Author: Benedict Jacka
Category: Science
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Oddly enough, Solace was quite right. The jinn hadn’t been trying to hurt me. It was just as well that she so obviously hated me. If she’d been a more credible witness, people might have paid attention.
“I see. Do you have any further evidence to present to the court?”
Solace thought for a moment. “No,” she admitted grudgingly. “But he was useless in the fight, too.”
“Thank you, Mage Solace. That will be all.”
Solace went to sit down, avoiding looking at me.
The bench clerk spoke up. “Councillor Verus.”
I rose to my feet and walked to the witness stand. The courtroom was quiet, and I could feel all eyes on me.
“I should clarify that this is an inquiry, not a trial, and you are not charged with any breach against the Concord or national law,” the coroner said. “However, in the event of any future trial, should one occur, any statement made at this court can be taken as evidence.”
I nodded.
“Do you have any further testimony to give?”
“Yes,” I said. “But first I would like to ask Mage Solace to clarify some points of information.”
“As this is not an actual trial, you do not have a right to cross-examine.”
“Mage Solace has directly accused me of capital crimes,” I said. Solace hadn’t been as careful as Barrayar, and I’d done my homework before coming here. “As such, I have the right to question her directly.”
The coroner hesitated. It was plain he didn’t want to grant the request, and just as plain that he couldn’t see a way out of it. “Very well.”
I turned to Solace. “Mage Solace. What kind of mage am I?”
“What?”
“What kind of mage am I?”
Solace looked confused. “You’re a diviner.”
“Can diviners use gate magic?”
“Why are you asking me?”
“Answer the question, please.”
“No,” Solace said in annoyance. “I don’t see how that matters.”
I nodded. “When I entered San Vittore, along with you and Barrayar, the three of us were checked for contraband. Is that correct?”
“Excuse me, Councillor Verus,” the coroner broke in. “Is this relevant?”
“I’ll demonstrate its relevance shortly. Solace?”
“Yes, that happened. So?”
“The list of contraband items included focuses, imbued items, and magic items of any other kind,” I said. “All three of us were examined with magesight to confirm that we were carrying none of those things. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“All right. Now, you claim that I was the one who let Vihaela into the facility.”
Solace shrugged.
“How?”
“What?”
“San Vittore is a bubble realm,” I said. “It’s accessible only by gate magic, and its gate wards are heavily reinforced. This was established at the previous inquiry. So how am I supposed to have let Vihaela in?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” I said. “You’ve just agreed that I can’t open a gate myself, and also agreed that I didn’t have any kind of item that would open one for me, but you’re still claiming that I must have let Vihaela into a place that’s only accessible via gates?”
“Well, that’s for a judge to decide, isn’t it?”
“Actually, no,” I said. “For a judge to be hearing the case at trial, there would have to be a trial, which, as the coroner has just pointed out, this is not. One of the things a criminal case requires is plausible means. Which means it has to be at least physically possible for the accused to have done what they’re accused of.”
“Well, who else could have done it?” Solace demanded. “You weren’t there!”
“I wasn’t with you, Barrayar, and Caldera, correct. Do you remember why?”
Solace paused. “I don’t know.”
“After we’d passed the security screening, I asked if I could accompany you and Barrayar while you questioned Morden,” I said. “Do you remember what your answer was?”
Solace shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t remember.”
“We could always ask Barrayar,” I said. “Or one of the other witnesses who were—”
“Okay, I think I said no.”
“Which means you were the reason I wasn’t with you when the attack happened.”
Solace looked angrily at me. “Next point,” I said. “Barrayar has stated that I rejoined you and Caldera shortly before Vihaela and Morden forced open Morden’s cell door. I came from the opposite direction that Morden and Vihaela did, correct?”
“So?”
“So let me see if I’m understanding you correctly,” I said. “You claim that I entered the facility with no magic items nor any ability to use gate magic. I then proceeded to override the gate wards on San Vittore and allow Vihaela into the facility, using some means that you’ve yet to explain. Having accomplished this—an opportunity that I only had because you refused to allow me to accompany you—I then split up with Vihaela in such a way that she ended up on the other side of the facility behind a locked cell door. Having done all this, I met back up with you. Does that sum it up?”
Solace glared at me.
“Your accusation is one of the stupidest and most incoherent things I’ve ever heard,” I said. “If I’d brought a case like that to my supervisor back when I was a Keeper, he’d have asked if I was drunk.”
“Excuse me, Verus,” the coroner said. “You’re becoming overly personal.”
I could see smirks on the faces of a few of the audience, but knew better than to push things too far. “Very well.” I turned back to the coroner. “As to the question of why I chose to pursue Vihaela and Morden, there are two reasons. The first is I’m a diviner, not a battle-mage. There’s very little I can do against an army of summoned jinn. I decided that trying to locate Vihaela and Morden would be a more productive use of my time than staying in a battle I couldn’t easily contribute to. Regarding locking the gate, well, Barrayar’s a force mage. He could cut through the bars. The jinn couldn’t.”
