The High Courts of the Realm were contained in ten different buildings, each constructed to a unique, majestic standard. The Hippogriff was a lofty structure of delicate arches, its facades of curves and fletched buttresses. The Sentinel was little more than a circle of pillars, open-aired and tree-ringed, carpeted in leaves. The Troglodyte was half-buried, hidden at the surface level by hedges, but, upon following the ancient steps down into its bustling hallways, one eventually found oneself beneath its marvellous glass ceiling, ensorcelled to enhance the clarity of the skies above.
Despite their differences all of the courts were contained on the same campus, directly north of the Westrise, and were connected by a sprawling maze of verdant paths winding about the gardens – connected to one another, and to the various gateways in from the street. On a day like today, with the sun blazing in the sky and the birds singing in the trees, a whole horde of visitors were walking the well-maintained avenues between the hedges. The trials were open to the public – all but those held in the Troglodyte, at least – and people often came to watch their rivals be excoriated by the legal process, getting the full money’s worth of their freedom. Not that the lowborn had time or cause to attend a place such as this, of course. There were the places in Hightown the unwashed masses were permitted to visit, and those they weren’t, and this was one of the latter. The Old Courts would see to their spats. The High Courts – those were for the real cases, for the making and breaking of the rich and powerful.
He came to a halt at the great green gates on Airbent Road, knowing that just inside the painted iron bars were two waywatchers, standing on either side of the path – knowing that the pair would hear every word his mother said to him when they stopped. He understood that the guards had perception spells folded into their consciousnesses, and he stood out in his lawyer’s austere robe of vertical grey lines, barrister’s black headdress under his arm. They would spot him, and listen, and the smiles they hid when he passed between them would reappear once he’d gone by…
And one of them, the skinny, freckled girl, would follow him with her eyes…
He accepted this with a swiftly-hidden smile of his own.
“Now, Gar,” Mother said, patting him firmly on the arm as she unhooked hers from his, “don’t you be home late today. You know we’re having the Abbershanks for dinner, and I expect you to be bathed and changed before dusk.”
“Mother,” he remonstrated, “this is an important case. I can’t tell you what time I’ll be home by.”
He had a pretty good idea what time he’d be home, truth be told, but telling the truth was never an option. Not for him. The chief magister who’d let him keep his job had drilled that into him from the first meeting.
“And you must remember to comb this nest you call your hair.” She reached up with clawed fingers, red-painted nails raking his scalp above the left ear. “I don’t know how you dare attend work like this. It’s a disgrace.”
She never sneered, never snarled – he’d inherited her soft, melodic voice. That only made it worse as she spoke down to him.
“I wear my headdress, Mother.” He gently shook the big, stiff garment in the crook of his other arm. “No one can see my hair.”
“But as you enter,” she murmured, still dragging her nails across his head. “There. That looks better – a little better.” She patted him firmly again. “Why don’t you put the wig on now?”
“Just after you sorted it out for me?”
“Don’t give me that cheek, Garone. It’s for your own good, like always.”
No, that wouldn’t do.
“It’s not a wig, Mother. It’s a headdress.”
“I know perfectly well what it is, thank you. Put it on, there’s a good boy.”
Even worse.
He sighed, sorted out the stray black feathers woven into the hair, and settled it upon his head.
“Hold on a moment.” She reached under the rim of the headdress, poking at his head for at least ten more seconds before finally releasing him – by the time she let him go, he’d drawn at least a dozen glances from the smartly-dressed pedestrians passing them. “Go on, then. Off with you. I’ll see you presently.”
She spun on her heel and strode away, her gait still strong, her flower-embroidered skirts swishing as she made her way into the crowds.
He waited until her last long, backwards glance concluded, then took the headdress off again. He ran his own fingers through his hair, sorting it out once more. He wasn’t conventionally attractive, with his pallid skin and abnormally-big ears, but he knew that if he fixed his hair back into its scruffy nest and wore his status like a mask he would turn a few heads.
Including the head of the waywatcher, pursing her lips while she smiled at his expense, eyeing him up from behind as he strolled between them. He was slender and not tall, but the robe hung well off his frame – there was plenty of muscle on his physique, and it showed, when she could spot him between the intervening people.
He explored that subsection of the future – the one where he turned back, spoke to the waywatcher – and found it led nowhere. He understood every part and parcel of her being, making him nothing more than a mirror when he was around her. She could never get at him. Not really. Four months of relative stability would only lead up to the evening he first had to employ enchantment spells to wipe her mind of her doubts about his night-time activities. The evening he’d give up on their relationship on his side.
