“But if you did have such power?”
Tayna thought about it for a moment, and then let out a tired sigh. “No, probably not,” she said. “I mean, it’s fun to think about it, but dead is pretty extreme. I’d probably just send him out to live with the Miseratu or something. I mean, you have to do something with him, right? If you want the Dragon’s Peace to come back? It only takes one guy to not care, to be willing to treat everyone else like crap, and the whole thing falls apart.”
Yama nodded again. More confidently. As though he’d made a decision. Then he stepped in front of her chair to look her straight in the eye. Tayna looked back at him, puzzled by his sudden seriousness. And as she watched, the timid little Gnome seemed to melt and shift. A moment later, she was staring into the eyes of the Judge.
“Oh crap,” she said.
* * *
“So that was all a trick?”
The Judge nodded. His face had none of the furious scowl that she’d seen on the screen. It was definitely the same face, with the same deep creases in his skin, but now they told a tale more of laughing than of frowning.
“The trial? The sentencing? All of it?”
Again he nodded. “Not everybody gets the full treatment, of course. Takes too long. Besides, most folk hang their souls on their shirtfronts, so to speak. I can read them without even slowing ‘em down. Most are already on the side they’re supposed to be, so they bounce right back. Never even know I’m there, doing the bouncing. But a few I let through, like your Djin friend. He’s good people, you know. You are traveling with him, aren’t you?”
Tayna nodded, although a trifle absently. The conversation was running ahead faster than she could process it.
“Who are you?” she finally managed to ask, her voice pinched with exasperation.
The old man smiled gently. “My name really is Yama,” he said. “Although most have forgotten…” His voice trailed off in thought, and then he seemed to remember her question, and he drew himself up more formally. “I am the Judge of Changes,” he said. “I was set here by the Dragon Methilien himself, to stand as the line between tranquility and chaos.”
But if he’d wanted to impress her with his job title or something, Tayna wasn’t buying. Instead, she focused on the part that mattered to her. “So, you really are a judge, only you conduct fake trials.”
“Exactly!” he crowed. Tayna’s eyes narrowed. She hadn’t expected him to agree to something that sounded so stupid.
“And this makes sense to you?”
He shrugged, and above his eyes, the white tufts of his brows danced merrily. “It is necessary,” he said. “You feared him, didn’t you? That great Judge, glaring down at you from on high?”
“You could say that.”
“And fearing him, you vested him with all of your attention, yes?”
“You mean, was I riveted by the giant angry face as he ordered my death? Yes, I was vaguely interested.”
“Precisely! And while you were so distracted by him and his judgments, how much attention did you pay to me? Hmm? Did you primp and preen to present your best face to your humble harried clerk? No. You spoke to me as you would speak to any other lesser being in a time of stress. To me you showed your natural self.” Then he pointed up at where the empty screen still hung above them. “That Judge sees only what a candidate wants him to see, but me? I am shown something that many might prefer remain hidden.”
“What? Terror? Maybe a little pants-wetting? Is that your thing?”
Yama chuckled. “No. I see truth—the candidate as he or she truly is. Although, to be fair, it is usually the darker colors of that true self that I am shown. Not every candidate is as genial with petty underlings as you might think.”
“So, what happens now? We have another trial—a real one—and you drag out everything I said or did during the fake trial and use all that against me, too?”
“No. You are free to enter the Realm,” he said.
Tayna’s eyes bugged out a little. She’d been expecting more of a run-around than that. “I can? Really? This isn’t just another fake part of the test, to see how I’ll react?”
Yama’s eyes sparkled. “No more tricks,” he said. “I have seen your truth, Tayna of Grimorl. You have an honest heart and a great soul. Such traits will always be welcome within the Dragon’s embrace.”
He seemed to be waiting for something. A hug, maybe? Tayna could feel the rage starting to build up in her ankles. She was tired of being jerked around. Tired of being danced through other peoples’ hoops without ever being told what the show was all about. Something inside her snapped.
