David Drake - Mistress of the Catacombs

Instead of speaking, Vascay stepped backward, a movement that allowed him to keep both Ceto and Garric in his field of view at the same time. His knives were back in his sash, but Garric had seen how quickly they appeared when Vascay chose.

“Well, Gar,” the chieftain said cheerfully, “then you’ll understand when I tell you that I’m not a captain. I’m merely Brother Vascay, a member of the band and its spokesman only so long as the majority wills it. Is that not so, brethren?”

“ We all know that, Vascay!” Ceto said. “Sometimes I wonder if you remember it, though.”

The others didn’t speak. Their attention was uneasy; their eyes moved from Ceto to Vascay, sometimes pausing to consider the person who’d been Gar when he went into the jungle this morning.

“So, Gar,” Vascay said calmly, “you say you found the ring—”

Which had vanished somewhere onto Vascay’s person during the same series of movements that brought out the knives ready to kill. Conjurors came regularly to the Sheep Fair, but Garric had never seen one as quick with his hands as Vascay.

“—and Ceto took it from you?”

“Tint led me to the ring,” Garric said, looking over his shoulder. “I dug it out.”

Tint had come into the clearing when the shouting died down, but she ducked away from Garric’s glance. He wouldn’t have believed it was possible to hide behind the tuft of ferns into which the beastgirl disappeared.

“How come Gar’s talking like that?” Toster repeated plaintively. “He can’t be Gar.”

Garric kept Toster at the corner of his eye. He and Vascay—who were probably opposite poles of the band’s intellectual spectrum—were the only members who fully grasped the truth. Unlike the others, those two knew they weren’t dealing with dim-witted Gar. The big man wasn’t hostile, and Vascay seemed more positive than not, but they were potentially dangerous.

“Why do you talk to that animal?” Ceto demanded. “It doesn’t matter what Gar says, he’s a—”

“Arguments between Brethren,” Vascay interrupted, “are judged by the Ball of Truth. We’ll have the trial now.”

He gestured to a wooden chest resting on blocks beneath the nearby tarpaulin. It looked to Garric like a sea locker, though its floral decoration was of a much higher order than the chip carvings of dolphins and mermaids that graced most sailors’ chests.

“What do you mean a trial?” Ceto said.

“Hey, it’s just Gar,” said Ademos, as puzzled as Ceto and almost as worried about what was going on. “Trials are for brothers, not monkeys.”

“Shall we cap each other’s quotations from Celondre, Ademos?” Garric said in a cutting tone. “‘ The same chance that joins the wolf and the lamb…. ’ Or do you have a different favorite poet?”

“What?” said Ademos. “What’s he talking about?”

Garric smiled coldly, though maybe it was a shame that Ademos hadn’t turned out to be a scholar. A contest of verses would be one way to prove to the band that Garric’s claim wasn’t the maundering of a monkey boy. In his mind he completed the tag, “ …makes you my enemy .”

But Vascay was preparing to prove matters in a different fashion. He squatted and opened the chest without using a key, keeping his eyes on Ceto. His left hand darted within and came out with a red ball the size of a hickory nut.

“Which will you have, Ceto?” Vascay asked as he stood upright again. “Will you tell your story first, or will you hold the Ball of Truth after Brother Gar has spoken his version?”

“He’s not a brother, he’s an animal ,” Ceto said, apparently hoping that repetition would give his statement an effect it’d so far lacked. “You can’t make me go through a trial with an animal!”

A bird shrieked in the canopy, responding to Ceto’s rising tone. Another of its kind answered from a distance.

“Unless we all vote to change our laws,” said Vascay, holding out the red bead, “that’s just what we’ll do, Brother Ceto. Which do you choose, that Gar takes the ball first or that you do?”

“He doesn’t talk like an animal,” Toster said. “He talks better’n me.”

“Yeah, the Ball of Truth,” said Hame, a short, bandy-legged fellow whose ears had been notched—for theft, Garric supposed; though, looking on the band with civilized eyes, they didn’t seem to be the illiterate bravos he’d expected. Several of them, Hame for one, were city dwellers by their appearance.

“All right, give him the ball and watch him spit his lies up!” Ceto snarled. “I don’t care!”

Gar might have been present at previous trials, but if so the experience had passed through his ruined brain like rain fallen on parched sand. Garric didn’t know what was going on—

But he did know he had Vascay on his side. The peg-legged chieftain touched his hands together, transferring the red bead from his left to his right. He held it toward Garric, and said, “Put the Ball of Truth under your tongue, Brother Gar. Speak your story, and if you lie the words will poison you.”

“I’m not lying,” said Garric.

“Then you’ll hand the ball to Brother Ceto, and he’ll do the same,” Vascay said equably. “A man who tells the truth has nothing to fear from the ball.”

He looked around the circle of watchful men. The whole band was present, twenty or so. Many of them were mutilated, like Hame and Vascay himself.

“I still don’t know about this truth stuff, Vascay,” Ademos muttered, his eyes jerking side to side without lighting on the man to whom he spoke. “I know what you say, but I don’t see how a little ball knows who’s lying.”

“With you, Ademos,” said Hame, “it’s whenever your mouth’s open.”

“Stuff it!” said Ademos. He kept his hands carefully clear of his weapons. “Stuff you, Hame!”

“I served a saintly hermit in my youth,” Vascay said, reinforcing the story he’d obviously told often in the past—and incidentally informing Garric for the first time. “The Ball of Truth was his legacy to me. Not wizardry but faith gives it the power to see men’s souls, Brother Ademos.”

“Get on with it,” Ceto snarled. “Just get on with it!”

“Yes,” said Garric. He took the red bead from Vascay. “Let’s do that.”

It was surprisingly light, more like wood than the stone he’d expected. The surface was hard but slightly pitted.

“Be brief, Brother Gar,” Vascay said. “And on your life, tell the truth.”

Vascay nodded expressionlessly. Garric put the bead under his tongue.

“I dug the ring out of the ground,” Garric said. The lump under his tongue slurred his words. He could feel the bead starting to dissolve. “Ceto sucker-punched me and stole the ring.”

He spat the bead into his left palm. He couldn’t see any change except the glister of saliva, but he knew it had begun to come apart.

“Your turn now, Brother Ceto,” said Vascay. “Give him the Ball of Truth, Gar.”

Garric’s belly muscles were tight. His tongue worked, trying to decide what the taste in his mouth was. It was dry, limy, and nondescript. Apparently harmless, but there was some trick connected with the business.

“Here, Ceto,” Garric said, stretching his left arm out to full length so that he didn’t have to approach the other man. The bead gleamed in the center of his upturned palm.

“I don’t have to do this!” Ceto said, turning his head side to side like a beast at bay.

“It’s your turn, Ceto,” Toster said. The big man carried an axe with a long helve, a weapon that in hands like his could smash through any armor a man could wear and still be able to walk. He raised the axe slightly, holding it slanted across his body. “Take the ball.”