Garone couldn’t have a pet human. From what he’d seen, most in his position appeared to experience the same discomfort at the notion.
He understood what Duskdown had taken from Timesnatcher, better and better every day. He understood the trap, now. There was no middle ground. The seer knew his lover intimately from the first glimpse, a knowledge the lover could never hope to return, unless the seer should fall in love with a seeress – in which case all such knowledge was forsaken from the outset. There were no mortal tools left for him to grasp at. Fellow arch-diviners were permanent enigmas. Timesnatcher had never been able to see his future, by virtue of she with whom he’d fallen in love, and Lightblind had never seen her own. It was a perfect knot, unbreakable except on the edge of a madman’s sword.
And so it had been broken.
I’m going to stay celibate forever, he mused as he idly picked his way along the paths. He was walking slowly behind a pair of fellow lawyers – enough people were passing in the other direction to make overtaking an awkward endeavour. He turned his head, looking into the treetops looming over the hedgerows, spotting the squirrels in the branches – it was easy for someone with his intimate understanding of the universe to find exactly what he was seeking.
Not that he had to look hard. It was everywhere – the very normality that evaded him. The two lawyers in front of him were subtly flirting, he realised as he pruned their conversation of its valueless content and exposed its future-worth without even trying. They would end up in bed together before the week was out, and –
No, he thought, the darkened room of their tryst’s completion disappearing entirely from his vision suddenly. No, something’s going to get in the way.
Why couldn’t he follow the channel back? Where was the cause of the effect? Ordinarily, the latter entailed the former in an inextricable loop that he couldn’t help but see when he bent his thought thither…
But now…
“If you ask me, Lormon’s lost a wheel at the last lap,” the woman was saying. “If he’d nailed the girl’s testimony, he’d have had it in his hands, but I have it on good authority: it’s over. They’re going to find cause to open it up to Tele-Scry. Knowing she had whitestick in her blood –“
Garone caught the long look the man cast her, understood the meaning of the coy elbow she thrust back at him in response –
“Stop it!” she hissed playfully, and turned back to check whether Garone had noticed their exchange; he was, of course, dutifully staring off into the trees, with a distant expression on his face, well in advance of her backwards glance.
Perhaps it’s the drugs, he considered. They might take inkatra together.
For every window, a wall. For every revelation, an enigma. The fates make of themselves what they will, and it is for us to play our parts.
Play our parts out.
As much as seers were said to put it on a pedestal, worship it in their hidden hearts, Garone despised surprise. Surprise always turned against him. The power of the obsidian tower had startled him, unmanned him and left him out, left Dustbringer to die. The dragon’s enchantment had come without warning and almost despoiled the very Realm.
Stolen novel; please report.
He felt his frown, recognised the way it would make others intimidated by him, and decided to leave it there. Let them see the way he felt inside. He couldn’t always wear the mask.
When he arrived at the Troglodyte, slowly descending the mossy stone stairs towards its yawning doorway, the guards checked his glyphstone and permitted him into the court’s halls without any lingering looks.
As he walked alone towards his meeting with her, he spent a few moments studying his clerk’s past, reading it without even needing a glance at the fleshy form her spirit inhabited. He wouldn’t ordinarily have done such a thing, and was for his part fond of Ms. Dyrdac, but he knew she was one route someone might try to get at him. Surely not an enemy – not a darkmage – but a professional rival perhaps…
No. She was clean. Sure, there were the borderline-illegal druidic treatments to rejuvenate her wrinkled brows, retract her jowls, smooth her crows’ feet – but he didn’t need his power to see the evidence of that. It was plain there upon her face. No one cared. Half the people her age currently in this building, this esteemed High Court of the Realm, had probably undergone similar magical regimens in a vain effort to claw back some lost youth.
She was clean, in the important ways. No interactions with darkmages or crooks. Even someone of Everseer’s calibre would leave blemishes he could see; it would take an enchanter on Tyr Kayn’s level to shroud her past from him fully.
He had glimpsed that past.
Even she had known love. Unconsummated – and she would likely perish a virgin – but love all the same.
And her future –
Where before there had been light between the aisles of books, there was now shadow. The shelves had been moved. The texts he’d not looked for could no longer be found in the library of her fate. Closer by than ever before.
An arch-diviner. Another such as I, and more powerful.
He shrugged it off. The darkness was always there, when one searched for it. Light would return, unlooked-for.
He met Ms. Dyrdac in their antechamber. She looked up from the paperwork strewn about the desk and it was difficult not to sigh in advance at her antics. He hid his face for a moment more, comporting himself as he closed the door behind him.
