Hurley's Heroes Collection 2015-2020, page 6
“None of it matters now,” Lealez said, and sniffed. Lealez pulled a cigarette from a silver case, but for all per insouciance, Bet noted that per hands trembled. “They have the relics. What they do with them now doesn’t concern me.”
“Dumb kid,” Bet said.
Lealez lit per cigarette with a clunky old lighter from per bag, something that would have weighed per down by an extra pound in the swamp. Lealez took a long draw. “I gave them the sword and the shield,” per said, “just so you know.”
“The . . . sword and shield. That’s what you gave them?” “Yeah, like I said.” Lealez pulled a leather map case from per
shoulder. “Here’s the thing I promised you,” Lealez said.
“I see,” Bet said. She took the case from per. “You know the relics don’t work unless they’re all together?”
“Don’t know about that,” Lealez said. “I’m just a dumb kid, remember?”
“I’m sorry,” Bet said.
Lealez shrugged. “Just get out of here. You aren’t suited to the city.”
Bet tipped her head at Lealez. “I don’t want us to meet again,” Bet said. “No offense meant.”
“None taken,” Lealez said. “If we meet again it means I’m not doing my job. I know how to play this game, too, Bet.” Lealez handed Bet the lighter and walked back into the college.
Bet pocketed it and watched per go. Lealez did not look back. When Lealez opened the great door of the college to go back inside, per hand no longer trembled. That pan was going to make a good Hunter someday, like it or not.
Bet shouldered the map case and began her own long walk across the city. It took nearly two hours to cross the dim streets, navigat- ing her way based on which roads had functioning gaslights. She went all the way to the gates of the city and into the damp mud of the swamp before she risked opening the map case.
Inside, the cloak artifact was rolled up dry and tight. Bet rented a skiff upriver and spent the next week trudging home on foot and by whatever craft she could beg a ride upon.
When it came time to do what needed to be done, she wasn’t sure she could do it. What if there was another Hanere? But so long as the relics existed, the world wasn’t safe.
Bet burned the cloak there in the canopy of the cypress trees while swamp dogs snarled and barked in the distance. She watched the smoke coil up through the dense leaves and moss, and let out a breath.
It was decided. For better or worse.
X.
She had retired to the swamp because she liked the color. The color was the same, but she was not.
Bet leaned over the dim light of her firefly lantern, pushing her stuffed hydra into its glow. She eased the big sewing needle through its skin with her rough, thick fingers. On the shelves be- hind her were dozens of cast-off hydras, each defective in some way that she could not name. The college knew where she was now, and it made her work more difficult to concentrate on in the many long months back at her damp home. She sweated heavily, as the sun had only just set, and the air would keep its heat for a long time yet. She was tired, but no more than the day before, or the day before that. She had made her choices.
Mhev snorted softly in his basket with a litter of four baby swamp rodents, all mewing contentedly out here in the black. She wished she could join them, but her work was not done.
Outside, the insects grew quiet. Bet had been waiting for them. The waiting was the worst part. The rest was much easier. Whether it was child or Hunter or Giver or beast who stilled their call, she had made her choice about how to defend her peace long before, when she first condemned Hanere to death. She had already killed everything they both loved then.
That left her here.
Bet took hold of the machete at her elbow, the machete she would be taking into her hands for the rest of her life, and opened the door.
THE JUDGMENT OF GODS AND MONSTERS
THE MOST MONSTROUS of the collaborators were put on trial, found guilty, and condemned to death in their absence, as it had been done for centuries. As it would be done for centuries more.
The Justice Commission saved the worst of the collaborators for last. Already, the day had been long, with sessions beginning well before the first rising of the sun. The room had warmed and cooled with successive rotations of the bloated orange star riding high in the sky, and the assembled spectators had pulled on smoked glasses or jackets as appropriate with the shifting heat and light. Eight sunrises into a ten-rotation day, the six judges on the great stone dais at the center of the court theater were slumped and weary. But the prosecutors still came, an endless stream of them, enough to condemn today’s five hundred named collaborators.
Finally, the last prosecutor of the session rose from her seat, the folds of her munificent violet robe shifting like ripples of storm cloud, and said, “Now we come to Elodiz Ta Muvard, former navy officer and one-time harbor master for the city of Cerize.”
She paused, and the crowd in the public boxes that ringed the great court theater leaned forward. Many had waited throughout the day’s rotations just to have a good seat for this condemnation.
She continued, “Ta Muvard has been tried by the Justice Commission and found guilty of the following crimes.”
Once more she paused for effect, and the silence stretched; the result of hundreds of held breaths. The crowd had heard of Ta Muvard only recently, his crimes exposed by a family member. Had he really been the worst of the collaborators during the war, this man they knew as one of the great heroes of their city, the benevolent master of commerce for their rich harbor, the man who sponsored the educations of dozens of poor youth and gave generously of his wealth each year, paying four times that required in religious tax to city’s patron god, Savazan? Surely it could not be. It was an impossibility. They had heard wrong.
