The Trials of Empire, page 47
“Few people are going to complain about your methods,” I said. “An army of men seeking to overthrow the Emperor is hardly a legal matter; it is a military one. You saved the city.”
“You saved the city,” Vonvalt said with great sincerity. “Most have no idea—”
“Honestly, I would prefer to keep it that way.”
Vonvalt paused, and looked at me askance. But eventually, he nodded. He understood. “I wonder what is happening down there,” he mused.
I wondered myself. The last I had seen of the afterlife, Oleni’s forces had been assaulting the Palace of Blood. I had explained as much to Vonvalt in the previous days, but he had no desire to enter the holy dimensions himself, especially with the erasure of Justice August’s soul. Besides, he was intent on sealing off that gate forever. A great many questions concerning the immortal plane were about to go unanswered.
Perhaps those questions should never have been asked in the first place.
“I try not to think about it too much,” I said.
“In the circumstances, I think that is wise. We can only hope that the forces of order prevail. But our time of meddling in these affairs is at an end.”
It is funny, thinking back to this conversation, how easily Vonvalt lied. How convincingly, too. I should have known better. The idea that he would simply walk away from these matters, knowing what was at stake, was ridiculous. But I believed him at the time. I think it was his way of protecting me. And for once, I was glad of it.
“You really will bring about the end of the Empire?” I asked.
Vonvalt nodded. “Certainly large parts of it, yes, though I doubt the history books will see it that way. I’m not even sure it will last. Memories are short. Reckless stupidity is in great abundance. Perhaps one day I will be seen as an aberration – a villain even.” He snorted. “That would not surprise me. Saint Claver, seeking to save the Empire. Nema, why do any of us even bother?”
“What will you do after you have tried Claver?”
“I told you I have not decided yet.”
“You told a room full of lords that you have not decided yet,” I said, pointedly.
Vonvalt smiled sadly. “My place is no longer in Sova.”
“And what about my place?”
“Your future is what you will make of it. You are, what, twenty? You have your entire life to live.”
“And what will I do? Knowing what I know? Having seen what I have seen? With no friends, no family, no career or purpose?” The bitterness surprised me with its intensity. Vonvalt was abandoning me in the purest sense, and yet… Did I even want to spend more time with him? Perhaps I didn’t. I certainly didn’t want to be his lover, or his wife, and there seemed to be nothing to be gained from simply accompanying him as some kind of platonic companion. How could our relationship with one another ever be normal? Was there even a need for it to be normal? Stranger couplings existed.
“Helena, you are not tied to me. You do not owe me anything – or, if you ever did, then you have discharged the debt a thousand times over.”
“Everything I am, everything I have become, every facet of my being, is a result of my time spent with you. For years I sought nothing except to impress you and earn your praise. I have come to define myself by how I am perceived. By you.”
“I know,” Vonvalt said simply. “I will not pretend that our relationship is not complex. But it is precisely because you have come to define yourself in such terms that your being apart from me feels so cataclysmic. I promise you this, though: in six months I will be a distant memory, and you will wonder how you ever let yourself become so entangled with one person.”
“It is an entanglement which you have encouraged,” I said. I felt as though Vonvalt were condescending to me, which of course he was not.
He nodded. “I have. And now it is time to extricate ourselves from that knot. There is nothing more you can learn from me. If you were to remain with me you would damn yourself to mediocrity. And frankly, I would rather die than let you squander your potential in that way.”
“My potential,” I said bitterly.
Vonvalt said nothing, just drank his wine. I watched the sun disappear behind the Temple of Creus. The shade made no appreciable difference to the hot and humid air.
“I am frightened,” I said eventually. “I feel as though… I can do so many things. Fight a battle, travel to the afterlife, combat a demon… but afterwards, when my blood is cooled, I feel as though I am not capable of doing it again. The fear returns. I doubt myself and my courage. I look back on the Helena who snuck into Keraq, or who fought in battles, and it is like I am remembering the life and deeds of someone else.”
