Lady Renine held up her hands.
“Please, my dearest friends and family,” she said soothingly, “your outrage is just, yet it is indeed pointless to direct it at our noble soldiers of the Steel. These are good and honourable men, merely obeying their orders, as all good Rhodaani soldiers will. If you please, Captain, we shall accompany you in just a moment. If we first might be allowed to gather some things?”
“No possessions, M’Lady,” said Captain Mieren, uncomfortably. “I’m sorry, M’Lady.”
“Indeed,” said Lady Renine. “Come, Alfriedo, we shall go.”
“Yes, Mother,” said the young lord, walking to grasp his mother’s hand, as cool and dignified as she.
“Fear not, my friends,” said Lady Renine to those surrounding, “this thing has merely begun. Our serrin friends appear to have forgotten exactly whose land this truly is.” With a cold stare at Aisha that had none of her previous, gracious warmth. And to Sasha, her charm quickly returning, “Dearest Sashandra, Alythia is fortunate to have such a dedicated and loving sister as you. Please give my regards to your noble uman; we have had the opportunity to meet on two occasions, and I hold his wisdom in the highest regard. Please ask him to consider the Nasi-Keth’s position on this matter, and that of the Tol’rhen. That position could, I feel, become the pivot upon which rests the future of Rhodaan.”
She walked to leave, accompanied by others, watched by wary soldiers. Alythia walked first to Sasha and embraced her. “Thank you for coming so fast,” she said, with real emotion. She pulled back to look Sasha in the face, and her eyes were shining. “I’m very touched.”
Sasha shrugged, and managed a wry grin. “You’re my sister.”
Alythia kissed her on the cheek. “And you’re mine,” she said proudly. “My little sister. Be well and look after yourself, yes? I think perhaps I shall be safer in a dungeon than you on the outside.”
The streets of Tracato were deserted. In places there was debris on the cobbles, human items, lost pieces of clothing, a walking staff, an empty leather bag. The crowds and rioting mobs had rushed, and gone. From somewhere distant drifted yells and chants. The soldiers at Rhillian’s flanks eyed the windows and alleys warily, shields ready, waiting for archers.
Nearer the Justiciary, the human traffic increased. Before its arches were milling cityfolk, horses, Blackboots, and a guard of Steel upon the steps. Above them all loomed Maldereld’s statue, her sword raised to a cloudless sky. A familiar lieutenant saw Rhillian, and broke off his conversation with a Blackboot officer from the base of Maldereld’s plinth.
“Lieutenant Raine,” Rhillian greeted him as he matched her stride. “What progress?”
“Many arrests,” said Raine, removing his helmet as they entered the building. “Someone is making lists inside, I’ve not seen the latest. I think we have half the councilmen we wanted…”
“Renine?”
“Yes, all of them. But the law states we cannot hold them if we do not charge them.”
“My, what a sophisticated city this has become.”
“Do you wish the law suspended?” Raine asked her. It took Rhillian a moment to realise he was serious. She could, it occurred to her. Captain Renard was respected, but did not have the authority of a general. Zulmaher was under arrest, and alternative generals were at the western border. In Elisse, the Steel officers had come to respect Rhillian’s command greatly, and had praised the
“No,” she replied. “The Blackboots are unhappy as things stand, and I’ll not make enemies of the justiciars entirely. The Steel cannot remain in Tracato for long, and once you’re gone, true power shall flow from this building.”
The entry stairs led into a long, wide hall, filled with activity. Justiciars in black cloaks argued, clerks hurried clutching immense rolls of parchment, Blackboots escorted hands-tied prisoners while other cityfolk protested and pleaded beneath the wary eye of local guards. Rhillian threaded her way through, with Lieutenant Raine as an escort.
She did not continue down to the rows of courts, but turned left instead, and was halfway down an adjoining hall when a page brought an old man out from a doorway ahead. Rhillian stopped before him, and bowed.
“Justice Sinidane,” she said with respect. “I regret I have not had the opportunity to call on you since my return from the war. You look well.”
Sinidane snorted. “One of the most irritating things about growing old,” he replied, “is that every acquaintance must remark to my face their mounting surprise that I’m not yet dead. What have you gone and done now, silly girl?”
Sinidane had better than eighty years, yet looked well enough for that. He walked tall and unaided, though slowly, and spoke with an eccentricity that could seem to the unacquainted like absentmindedness. There were some Rhodaanis who opined that Sinidane, rather than Premier Chiron, was the true power in Tracato. As chief justiciar, his world was the law, and even premiers, High Table seats and councilmen must bow to the law. If only, Rhillian thought sadly, Maldereld had been more successful in removing the temples from the equation entirely. Sinidane’s black robes bore the emblazoned silver of a great, Verenthane star. Rhodaani justice came from the gods, or else no citizen would respect it as true. And that, frustratingly, brought the priesthood into the equation.
“If you will accompany me downstairs, I believe I can demonstrate to you exactly what I’ve been doing, Justice Sinidane,” Rhillian replied.
“Stairs, you say? Do I look like a sprightly young man to you?”
He followed her anyway, his page at his elbow, down some dark, stone steps, then, and into the bowels of the Justiciary dungeons.
A lantern hung outside Lady Tathilde Renine’s cell, yet she blinked at the new light beyond its bars. She sat alone on a small stool…a lady of her breeding would never deign to sit on the stone floor, Rhillian judged. The lady’s eyes narrowed in suspicion to see Rhillian, then widened as the Chief Justiciar shuffled into view, and leaned a steadying hand upon the bars.
“Your Justice,” said Lady Renine. “You’ve come. I had feared this insurrection had claimed you too.”
“The law is intact,” Sinidane replied. “Merely somewhat taken aback.”
Lady Renine came smoothly to her feet. “Your Justice, I would like to protest this appalling treatment, as it is clearly beneath a lady of my station. Further, the laws of your beloved Justiciary clearly state that any so detained must be formally charged by an officer of Rhodaan,
“Captains of the Steel do qualify, Lady Renine,” Sinidane said mildly.
“The Steel swore an oath before the gods to uphold the office of the Council, not to arrest them!” said Lady Renine. “I have seen many dear family friends and elected councilmen marched past these bars, men the Steel swore to serve and protect with their lives.”
“You seem to confuse the nobility with the Council, Lady Renine,” Rhillian observed. “They are not the same thing, whatever the nobility’s attempts to purchase so many Council seats that it may appear so.”
“I’ll not stand here and be dictated to on matters of Rhodaani governance by a serrin! Just the other day, I was lunching with the serrin ambassador Lesthen, and he assured me that the days of Saalshen’s interference in the affairs of Rhodaan were over. And now we see it happening all over again.”
“Again?” Rhillian asked. “To my memory, we’ve never done this
Lady Renine’s jaw trembled. Sinidane watched her. It was a curious question for the leader of Rhodaan’s feudalists to be asked, before such a man as Sinidane. Feudalists who decried the loss of old human ways, yet professed not to hate the new Council, the new Justiciary, the new laws, the divisions of human power, that had made Rhodaan everything that it was today. To regret the coming of Maldereld would be to regret all those things. To regret, indeed, that a man like Sinidane, practising the things he practised, should even exist.
“I wish to see my son,” Lady Renine replied, her voice low and cold.
“He is in the Mahl’rhen,” said Rhillian. “We do not lock up children, Lady Renine. He is well fed and looked after.”