“We’ve only five minutes!” she huffed, even though she’d been doing nothing to make her out of breath. “If you want to see him, you’re out of luck! They’re going to immolate him in there!”
He drew a breath, drew in the instant until it stretched, elasticised, a gelatine for him to spread about his surroundings.
When I close myself I dam the flow. I know my page, my place in the universe of existence. I am the conduit through which the waters of time course. Time is not brittle. It is built up not of layers. There are no strata. There is only the flow. I am unique. I open myself, open the flow. It is then that I can direct the course, follow it whither I will.
But I lose my place in the book.
He pressed his eyes closed. It wasn’t working.
What is it? What’s wrong?
He didn’t know.
Something I don’t know. Something… familiar…
“Mr. Corteno, please!” Ms. Dyrdac’s voice suddenly resumed itself; the elastic bubble of chronomancy snapped back. “If you let him answer the summons to the stand, they’re going to ask him about the trip when he took the weapons with him. I don’t think anyone wants…“
He faced her, finally, and she silenced herself.
“Thank you,” he said after enjoying a moment of stillness. “Our client is quite innocent, Ms. Dyrdac. If Mr. Yaneyar can control himself –“
“He won’t!” she cried.
He will, he thought.
“If Mr. Yaneyar could control himself, he wouldn’t be in this mess. We wouldn’t be in this mess! Bragging, about how much he made, when it broke at least three contracts?“
“Ms. Dyrdac.” His quiet voice worked its own magic on her. “Nerifica. If Mr. Yaneyar can control himself, everything will go smoothly.” He tried to be as reassuring as possible – but it didn’t matter that she’d seen it go his way almost two dozen times before, didn’t matter that he’d turned defeat into victory time and again. She was a born doubter, and it’d given her instincts that had brought her far in her chosen career.
Instincts that had robbed the trust from her, robbed her chance at true love decades ago.
Why do we all play our parts? he wondered. What is in it for us to gain, if we are all doomed to die from the start, sent into the next world only half-born…?
He relented, releasing the sigh that’d been threatening to escape him, then spoke the words she wanted to hear. She was, for all her faults, a devout woman.
“Let the gods determine the victor,” he said in the end.
He saw the doubt melting on her face in his mind’s eye.
“Three minutes, Ms. Dyrdac,” he said, already opening the door. “If you please?”
She suddenly seemed to realise how much paperwork she needed to gather up; she started wedging the various sheets into a folder and chased him out of the room, even though he wasn’t going anywhere without her. He took the opportunity to settle his headdress in perfect position upon his head.
Within sixty seconds, they were entering the Troglodyte’s main hall, an ancient grey stone circle festooned with sumptuous crimson chairs and Magisterium drapes. The glass roof was displaying an eager blue sky over their heads. The sun wasn’t overhead but that didn’t make a difference – the spells infused into the slightly-concave dome permitted just the optimal amount of light into the room, shade existing only at the hall’s perimeter.
If he allowed himself, he could go back into this place’s original purpose. It had always been a place of law, of settling scores, but the blood-red silk of the plush seats was a veiled testament to the hall’s history. The High Courts were no less ancient than their lowborn counterparts, for all that the prefix ‘Old’ might’ve led the uneducated to the opposite conclusion. Once – and the dates were indeterminate, thanks to Arreath Ril – this had been a hall of combat. Men and women had come to this place, and lawyers – not such as Garone, but lawyers of a kind nonetheless – had fought on their behalf… Fought to the first bloodshed, or, sometimes, to the last. He could sense the mindlessness of it all, the insanity of the Age of Nightmares echoing back at him from the immutable grey stone. He could hear the gasps of the dying. See the gold exchanging hands over not-yet dead bodies.
If such trials were still permitted, he could get through a few hundred cases a day without causing a single death.
The victory–streak I could amass. It would be a thing of legend.
Then another diviner would become a lawyer, and another…
Was it possible that’s what they’d been, those ancient, gladiatorial proto-lawyers? Could they have been his predecessors? He saw the artistry of their craft, the long knives flashing as they met under moonlight or starlight. When this place had been open to the sky, the stone floor surrounded by the rising grassed slopes on every side.
Before the Founders. Before Mund.
Such glimpses were rare, and more swiftly lost the harder one attempted to cling to them. The moment passed, and the arch-diviner in him experienced a brief but strong wave of sorrow, bittersweet nostalgia drying his tongue, setting his arm- and neck-hairs on end.