“Oh, that never goes away,” Vonvalt said, almost dismissively. “You are a thinker, Helena. Like me. It was the same in the Reichskrieg. Campaigning. Fighting. A few times a month. Sometimes days on the trot. You survive and then… Your mind just turns it over. You think about how close you came to dying. A foot wrong here, a turned parry there…” He shrugged. “It is just the way your mind works. Do yourself a favour and accept it now. You will never be free of self-doubt. It is part of what makes you a good person. The evil in this world are entirely unafflicted by it, and that is the problem. Would that we were all a little more introspective, a little more empathetic.”
There was another long silence. Vonvalt’s words, wise, spoken with such casual authority, resonated with me so strongly that they only made me feel worse about the prospect of our parting. But I knew he was right. He had to leave Sova. And I was going to have to strike out on my own. The thought filled me, out of nowhere, with an incurable sense of urgency.
“You want to know what I think, Helena?” Vonvalt said. He had pulled out his pipe, and was packing it as he asked me.
“About what?”
“Why I listened to you? In the Temple of Nema.”
“Why?”
“Because I think only you could have stopped me. From killing Claver. I think that was the purpose of your Entanglement in the temporal pathway. I think our meeting in Muldau was preordained. I think our relationship was precisely what Fate wished it to be. And I think you achieved exactly what it was you were meant to achieve; what Oleni and Aegraxes and Resi and Lady Frost hoped you would do. You are right: killing Claver would have been a mistake. I am convinced that trying him now is the only way to make sure he dies forever.”
I took a moment to digest this. “That still doesn’t really answer my question,” I said.
Vonvalt smiled, and lit his pipe. He took a deep draw of smoke, and then one of wine. “You said just now; that for years you have defined yourself by what I think of you.
“Well, perhaps I have come to define myself by what you think of me.”
XXXIV
The Murder of an Idea
“An idea is like a pox: it can persist long after its host has died.”
CHUN PARSIFAL, THE INFINITE STATE
Sova slowly returned to normal. Within two weeks the Victory Gate was completely fixed, as were all of the siege weapons atop the Estran Wall. The Grasvlaktekraag, having achieved their purpose, left with the gratitude of the Sovan people, and guarantees that they would never be troubled by the Templars again.
The Legions encamped outside of the city remained, re-formed and reorganised, fed and watered and rearmed. They remained for many months, in case the Kova Confederation decided that peace did not in fact equal justice and attempted to take the city whilst it was weakened. But House Casimir, led by the indomitable Iliyana, had been stripped of its blackpowder thanks to the raid led by the Kasar and von Osterlen, and like the Two-Headed Wolf, lost its appetite for war.
This was a time of death. Not only of the Templars, who were hanged en masse on a special scaffold erected outside the Royal Imperial Courts of Justice, but of their many supporters and enablers throughout the city. Some of these people met their end very messily. I heard talk of the residences of Mlyanars being stormed, and the senators and their staff dragged into the streets and beaten to death. Others were tried, and given the noose. Still more had fled during Vonvalt’s earlier purge of the city, to live out their days in obscurity, claiming no responsibility for their actions.
Yet there was one notable death missing from the tally. And it was one that Vonvalt would not be moved on.
“You don’t even need to try him,” von Osterlen said. It was dawn on the morning of the trial. We were in a private chamber in the Royal Imperial Courts of Justice, one which Vonvalt had taken over as his personal office. I was in there, as was Sir Gerold. His city watchmen were busier than ever trying to restore Sova.
“She’s right,” the sheriff said. “He led an army against the capital. Kill him as a traitor. The case could not be cut clearer. Every day he lives is a day’s succour to our enemies.”
“You doubt me, Sir Gerold? After everything I have done?” Vonvalt asked.
