Chapter Nine
i
After several days of respite, another storm front approached across the continent, bringing a vanguard of ragged clouds over First Landing. Kalliana stood in her quarters, staring out the window up at the sky and fixing her attention away from the gathered crowds that waited again for her in the central plaza. Just like before.
The storm clouds were brooding gray mounds near the horizon, but here the day was merely overcast and cold. A wind sprang up, whipping the fronds of stunted palm trees along the streets, their roots sprawled out in a broad mat to suck nourishment from the heavily fertilized topsoil.
Kalliana stared through the transparent portion of her window, which was surrounded by a sunburst of triangular wedges in green, crimson, and royal blue glass, distorting the view to symbolize the uncertain nature of truth. The central transparent pane was a metaphor for how Truthsayers saw clearly, while others were doomed to see the colors of lies.
Another accused murderer waited for her in the plaza. Kalliana would have to dig into his mind, witness the truth in his own thoughts, and make her judgment.
Truth Holds No Secrets.
The Truthsayers’ code decreed that the accused was innocent until she read his guilt. But she already knew through grim experience that very few people were truly innocent. She swallowed hard.
Kalliana feared more vivid nightmares that were not her own—but even more she dreaded being transferred from the Guild, being forced to leave her comfortable, familiar existence. With Veritas she had witnessed secondhand the difficult existence the other colonists endured. She didn’t want a pointless life outside the Guild. She wondered if it could truly be as unpleasant as she imagined it … out there. She would rather face another murderer.
Only she and the accused could ever know for certain what had actually happened. A Truthsayer had to wear a blindfold to any repercussions of the verdict, decreeing only whether the man was guilty or innocent.
The truth would come out, but Kalliana had to show it the way.
ii
Down in the detention levels, Troy Boren lay motionless on his hard bunk. He kept his eyes closed, willing himself to sleep so that the time might pass more quickly. But his stomach roiled with anxiety, his dry throat burned, and thoughts whirled behind his eyelids, making him squirm with the possibilities of a worst-case scenario. But it wouldn’t happen. Truthsayers didn’t make mistakes.
He had no idea how many days had passed since his arrest. The guards had taken his personal chronometer; apparently they were afraid he might attempt some sort of bizarre high-tech sabotage with its tiny components.…
Though hunger gnawed at his stomach, he felt no real appetite, doubting he could keep anything down if he bothered to eat. The sol-pols had given him only a limited amount of time to pick at his food, then they had taken it away.
When the elite guard switched off the confinement field, Troy was startled to find that he had indeed dozed off, despite his anxiety. He sat up, blinking bleary eyes. His shoulders and back crackled with stiffness from the uncomfortable pallet.
“Got your thoughts in order?” the guard said gruffly, his eyes hidden behind the uniform’s tough goggles.
“I’m ready,” Troy said, hauling himself off the bunk.
“Do you have a guilty conscience?” the helmeted guard asked with a slight smile in his voice.
Troy couldn’t tell if the guard was mocking him or not. “I don’t have anything to worry about.” He smoothed down his formless prison outfit.
This time the uniformed man did laugh. “If you say so.”
Troy followed him numbly out of his cell. The metal deck plates were cold against his bare feet, and he longed to be standing under the warmth of the sun again. At least he could look forward to that part.
iii
“Sit next to me,” Tharion said, gesturing for Qrista to take a place on one of the flecked granite benches at the center of the plaza. “I won’t be performing for this one. A Guild chanter is announcing the crime.”
Most of the audience stood on the open flagstones, waiting for the show. The crowd was smaller than it had been for Strone’s trial. This single murder was not as titillating.
Qrista flashed a hurriedly covered frown and fixed him with her ice-blue eyes. Her pale hair was braided again and wound around the top of her head. Angular bones gave her face a finely chiseled beauty that her smile enhanced … but now, troubled, Qrista appeared harsh and sharp. Tharion didn’t have to ask why.
“This is a sham, and you shouldn’t have allowed it,” she said quietly, but sat down beside him with a rustle of her white robes, tightening her crimson sash. Because they had shared their thoughts completely, she knew her husband’s reasoning, but that didn’t mean she came to the same conclusions.
“I know,” he answered. “But it’s my decision as Guild Master and I have to live with it. We can’t announce that we know what the outcome will be, because that would open up a thousand new questions. We must proceed and get this behind us. Let him be declared innocent in open court.”
Qrista looked at him uncertainly. “So the damage to our ethics can heal? What if it leaves scars?”
Tharion knew she was right, but he had determined that this path was the best resolution to the complex and uncomfortable situation the Truthsayers Guild had stumbled into.
