their records. Entries could bear allegations of dereliction, medical unfitness, or even treason; some notations had accumulated under Murini’s investigation and others under Tabini’s inquiry into the coup. Those allegations were not proof that every person named was culpable. The possibility that some were merely disaffected with the Guild, angry at its leadership, or unwilling to answer questions made the roster’s classifications especially uncertain. Some former members had gone further, pursuing private lives under changed names.

The List as a Political Dispute

The people on the list challenged both its accuracy and the legitimacy of the process behind it. The reconstituted records, they argued, were corrupt; the list was a farce and an insult. They refused to answer summonses, account for their movements during the coup, or disclose information that might expose the contacts or locations of other missing members. The standoff therefore persisted not simply because former Guildsmen were absent, but because each side disputed what an answer would mean: submission to an inquiry they considered invalid, or acquiescence in a record they considered compromised.

Two former Guild Council members sent the only quasi-official response. They described the senior leadership as believing its usefulness had ended in a changed world of cooperation with humans and Atevi presence on the space station, and they argued that younger members should now sit in council. With their own records marked or tainted, they said, it was impossible to know which accounts were true or whom to trust. They were unwilling to return in order to hunt down fellow Guild members, rejected the investigation, and refused to submit to a Guild inquiry. Nor would they ask Tabini to include them in the case-by-case amnesty extended to members of the Assassins’ Guild. They maintained that the executive branch had no authority to intervene in the Guilds and that the roster violated that principle.

That constitutional objection had force within the Guild’s own history. The Guilds had developed authority that crossed clan and regional lines, and their postwar rules gave them control over membership and assignments according to qualification rather than clan origin. The Assassins’ Guild had also secured protections against political pressure, including limits on the ability of lords to summon its records. The Missing and the Dead consequently stood at a difficult boundary: a demand for accountability after a coup, but also an inquiry that former members could regard as an executive intrusion into an autonomous institution. Their refusal to return was presented as a matter of principle as well as distrust.

Exile and the Return Plan

The list also obscured a different reality: some people recorded as dead were alive, and some of them had helped operate the network that restored Tabini. Jago explained to Bren Cameron that senior members had gone underground when Murini took power, with some remaining dead on the Guild’s records and others claiming retirement. They had watched the Guild purge itself more than once and had resisted repeated orders from its current leadership to resume duty. Their conflict with that leadership had become a prolonged war of wills, shaped by personal grievances as well as disagreement over Guild policy.

Jago’s account connected the roster dispute to the current Council’s conduct. Of its three leading members, one was compliant with the other two; Jago said the other two had pushed through Office of Assignments recommendations without debate, including appointments of chief officers in Dojisigin Marid. When assistance was needed in the west, the Council had been slow to move forces, and Tabini had gone into the field himself. At another critical moment, the Guild diverted from helping Tabini and his allies in the south to send a mission to arrest the two most senior retirees. The operation became an extended distraction, and an information source was caught in the danger surrounding it. At that point, Jago said, the evidence against the Council’s conduct had not yet been proved.

The exiles’ decision to return changed the meaning of their absence. They did not favor humans and had not favored Tabini because of his association with them, but they were committed to the law and had worked with humans on Mospheira during Murini’s rule to restore the Guild. They now gave their word to support Tabini and the effort to take back the institution. Their return required them to abandon identities for a second time, leave families, and break off marriages. The purpose was not simply to defeat the current Council: they intended to enter the Guild, examine the records, and restore the law. Jago warned that a direct assault on Guild Headquarters risked killing innocent members, losing people who might join the effort, and destroying the assignment records needed to prove the case. The return of those long listed as absent offered a way to seek control without sacrificing the evidence on which the Guild’s legitimacy depended.

Reversal and Aftermath

The list’s reversal took place amid violence and an attempt to destroy records. Shishogi died in a fire apparently set by an incendiary device; the records were damaged but not destroyed, and one man was intercepted carrying several notebooks from the office. The confrontation cost the resistance two dead in addition to its target, left fourteen people wounded in the building, and put sixteen under arrest for sorting and testimony. Two members of Bren’s side were out of action, including Banichi. Meanwhile, 147 people in the building voluntarily stood down pending a resolution, and a new Council was preparing to establish a quorum, record the change, and close its meeting.

Bren later described the outcome as the returnees taking control of the Guild. Members who had joined during the previous three years began reporting from across the Aishidi’tat and asking for instructions, apparently recognizing the change in policy. The returning seniors’ reputations commanded respect, even as younger members faced uncertainty about the new order. Bren expected the restored Guild to argue with Tabini, but not to undermine him, and he hoped it would end intermittent sabotage from Assignments. The list’s former absentees had become the people capable of ending the Council’s obstruction.

Restoration did not make the list disappear or settle every case. The old Guildmaster was back, and the restored leadership began interviewing members, starting with assignments to the Bujavid. It examined man’chi, kinship, past service, references, and other testimony. Five high officials installed in the previous year were missing from the Council meeting, while a few people who had not been present were still being actively sought; others might have escaped or gone into hiding. Banichi, Cenedi, Nawari, and the members of Ilisidi’s bodyguard were accounted for, but the continuing alert also meant that personnel previously assigned under the former leadership expected their own assignments and loyalties to be reviewed. After Najida, there had been a few more resignations, and the list had grown; some of those departures were angry ones.

Institutional Significance

The Missing and the Dead gives an administrative form—names, status, contact, and paperwork—an unusually charged role in the crisis. A field instruction to locate former members turns into a disputed mechanism of investigation, while the records meant to support an inquiry become evidence whose integrity is itself contested. The eventual effort to regain the Guild depends on preserving those records and proving a case before the membership, rather than relying solely on Tabini’s authority to impose a change. In that sense, the list’s most consequential reversal is not merely that the missing return: it is that their return makes the Guild’s own rules and records central to the recovery of its legitimacy.