The sheriff cleared his throat, missing the wryness in Vonvalt’s tone. “Not at all, my Lord Regent,” he said. It was amazing how quickly everybody had adopted the moniker. In spite of the increasingly public misgivings of the Haugenate loyalists, Vonvalt could certainly have stayed in power if he had wanted to.
Vonvalt waved him off, having neither the time nor the inclination to toy further with the man. “I know that. But more is at stake here. I don’t just want to cut his head off. If I was going to do that I would have done it in the Temple of Nema. Do you know why I didn’t?”
“Because Helena told you not to,” von Osterlen said drily, glancing at me.
Vonvalt gritted his teeth. “Helena realised something that I myself should have realised. A man like Claver does not ascend so quickly and comprehensively without the support – overt and tacit – of a great many people. And for all we know the man to be evil, there will come a time in the future when people lament his passing as a great martyr to the cause of Nemanism.” He shook his head. “No. If I execute him, Helena is right: he escapes with some of his honour intact. My way? People will remember him for what he is. A coward. A despot. The word will spread, and those of his supporters who have escaped justice, and who are planning on making mischief? Their cause will wither on the vine. I want to pull Claver and his lunacy kicking and screaming into the harsh light of the sun and lay it all out like a cadaver on a barber-surgeon’s slab. I want to dissect his insanity in front of everyone in the city. And when they see what it was all in the name of, all the horror and death and destruction for the mad exhortations of one power-hungry priest?
“They will despise him for it.”
Of course, no one would represent Claver. This was in spite of the convention that required the first lawman presented with the case, and who had the time, to take it on. I had only ever seen it happen once before, in a small town where no one would take on the defence of a child molester. In such circumstances, the defendant was forced to represent themselves. They always made a terrible job of it.
We left Vonvalt’s private chambers and shouldered our way through a huge press of people. Vonvalt had been involved in cases that had attracted large crowds before, but this was something else. This was the mob on games day. These people were spitting blood. Sir Gerold and his city watch were out in force, forming a human corridor down which we walked.
The people cried out to Vonvalt. They reached out to him, too, trying to touch any part of him they could, in the same way one might try to touch a living saint. They wept in gratitude. They named him “saviour” – the “saviour of Sova”, and prostrated themselves. They urged him to stay, to make his regency permanent, to take up the Emperorship.
Not everybody was pleased. For every nine people singing his praises, there was one shouting “despot”. Vonvalt, a veteran lawman, took these calls in his stride.
He had of course selected the central courtroom within which to conduct the trial. It was far from the first courtroom I had stepped foot in, but it was by far and away the most impressive. It was more akin to a stateroom within the Imperial Palace than a place of administration, with darkly abundant – and abundantly ornate – wooden panelling and fixtures, a frescoed ceiling, walls festooned with oil paintings and busts, and a heavy sprinkling of Autun imagery.
The layout was the same as any court in the Empire, with the southern wall given over to the warden’s bench, an elevated dais where a large leather armchair sat below an imposing two-headed wolf rampant. To the right was the jurors’ box, with accommodation for twenty or so persons, and with the prosecuting and defending lawman’s benches facing the warden. To the left, enormous arched windows of patterned stained-glass let in a glorious volume of light.
The thing that surprised me most was that Vonvalt brought nothing with him except a volume of the Neman Creed. I saw a few bits of paper sticking out of it where he had earmarked some passages. Normally he would have a roll of papers with him, some volumes of precedent, perhaps some notes on all the cases which he had asked me to find from the nearest courthouse library. Now he had that one holy text, and nothing else. I did not know what he was going to say. The only thing he had asked me to do was bring the Spear of Vangrid, though I kept that strapped about me at all times anyway.
The public gallery was filled with twice as many people as the space permitted. There were some commonfolk, but most were lords and ladies. Such was the way of things in Sova. There were many knights, too, who had partaken in the battle. They deliberately wore their colours; I saw plenty of the red, yellow and blue of the city watch, and the purple of the Imperial Guard.
