The Justice of Kings, page 29
Bauer arrived in an armoured cart flanked by Imperial soldiers from the wayfort at Gresch. Rumours of his complicity in the murder of his wife spread throughout the town like wildfire, and I heard that he was booed and pelted as he was led into the town gaol. Whatever the ultimate legal outcome of the case, his status as a social pariah was cast in stone.
Sanja Bauer was freed from the kloster dungeons and repaired to the family home. Sir Radomir had her placed under guard for her own protection, and to keep an eye on her.
Matas died without ever regaining full consciousness on the morning of the third day. The words still hurt to write them. I still feel keenly the pain of his death. He was my first love and he was snatched cruelly from me. I did not just mourn him; I mourned the life I could have had. That we could have had. It would have been quieter and less eventful, certainly, but it would have been mine, and we would have been together. That the choice of whether to stay or go was taken from me made it all the more difficult to endure. Life was a little bleaker, a little less colourful after that.
To his credit, Vonvalt did briefly halt his work for the morning. The town watch had its own plot in the temple burial ground, and we had a short service in which a number of people, including Sir Radomir and Vonvalt, said a few words. Vonvalt also arranged for Matas’s father to receive an allowance from Imperial funds. Vartan attended the funeral, but his son’s death brought old, buried prejudices and resentments to the fore, and he would not speak with me. That, too, was a difficult thing to have to deal with.
There is not a great deal more to say about it. Although I am an old woman now, some wounds never fully heal. The pain of it all is something I have tried to repress over the years, sometimes successfully, more often not. But I know how I felt about him and how I felt – feel – about his death. Spilling ink offers me no catharsis, only more pain. For that reason, I will not dwell on the matter any longer than I must.
Indeed, I did not have much time to dwell on it in any event. The end of the investigation was merely the beginning of wider events, and there was a great deal more bloodshed and heartache to come before we could close this miserable chapter in Galen’s Vale.
XXIII
Trial Preparation
“It is imperative that a Justice take the time to fully familiarise himself with the facts and nuances of a matter, and particularly when dealing with an infamous or widely disliked accused. The wider populace is easily exercised and given to pass immediate judgment on the barest of evidence.”
FROM CATERHAUSER’S THE SOVAN CRIMINAL CODE: ADVICE TO PRACTITIONERS
It was Sir Radomir who came to find me. I had holed myself up in an inn. I had plenty of money which I rarely had any need to spend. Staying there for at least the medium term did not pose a problem. I wanted my own space for a while, to grieve, and then to spend time thinking about what I wanted to do with my life.
I had no doubt that Vonvalt knew where I was. I had not been particularly secretive about it, though he would have ensured that I was somewhere safe. Sometimes I found that a comfort. Other times I found it stifling. Had Vonvalt been a different sort of man, it would have been frightening, though knowing him as I did, I knew that it came from a place of concern rather than control.
The trouble was, sometimes I didn’t want his concern.
I had expected Bressinger, rather than Sir Radomir, to come and speak to me. The sheriff knocked softly on the door two days after Matas had died.
“Sir – Radomir,” I said, faltering as I opened the door. Immediately I was appalled. I had barely bathed and I was clad in my nightclothes. My hair looked like a bird’s nest. I cared not one jot if Bressinger saw me like that, but I was not close to Sir Radomir, and the man was a town official to boot.
“Miss Sedanka,” Sir Radomir said, affecting not to notice my poor state. “Justice August—”
“Just give me a moment,” I said, flustered.
“Of cour—” he began, but I had already closed the door in his face.
I bustled round the room, changing into something more appropriate and combing my hair. The room did have a rudimentary mirror, but I could stand to look at myself only briefly. My face looked pale and drawn from days of anguish and poor appetite, and having lived on the road for two years, I did not have a great deal of meat on my bones from which to draw reserve strength. The cut which Vogt had left on my cheek was unsightly, and my hair to one side was still fuzzy and short and revealed the scar which Graves’s man had left me with.