“You claimed there were two reasons . . . ?”
“The other reason is that ever since I’ve known them, Mages Barrayar and Solace have treated me in a hostile manner. Given the choice between having the two of them at my back in a fight, and running into a horde of monsters, I decided I’d rather take my chances with the monsters.”
Someone laughed from the back of the courtroom. The coroner shot a frown in their direction, which he then turned upon me. “Jokes are not appropriate to this inquiry.”
“I wasn’t joking.”
“Well. Returning to the matter at hand, you stated in your initial report that you did not have any further contact with Morden or Vihaela. Is this accurate?”
“Yes,” I said. “At the time, I was still under the impression that the only way for the two of them to have left San Vittore was via the main entrance. Unfortunately, when I reached it, I met a Keeper relief force who told me that they’d seen no one exit the facility. I was able to direct them to the location of Mages Barrayar, Solace, and Caldera, but I wasn’t able to pick up the trail.”
“You stated in your report that you were unable to track Morden and Vihaela thereafter.”
“That’s correct.”
“According to records, various Keepers and Council personnel made multiple attempts to contact you in that time,” the coroner said. “You did not respond to any of the requests for several hours, and when you did so, it was to provide a brief message stating that you were otherwise occupied. It wasn’t until the following day that you reappeared to deliver your report of events.”
“That’s correct.”
“Can you give an account for your movements during this t
ime?”
This was the most dangerous part. “I hoped to trace Morden and Vihaela’s route before they could cover their trail.” I looked straight at the coroner as I spoke, eyes straight and voice level. “First I tried several staging points that I’d seen Morden use during my previous association with him. When that didn’t work, I attempted tracking spells using Morden’s chain of office as a focus. I was aware of attempts to contact me during this period but felt I couldn’t afford the distraction.”
“You didn’t consider the sequence of events important enough to report to the Council?”
“I felt that pursing Morden was time critical and as such was the first priority,” I said. “We now know that given the method by which Morden and Vihaela left the bubble realm, any such attempts to trace them were doomed to failure. However, I believe it was the correct decision given the knowledge available to me at the time.”
There was a pause. I saw the coroner glance towards the Senior Council table, but I didn’t turn my head to look. “Very well, Councillor Verus,” the coroner said. “That will be all.”
I nodded and walked back to my seat. Almost everything I’d told the coroner in those last two answers had been a lie.
“The court will now consider timesight evidence,” the coroner said.
The bench clerk spoke up again. “Mage Sonder.”
There was a pause, then one of the doors opened and a young man was escorted in, pale-skinned with black hair and an academic look. When I’d first known him, he’d been slender, with a pair of glasses that he’d fiddle with when nervous. Nowadays the glasses were gone, along with most of the nervousness. He was less slender too.
Sonder and I had been friends once. He’d joined me and Luna on our early adventures, and the three of us had formed a group to which Variam and Anne had been later additions. They’d stayed, but Sonder hadn’t, and when events brought us together again, he wasn’t very friendly anymore.
“If you could state your name and occupation for the court, please,” the coroner said.
“My name is Sonder, and I work for the Council Home Office,” Sonder said. “I’m also a Keeper auxiliary seconded on a semipermanent basis to the Order of the Star.”
“You are a timesight specialist?”
“That’s correct.”
“And were you assigned in the aftermath of the attack to perform a timesight scan of San Vittore?”
“That’s correct.”
“Can you give a summary of the attack for the court, please?”
“The attack unfolded as described in the initial report, but further scans have uncovered some additional detail,” Sonder said. “The lesser jinn were summoned in two separate areas marked on the fifth page of the report on figure C. Having been summoned into the facility, they then spread out, attacking facility personnel in the locations marked in figures D and E on the next page . . .”
I let my attention drift; this had been covered at the previous inquiry. Instead I tried to remember exactly where the rift between Sonder and me had come from. We’d been close, once. What had caused the split?
Five years ago, I’d been hunted down by an adept vigilante group called the Nightstalkers. Sonder, Luna, Variam, and Anne had gotten involved in the aftermath of the attack, and explaining why the Nightstalkers were after me had involved telling them some bits of my past that I wasn’t very proud of. Sonder hadn’t taken it well, and he’d liked the way I’d eventually dealt with the problem even less.
But while that had seemed like the obvious explanation at the time, it didn’t fit so well with hindsight. In the years since then, Sonder had become a rising star in the Council, and that meant buying into the things the Council does. I was pretty sure that by this point he’d have been involved in Council-sanctioned operations that were just as dirty as anything I’d ever done, if not worse. So while that might explain why he’d avoided me then, it didn’t explain why he was still doing so now.
