“Bring him to me!” Lady Renine shouted. Rhillian did not blink, the lady’s furious stare struggled to hold her own, then flicked away.
“We have your correspondence with the Larosans,” Rhillian continued. “The letters. The offers of conciliation, of marriage and alliance.”
“Forgeries,” said Lady Renine, recovering some of her imperious calm. “I was warned the serrin would try something like this. Do not believe them, Justice Sinidane, they are sly and full of tricks.”
“I can prove otherwise. You would have offered the Larosans alliance, would you not? They already wed Sofy Lenayin. You would perhaps wed Alythia Lenayin to one of your allied nobles…perhaps even to your son Alfriedo? Or perhaps one of your new allies in Elisse? King Torvaal of Lenayin’s honour would not then allow him to attack Rhodaan, but only if you could demonstrate true rulership over Rhodaan. To gain it, you could offer the people of Rhodaan peace, against the armies that threaten them.
“But that peace would come with terms, would it not? The Larosans have invoked a holy war to free Bacosh lands of ungodly serrin. If the Larosans cannot demonstrate Rhodaan to be free of serrin, then they cannot claim victory, and the priesthood that pays for much of their war shall be displeased. What would be your intent then, Lady Renine? To rouse a pogrom against all serrin and part-serrin in Rhodaan? To cleanse us from this place?”
“You speak in paranoid riddles!” Lady Renine laughed contemptuously. “We could not do such a thing if we tried. The Steel would not allow it, nor the Nasi-Keth. Saalshen has so many powerful friends in Rhodaan, yet the serrin claim fear of persecution to justify this new tyranny!”
“Or would you seek to use the support for the nobility that does exist within the Steel,” Rhillian continued, “to undermine them? Already we have reports of desertions from amongst their ranks, and protests from some of General Zulmaher’s friends at his arrest. Would you undermine them to the extent that you should encourage them to lose? If the Army of Larosa and their allies should march into Tracato and hand the Lordship of Rhodaan to young Alfriedo, that would solve all of your problems at once, would it not?”
“You fool,” Lady Renine replied, “with your actions here, you make that all the more likely.
“I assure you, Lady Renine,” said the old man, “I shall take no outrageous slurs seriously, should they be proven to be so. But quantified, proven accusations, I should take very seriously indeed. We shall see, in due course, which these are.”
Sinidane warned Rhillian later, as they made their way slowly up the steps from the dungeon, “Do not think that you have convinced me of the woman’s guilt, Lady Rhillian.” The old man’s grip was firm upon her offered arm, and she climbed slowly. “Nor that of her companions. I do agree to a likelihood, and in all my years I have never known serrin to produce false evidence, but the exact truth of such matters lies only in the laps of the gods. We mortals have only the law, and the law requires proof.”
“If such exists, I shall present it to you.”
“Furthermore, I do not like to see the Council suspended,” said the old man. “The gods shall think it ill. I would ask that you allow it to sit in session as soon as possible.”
“How is that possible, with half its members either arrested or under suspicion?”
“Lady Rhillian, I care not for your difficulties. This city’s institutions have been all that holds us above the barbarian fray for two centuries now. I tell you, I will not see them suspended indefinitely. Instruct one of your people to look into finding replacements for those arrested, I will investigate the legality at this end. You may consider that my order.”
“As you say,” Rhillian agreed. She was not prepared to challenge the man’s authority. They reached the top of the stairs, and Sinidane stopped, turning to face her.
“Is it you who commands?” he asked her, searching her face.
“By default, it appears so,” Rhillian said carefully. “Until General Lucia is returned from the border. It was not of my choosing, but the captains insisted.”
Sinidane sighed, and patted her arm. “I love this city,” he conceded to her. “I love this land of Rhodaan, and Enora. Ilduur too, in my weaker moments.”
“I too,” said Rhillian. “I hope to save them from capitulation to the darkest forces humanity has known.”
“I do not mean love in some woolly headed parochial sense, please understand. I mean that I love them for what they are. For the hope they represent, for all humanity. In fact, parochialism is my enemy. I fight it daily, and today, I see it running loose in my city. Beware the parochials, Lady Rhillian, for they believe in the conceit that Rhodaan’s greatness stems purely from the greatness of the Rhodaani character. And I am well aware that it does not.
“It stems from institutions, such as my own. Institutions that work in
Rhillian nodded. “I understand.”
“Do you?” Sinidane looked pained. “Sometimes I wonder if serrin truly do understand what they have done, here in the so-called Saalshen Bacosh. When Maldereld came to us, and brought with her the enlightenment of thousands of years of serrin wisdom, we were but savages, in truth. We believed in lies, we had eyes but could not see, we had minds but could not think, we murdered on a whim and felt naught for the consequences. Such savages threaten us today, from across the Steel border, and we look across that border and we are pleased to be so much more enlightened than them.
“But in truth, I do not think we are. This…this civilisation, that the serrin have helped us to construct, and the thinking that attends it…this is not the natural state of humankind. Or not, at least, from where we have just recently come. Left to our own devices, perhaps we could have achieved this sophistication in…oh, I would guess a thousand years?” Sinidane’s fingers dug into her arm, with an almost painful grip from one so old. “Do you see what serrin have done here? You have accelerated us. You have taken a tribe of barbarians and dressed us up in pretty clothes, and taught us table manners and polite behaviour. And we are such good actors that when it works, it seems wonderful. Yet underneath, the barbarian still lurks…never doubt it! In some ways we have truly changed, yet in our hearts, we are not so advanced as serrin would like to have made us. We are children in adults’ clothing, grown up before our time.”
Rhillian took the old man’s hand, gently. “I understand. This was our experiment, in human lands. But we have achieved it together, human and serrin, and now we must defend it together. Have no fear of my naivety, Chief Justiciar. I have seen Petrodor, and the War of the King. I trust no one.” She smiled. “Not even you.”
Sinidane smiled back, and patted her hand with a sigh. “Well enough. But, dear girl, know this. I would give my life for Saalshen. Coming from one so near the grave as I, that is perhaps no great offer, yet even so, I would throw myself upon the spears of Saalshen’s enemies should it serve the purposes of Saalshen’s survival. Everything that is good about Rhodaan, you have given us. You are humanity’s greatest hope, and I despair that so many are ungrateful. I fear that we do not deserve you.”
Rhillian recalled Master Deani, of Palopy House in Petrodor. He had said to her much the same, in those final, desperate moments of siege and fire. Palopy was now a ruin, and Deani was dead, with so many others. Only she and Kiel had survived. She would not see such a fate befall Sinidane and his beloved Justiciary. She understood human power so much better now, for the lessons she’d learned in Petrodor.
Rhillian kissed the old man’s hand. “I am your servant, Chief Justiciar. Never doubt it.”
She escorted Sinidane out to the Justiciary grand hall once more. His page walked with him back to chambers, while Rhillian cornered Lieutenant Raine.
“I need evidence of the feudalists’ plot,” she told him in a low voice. “The Chief Justice is well disposed to us in that he is ill disposed toward the feudalists, but he is a man of principle and will not deviate from the law. We need proof.”
Raine ran a hand through his wavy blond hair. In the war in Elisse, he had proven to be one of the Steel’s best. “I have all available men on the task, yet our powers to gather evidence are limited. I cannot trust the Blackboots,
