‘No man breaks the Rock,’ a woman said. She was big and broad-shouldered, and she stepped towards us before kneeling in front of Aline. ‘I will guard the girl’s life if she stays, and I will guard her name if she leaves. I will pay the red price.’
‘I will pay the price too,’ said a man, more a boy really, barely taller than Aline herself. ‘No man breaks the Rock,’ he said as he knelt.
‘No man breaks the Rock,’ another voice said. I couldn’t see who spoke this time, but soon I could hear the phrase repeated over and over as men and women knelt upon the ground. When the sounds stopped there was a wide circle in front of us, and behind that almost every member of the crowd was on one knee.
I heard clapping: the Duke. He stood on the opposite side of us, some hundred feet away, flanked by Shiballe and his guards, and fifty bowmen were arrayed in front of him, arrows nocked and aiming at the crowd.
‘Such pretty words,’ he said. ‘How masterful, Trattari, that you can make treason sound so noble.’
‘The first law of Rijou ain’t treason!’ a man stood up and said angrily. An arrow appeared in his neck and he dropped to the ground.
‘Treason is what I say it is,’ the Duke replied calmly. ‘And any man or woman who speaks again is a traitor and subject to execution. Ganath Kalila will hold today, and for ever. The girl is a criminal and she will be taken and dealt with, and her name and bloodline extinguished, as will all those with traitor’s blood in their veins.
‘Well?’ he said finally, into the silence. ‘Well, Trattari, is that all you have to offer them? Words? You’ll not get much from that. A dead man cannot feed his family. Where will they be when you run away, tatter-cloak? Where are your fellow Magisters to come and enforce your interpretation of the law once you leave? Come on now, “Greatcoat”, you have heard the evidence! Now tell us your verdict!’
The crowd was looking at me and all at once the fear was back.
‘My verdict is this,’ I said firmly. ‘Ganath Kalila is unlawful. It violates the laws of this land – and more, it violates the laws of this city. My verdict is that henceforth there shall be no Blood Week in Rijou.
‘But the Duke is right,’ I said. ‘I will leave here – alive or dead, I will leave here today. So I cannot be here to preserve the decision. There is no army of Greatcoats coming to protect the verdict. There is only you. There is only the Rock.’
One by one I pulled the plain black buttons from my coat and popped off the soft leathery caps to reveal the solid gold disks beneath, each stamped with the symbol of the King’s Magisters. Within a few moments I was holding enough money in my hand to feed each of twelve families for a year.
‘I need a jury,’ I said, ‘twelve men or women who will see to it that the verdict holds. Twelve people who must face what comes after I leave, who will see to it that no man forgets what was said here. Twelve who may well die in the attempt.’ Then I threw the golden coins onto the ground in front of me and waited as they clattered and rolled.
No one reached for them.
Silence filled the Rock of Rijou as nobles, soldiers and commoners waited to see what would happen next. Aline squeezed my hand for reassurance, but I couldn’t bring myself to look at her face. I had failed her. I had brought death to this little girl and to myself, because I was obsessed with the belief that my King had some ingenious plan – that he’d had it all along – and that the quest he’d given me all those years ago had some meaning.
‘Find the Charoites,’ he’d said, as if jewels could change the world any more than words could. And now Aline would die, for no better reason than that she’d wanted to hear her family’s name called out, to preserve her rights of inheritance – as if those had any value in this hellhole. In the end, the City Sage hadn’t even given her that. He’d spoken her name, but not that of her family.
The Duke smiled at me from his distance. He would smile until the last coin stopped spinning, until he could see the resigned despair on my face, and until someone in the crowd, realising they had pushed their ruler as far as they dared, decided they would do better to curry his favour by killing us.
The City Sage sat next to the Duke, looking for all the world as if he’d fallen asleep. The old fool couldn’t even remember to give Aline’s family name. That realisation brought back the memory of the wreckage of Aline’s home, now the unconsecrated tomb of the Tiarren family; dead and gone now, their names never to be spoken in Rijou again. Almost every pair of eyes in the crowd was locked onto the spinning coins on the ground, but a few stared at me. Did any of them know Lady Tiarren and her children? Did they blame me for what would come next? How many deaths had I faced only to bring this thirteen-year-old girl to meet her end at the Rock of Rijou, gambling her fate on the hope that, somehow, the people of the most corrupt city in the world would stand up and risk their own lives for hers. I turned to Aline and she gave me a brave little smile, crooked on the left side, like the hint of a secret about to be told. That smile. I wanted to hold her, to say, you are precious to me, even though I didn’t know why; I had no right and no cause. I wanted to tell her that all would be well, that I would protect her no matter what happened, but I couldn’t. Her life lay in the shining metal pieces and the hands that would either take them up or watch them fall. Aline and I turned together to look at the coins, spinning slower and slower on the ground, coming to the inevitable conclusion.
No one reached for the coins.
So I listened.
THE JURYMEN
‘Yer don’t look none too comfortable there, Mister Magister,’ the lady blacksmith had said, years ago in Uttarr during one of my first missions as a King’s Greatcoat.
She was quite right. The stocks in the town square had been passably well built from the local greenwood trees, making a sturdy if not very accommodating structure.
It was my second day in the stocks. In my first attempt to resolve the dispute, I had gone to speak to the local Lord, to plead for his intervention. One of his own clerks had challenged a farmer’s son to a duel after the boy had tried to protect his sister’s maidenhood. Though duelling was legal – even if it did involve a grown man with military experience fighting a boy barely seventeen – forcing that boy to fight without the benefit of a weapon was not.
The man had renewed his interest in the woman, and now it was her elderly father who stood in the way.
‘Yer know what yer problem is, then, eh?’ the blacksmith asked.
I craned my head up to look at her. ‘I don’t listen?’
‘Yer don’t listen. Words came out yer damned mouth, but none got in yer damned ears.’
She had warned me when I’d first come to town. I had verified the information in the poorly written complaint brought to us by a minstrel who had come through town and seen the initial events take place.
‘Yer didn’t listen when I told yer to leave well enough alone. Yer didn’t listen when I told yer the boy was already long dead. Yer didn’t listen when I told yer no one else wanted to die.’
‘And the girl?’ I asked.
‘Yer think she’s not goin’ to end up in some nobleman’s bed afore this is done?’
The Lord had refused to take action against the man, so I’d done it myself. I challenged him to a duel and beat him bloody, and when he’d tried to sneak up on me from behind after the duel had ended, I taught him the first rule of the sword and put my point through his belly and killed him.
‘Yer talked and yer talked and yer talked,’ the blacksmith went on.
The blacksmith had warned me that the Lord himself would have me put in the stocks before hanging me the next week, during their monthly trials.