When I felt some semblance of seemliness, I reopened the door. Sir Radomir was standing in the hallway, leaning against the wall. He pressed himself away with a clank of armour.
“Justice August would speak with you,” he said. “She is in the courthouse with Sir Konrad. ’Tis a matter of great importance, so I’m told, and not a little urgency.”
I stiffened. I did not want to see Vonvalt, but I could hardly refuse two Imperial Magistrates.
“All right,” I said, and followed the sheriff out of the inn.
We walked through the streets at a brisk pace. It was a sunny morning, and a mild breeze carried with it the smell of effluent and offal.
“You and Sir Konrad have had a falling out,” he remarked.
“Is it any wonder?” I snapped.
Sir Radomir shook his head. “No, not to me. You forget that Matas was one of my lads, too.”
I had forgotten that, and I felt a flash of guilt. “You are right. I am sorry.”
Sir Radomir waved me off. “I’ll not pretend it is worse for me than you. But – Helena – however you feel about it, you cannot hold Sir Konrad responsible for the death of the boy. I feel the lad’s loss keenly, believe me, but he made his own decision.”
“Hm,” I grunted. I was in no mood to hear this.
“You must make amends. The Justice is not himself. I have not known him for long, but that is enough to see. He is distracted. He is having to work twice as hard, but he has half the help. Bressinger does what he can, but he is a blunt tool, not suited to detailed think-work. He is more acclimated to removing heads than using his own. I have given Sir Konrad the men I can spare, but they hardly meet his requirements. He needs you, Helena. His head is elsewhere. He needs you by his side, working with him. I do not think you appreciate how much he depends on you.”
I shook my head. “He does not.”
“He does!” Sir Radomir said emphatically. “It is not just your labours he misses; it is your company, too. You are many things to him. He will never ask you to come back. He respects you and your decision too much, and he would prefer your happiness over his own. But I know that he greatly fears that his relationship with you has soured too much to be repaired. And if I may add, I think the world of lawkeeping will be the lesser if you decide to leave it behind.”
I didn’t want to hear Sir Radomir’s words, but I couldn’t ignore them. And, as with Bressinger’s words before, they resonated with me in a way that I wished they hadn’t.
“I will think on it, I said.
“That is all I ask,” Sir Radomir replied, as we reached the courthouse. “Come,” he said, “they are in the vaults.”
Vonvalt and August were huddled in a dark, ill-lit corner of the cavernous record vaults of the courthouse. There was no one else down there, just shelves stacked with scrolls and codices, and reading benches for lawmen to use as they searched for precedents.
“Helena,” August said as Sir Radomir left me with them. “I have heard of your exploits, and of your loss. Your bravery and your commitment to the cause of justice is to be highly commended.”
“Thank you,” I said, put off guard by this charm offensive.
August smiled sadly. “It is a cruel fate to lose a lover. I know your heart must ache. You can take some succour that his murderers will die.”
“We have had full confessions from the three of them, as of this morning,” Vonvalt said grimly. “Fischer, Bauer and Vogt. It will take but a little time to draw up the indictments. The trial will be nothing but a formality.”
“Helena,” August said seriously, cutting across me before I could probe further. “I want to discuss the séance you had with Fenland Graves.”
I shivered. The vault seemed to darken. “I had hoped to forget about it,” I said.
August nodded. “I understand that,” she said, “but…” She paused, looking for the right words. “The visions you had. The dreams. I fear they may be important.”
“I have told Resi about the sequence,” interjected Vonvalt. “About Lady Karol Frost strangling the two-headed wolf pup. And of Aegraxes’ intervention.”
“Did you see anything else?” August asked. She spoke softly, but there was an intensity in her eyes that made me feel frightened.
“No, just the marshland, and the funnel in the sky,” I said, and I told her everything I had seen in as much detail as I could. Once I was finished, she looked grim. She sat back, thinking for a moment.