“So that’s it? Show’s over, folks! Move along. We got what we wanted, so you’ll have to get out now. Is that it?”
Yama looked at her, bewildered. “I thought you would be pleased.”
“Sure, yeah. Now I have your permission to go back to exactly what I was doing before you pulled me in here! Everything is so much better now. I really oughta remember to send you a thank-you gift.”
“You are truly displeased?”
“Buster, I’m way beyond displeased. I’m… anti-pleased! Who the hell are you anyway? And no, don’t give me your name and your job title again. I got that. You’re the Dragon’s lap-dog who gets to jerk people out of their lives and scare the crap out of them. Does that make you special? What did you do to earn this fancy job you’ve got, anyway? Did you babysit for Methilien when he was just an egg? Did your sister marry his brother or something?”
Yama shrank back from her blustering tirade, and Tayna stood tall, towering her Wasketchin frame over the little Gnome, and she was so deep in her righteous fury that she almost missed his answer.
“I died,” he said.
She paused. “Come again?”
“I died,” Yama repeated. “Myself and two others. We sacrificed our lives so that the Dragon could forge us into the three avatars of his Peace.”
“So you’re dead?”
“I thought you knew.”
“I’m not from around here,” she said.
That made the old Gnome smile. “Yes, Tayna. I know your tale. I wept when you left us and I sang when you returned. But you do not know mine.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
The old Gnome waved her apology away. “How could you? You were raised in a world not your own.” Then he paused, and a look of irritation swept his face. “If only we had more time!” Then he took her by the shoulder. “We are three,” he said. “Three Avatars of the Peace. One to preserve it, to repair it against all harm. Another to destroy it, to tear it down and grind it to dust. And myself, to test the suitability of the participants and hold the line between those within and without. As you said yourself, there are some whose very presence would taint everything.”
“But that makes no sense,” Tayna said. “There’s some great dark minion out there who’s trying to tear the Peace apart? And he was put there to keep the Peace going? How does that work? Is it suddenly Opposite Day?”
“It is actually quite wise,” Yama replied. “No promise that is made in one age can be held in earnest by the folk of the next. To make a thing and then to walk away, expecting it to endure without change would be folly, and the Dragon Methilien was no fool. The only way that his Peace might be hoped to survive was to give it life. Allow it to grow and change. To make it do so. To endure, it must be forced to adapt, ever seeking its own weaknesses and pressing upon them. And occasionally it must fail, and then be built anew. Stronger. More resilient. But how are we to ensure its periodic destruction if we do not provide that destruction a champion? I am but the filter, keeping away those who would tip the balance irrevocably. But the pulling and the pushing—the necessary tension of the Peace—that is for the others. Mardu and Suriken. The Oath Keeper, and the Oathbane. Creation and Destruction.”
“Jeez. They sound like fun. I hope I never run into them.”
Yama clapped her on the shoulder. “Oh, but you already have. One of them anyway. And
you will meet the other before long, I suspect.” Then he glanced away, and when his gaze returned, it was full of sadness. “Our time is ended,” he said. “You have passed through.”
“Through? Passed through what?”
Then, with a puff of fog, Yama vanished, and he took the chair, the guards, the big screen, and the clouds with him. “Welcome home, Tayna,” was the last thing she heard him say.
And then she was thirty feet above the ground and plunging rapidly toward it.
Chapter 6
“More personal research, Detective?”
DelRoy nodded happily. “Maybe I should start paying rent around here, Doris.”
“What? Your taxes aren’t high enough? You want to pay more? You could always pay mine.” He chuckled as the older woman ducked down below the desk for a moment and then popped back up and held out an old laptop. “You know the password?”
DelRoy accepted the computer and its dangling cords from her with a nod of thanks. “Wouldn’t be much of a detective if I couldn’t remember the word ‘matronly’ for longer than three days, now would I? Next month, what about, ‘encyclopedic?’”
