The Sword-Master tipped back his head and brayed laughter through his nose.
"It's time to decide, old man," he said in a challenging voice, hand on rapier hilt. The two blue-and-bronzes behind him wore unhappy looks beneath their morions.
"Decide what?" the duke demanded, visibly bristling at the other's impertinence. His escorts, in the blackenameled boiled-leather helmets and cuirasses of the constabulary, glared at the civic guardsmen with frank hostility. The police had no love for these Johnny-come-lately paramilitaries.
"Whether you're serious about the getting and keeping of power. Here's an enemy to the state, an obstacle to your plans as well as ours. We had the situation under control. Why interfere?''
"The rule of law is paramount, and must be maintained."
"Law?" The swordsman flicked dismissive fingers. "What is law? A means to an end. Law's a fine tool; power's better. But to use the power, one must have the will."
"Power without law is corrupt, and soon turns to evil," the duke said acerbically. "Sooner, rather than later, for the application of will."
"Words," Shaveli said. He gestured around the torch-lit corridor. "Around you is stone." He slapped his rapier hilt. "And steel. Here are facts. Pit your words against them: which prevails?"
"The will of the council that your master has petitioned to make him master first of Zazesspur, and then of all Tethyr, will prevail," the duke said. "For that is the law."
Shaveli laughed again. "So now the law is to be your will?"
"It is given to the council to make the laws. Do you defy us? I think your lord will little thank you for your contumacy."
The Sword-Master swept off his plumed hat and bowed low. "No contumacy, Your Grace; take your prisoner, and greatly may you enjoy the use of her." The duke stiffened. "I crave only that you answer me a question philosophicaclass="underline" each day a dozen factions strive to pull you, your council, and my lord baron down. Will your laws suffice to stay them?"
"They must," Duke Hembreon said stiffly, and nodded for his men to go.
The morning sunlight stung Zaranda's cheeks like salt sea spray on an open cut, and made her eyes water. It was glorious all the same. She drank deeply of the breeze that molded the smock to her rangy form, and savored every nuance of it, the rotting fish and garbage and soot no less than the ocean smell and the spring-green grass without the walls. She even relished the freedom of a walk across the plaza, illusion though it was.
"Where are you taking me?" she asked, voice hoarse from screaming.
To city hall," the duke said. "You shall be decently housed and treated, though a prisoner you must remain."
Passersby stopped to stare at the spectacle of a striking woman being led across the square in manacles, then hurried on their way. Zazesspurians were acquiring the reflexes needed to survive under tyranny, it appeared. "And why must I remain a captive?" she asked. "What laws have I broken?"
The duke's blue eyes looked elsewhere than at her. "It is not for me to say. A bill of particulars shall be read to you when you face the judgment of the council."
"So that's the way of it." Zaranda laughed. "And how did you come to learn I was Faneuil's secret captive?"
"Information was confidentially lodged with the council to this effect."
"Ah, so much goes on in Zazesspur these days that won't stand the light of day."
She shook her head. Her long dark hair, unbound, whipped in the wind like a cavalry pennon. "My erstwhile host the Sword-Master questioned your commitment to power. I have to wonder about your devotion to this rule of law you speak so much about. And I've a philosophical question of my own: if you lack the force of will to use and indeed abuse power, and at the same time, lack the will to adhere unswervingly to the law you pay lip service to-what then?"
But the duke had no more words to say to her, and so she passed into the ornate, archaic city hall, and back once again into servitude.
The great council hall of Zazesspur was a vast cathedral space, with a black and white parquetry floor, a pointed vault high overhead, and windows running clerestory beneath it down either side of the chamber. Beneath the windows, even above the two large doors of beaten bronze that gave onto the hall, ran rows of benches to seat such onlookers as the council saw fit to admit. Today they were thronged. Zaranda's appearance before the city council-not her trial, as the crier made abundantly, indeed redundantly clear-was the social event of the season.
The council members had all brought claques selected from among them retinues, which made for interesting and clashing blocks of color in the stands. Lords Faunce and Inselm Hhune, former councilors, were on hand, as were the syndics who ruled the guilds of Zazesspur, sweltering in fur-trimmed robes. Earl Ravenak and a noisy, aromatic contingent of Hairheads occupied a sort of island near the exit, none of their fellow spectators caring to get too close to them. On the other end of the hall and social scale, Armenides the Compassionate sat beaming benignly, surrounded by the white-robed scions of Zazesspur's most pretentious families. Finally, a number of common citizens had been let in to watch the awful majesty of the nascent state vindicate itself. Evidently awed by the grandeur of occasion and surroundings, they were subdued by Zazesspurian standards, their jostling and chatter a low commotion, like a stiff breeze in the green-budding branches outside.
A long table occupied a low dais that ran from wall to wall at the head of the hall. Behind it sat the twelve members of the counciclass="underline" Deymos, Hafzul Gorbon, and Marquis Enzo; Anakul, serenely smiling in his robes of black and red and his black silken cowl fitted close to his round head and drawn to a peak between his brows; Malhalvadon Stringfellow, afidget in his chair like a barely continent child; Strombolio, in red and yellow; Jinjivar the Sorcerer-tall, gaunt, and splendid in a pale-blue and purple turban so extravagantly round as to make him resemble an attenuated mushroom; Torvid, Naumos, and Lady Korun; Baron Zam, looking sour; Duke Hembreon, looking even graver than usual, possibly preoccupied by the fact that his daughter Tatrina was nowhere to be seen in the placidly smiling All-Friends contingent. Their seating was controlled by a rigid and deliberately arcane rotation schedule.
At the table's right end stood Baron Faneuil Hardisty. He was simply dressed in green, gold, and brown; his closest approach to ostentation was the silver chaplet he wore around prematurely graying tem-pies, significant of his recent acclamation as lord of the city. Like the late kings of Tethyr, he had no right to sit at the council table, and his very presence was of questionable legality. It seemed to symbolize the radical traditionalist thrust of his program: things will be as theу once were, only different.
At the table's left end the crier stood forward. He wore a tabard sporting the traditional device of lion, gules, rampant on field of gold. No one knew why this was traditional, inasmuch as Zazesspur's emblem was a blue cockatrice on a light-green field. No one knew where that came from, either, cockatrices being exceedingly rare in Tethyr, even since the monarchy's collapse. Some savants theorized that was the reason for the symbol's adoption, that the appearance of such a rarity as a cockatrice in Zazesspur might have been deemed worthy of commemoration. Actually, nobody cared anymore.
"Oyez, oyez! " the crier cried. "Gentles of Zazesspur, attend! The city council is now in session: let all observe the gravest punctilio!"