“Many years ago, I was undertaking some research into the afterlife in the Law Library in Sova,” she said. “I was reading specifically about Kane, and the Great Gvòrod Plague. Do you know of what I speak?”
“I have heard of Kane,” I said. “Not the plague.”
“Then you have not been paying attention in my lessons,” Vonvalt said sternly. Both August and I ignored him.
“You’ll know then that he was a Justice and one of our wisest and most learned jurists,” August said. “He died about a century ago, but his works form something of an orthodoxy which underpin much of the Order’s practices to this day. Justice Kane was also one of the Order’s best necromancers. Legend has it that he could commune with the dead as easily and casually as you and I are speaking now.”
“I can think of nothing worse,” I said.
Vonvalt and August exchanged a brief look. “It is not always so upsetting,” she said. “Graves was a rare case.”
“The Great Plague of Gvòrod was a famine that ravaged the Gvòrod Steppe,” Vonvalt said, eager to press on. “A cloud of locusts so thick they blotted out the sky consumed every acre of crop for five hundred miles. Thousands perished. It changed the nature and course of the Gvòrod Empire for ever, ending the Gevennah Dynasty and leaving its western city states to be subsumed by the Kova Confederation.”
“I don’t—” I started, but August interrupted me.
“Justice Kane had conducted a séance about a year before with Princess Bayarma at the behest of her husband. The woman had perished in childbirth. During the séance, Aegraxes – the Trickster, if you hold to the Neman gods – spoke to Kane in the same way he spoke to Sir Konrad a few weeks ago. He gave Kane a glimpse of the future, a… sequence of visions, if you will, each rife with symbolism. The significance of these visions was only apparent many months later, after the plague itself had come to pass, and Kane spent much of the rest of his life theorising about the spirit dimension and the practice of divination.”
“Divination?” I asked.
August waved her hand like she might conjure up an explanation from thin air. “Looking at visions and symbols and deconstructing them so as to understand what the future might hold. Kane realised – too late – that he had been afforded a glimpse of the future. The death of Princess Bayarma had, through some extremely significant but unthinkably tangential way, led to the destruction of the Gvòrod Empire; and in conducting a séance with her, by crossing the bridge into the afterlife, Kane had become privy to great, world-shaping events. He called his theory that of Entanglement – the means by which necromancers can see the future because they have become entangled with the spirit of a historically significant person.”
“And Graves is one such person?” I asked.
“Graves, Bauer, Fischer, Lady Frost – any one of these people could be historically significant,” August said. “We are talking about chains of causation that have their roots in the beginning of time, with each new branch throwing the entire future into a different direction.”
“But why Lady Frost? There is no connexion between what happened in Rill and the criminal conspiracy in the Vale,” Vonvalt said to August.
“There is at least one,” I said.
Vonvalt looked at me sharply. “What?” he asked.
“Claver was corresponding with Fischer. I found letters in Fischer’s undergarments drawer, concealed. ’Tis clear from at least those letters that Fischer was diverting the illicit funds sent to the kloster by Bauer to Claver and his Templars.” I shrugged. “Fischer told me himself on the first night I was there that Claver had been visiting the kloster. And Claver’s catching up with us on the Jägeland border was no accident. He was seeking you out. Fischer knew this.”
“So, Claver and Fischer corresponded. Claver was probably corresponding with most obenpatrias in Haunersheim,” Vonvalt said.
“But most obenpatrias in Haunersheim are unlikely to be operating large criminal enterprises in which noblewomen are murdered,” August remarked. “If Fischer is close to Claver, and Claver is close to your enemies, they are not likely to abandon him to his fate.”
“I think it perfectly likely that they will abandon him to his fate. Though I do admit that I am troubled that Claver was seeking me out,” Vonvalt said. “Was it clear from the correspondence whether he was seeking me out personally, or did he just want to meet a Justice?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It just said an Imperial Magistrate. But I got the sense that his goal was to learn more about the Order.”