The warden was a woman from Zobryv Gardens. She obviously relished in the task of presiding over these proceedings, for there would never be a greater opportunity to gild her reputation. She steered through the procedural preliminaries with a professionalism untempered by the obvious historical importance of what was taking place, and the jury – a collection of twenty ennobled men and women – were sworn in.
And then Claver was produced.
Vonvalt had not visited Claver at all during his time in gaol. But I knew that Vonvalt had gone to great lengths to ensure the man was treated like a common criminal. His only injunction – and it had been a strict one – was that Claver was not to be harmed in any way. He was not to be beaten or starved of victuals, and he was certainly – most assuredly – to be prevented from suicide. There was to be no question of the man’s fitness to stand trial.
It was funny; the first time I had seen Claver he had been at pains, as most Neman priests were, to affect humility and poverty. He wore threadbare habits, often went barefoot, and seldom washed. Then I had seen him in Galen’s Vale, and then in and around Keraq, and finally here in Sova, and he had looked like a living god. As much as I hated him, and as great the temptation to portray him as a miserable, wretched failure is, the truth was he had cut a striking figure. Clad in his ornate armour, fleshier and more muscled thanks to months of living off a castle larder, and more often than not sitting at the head of an army, I had lost that initial impression of him as a weaselly, skinny man.
Now, that initial impression returned in force.
The failure of his earthly mission had deflated him. Divesting him of his power, both martial and eldritch, had humanised him – literally. I almost didn’t recognise the man standing in the dock. He was so diminutive. His flesh had sloughed off him as though he were in the grip of a wasting disease. And yet he still wore his perennial expression of distaste. His face was a sneer of resentment. He had lost everything, killed thousands, and yet nothing would humble him.
“Bartholomew Stanislaus Claver. You are accused of… well, to be perfectly straight, more crimes than we have time to list. But the nub of it is treason, blasphemy, incitement to blasphemy, the theft of illegal magicks and the practice of the same, unlawful association, rabble rousing, an…” the warden squinted at the papers in front of her “… extraordinary number of counts of murder, countermanding the orders of a Justice, assaulting a Justice, assaulting a Justice’s retainer, and…” again she flicked through the pages of the indictment “… a great deal more. I understand that a full list has been made available for you to inspect?”
Claver said nothing.
“That is correct, my lady,” Vonvalt said.
The warden smiled gratefully at Vonvalt. She turned back to Claver, and the smile vanished. “How do you plead?”
Claver said nothing. He did nothing, except glower at Vonvalt.
The warden, who might have been administering the case of the theft of a loaf of bread, spoke to the clerk in front of her, though loud enough for the entire courtroom to hear, “Let it be known that the defendant has said nothing, and that a default plea of ‘not guilty’ will be entered.”
This was met with great roar of outrage from the public gallery. Vonvalt waited patiently for it to subside. Eventually, silence was achieved.
“My Lord Regent,” the warden said to Vonvalt, “you may make your remarks.”
Vonvalt stood. The courtroom was silent. Nothing like this had happened before. Nobody knew what to expect.
“Systems,” he said, turning to the jury. He had one hand on the Neman Creed, fingers splayed, leaning on it like a prop. His other hand was held out in front of him, thumb and forefinger pinched. He looked more like a professor than a lawman. “I want to talk to you, my lords and ladies, today, about systems. We are surrounded by them. Every facet of civilisation, and what makes a civilisation, is a system. Our very society, a hierarchy of emperors, senators, lords and commonfolk, is a system. How we interact with one another is a system. Language is nothing more than a system of noises which we make, and to which we ascribe meaning.
“Systems, ladies and gentlemen, produce order. Certainty. We as human beings like certainty. As a man I knew and once greatly respected liked to say, when I wake up in the morning I want to know three things.” Vonvalt duly held up three fingers. “That the Emperor is alive; that the value of a mark is the same as it was yesterday; and that the borders are secure. If those three things are true, then another day of prosperity awaits.
