Well, at least the game was over now. He'd simply order Thsese to let Sinina come over and fix the channel, and that would be the end of it.
But even as he opened his mouth to say so, he took another look at Thsese's expression. Radiating pride . . .
And suddenly he saw the trap he'd nearly walked into. These people had built their whole society on status and position, and on who could do what and with whom. Throw in their dependence on their limited crop area, and there was the potential here for long-term trouble. If he casually brushed their cultural legs out from under them, it would leave scars and resentment that would linger long after he was gone.
Still, even in places where status was king, greed was always queen. And if there was one thing Uncle Virgil had taught him, it was how to deal with both of those.
"Very well," he said, turning back to the complainants. "It's clear that through the extra water obtained for his crops, Thsese has been taking unfair profit from his neighbors."
"Yet I did not cause the rupture," Thsese put in stiffly.
"I understand that," Jack agreed. "Nevertheless, you did profit from it. I therefore decree that until the channel wall has been returned to its proper condition, twenty percent of your crops will be forfeit, to be divided between Sinina and the—"
"What?" Thsese all but screeched. He started forward, stopping only when one of the two silent males who had accompanied Jack stepped into his path. "This is outrageous!"
"To be divided between Sinina and the other landowners downstream," Jack continued. He gestured to his right. "The choosing and distribution of that twenty percent will be handled by my assistant, Thonsifi."
Out of the corner of his eye, Jack saw Thonsifi stiffen with surprise. Apparently, she wasn't looking forward to invading Thsese's territory any more than Sinina was.
But most of Jack's attention was on Thsese, and the resulting show was well worth it. The older Golvin's eyes widened, his skin wrinkling violently at this casual piling of insult onto injury. For a Three to have to allow a Thirty-One onto his land for the purpose of confiscating some of his crops—
"The channel will be fixed," he ground out.
"By sundown today?" Jack suggested.
Thsese sent a glare at the One. But he was stuck, and he knew it. "By sundown today," he agreed blackly.
"Good," Jack said. "Then I declare this case settled. Next?"
He spent the rest of the morning handling more water cases, a few land disputes, and one involving crops that had migrated from one plot to another. Most of them were quickly and more or less easily handled. A couple of them took a little more thought, and one was tricky enough that he decided to postpone it to the next day.
As the group in the Great Hall thinned, runners quietly left and rounded up the next batch of complainants.
There didn't seem to be any particular pattern to the cases. Jack wasn't being given the oldest complaints first, or those involving the highest-ranking Golvins. Certainly they weren't dealing with the most urgently pressing. His only guess was that Thonsifi had put some of the easier ones up front so that she and the One could see whether their kidnapped Jupa actually knew what he was doing.
Finally, thankfully, they broke for the midday meal.
"You're doing well," Draycos murmured from Jack's shoulder as the boy wandered along the edge of the Great Hall munching on a stalk of something sweet and crunchy he'd snared from the buffet table Thonsifi's people had set up.
"Thanks," Jack murmured back, glancing down at his shoulder before he remembered that the Judge-Paladin robe ran right up to his neck. "I hope you'll still be saying that when they start throwing the tricky stuff at me."
"Some of this morning's cases have been tricky enough," Draycos said. "You've had to deal not only with legal questions, but social and political ones as well."
"Actually, I don't think I'm doing much legal work at all," Jack said. "Mostly I'm just getting everyone to do what they should have done months or years ago on their own."
"Perhaps you're not so much a judge as a mediator," Draycos offered. "Your success here has been in bringing opposing sides together in a compromise."
"What I'm doing is finding the right levers to use on them," Jack corrected. "It's not a lot different from con work."
Draycos was silent a moment. "Some of the techniques may be similar," he said. "But the intent is far different. Under Uncle Virgil's direction, you used these methods to steal from people. Here, you use them to bring justice and harmony."
"Maybe," Jack said reluctantly. Draycos might be right, but he wasn't quite ready to agree that what he was doing was nearly so noble. It still felt way too much like what he'd been doing for Uncle Virgil all those years,
"I am concerned, though, by the fact that apparently no other Judge-Paladins have been here in all this time," Draycos went on. "You said they traveled in circuits through the less populated areas."
"I also said there weren't enough of them," Jack reminded him. "Actually, this whole planet probably qualifies as a less populated area. My guess is that any Judge-Paladin who's touched down on Semaline has stuck to the cities and towns. I doubt most of them even know this canyon is out here."
"I wonder how your parents found it."
"I don't know," Jack said. "Maybe we'll find out when we get a chance to go up to that mining area. I wonder if there are any cases that'll give us an excuse to do that."
"You believe that's where your parents died?"
"Look around," Jack said, turning around and leaning his back against the wall. "Well, no, I guess you can't. But this seems to be where Jupas judge, and there's no sign anywhere of any kind of explosion."
"It has been eleven years," Draycos reminded him. "They would surely have repaired any damage."
"If they did, they did a really good job of it," Jack said. "Don't forget, I've had a pretty good look at the building. It's all the same type of stone, and all the stone shows the same wear pattern. The floor stones in particular fit perfectly together."
"I'll accept your analysis," Draycos said, though Jack thought he could hear an unspoken for now. "But that brings up another possibility. If they were visiting the mine, could the explosion that killed them have been an accident after all?"
Jack chewed the inside of his cheek. That was a good point. Maybe there was no real mystery here, no hidden crime to be uncovered and avenged. "We won't know until we get up there," he decided. "Let's put our heads together and come up with some reason to go topside."
Finishing off the sweet stalk, he turned back toward his Seat of Judgment. "In the meantime, I've got more justice to dispense."
The afternoon's cases were pretty much a repeat of the morning's stack. Most of them involved water and crop problems, with a few apartment and neighbor troubles thrown in.
Most of the cases struck Jack as rather feeble, with the appeal to a higher authority in each case probably having been made by whichever side had been the loser under the One's original decision. Close to half the canyon, he reflected, had probably been rather annoyed when a new Judge-Paladin had actually shown up.
It was on the last case of the day, as the sky was beginning to darken overhead, that the pattern suddenly changed.
"This is Four-Eight-Naught-Two," Thonsifi said as a slightly bedraggled Golvin was brought forward. "He was discovered this morning sleeping in the flying transport of the Many."
"Really," Jack said, noting the bruising along the right side of Foeinatw's neck where Draycos had knocked him out. "Why didn't you simply sleep in your apartment, Foeinatw?"
The other didn't answer, his eyes focused on the floor in front of Jack's feet. "He claims to have been set upon by others," Thonsifi said. "At least one, possibly more. He further claims that these others damaged the flying transport's interior."