“Nema knows he asked us enough questions. And I, like a fool, obliged him.”
“You could not have known his reasons for probing were nefarious,” August said.
Vonvalt sighed. “No. Not that it particularly matters anyway; it sounds as though Kadlec is doing that job for us already – though I do feel as if we are drawing conclusions where none lie to be drawn.”
“The connexion is you,” August said. “You are the thing that links Rill with Galen’s Vale.”
“I link a thousand settlements across the Empire, if my presence is the only measure of the linkage.”
“Think on it, Konrad,” August said. “However you cut it, it all began in Rill, did it not? The disruption of the Draedist ritual; Claver’s anger that the peasants were not burned. It all stems from that. Had you not met Claver, or Sir Otmar, or if you had bypassed Rill entirely, either by accident or design, the place might never have been razed. Whether there is a connexion or not to the Bauer case is in many ways immaterial.”
“There was one more thing,“ I said, “though I am loath to dredge my memory for it.”
“What is it?” August asked sympathetically.
“Emilia,” I said. “A girl in the kloster – Obenpatria Fischer’s spy. She spoke the same words as Graves.” I shuddered as I recalled it. It was as though my mind were fighting against me, trying to dislodge the memory and cast it away like a fox with a thorn in its paw. “Graves said… ‘the kloster is a dark place – mine is a black future’.”
Vonvalt’s eyes widened slightly. “I recall that,” he said. “I remember Graves saying those words. In fact, now that I think about it, he sounded like a maid when he said it.”
“This girl,” August said. “She said the exact same words or similar words?”
“The exact same words,” I said. I felt like crying.
August sat back. “It is in keeping with what I have been saying. You are at the centre of something,” she murmured to Vonvalt.
“Faith,” Vonvalt muttered, drawing a hand down from his forehead to his chin.
“The image of Lady Frost strangling the two-headed wolf-cub – the Autun – is a stark warning that her death will lead to some harm to the Empire,” August said. She turned back to me. “Perhaps even its destruction. When you communed with Graves, you were shown the future – or at least, a possible future. As Kane would theorise, you and Sir Konrad have become entangled.”
I cleared my throat. “But surely it is all open to interpretation,” I said, floundering for an explanation that was at least passably rational. “The strangling could mean… I don’t know, economic strangulation. Perhaps there will be a blockade along the Gale, or the Kova, or even the mouth of the Jade Sea.”
“Aye, it might mean that,” August conceded.
“One thing is certain, Helena,” Vonvalt said. “Whatever is happening, it would appear that our actions here in the Vale may have some future significance.”
“Which is why I have been urging you to return to Sova,” August said. “You must speak with Master Kadlec and the Emperor.”
“I said, did I not?” Vonvalt replied testily. “We will be here another two or three days at most. A vast criminal enterprise has been operating out of that kloster for years. It is not a trifling matter that I can simply turn my back on.” He gestured to me. “We know from Helena that Claver has spent at least some time with Obenpatria Fischer before leaving off on his proselytising, and that Fischer has been diverting money to the Savaran Templars. We would do well not to try and second guess every one of our actions from here on out. This connexion between Fischer and Claver may mean that foreclosing the investigation here in favour of tearing south to the capital may be as much the ‘wrong’ course of action as it may be the ‘right’ one. All we can do is what we have always done: ensure the supremacy of the common law. Everything else – justice, order, civilised society – stems from that one absolute.”
“Just use the Voice on Fischer again and have it out now,” August said. “If there is a deeper connexion between him and Claver you can find out the long and short of it today.”
“If I use the Voice on any of them again their hearts will give out,” Vonvalt said irritably. “They are half-dead as it is. They need time to recover for the trial.”
August sighed mightily. She started shuffling together her effects. “I have changed my plans. I will remain here in the Vale until your business is concluded; then I shall accompany you south. Our voices in conjunction will be better than one alone.”