Garone found his place near the front, drew his robe about him, and seated himself. On his left, Ms. Dyrdac flopped into her chair, laying her folder on the long table in front of them and trying futilely to smooth her rumpled dress. Garone kept his eyes forward, waiting. The judge’s redebon dais was just ahead of them in the northern third of the room, and the lawyer, the human in him enjoyed this part – the tension in the hall slowly building to a critical pitch as the time for the trial’s conclusion approached. He wouldn’t look back, wouldn’t give the assembled witnesses and esteemed guests a second glimpse of his face until he had to. They could stare at his back. It was his role to be the embodiment of the law in this place, not a person – and he would play this part with aplomb.
The wave of suspense almost broke as Mr. Ixi Yaneyar, their client, entered the room, escorted by an entourage of his family. His mother and father, his wife, one of his brothers and two of his sisters – various cousins, uncles, aunts – two nephews – even his mistress-cum-housemaid –
Not one of his children, Garone observed. He’s afraid about how this is going to play out.
It will play out, and he need not fear.
He stood as the scoundrel finally reached his side, and held out his hand.
Mr. Yaneyar just looked at it, then back at the lawyer’s face, smiling toothily, baldly, as though he were sharing the amusement with Garone rather than extracting it from him.
He’s no lord – and my family is far richer than most – yet still he’s so far above me that shaking my hand would be a disgrace to him.
His diviner’s mind, used to sifting time and space for relevant details, quietly summed the man’s wealth. He found that, since the last time he’d done it, that wealth had increased considerably. Even Yaneyar probably hadn’t the foggiest how much he was actually worth, contained as his funds were in investments, some of which were quite abstract – a merchant company and an ensorcellment laboratory here, yes, but a band of pillaging outlaws or a fledgling outland kingdom there…
The dry estimation-power was Garone’s forte.
Seven hundred and sixty-two thousand, and fifty-four platinum, two hundred and twelve gold…
There wasn’t the coin in existence to support such a hoard – and the scoundrel was far from Mund’s richest man. Top two hundred, perhaps, if the wind was right.
… seven hundred and sixty-two thousand, and fifty-five platinum, thirteen – eighty-four gold…
Garone let go of the moment, and tried to prepare himself after his usual fashion, but still something eluded him, something making him feel apprehensive…
“Corteno,” Yaneyar said, his voice barely better than a snarl. “I hope you’re going to win this thing for me.”
“That is the idea,” Garone said, retracting his hand and smoothing the front of his robe with it as he found his seat once more. “We have a strong case.”
Yaneyar sat down on his right. “I very much doubt that. You really want me to do this?”
“I’m afraid you don’t have much choice, Mr. Yaneyar.”
“They said you was good.” He felt Yaneyar’s cold stare on the side of his head but he wouldn’t turn his face, wouldn’t remove his gaze from the judge’s chair. “Even I know they can’t make me do it. What am I paying you for, exactly?”
“Let me be candid with you, Ixi.” Garone chose his cadence carefully. “If you wish to escape this place a rich man, you may walk out now – walk out and never look back. Less rich, perhaps, to be then found guilty in your absence – vastly-so, by your own strange standards. Nonetheless, to the observing eye you would suffer not for it, not even by so much as a single hair from your head, a single thread from your garments… The dogs whose hungers are sated by the crumbs falling from your table would not want for their supper. And still I would blame the loss of repute for your reticence to go – the potential dishonour of such a contemptible disgrace as to walk freely from here with your head held high… if not for the fact that you clearly care little for the tongues wagging away in the corners, trading in gossip. In fact, you parade your dishonour,” Garone cast an obvious glance over his shoulder at the rich man’s not-yet pregnant mistress; “you revel in it. So, then, we come to it – it is the platinum which matters to you. It is the sum itself. It is the greed. You wish to live and die by King Money-Bags. You will not leave. You will stay, and face the reality of the trial.
“Yet your testimony will not be enough. You are innocent. The Chief Audient will not believe it. You must take the oath, or submit to enchantment!”
“I make a point,” Yaneyar said through gritted teeth, “of not swearing oaths.”
Then you won’t actually tell the truth, will you?
Garone found a better avenue to exploit.
“Minus five hundred and eighty-four thousand, nine hundred platinum.”
Yaneyar’s face fell, and sweat sprung out on his forehead instantly.
“Five hundred… minus… wh-what’s that, Corteno?”
“Just a guess.”
“At…”
“Your losses, of course. You’ve accrued a significant sum in the last three years.”
“But you – how could you –“
“I’m very thorough with my research, Mr. Yaneyar. Are you quite ready?”
* * *