The prosecutor began her recitation: “Ritual cannibalization with the intent to call nefarious magics aligned with the Enemy’s purpose. The mass killing of over forty infants in the Mosov hospital, their bodies delivered to the Enemy to power the sentient machines that killed tens of thousands of our soldiers in Fuzil. The facilitation of murder in the death of fifty-seven mentally unsound patients of the Sazid Retreat with the intent to revive them through dark magics for insurrection against the home state. The capture, abuse, and sale of three thousand young people over the course of forty years for conscription in the Enemy’s army. Identifying and aiding in the murder of General Ozian Te Soliviar and her family during the ceasefire he conspired with the enemy to negotiate for just this purpose, removing her from the field to her less secure family estate. Aiding and abetting the Enemy with information leading to the deaths of ten thousand soldiers on the fields of Gavozia, and forty thousand more burned alive at the front near Hovash. Channeling city funds collected via the harbor tax to the Enemy and Enemy agents. Facilitating the theft and shipment of weapons from Cerize harbor to Enemy weapons caches.”
The prosecutor shuffled the green billets in her hands. “There are another three pages, your worships.”
“Continue,” the Senior Judge said.
And so the prosecutor did, until even the eager crowd began to become restless and uncomfortable. One of these was a young reporter from the Cerize Standard, the first of the free media to capture and record the opening of the Justice Commission sessions. A copper recording device was affixed to his shirt like an oversized metallic boutonniere. The device smoked occasionally, and for the last three rotations of the sun he had expected it to set him on fire. But it continued to whir away without issue, and he was glad of it now, because the exhaustive list of Ta Muvard’s crimes was so long as to be unbelievable. The absurdity of it, that a single man had committed so many crimes over forty years, was the sort of story that a fictioneer would never have had the audacity to dream up.
Beside him sat a meaty, squinty-eyed woman with a wide rump that pressed comfortingly into his, a closeness among strangers that would have been impossible a decade before. She wore the red-and-black linen suit of a Justicar. She was the only Justicar in the building, at least the only one on duty, and he thought it odd that she was here to listen to a list of crimes instead of out there capturing men like Ta Muvard, as was her sworn duty. Her fingers absently caressed the edges of the hat resting on her left knee. Her face was impassive as the prosecutor rattled out the charges, and the reporter thought that curious, too, because Ta Muvard’s crimes were truly the most stomach-churning he had yet to hear in this court theater since he had taken this beat six months before. Of course, Justicars had been bringing collaborators to trial since the end of the war five years ago, so there was the potential, certainly, that she had seen worse. But if so, the public would have heard of it. Wouldn't they?
Finally, the prosecutor below finished her long sermon of horror. The reporter found that he had blanked out the last few paragraphs, letting his mind wander. Well, that’s what the recording was for. He couldn’t remember everything.
Senior Judge Corvoran rose from her seat at the end of the table of Judgment. The reporter leaned in to get a better recording. People loved Corvoran, as she was the only commoner to be given a seat on the Commission.
Corvoran said, “We, the Thirty-second Justice Commission of the Sixth Age, do hereby find the citizens on trial today guilty of their crimes. We legally condemn them to be labeled collaborators henceforth. The sentence for their crimes is heretical death. This sentence may be commuted to consecrated death only if they agree to appear before this court within ninety days’ time and provide full written and spoken confessions of their crimes, willingly and without duress. Those who do flee from the Justicars who serve their warrants, or who refuse to cooperate with the Justice Commission hearings, will be buried alive, their names expunged from all historical record, and a list of their crimes engraved on their tombs for all the gods to see here and in the afterlife. It being so ordained, we arraign this hearing. The Commission shall recommence after the Maliter holiday season.”
The other judges rose and bowed to the crowded theater of justice. At that, the assembled citizens finally began to mutter and shuffle, searching for belongings or making quick exits in search of the lavatories.
The reporter stretched his legs and turned to the Justicar beside him as she, too, shuffled to her feet.
“I admire what you do,” the reporter said to her, “bringing monsters like that to justice. “Someone so vile…" He shook his head. "It’s incredible no one knew of his crimes before the Commission convened. Had you heard of him before today?” He fiddled with his recording device. It was smoking silently again.
“I have,” she said, pulling on her broad black hat. “He’s my father.”
#
Darkness came up from the south forty years ago. I wasn’t alive then, but I heard about it, of course. They were the stories I learned around the warm hearth on a cold night as my mothers mended fishing nets and baked bread and cobbled shoes. None of us were fighters then. Even the community guardians we appointed were trained in little but the art of restraining a drunk widower or mischievous teenager bent on stealing chickens for sport. The Enemy, the darkness, brought with them war machines steeped in magic, already well-oiled with the blood of countries they had destroyed before they reached ours. The young people back then thought they could halt the encroaching armies with the words and gifts and fine speeches they had been taught in school for quelling personal arguments and community disputes. But the elders knew better. The elders knew we had faced the Enemy before, and knew the only way to fight monsters was to become monsters ourselves. There was a guidebook for it. The plan was all laid out. It was the only way we could survive.
