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.”
“Then why?” the girl persisted, and Zin sighed, because she realized now as the girl’s body shifted toward hers, that the girl’s interest in Merriz had been a feint.
Merriz rolled his eyes. “Here it comes,” he said.
“I do it because I want justice,” Zin said, and finished her tea. She set the empty cup down in its saucer with a clatter and pulled on her hat.
Merriz sighed and slumped from his seat, waving his hat at the table girl. “Off we go to catch another collaborator,” he said. “Soon we’ll have condemned so many there won’t be an old wretch left in Fravesa.”
“I suspect that’s the point,” Zin said, and held open the door for him.
They got three paces into the street, into the looming shadow of the great status of Savazan, Merriz still limply waving his hat at the counter girl, when the whuffing-thud of weapons fire compressed the air and shattered the glass storefront behind them.
Merriz hit the ground first, his reflexes better than Zin’s. She slid to the cobbled pavement right after him. Her hat landed an arm’s length away, its cap tangled with spidery snarls of bone fungus released from the weapon shells. She grimaced. She had very much liked that hat.
Two more shots. Then footsteps scraping the stones.
Zin peered under the row of tricycles between them and the trolley tracks and saw the shooters approaching. Two at least, possibly three.
Merriz pulled his sidearm. Hers was already out. “Your family or mine?” he asked.
She shouldn’t have gone to the trial, or talked to that stupid reporter, even for a second. Her father would know, now, that it was her who had his file. It was her who had been called upon to bring him in. She wouldn’t have shown up at the trial otherwise, and he knew it.
“Two bits to the one whose family it isn’t,” she said, and rolled up to get a look at them.
* * *
My childhood was normal, which no one wants to hear, because no one wants to believe they could live with a collaborator, but it’s true. Elodiz was the senior father in the house, and I suppose that gave him a bit more authority, but it also meant we saw him less. Senior family members tended to work more, and he and my two senior mothers were rarely home. Growing up, my relationship with him, and my understanding of what it was he did, was informed by the media as much as it was my mothers’ and other fathers’ stories of him. He was a figure of legend even in his own household. A former navy general, a hero. I tell you this so you’ll hear the same stories I did. So you know I couldn’t have known what others say we all must have known.
I went into the army with my sisters and most of my brothers. The war took a turn for the worst when I was fifteen, so I joined up early with my older sister Savoir, and the whole household was proud of us. Elodiz sent me a singing boy to congratulate me. I remember because his dance was so ridiculous and his voice was very poor, and that was why I recognized Merriz when
I met him again a decade later when he introduced himself as the other Justicar assigned to case folder 446. I burst out laughing when I saw him, because I knew his voice right away. I still haven’t told him why I laughed, but when he gets drunk and sings along to war ballads, I have to excuse myself because I can’t contain my mirth.
Elodiz always said that when one was a public figure, the person you had to be in front of the tinny recorders and ever-smiling politicians could not be the same as the one you were at home. It was, he said, an impossibility, like a fish trying to survive on land without water. One had to make accommodations. When I was a child I pictured this as something like a fish in a bowl carried around on a cart driven by speckled deer like the ones our neighbors used for the ritualized furrowing of the fields during the fertility festival. But politics was not as easy as that. It wasn’t just a fish wearing a bowl on its head.
If you want to live in the same tree as a family of snakes, you have to become a snake.
* * *
Three shooters, all dressed in black and tan linen like scholars. But the long black curves of the weapons they carried at their sides were anything but scholarly.
Zin scanned for civilians, because she wasn’t permitted to shoot within sight of any of them, not even in self-defense, and then it would be up to Merriz to take these three down with some cunning combination of flash-bangs and grappling. People had scattered in the streets at the sound of the shots, most of them worshippers at the Savazan shrine, but they hadn’t retreated inside. Zin saw two men cowering in the trolley stop thirty paces up, their arms full of lilac blooms to offer at Savazan’s feet. She holstered her gun, took cover, and pulled her truncheon.
Merriz rolled next to her.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies #200 Page 4