A Conspiracy of Truths Read online

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  For my father,

  WHO KNEW A THOUSAND STORIES

  The whole mess began in a courtroom in Vsila, the capital of Nuryevet, where I was being put on trial for something stupid.

  “What’s all this about?” I said, not for the first time.

  “Charges of witchcraft,” they said; at least, that was what it boiled down to.

  “Utterly ridiculous,” I said.

  “We got some witnesses,” they said.

  “Your witnesses can go fuck themselves,” says I, although not in so many words.

  I couldn’t even hear the witnesses from where I was sitting. The guards had stuffed me in an iron cage at one end of this giant fucking hall in the House of Justice, and of course it makes sense to someone to put the witnesses at the other damn end, as far away as possible from the man accused, like I was an afterthought of some kind.

  Worst acoustics I’ve ever heard! I kept shouting, “What? Speak up!” and, to one of the guards near me, “Is someone speaking over there? What’s happening now?” and generally making a nuisance of myself until the bored lawyer with whom they had begrudgingly supplied me turned around and shushed me.

  Says she, “Can you prove you’re not a blackwitch?” First thing she ever said to me. Can you prove you’re not a blackwitch? And, of course, that was Consanza. That was how I met her. Don’t like her any more now than I did then. Less, probably.

  “Can you prove I am?” says I.

  “The witness just now said you pointed at her cow and it died.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “And the one before that said she heard you talking and felt a chill up her back like the claws of a ghost. She said your familiar is haunting her house now.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Noises at night, something crawling across her bed.”

  “Tell her,” I said, projecting my voice loud enough to be heard clear at the other end of the damn hall, “tell her that it sounds like some kind of vermin. A cat or a dog would take care of it.”

  “Hush. You’re confessing? What was it, a plague of rats?” Still bored, cheeky twit!

  “No,” I says to her, “I’m saying that it’s foolish to accuse someone of witchcraft when there are much more reasonable explanations.”

  She was shaking her head before I even finished my sentence. “No, she has an icon of Brevo hanging in her kitchen.” Some homely little fireplace god, I suppose, or a saint. I never found out. “And the master of the public house where you were arrested testified too, and he said that the cask of beer he served you from went sour.”

  “It was sour to begin with!”

  Consanza shrugged at me and turned back to face the rest of the courtroom. “Just don’t make noise or they’ll add ‘disrespect of the court’ to your charges.” She did something horrible with her face for a moment, and then stuck nearly her entire hand in her mouth. “Oh, finally,” she said, and spent the next ten minutes making a thorough examination of the shard of corn husk she’d extracted on one fingernail. Didn’t pay a lick of attention to the proceedings. I tell you!

  Still couldn’t hear a damn thing, but I kept my mouth shut. Witchcraft was enough of a hassle; disrespect of the court was something they would actually have evidence for.

  I’d never been in a Nuryeven court of law before. Completely dull country, Nuryevet, I’ll tell you that now, not that I need to point it out. Wouldn’t have even bothered passing through, but the kid wheedled me into continuing north. He was a little homesick, I think, and we hadn’t seen a proper winter in years.

  Don’t know why I keep picking up apprentices; more trouble than they’re worth, but it’s part of the job, training the next one. I would have preferred another year or two in Ondor-Urt. The heat does a body good, and they have some basic fucking respect for their elders, once you convince them that you’re hale enough (and have teeth enough) to stomach more than goat-urine soup and that vile tea. I still hold they slipped goat urine into the tea, too, even though Pashafi—my Ondoro host—swore up and down that they didn’t.

  Nothing but these smelly, muddy gray towns and this dull wilderness in Nuryevet. Not even interesting landscapes, even farther east from here. Just scrubland and rocks and a few halfhearted hills until you reach Vsila and the ocean, and then of course there are those uninspired mountains in the west. Hardly any decent farmland. It’s astounding how superstitious they are, considering there is literally nothing around to jog their imaginations. Even their magic is scanty and twisted, and it only manifests with the blackwitches, common enough to be a problem and to dull the Nuryevens’ sensitivity to the presence of magic, just as a baker’s hands are dulled to heat, but rare enough that no one quite knows how to deal with them, except through rumor, hearsay, and apocrypha—and I assure you, there are rumors aplenty. Stories from the whole region, in this corner of dull, dreary land, are chock full of the creatures. It’s a perverting kind of magic. There aren’t any good blackwitches, you know.

  When I was first arrested, I’d overheard some talk of just killing me outright, but I suppose that the circumstances were muddled enough and the paperwork for executions complex and tedious enough that the backcountry civil servants of the Ministry of Order preferred to pass me up the food chain rather than endure that ordeal themselves.

  Nuryeven bureaucracy might have been the one key thing that saved my life, come to think of it. They didn’t quite know whether I was a witch, being unable to sense the presence of foul magics, but what they did know was that paperwork could be evaded if you were clever. Put it off long enough, go to twice the effort you would have spent in the first place, and irritants like doing the paperwork eventually become a problem for other, less clever people.