The darkness was an old evil, one we had purged from time immemorial, as predictable as the rotation of the heavenly bodies. They came every two hundred and twenty-eight years, their emergence perfectly timed with the aphelion of the ever-present winking green star in our sky called the Mote. We had fought them so many times that we had a strict protocol for the aftermath of that conflict. When the Great War was over, we were to appoint Justicars to hunt down what remained of the Enemy’s machines and black magics and the monstrous people who had collaborated with them and we were to expunge them from the face of the world. Then the guidebooks and the records would be shut up again, until they were needed during the next cycle. Until we began it all again.
I fought in the war. I commanded in it like a good woman from a decent family, because I was a Ahgazin Te Muvard and my father was the harbor master of Ceriz, Elodiz Ta Muvard. He called me Zin, and his friends called him Diz, and we had a reputation to uphold, which we both did, right up until the end.
When the war was over I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was twenty-nine, and the war had been going on longer than I’d been alive. Most women I know drank away their memories at liquor theaters or took cushy family jobs that would never fire them, even if they came to work drunk or burned down their own family factories. And they did. Burn down factories and drink, I mean. They did it again and again, and the media nodded sagely about it and put up tinny little recordings on the tabletop displays at every restaurant and bodega as if these were all unfortunate, unrelated incidents. But our cultural psychosis was real. We were broken people, twisted foully by war, and if we were lucky, maybe, our grandchildren might be whole enough to build something better.
This is why my task, and the task of our children, was now this: to obliterate the machinery of the war. Including the people who ran it.
People like my father.
Only in destroying everything evil could we become the peaceful people we’d once been. It was in the guidebook. It was part of the protocol.
You have to believe in the protocol, because in the aftermath of a war that breaks you down like it has us, it’s the only faith you can still muster up at all.
#
Zin sat up at the counter of the bodega across from the god Savazan’s shrine, drinking tea and brooding, when she saw her own face pop up on the news display in the tabletop. She almost choked on her drink.
Her partner, Merriz, cackled when he saw the image of her sitting in the courtroom with her hat on her knee, frowning out at the room. “That’s you!” he crowed. “I can’t believe some kid had the audacity to record you. At your own father’s trial!”
“He didn’t know who I was,” Zin said.
Merriz watched the report intently. Zin frowned at it. Did she really look so lean, still? All her friends had gotten fat at the end of the war as the harbors opened up and the government encouraged the overproduction of starches. Zin couldn’t go anywhere without confronting something concocted from some glutinous mess of sticky dough, but she didn’t have the stomach for it. She had always been meaty, but tastes ran more toward fat now, and to many onlookers she probably appeared like she was stuck in the past. Maybe it’s all the running after monsters, she thought grimly, and watched the reporter vomit her family’s shame all over the newsfeeds again.
“You’re Justicars?” the girl behind the counter asked.
Zin raised her head from the recording. Clearly the girl wasn’t paying attention to it. Her gaze was fixed on pretty little Merriz. Zin didn’t blame her. He was foppishly charming on first glance; a petite, wiry little man who was also the best grappling opponent she had ever met. Once he got you to the ground, the fight was all but over.
Zin suspected the girl was interested in a different sort of grappling. She would be supremely disappointed.
“We are,” Merriz said, practically preening. He touched the brim of his black hat resting on the counter beside him. He nodded at the new report, which had moved on to a lengthy speech about the last time Elodiz Ta Movard had appeared in public, six years ago, just before the end of the war. No one had seen him since. Not even Zin. The report replayed his final speech. Before he disappeared that day, she had seen him at the house. She was already on leave then, as the armies were already being recalled. The last of the Enemy were all but routed from their holdouts. She and her father had argued about something petty – dirty dishes, a stained tablecloth – and he had stormed from the house, calling her soft and irresponsible. An irony, of course, considering what she and the rest of the world had come to learn about him since.
The girl leaned toward Merriz, letting the long hank of her dyed blue hair fall over her shoulder. “I’ve always wondered,” she said, “why do people like you become Justicars?”
“I want to know what convinces a man to betray his own principles,” Merriz said. He moved his fingers from the brim of the hat to the counter, a breath from the girl’s forearm. Touching strangers without permission was still frowned upon; there were still errant magical plagues and curses jumping person to person, but the danger had only added another level of intrigue to flirting. “What makes a man a monster?” Merriz said, and he lowered his voice conspiratorially when he said, 'monster.' “So many of us fought bravely, in accordance with the laws and principals of war. What makes men like him?”
Zin snorted at that but said nothing. The girl cocked her head at Zin, though, and asked, with a hint of contempt, “Why do you do it then?”
“I don’t need to know why they do what they do,” Zin said. She wiped away the tea she’d dribbled on the table. “The reasons are all the same. Power. Greed. A belief that one is above the law. That one is law. Belief that one is somehow special, more equal than others. It’s people with no empathy, no understanding that human beings are sentient creatures, not things. I see these people every day exploiting workers, bullying lovers, nattering on about refugees squatting on their land. It’s an easy step to the right, once you cease to acknowledge the humanity of others, to become a monster. That’s all it is. A half step.”