Doris rolled her eyes. “Oh yeah, that’s all I need. Every teenager in the city would be lining up here nine times a day to ask, ‘Whatsa password again?’ and ‘Couldjuh spell that?’ I’d never get any work done.” Her impersonation of modern teen speech was bang on, and doubly funny, coming from the mouth of such an articulate, older woman. DelRoy laughed.
“Right, I forgot about the kids,” he said, giving in gracefully. “Thanks again, Doris. I’ll have it back in an hour or so,” but the librarian was already bustling down the counter to help a young mother and her child with a stack of books to check out.
DelRoy turned away from the long counter and headed toward the hall that would take him back to the reference stacks. Most people he knew had computers at home. Some even had several, scattered around for decoration, like high-tech throw pillows. But DelRoy lived alone, and he knew that if he allowed himself to buy a computer, he would never leave the apartment on his days off. At least this way, whenever he found something he wanted to look up, he had to come out into the world of people to find a computer. It kept him from getting too isolated. He stepped back against the wall to make way for the shelving kid, who was coming toward him down the hallway with a cartload of books.
The other advantage of not having a computer at home was that he was rarely tempted to work on his days off anymore. Years ago, he had enjoyed the work—back when it let him actually help people. In those days, he’d spent lots of his personal time down at the station. His work had made him feel useful. But these days, policing was more about reports, accountability, and blame assignment. What little helping he actually got to do anymore had to get crammed into those little bits of time left over between all the finger pointing and keester covering.
Not that his down time was any better, really. No wife, no real hobbies, no yard work to do, no family to speak of. When he looked at his existence honestly, DelRoy couldn’t tell which part was worse. A working life that was slowly having all the joy sucked out of it? Or a home life that steadfastly refused to let any in? But at least it was balanced.
The light at the end of the hall was out, making it hard to read the sign on the door, but he already knew what it said. “Reference and Research. Quiet, please.” He pushed the door open and went in.
It was a large room, filled with book shelves. The stacks. At the back of the room, two long work tables filled an open area, each surrounded with chairs. It was a quiet place where he didn’t have to listen to the kids giggling and snorting, but where he could still get a decent network signal. It was his favorite room in the library. DelRoy eased himself around the shelves and made his way to the back.
One of the two long tables was unoccupied, so he took a seat there, near the electrical outlet, and set the computer down beside him. A middle-aged woman was sitting at the other table, facing toward him, but she had her head down, peering at what looked to be a legal text. Behind her, an elderly man was scanning carefully along the shelf of books about appliance repairs.
Not together, he thought to himself.
It was a game he often played when he first came into a room—watching the people he found there and trying to pick out who was connected to whom, before anybody spoke. It was the only foreign language he spoke, and a very useful one for a detective to know. Body language. And DelRoy had always had something of a knack for it.
The appliance man pulled a book from the shelf and studied the back cover for a moment, then he tucked it under his arm and wandered away, never even looking at the lawyer woman. Nope, not together. Chalk up another win for Detective DelRoy. Although, on second glance, the woman didn’t seem to be a lawyer, after all. Her posture was wrong—as though the entire book was written in some alien script, and she was studying each word as she encountered it, teasing out its meaning from only the vaguest of clues. So not a lawyer. A professional woman of some kind though. Maybe considering a legal action?
But it was just an idle thought. He bent over in his chair, reaching under the table to plug in the ancient laptop. After a moment of fumbling, the plug slid into the socket and he was rewarded by the familiar, high-pitched whine from the electronics. As he sat back up to wait for the old beast to boot up, his chair scraped across the floor. The woman jerked her head up, startled by the sudden noise.
DelRoy smiled sheepishly. “Sorry,” he said. She gave him a distracted smile in reply and then bent back to her reading. Obsessive and very intent. Considering legal action very soon then.