For a moment he wished that Troy Boren were guilty, so they could drain more information about the black market Veritas from him. But since the young man was simply a clumsy bystander, Tharion knew they could get nothing else from him.
He reached out to hold Qrista’s cold, pale hand as they sat looking up at the empty podium. “Nothing is ever certain,” Tharion said. “We’ll need to ride this out, and I need your help and support.”
She pressed her lips together. “Of course you have my support,” she said. “I don’t make your decisions for you. I just abide by them.”
“This will all turn out all right,” he said.
Qrista raised her white eyebrows, allowing him a small smile. “Oh? You can see into the future now as well as reading minds?”
“I wish that were so,” he said with a forced smile. “A new kind of drug developed up on the Platform.”
He looked up to see the great ship doors opening in the Headquarters building. The Truthsayer Kalliana and the prisoner would be brought forward momentarily.
iv
Quietly anonymous, Franz Dokken stood in the middle of the crowd. He wore sturdy cotton slacks and a warm woolen jacket: expensive clothes but not showy. His ragged hair whipped in long strands in the gusting breeze.
Judging from the cloud bank on the horizon, he guessed it must be raining hard at his holding—good. They needed the water in the dwindling rivers that powered his hydroelectric plant.
Beside him, Maximillian loomed tall and stiff, ready to block anyone who approached his master too closely, though Dokken preferred to remain camouflaged within the crowd. He didn’t want Tharion or the others to know he had come to see Troy Boren brought before the Truthsayer.
Dokken wanted to watch the crowd, see how they reacted. He enjoyed observing how all the threads tangled together. He had begun to calculate the earliest possible time when he could disappear for a few weeks on another sojourn. He felt tired already.
“Behind schedule,” Maximillian said, glancing at his chronometer.
Dokken pursed his lips. “Don’t be such a slave to time.”
“Plenty to do back to the villa,” Maximillian pointed out. “Another shipment of pine logs coming in this afternoon. And there seems to be some problem with the fish farm. Your presence has been requested to check it out.”
“Yes, yes,” Dokken said impatiently. “Let’s just watch the show and see how much they think they know.”
Maximillian’s expression was flat and unreadable. “They know nothing about what I did.”
“Of course not,” Dokken said. “I certainly wouldn’t bring you here if they did.” He raised his head as the ship doors opened.
The hapless prisoner stumbled out in chains, escorted by the elite guard. Dokken scrutinized this lanky man who moved like a pigeon. Troy Boren was fidgety and nervous, his hair curly brown, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as he swallowed repeatedly.
“They think he killed Cialben?” Dokken breathed a short laugh. “That’s funny. He doesn’t look like he has enough courage even to harvest vegetables.”
Maximillian nodded with no change of expression. “You never can tell,” he said. “Sometimes people surprise you.”
v
Troy stood alone on the open platform above the crowd. His hands and ankles were wrapped in firm bindings, though he wondered where they expected him to run, how they thought he might attempt to escape. He shivered.
Above, the sky was a bowl of clouds the color of cast lead. Stray breezes hurled the mutters of the crowd toward him like a slap in the face. Troy hunched his shoulders, trying to appear small. He didn’t want all these people staring at him. He had never wanted to call attention to himself, just to do his job and make a living, maybe help his family’s situation improve.
The noise of the audience rose higher, and he realized what their hopes were. They wanted him to be found guilty. They were eager to see another criminal sentenced. They would be disappointed when he was found innocent.
Troy did not dare look out across the crowd. His family was probably out there, watching for him. He knew they would resent having to stay several days in First Landing; they didn’t have the money to afford such luxuries. He would try to make it up to them—especially Leisa—once all this was over. A new blanket for the baby, perhaps, or special confections from a sweetshop. Even Rissbeth would enjoy that.
The sol-pol elite guards stood back at the edge of the platform, keeping order through intimidation. Troy remembered the guard asking him if he had a guilty conscience, and he tried to clear his thoughts and think straight—but now the idea of guilt had fixed itself rigidly in his mind.
He knew he was innocent, but that meant the real killer was still on the loose. Troy had stumbled upon the body of the murdered man … there had been so much blood. If he had arrived an hour earlier—even fifteen minutes—the killer might have caught him as well. Troy shuddered. If only he hadn’t botched those manifest sheets in the first place. If only he hadn’t gone back to fix his mistake, creating an even bigger error in the process. He had changed what would have been a private (though still disastrous) reprimand into a murder trial.
The image danced across his mind: the dead body, eyes wide, two capsules of the Veritas drug, the wound where the blade had stabbed between the ribs and up into the heart.
And the blood. The dark blood spreading across the concrete floor.
So much blood!