  My apologies. I’ve gotten distracted.

  I reached out between the bars, as far as I could, and just managed to tap Consanza on her shoulder.

  “What?” she grunted.

  “I want to be able to hear what they’re accusing me of, at least.”

  “What for? Curiosity?”

  “So I can defend myself,” I hissed back. My feet and knees ached from standing in that little cage for so long. There was hardly room to turn around, let alone to stretch my bones.

  “Defend yourself?” She glanced back at me, eyebrows drawn together. There’s really no expression that would make her face look any prettier. Her nose could fell an entire oak forest, and her eyebrows are on the unruly side, thick and black, with a trail of hair in between.

  “I’m allowed to speak in my own defense, aren’t I?”

  She just stared at me with that idiot expression on her face.

/>   “It’s not like you’re doing me any good,” I added. “Although I suppose the court would have no choice but to be impressed with your oral hygiene.”

  “People accused of witchcraft have never been put on the stand. Isn’t done. Well, except at the end, when you go up to receive your death sentence. Technically, you should be gagged, but the guards in the Grey Ward said you’d been very well behaved.” She turned away again, her long robes swishing against the ground. “Except for being unbelievably rude.”

  “I haven’t got a lick of magic in me!” I roared at her. “And even if I had, I’m from Kaskinen! We don’t have blackwitches in Kaskinen. It ain’t in our fucking water, woman—I’m a goddamn Chant!”

  “Shut up,” she snapped at me, but the court had fallen silent.

  One of the five judges behind the bench sighed heavily, audible now even halfway across the hall. “Scribe, add ‘blatant disrespect of the Sovereign Court in the second degree,’ and ‘obscene profanity in the presence of an acting court official in the first.’ ”

  “Let’s table the witchcraft charges for a moment and get the new ones out of the way,” creaked the judge on the far end. “It’s nearly lunchtime.”

  The panel made some mumbles of agreement and summoned me up before them. Well, that was one thing in my favor. The cage was opened, they clapped chains on me, and Consanza tugged me out by my sleeve, steering me ahead of her towards the bench, across miles and miles of stupid excess courtroom.

  They have to have miles of stupid excess courtroom: no real schools of law. Students just sit in court and watch hearing after hearing for years. Has to be plenty of room for them. The particularly keen ones fight for seats in the front-most rows. Consanza did not strike me as one who had been particularly keen.

  She gave me a bit of a shove when we made it to the bench, and I made a show of stumbling. The feeble-old-man show again, you see.

  “Defendant,” the senior judge said, in a tone that clearly indicated to me that he was already thinking about lunch and no longer cared much about the trial, “we hereby charge you with the following: disrespect of the Sovereign Court in the second degree, one count; obscene profanity in the presence of an acting court official in the first degree, five counts—”

  “We’d better add on ‘obstruction of lawful proceedings,’ ” said the judge on his right. She blew her nose into a lace-edged handkerchief. “One count, third degree.”

  “Obstruction of lawful proceedings in the third degree, one count. All in favor?”

  “Aye,” echoed the panel.

  “Scribe, if you would.” The senior judge cleared his throat. “Present evidence. Witnesses to the charge of disrespect of the Sovereign Court, please stand.” Every soul in the room stood—the keen students jumped to their feet quickest of all. “Thank you, be seated. Witnesses to the charge of obscene profanity, please stand. Excellent—I think we all heard those vile words,” he added with a wheezy chuckle. “But proceedings must proceed according to precedence, as it were. Be seated. Witnesses to the charge of obstruction of lawful proceedings, please stand. Thank you, be seated. I would call that fairly clear-cut, wouldn’t you?” He looked around at the other judges on the panel, who nodded. “Defense?”

  “Nah,” said my lawyer, yawning almost theatrically. “It’s almost lunchtime, after all.”

  Another chuckle ran through the panel. One or two of the judges gave her almost benevolent looks. I spluttered for a moment and scrambled for words. “Excuse me! I would like to defend myself!”

  “Defense rests,” Consanza said, and grabbed my elbow.

  I tugged it away from her. “You horrible woman, if you’re not going to speak in my defense, then why shouldn’t I? You’re dismissed.”

  “You can’t dismiss me,” she said.

  “You can’t dismiss her,” said the chairman. “She’s your court-appointed defense.”

  “She’s shi—She’s no good at her job!”

  “This is highly irregular,” the female judge to the chairman’s right said through her handkerchief.

  “Listen. I’m an old man, going deaf, eyesight not what it was”—my eyes are still as good as ever they were—“and you’ve shoved me in the back corner, where I can’t hear or see what’s happening to me, and she ignores me. Isn’t she supposed to be defending me? I don’t know how she became an advocate with this kind of attitude.”

  “Consanza Priyayat’s credentials are not the matter of this court’s present concerns,” the chairman said.

  “Sorry, say again?” I said loudly, just to drive home my point.

  The chairman obligingly leaned forward. “We don’t care if you think she shouldn’t be an advocate,” he said loudly.

