Legacy (Shira Calpurnia Book 2) by Matthew Farrer

Author:Matthew Farrer [Farrer, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2011-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

The Bastion Praetoris, The Wall, Bosporian Hive, Hydraphur

Reverend Simova’s appearance in the court of Praetor Imprimis Dastrom was insultingly brief, an anticlimax. He had been marched into the court to testify and answer questions about how the cages had been commissioned and hung over the Avenue Solar, how Ghammo Ströon (now chained with Symandis in the dock) had been apprehended and sentenced, how the whole ordeal and the handling of prisoners worked, what his own role was. He was stunned and mortified that his mission to Trylan Tor had ended back here, scant kilometres from the Cathedral where it had begun, in a courtroom full of harsh lights and steel fittings with the cadaverous Judge enthroned high above him.

Simova was not stupid. The Ecclesiarchy worked as hard at keeping citizens’ minds in line as the Arbites did, if not harder, and he knew the rituals, the settings, how to place an accused in awe. The Judge on high, the booming orders and decrees, the quieter tones of the junior examining Judges who unrolled in front of him a clever mix of what the Arbites already knew and what they suspected, lines of questioning hidden inside one another, hunchbacked scribes and blank-eyed auditing servitors recording every word. Why, had he not presided over the trials of heretics and blasphemers using exactly the same strategies?

The true humiliation: it was working. Simova had walked into the courtroom full of anger at the coarse treatment he had received at the sentry post, and disdain at the Arbites’ belief that the tricks they used on common criminals were going to work on him. But still he found himself reacting the way he knew they wanted him to: wrong footed, over-anxious to explain himself and fill in the gaps in their knowledge. ‘You are not on trial here, reverend,’ they kept telling him, and he knew that it was a lie. This was a trial if ever he had seen one.

And it didn’t help that the arrogant thug of an arbitor senioris seemed to be able to pluck his thoughts out of the air, because the first thing she said to him when he emerged from the courtroom through the four-metre-high courtroom doors was: ‘That was not your trial, reverend, but it so easily could have been.’

She was standing in a carefully careless way in amongst a knot of black-armoured Arbites in the centre of the corridor. Facing her, still alone as the door swung silently closed behind him, Simova touched the gold aquila on its chain around his expansive waist, for confidence.

‘Do not presume, arbitor, to even speak to me, much less to hector me about trials and what you might or might not do to me. I do not back away from a single word I have said about what will come of this. There are some things I took care to make clear to your subordinate on the flight back from that wretched tor–’

‘Indeed there were. I understand that your eloquence was matched only by your stamina.

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