Troy squeezed his eyes shut. He just wanted this entire ordeal to end. He gulped, hunched down even further, and waited for the Truthsayer to come out and free him.
vi
The promenade doors to Guild Headquarters split open, leaving Kalliana to stand in their center. A thin fingernail of cold breeze scraped along her white cotton robe. She straightened her green sash around her narrow waist. Her translucent skin flushed in the chill air as she stepped barefoot toward the plaza. The gold ceremonial collar felt heavy on her shoulders.
She saw the crowd, saw the accused, and was reminded again of Eli Strone—but this skinny young man looked so different, so quiet and lost, like a terrified waif. He insisted he was not guilty. However, Strone had also been certain of his own innocence, convinced that he had done nothing wrong. A Truthsayer could not judge on the basis of outward appearances. Because Troy Boren looked so unlikely, he seemed paradoxically more suspect.
Kalliana came forward and waited as one of the Guild chanters listed the case and the details, describing the crime of which Troy had been accused. As the chanter summarized, the crowd booed and jeered. Kalliana frowned. They needed to be reminded that the accused was innocent until she pronounced him guilty.
If she pronounced him guilty.
She came forward, an angel in white, holding the power of this man’s life in her hands. She received one of the sky-blue capsules of Veritas from its ornate brass-and-copper box, the small pill that protected Atlas from the deceptions of criminals. She popped it into her mouth, cracked it, and swallowed, taking a deep breath.
“If you’re innocent,” she said to Troy Boren, “you need not fear the truth.”
He drew a quick breath and answered in a quiet voice that no one else could hear. “I’m not afraid,” he said. “I am innocent.”
Kalliana tried not to show that fear engulfed her as well. She hoped that her exposure to Strone hadn’t set up echoes in her mind that might dampen her telepathic abilities. She felt the power of the Veritas surging through her, but she had difficulty focusing her thoughts.
Kalliana reached out and placed both of her hands flat against Troy’s temples. She closed her eyes as he blinked up at her like a wounded and confused animal.
She worked to sharpen her truthsaying ability into a usable tool, then went inside Troy’s thoughts, tentative and skittish. She brushed the surface of his memories, unwilling to go deep—and there she found it sitting like a black stain on the top of his mind: a guilt, a fear.
She probed deeper, feeling herself stiffen and grow even more wary, afraid to see—but it was her duty. She was a Truthsayer. She had to see.
She looked into Troy’s memories for just a glance, a snatch, a vision—
—and saw the sprawled body, saw the blood, heard the scream echoing in his mind. My God, there was so much blood.
The body lying there in the dim orange light.
The blood.
The overpowering guilt.
Kalliana froze, trembling until her shuddering became so violent she could not go deeper. She didn’t have the strength to probe for clearer details of the actual murder, but the answer was obvious to her. Too obvious.
She pulled back, jerking her hands away and cried out in a hoarse gasp. “Guilty,” she said. “Guilty!”
Troy’s face drained completely of blood. “No,” he whispered. “You’re wrong.”
But Kalliana staggered away, hiding from him. She did not wish to see any more. “Guilty,” she said again, then fled into Guild Headquarters, to safety.
vii
Guild Master Tharion leaped to his feet as the crowd yelled.
“That can’t be right,” he mouthed, but caught himself before saying it out loud, knowing the terrible consequences if he, the Guild Master, accused a Truthsayer of making a faulty judgment, of distorting the truth … of finding an innocent man guilty! That simply could not occur. On Atlas it would never happen. The Guild would fall apart if the faith of the public faltered.
Qrista grasped his wrist and squeezed so tightly that her fingernails bit into his skin. Tharion looked down at her, his face devastated. How would he be able to remedy this? He couldn’t announce that he knew Kalliana’s judgment was in error. He couldn’t admit how he knew.
“You can’t let this happen,” Qrista said, her words stabbing like knives.
“I can’t do anything about it,” Tharion said. “Not at the moment.”
He looked up to see a pair of familiar figures in the crowd: bald Maximillian, then Franz Dokken with his blond hair and ageless face. Both Dokken and his manservant looked bewildered by the outcome, and Tharion wondered what could have gone wrong. Had Kalliana intentionally given a false verdict? Was she involved in the black market sales somehow? He realized that someone in the Guild might be a link—but Kalliana? The possibilities swam in his mind, making him dizzy.
He wanted to rush over to the landholder, to grab him by the collar and demand to know what had gone wrong, but Dokken and Maximillian looked as confused as Tharion.
Troy should not have been found guilty—but now that the judgment had been pronounced in public with full ceremony, Tharion knew of no way he could rescind it. This was all so impossible!
The uproar continued, and he looked up to see the elite guard grabbing a limp Troy Boren by the bindings on his wrists and hauling him toward the armored walls of the Guild Headquarters. A convicted murderer.