  “Well, fine, fine. You can’t fault me for having an interest in my own fate, though, can you? How is it fair for me to be caged in the back, like I’m not the reason we’re all here today?”

  “You’re not the reason we’re here,” said the judge with the kerchief. “It’s hearing day. Happens every month.”

  “There are six other people whose cases are also being heard today,” the chairman said, pointing around the room. There were several other cages. The prisoners in them glared at me. “You’re interrupting the proceedings of justice for them as well. Hence your charge of obstruction.”

  My surprise was, in fact, genuine. “Well, dear me, what an embarrassing situation.” Consanza, behind me, snorted. “I suppose I’d better apologize to these honorable men and women. I hope they can forgive an ignorant foreigner.” They didn’t look like they would. “If I’d been able to hear what was going on, or if anyone had bothered to explain, I surely wouldn’t have kicked up such a fuss. Truly, I had no idea.”

  “The charge of obstruction will stand,” the chairman announced to the court. “We will lighten it from third degree to second for your repentance.”

  “The charge of ‘obscene profanity’ ought to stand as well,” said the youngest judge on the end. He still had some color to his hair. “We did all hear him say what he said.”

  “So we did, so we did,” said the chairman. “What do we think of ‘blatant disrespect,’ panel?”

  My no-good lawyer, primly inspecting the state of her fingernails, said, “Not that I don’t completely agree with the charges, Your Excellencies”—I squawked at her in protest—“but he is a foreigner. And passing senile, as it seems to me.”

  “And deaf,” I added sharply. “Mostly deaf.”

  Consanza gestured to me. “You see my point, Your Excellencies? He’s an ignorant outlander, and unfortunately, punishment by law isn’t something that can help him with that.”

  “Do you suggest we drop the charge of blatant disrespect, advocate?” asked the chairman, clearly dubious.

  “Not drop, per se, no,” said Consanza. The chit drew a handkerchief from her pocket and started cleaning the wax from under her fingernail. “I might suggest an alternate charge, however. Brazen impertinence, perhaps. Shall we say . . . third degree?”

  “A charge for children!” from the sniffling judge with the handkerchief. “I once presided on a panel that found an eight-year-old guilty of that.”

  “And are ignorant foreigners any better than children? Clearly not: my client is incapable of comporting himself appropriately without supervision, thinks rude words are amusing, and would not stop scratching himself before you called us into your presence.” I squawked at her again—I had done no such thing! “As stated by the philosopher Vesas the Walker, the goal of law must not be to punish or oppress those who break its tenets, but to guide them towards enlightenment, wisdom, and righteousness. I would suggest that if the court charges my client with blatant disrespect, we may be punishing him with undue harshness. What will his sentence be for blatant disrespect? Another week in Grey Ward Prison? I ask, Your Excellencies: What will he learn from that? How will it better his soul?

  “Charge him instead with brazen impertinence in the third degree: With this charge in hand, the
appropriate and traditional sentence is for him to state a formally structured and sincere apology, delivered immediately to the injured parties—yourselves, the students of the court, and his fellow defendants, all conveniently gathered here at once. By this method, this ignorant foreigner, no better than a child, will learn of our customs, our ways, the behavior we expect from an upright and law-revering citizen. Can you expect a child to learn good behavior by locking them in a closet? No! They must be shown the error of their ways and made to correct it, making the necessary amends. Likewise, can you expect a doltish foreigner to acclimate to our way of life without being guided towards the right path?”

  I gawped at her, I’m not too proud to tell you, and then, having said her piece, I suppose, that young chit dug around in her pockets and brought out a pipe—plain wood, with a rather large bowl, an oddly crooked stem, and a silver mouthpiece. And I kept gawping at her, and she just stood there in the middle of the floor, packing leaf into the bowl and lighting it with a little flick-match.

  I suppose the panel must have been discussing her argument amongst themselves, because the next thing I heard was the senior judge saying, “All in favor of substituting a charge of brazen impertinence, third degree, for the charge of blatant disrespect of the Sovereign Court?”

  There were three ayes and a nay—the nay from the creaky judge on the end, the one who had noted that it was nearly lunchtime. The chairman, it seemed, abstained.

  “We hereby charge the defendant with brazen impertinence, then, amongst his other crimes,” said the chairman. There was a smattering of applause amongst the students—for the advocate’s argument, I supposed—but it was quelled by the chairman’s hushing wave. “We’ll recess for lunch and resume after the next chime. Consanza Priyayat, when we return, we will sentence your client, but as you already know we’ll be demanding a formal apology. I suggest you take this time to coach him on what he will be expected to say.”

  The chit—my advocate—nodded, and everyone started getting up and leaving the room, except for a horde of apprentice advocates who immediately bounded up to Consanza in a flock, hounding her and fluttering around her like nervous butterflies. She pushed her way through the crowd, trailing smoke and students, and two guards came for me. Dragged me back to that little cage again! Stuffed me in it like I was some kind of decorative bird!