I heard the Cursant from Xotok arrive the morning after the escape attempt. Though I could not see it from my window, it came through as a pattern in the noise at the fortress gate, the way the men's routines changed. Then I could hear the noise move to the inner ward.
Ruvuk's dispatch had arrived first, built over three weeks. Whatever Xotok had written, it had gone to Ruvuk. Kramov was done.
Ruvuk summoned me shortly after. He was at his desk. He did not invite me to sit. There was soot still on my hands from the flints. I had not been given water to wash.
"The Strategoi have been informed," he said. "And the High Tribunal will convene to address what has been placed in the record. The constitutional questions require their direct authority." He moved a document to one side of the desk and set another in its place. "You are required to attend the proceeding."
He slid the document across the desk. Travel orders.
"You, your men, and the condemned Centurion will travel to Spartova under my personal guard. The journey is eleven days. Your men will march in the rear. You will march in the forward group with me." He paused. "You have been cooperative. I expect that will continue."
I looked at the orders without picking them up. The word cooperative caught my attention. I had broken through the wall twice and sabotaged the gate mechanism. His definition of cooperative must have been quite narrow. I had continued to use the stone as directed. From his perspective, that was all that mattered.
"My men are well?" I said.
"They are functional." He said it the way the Hegemony classified everything. Either they were useful or they were not. "They will remain so."
"I will continue to cooperate," I said.
He noted this with a nod, and I was escorted back to my cell.
Ruvuk assembled a column for the journey. I watched what I could from my window. His preparations were thorough, everything at the correct time. The tuspaks from my confiscated caravan appeared in the outer ward on the second day, their broad feet quiet on the stone. One of them was still wearing the lead harness Bastien had been fitting two nights ago when Ruvuk's guards reached him. It had been left on and secured for travel.
Our tuspaks did not appear in the forming column. Their broad feet were built for loose sand. An eleven-day march on plateau road would not only risk injury but cost more in feed and handling than they were worth as transport. They were State property now, confiscated and retained at the fortress.
I could see the rear of the formation from my window. My men were back there, barely visible, guarded just enough. Ruvuk had put his own complement between the forward group and the rear. The separation was efficient. A foreign prince who had made an escape attempt had to be kept well separated from his men, colluding made impossible. Seeing them confirmed that Ruvuk was a man of his word. I had never doubted it.
Centurion Orso was brought out at nearly the same time I was, his hands bound in front of him, his uniform stripped of insignia. He walked with the resolve every other Spartovan Hoplite showed. We were placed near each other in the forward column.
He looked at me, patiently attentive to all his surroundings. Then he looked away, and I looked away. The column began to move.
I had not expected to feel anything about Orso. He was yet another point in the sequence of events that was taking me to Spartova. The charge produced the verdict, the verdict produced the report, and the report produced the summons. That was his function. I had understood as much the moment the stone shone yellow.
Yet seeing him march in bonds beside me struck me harder than I expected. He was steady and unresentful. Though stripped of rank, his dignity was undiminished. The memory of what I had done gave me pain that logic had not prepared me for. The trial was not mine to conduct, and the stone's verdict was not mine to interpret. And still, a good man was in chains because I had held it.
The column moved through the gate and onto the road that would lead us to the center of the Spartovan highlands. Gradually, the fortress fell behind. I watched it until the walls dropped below the ridge line, then turned to face the road ahead.
Kramov had done everything to himself. He had invoked a classified legal instrument in a filled hall with scribes writing everything down. Ruvuk had simply prepared the hall in advance.
Ruvuk had said it the night of the attempt, in the same tone he used for everything already decided. "You should have been trying to break the system."
The system in that fortress had been Ruvuk's, built from its walls out to its procedures. He was right that I could not break it from inside the cell he had put me in.
But we were no longer in that fortress. We were on the road to Spartova. That was a place he did not control.
The system there belonged to the Strategoi. They had built a system of controlled custody around the stones, one that answered jointly to them and to the Tribunal. Neither body could reach it unilaterally. They understood what happened when a single institution got uncontested control of something that powerful. They had built a gap in their system because they understood what it was they were trying to contain.
Systems built to suppress a problem contain, within their architecture, the shape of the problem they are trying to suppress.
The road ran northeast across the plateau. Eleven days.
I watched the horizon.