David Weber - How firm a foundation

The entire scene froze, and then, grudgingly, the Guardsmen stepped back and allowed the fallen to rise. There were still blows, still shouted obscenities, still sneering promises of worse to come, but at least Manthyr was allowed to carry that slight, fallen body to the waiting transport wagons.

The wagons were big enough for fifteen or twenty men to be crammed aboard with room for perhaps six of them to lie down at any given moment. They were heavy framed, without shock absorbers, springs, or anything resembling seats, sided with iron bars and roofed with iron gratings. They were basically dungeon cells on wheels, and the only overhead cover was in the form of canvas tarps which were currently tightly rolled and stowed behind the drivers’ tall seats. Each wagon was drawn by two hill dragons, the size of terrestrial elephants but with longer bodies and six powerful legs each. They were capable of a surprising turn of speed and possessed excellent endurance.

The wagon doors were slammed and locked. Orders were shouted, and the convoy lurched into motion. There was no reason those wagons had to have been built without springs, Merlin knew. They’d been built that way deliberately, with only one object in view: to make any prisoners’ journey as unpleasant as possible… and to show any witnesses how unpleasant that journey was.

Which is the entire reason they decided not to send them by water after all, Merlin reflected bitterly. They’re sending them the long way, by land, so they can stop in every town to display their prizes, give every village the chance to watch them roll through on their way to the Temple and the Punishment of Schueler. They’re too damned valuable an object lesson for Clyntahn to waste sending them by sea… and God knows how many of them are going to die on the way. And there’s not one damn thing I can do about it. I can’t even sink them at sea to spare them from what’s waiting.

He watched that clumsy procession of iron-barred wagons lurching slowly northward from the city of Gorath and hated his helplessness as he’d seldom hated anything in Nimue Alban’s life or his own. Yet while he watched, he made himself one solemn promise.

Sir Gwylym Manthyr was right. What had happened to the city of Ferayd was nothing compared to what was going to happen to the city of Gorath. . VII.

Royal Palace, City of Manchyr, Princedom of Corisande

It wasn’t the throne room this time.

In many ways, Sharleyan would have preferred that venue, but there were traditions to break. Prince Hektor’s notion of judicial procedure had been to see to it that the accused got the proper sentence, not to worry about any pettifogging legal details like proving guilt or innocence. Trials were an inconvenient, messy formality which sometimes ended with the accused actually getting off entirely, which was scarcely the reason he’d had the culprit arrested in the first place! Far more efficient and direct to simply have him hauled in front of the throne and sentenced without all that unnecessary running around.

To be fair, the majority of Hektor’s subjects had considered his justice neither unduly capricious nor unnecessarily cruel. He’d maintained public order, prevented the nobility from victimizing the commoners too outrageously, supported the merchants and bankers’ property rights and general prosperity, and seen to it that most of his army’s killing had been done on someone else’s territory. Theoretically, there’d always been the appeal to the Church’s judgment, although it had been resorted to only infrequently… and usually unsuccessfully. But by and large, Corisandians had assumed anyone Prince Hektor wanted to throw into prison or execute probably deserved it. If not for the crime of which he stood accused, for one he’d committed and gotten away with another time.

What that also meant, unfortunately, was that being hauled in front of the prince had been tantamount to being punished. And what that meant, in turn, was that if Sharleyan dispensed justice from the throne room which had once been Hektor’s, those being brought before her would automatically assume they were simply there to learn what fate had already been decreed for them… and that “justice” actually had very little to do with the process. All of which explained why she was, instead, sitting in the magnificently (if darkly) paneled Princess Aleatha’s Ballroom.

Sharleyan couldn’t imagine anyone voluntarily holding a ball in the room. Only one wall had any windows at all, and they were small. Not only that, but more recently constructed portions of the palace cut off most of the light they would have taken in, anyway. She supposed the vast, gloomy chamber would have looked much more imposing with its dozen massive bronze chandeliers all alight, but the heat from that many candles would have been stifling, especially in Manchyr’s climate.

Probably just that northern blood of yours talking, she thought. As far as these people are concerned, it might simply have been comfortably warm. Maybe even bracingly cool!

No, she decided. Not even Corisandians could have done anything but swelter under those circumstances.

She was dithering, she told herself, looking out across the rows of benches which had been assembled to face the dais upon which she sat. The main reason she’d chosen Princess Aleatha’s Ballroom-aside from the fact that it wasn’t the throne room-was its size. It was stupendous, bigger than any other chamber in the palace complex, and almost five hundred people sat looking back at her across the open space cordoned off by Sir Koryn Gahrvai’s Guardsmen. There were nobles, clerics, and commoners in that crowd, chosen to make it as representative a mix of the population as possible, and some of them (not all commoners, by any means) seemed acutely uncomfortable in their present surroundings.

Perhaps some of that might have been due to the six members of the Charisian Imperial Guard who stood between them and her dais on either side of Edwyrd Seahamper. Or, for that matter, to the way Merlin Athrawes loomed silently, somberly, and very, very intimidatingly at her back.

The dais raised her throne approximately three feet, and it was flanked by only slightly less ornate chairs in which the members of Prince Daivyn’s Regency Council were seated. Two more chairs (remarkably plebeian compared to the Regency Council’s) sat directly before the dais at a long table placed just behind the line of Guardsmen and piled with documents. Spynsair Ahrnahld, her bespectacled, youthful secretary, sat in one of those chairs; Father Neythan Zhandor-bald head shining above its rapidly retreating fringe of brown hair, even in the ballroom’s subdued light-occupied the other.

Archbishop Klairmant was also present, but he’d chosen to stand to Sharleyan’s right rather than be seated himself. She wasn’t certain why he’d made that choice. Perhaps it was to avoid giving the impression he, too, was seated to give judgment ex cathedra, adding the Church’s imprimatur to whatever judgments she rendered. Yet his position might also lead some to think he was standing as her advisor and councilor.

And he’s going to get damned tired before the day is over, she thought grimly. Still, I suppose we’d best get to it.

She raised one hand in a small yet regal gesture, and a shimmering musical note rang through the enormous room as Ahrnahld struck the gong on one end of the document-piled table.

“Draw nigh and give ear!” a deep-voiced chamberlain-a Charisian chamberlain-bellowed. “Give ear to the Crown’s justice!”

Utter silence answered the command, and Sharleyan felt the stillness radiating outward. Many of the people seated on those rows of benches would normally have been chattering away behind their hands, eyes bright as they exchanged the latest, delicious gossip about the spectacle they were there to see. But not today. Today, they sat waiting tensely until the double doors of the ballroom’s main entrance swung wide and six men were marched through them, surrounded by guards.