For the next hour, DelRoy busied himself on the web. He called it “research,” but the truth was, he didn’t really know what he was looking for. A hobby, maybe? A new career? What might someone have deduced from the list of websites he’d been visiting lately? He scrolled back through his browser history, and then laughed. Private security companies, alarm technologies, bodyguard training, banks, private investigators. “Looks like I’m planning a bank heist,” he muttered.
“Excuse me?” The woman at the other table looked up at him with a slightly panicky look in her eyes.
“Sorry again,” he said. “I was just laughing at my browser hist— Never mind. Thinking about suing somebody?” It was the first thing that came to mind—just something to change the topic from his own weird tangle of thoughts. But it hadn’t been the right thing at all to say, and he watched helplessly as the woman’s face seemed to shatter in front of him. Tears began to spill down her cheeks, and she could only nod.
DelRoy was out of his seat in a heartbeat.
“Oh, God! I am such an idiot!” he said, as he hurried around the ends of the tables. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I was—”
“Right,” she said, smiling up at him through the tears. “What you were was right. I’ve just never said it out loud until now, and it just…”
“So it’s a family matter,” he said, as he pulled up a seat next to the woman. And now he suddenly felt awkward. He wanted to put a hand on her shoulder, to undo whatever unhappiness his blunder had triggered, but he didn’t know her. Instead, he put his hand on her book, and turned it toward him. Town Ordinances.
“How could you know possibly know that?” she asked. DelRoy looked up from the book at her. “How could you know I was thinking about suing somebody over a family matter?”
“I’m a good guesser,” he said, still trying to lighten the situation, but she shook her head, and her eyes narrowed in suspicion.
“Are you working for them?”
“Working for who?” he asked, but even as he did, he recognized that this was turning into one of those conversations where everybody talked but nobody really listened and nobody really learned anything either. His training took over and he raised his hands, palm out, to stop her.
“Let’s start again,” he said. “Hello. My name is Martin DelRoy. Detective Martin DelRoy. I’m not working for ‘them,’ unless ‘them’
is the city police. When I said I was a good guesser, I was being completely honest. It’s my job, and even there, I’m known to have better instincts than most. Guesses. So if I upset you by seeming to know something about you, I’m sorry. I really was guessing. And I was also talking without thinking.”
“That’s three now,” she said. Her eyes were a bit puffy, but the waterworks had stopped, and she was wiping at her face with a tissue she’d taken from her bag. Not blotting daintily, the way some women would, but actually wiping. For some reason, he liked that.
“Three what?”
“That’s how many times you’ve apologized to me so far.”
“Oh.” Suddenly he felt self-conscious. What do you do when somebody accuses you of apologizing too often? Apologize? Instead, he grinned. “My quota for the day is seven,” he said. “You’ve still got four more coming.”
The woman laughed, and held her hand out. “Sue Nackenfausch,” she said. “And I do believe I am glad to make your acquaintance, Detective. I wonder if you’d mind paying for all those apologies by answering some questions for me?”
DelRoy grinned. The conversation was darting like minnows in a brook and he was finding it hard to get his balance. Which meant that he was also finding it extremely refreshing. “I’d be happy to,” he said. Then he leaned in conspiratorially and added, in a whisper, “But if you are planning to sue the department, I should warn you. I’d be willing to help with that for free.”
“Really?” Sue said. “I’ll keep that in mind. But for now, I was wondering if you could tell me about Missing Persons.”
DelRoy’s eyebrows shot up all by themselves. Now it was her turn to seem the shrewd guesser. How had she known he worked that desk?
Suddenly, it was looking to be a very interesting day.
* * *
They didn’t stay in the library for long. What had been a comfortable silence for quiet reading, or for private research, had quickly felt too conspicuous for conversation—especially if they were going to talk about her problems. So they left the library and went across the street instead. By the magic of coffee shops, the constant din and clatter of the busy restaurant was somehow a much better cover for their private conversation than any silent library archive could ever hope to be. Although, “conversation” was a bit of a misnomer, because it was Sue who did most of the talking.
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