Maybe it was more about beliefs. Sonder is a Light mage through and through—he grew up in the system and he belongs in it in a way that the rest of us don’t. I mean, our group’s all tied to the Council, at least on the surface—I’m a Junior Councilman, Anne’s a member of the healer corps, Variam’s a Keeper of the Order of the Shield, and even Luna graduated from the apprentice programme. But none of us really buy into the idea of the Council. We’ve had too many bad experiences to trust it completely, and even when things are going well, we try to keep its people at arm’s length. Sonder doesn’t. At a deep level, Sonder basically believes that the world would be a better place if the Council ran everything. Maybe if it hadn’t been the Nightstalkers, it would have been something else.
A split usually starts from something small. What had been the first serious disagreement I’d had with Sonder? I thought back to beyond the Nightstalkers. There had been something that was . . . oh. That.
Last night, Anne had mentioned her father’s death and Jagadev. I hadn’t said anything, but it had reminded me of something that I’d been avoiding for a long time. I was one of the few people who knew that Anne’s parents’ deaths probably hadn’t been an accident, that the death of Variam’s father probably hadn’t been an accident either, and that Jagadev—who had been Vari and Anne’s guardian at the time I met them—was probably responsible for both.
Back in the nineteenth century, India had been the site of the rakshasa wars. On one side had been the Light Councils of India and Britain; on the other had been the rakshasa, ancient shapeshifters who traced their origins back to before human history. The rakshasa were immortal and powerful, but they weren’t unkillable, and one by one they were hunted down. A hundred and fifty years ago, a team of mages had attacked the palace of a rakshasa lord and lady. The lady, Arati, was killed. Her husband was not. That rakshasa was Lord Jagadev, and he’d spent the century and a half since then nursing his hatred for humanity in general and mages in particular. And he’d worked from the shadows to arrange the deaths of the mages that had killed his wife, and their children, and their children’s children, until as far as I was aware there were only two descendants of those families still alive. One was Variam, and the other was Anne.
Or so I guessed. Sonder had been the one to dig all that information up, and he hadn’t been able to find hard proof, but it had been suggestive. Sonder had been expecting me to tell everyone, and I could have done just that, but for a variety of reasons that seemed good at the time, I’d decided instead to force Jagadev into an uneasy truce. He’d leave Anne and Variam alone, or I’d go to the Council. It had worked, more or less—to the best of my knowledge Jagadev had cut all contact with Variam and Anne, and they’d been left to finish growing up in peace. But Sonder hadn’t been all that happy with my decision, and over the years, I’d become increasingly uncomfortable with it too.
I’d thought about telling Vari and Anne several times, but I hadn’t, and a big reason had been the likely consequences. There was a one hundred percent chance that the first thing Variam would do would be to go after Jagadev in a white-hot fury, and if he did, Anne would be right there with him. Their chances would be a lot better now, but no matter how the fight turned out, I couldn’t see any of the consequences being good. Maybe Jagadev would kill them; more likely he’d run away and resume his secret war from the shadows, in which case he’d certainly do his best to screw up Anne’s and Vari’s lives out of sheer spite. And even if they took vengeance, what would it get them?
But if I was being honest, a bigger reason had been that I was afraid of how it would make them see me. I could imagine the first question—why didn’t you tell us?—and the second—so all these years you’ve been keeping it a secret? Telling Vari would be bad, but I couldn’t bear the thought of the look in Anne’s eyes. Anne trusts me, and she’s not one of those people who trusts easily or often. I hated the idea of letting her down.
But this wasn’t going to get
any easier if I kept putting it off. Back then, Sonder had looked up to me. Maybe that had been the point where he’d started mistrusting me. After all, if I’d keep that kind of secret, I might keep others. If I cleared that up, could it be a way to mend fences?
It might be worth a try.
The sound of my name brought me back to the present. “. . . read Councillor Verus’s statement?” the coroner was asking.
Sonder didn’t look at me. “Yes.”
“Are your findings consistent with the evidence he’s given?”
I forced myself to stay relaxed. Timesight can let you view any past events that have occurred at a location. There are a lot of things that can block it, and the wards that the Council layers on places like San Vittore make viewing those locations difficult. But difficult isn’t the same thing as impossible, and Sonder is very good at what he does. Right now, of all the people in the room, he was the one I had most reason to fear.
Sonder hesitated, choosing his words carefully. “As I said in my initial report, the wards on San Vittore made it impossible to take a precise viewing.”
“However, you stated that you were able to trace movements.”
“Yes.”
“Are you able to conclusively confirm or disprove Councillor Verus’s account of his movements?”
“Not . . . conclusively. But everything I was able to establish tended to confirm them.”
“Could you elaborate?”
“I can confirm that he did travel directly from the facility entrance to the interview room,” Sonder said. “And he later travelled directly from the interview room to the wing containing Morden’s cell. However, I wasn’t able to clearly view the period in between.”
“Are you able to tell us why?”
“Council interview rooms have extensive ward protections. The corridors are less heavily shielded.”
“So you can’t confirm or deny Councillor Verus’s actions in the period leading immediately up to the attack.”
“No.”