Though the morning bells had not yet finished their count, two guards I had not seen before came for me. Ruvuk was right behind them, already dressed for the day. I noted the route as we walked: through the administrative quarter, deep into the Grand Assembly Hall compound.
From the road I had seen buildings older than anything else in Spartova, stone cut in a manner that predated the current Hegemony and possibly whatever came before it. The archive building's interior was purely functional. The same plan as every administrative block I had seen since the border, built against the older structure. Whatever the compound had been built for, the Hegemony had filled it with the same system it filled everything else.
The hearing room was on the second floor. A rectangular table, chairs of the same grade on all sides, two oil lamps burning because the windows were narrow and faced away from the sun. Three Hoplites were already seated when we entered. A scribe sat to one side.
Ruvuk took the chair at the head of the table. He gestured me to the seat across from him.
The senior Hoplite read from a prepared document. It was Ruvuk's complete legal case converted into the formal petition to the Grand Assembly.
The petition contained four accusations:
The first was the pattern of systemic rot established at the fortress: the physician, the quartermaster, the mason.
The second was Kramov's invocation of a classified legal protocol in a filled hall with scribes recording everything. This was a dereliction of duty to the Hegemony's security and served as evidence of the command structure's failure to manage what it was supposed to contain.
The third was the big one, but it wasn't direct in accusing the Strategoi of living in luxury behind closed doors. It accused them of arranging for material rewards to flow to Polemarchs across the command structure, the records of preferential allocation to garrisons under particular Strategoi's direct control. Individually, each could be ascribed to judgment calls made by good administrators. But together, across decades of records, they hinted at something that no document alone could prove: that the Strategoi had been cultivating personal loyalty inside the military through material reward. A factional structure inside the Hegemony's own army.
Ruvuk needed the stone to confirm the intention. This was what I was here for. Orso had told me what it would take to move the Assembly. Proof that the Strategoi had endangered the nation. A factional army answering to individuals was that proof.
The fourth count was the constitutional one. No one within the Hegemony's existing command structure had authority to adjudicate charges against the Strategoi themselves, which meant the Grand Assembly, as the supreme body under the Code, was the default judge.
Ruvuk had built a solid case. The Code would demand it be heard, in the only room with authority to hear it.
The final section was about my purpose here. I would operate the Justice Stone on questions put to it by the presiding body. The results would be entered into the official record by the scribe as they occurred. The session existed to put into the record, before the Tribunal convened, that I had been informed of this function, that I had not objected, and that the proceeding could go ahead on that basis.
Ruvuk had watched me find the gap with the Legate and counter it in three seconds. He had watched me attempt the escape and failed to stop it until the gate, and then told me afterward, with the same tone he used for everything already decided, that I should have been trying to break the system. He had left me Olen to watch and the parchment to sit with and the cell to think in. And now, before the most consequential proceeding of his life, he was here to assess me one last time.
If what he found was a broken tool, he would have to try the Grand Assembly Hall without me and he would find a reason for my men and me to be executed. But he had built his entire proceeding around the stone and around the person who held it. He needed that person to be present and functional and he needed to know it before the Tribunal convened.
The senior Hoplite finished reading. The room waited. I looked at Ruvuk. He said nothing.
I spoke. "At the fortress, you reported the verdict accurately every time. The nuance, however, you felt the room didn't need. But you did not alter the finding." I paused. "The record of the Tribunal will show the same. Whatever the stone produces, that is what the scribe writes."
A silence. The scribe was not writing.
"So you understand the weight of the stone's verdicts," Ruvuk said.
"I have understood it for some time."
He considered me for a moment, recalibrating. It was the same look I had seen after the Legate encounter, after the escape attempt. He was determining implications.
"What else have you concluded," he said. More of an order than a question.
I told him part of what I had concluded. I had watched Orso on the road and spoken with him at the waystation. He said Ruvuk was wrong about Kramov's influence on him. What he had done in the Agoge came from thirty years of watching the system discard capable soldiers. He had identified what he believed was a design error in the prescribed curriculum and spent years correcting it at personal risk.
"Orso was Kramov's subordinate," I said, "but he was not party to whatever Kramov was doing. His modification to the Agoge was his own conclusion about the Code's purpose. The Strategoi had no investment in it."
Ruvuk said nothing.
"Which means the luxuries going to Kramov were buying his personal loyalty. The Strategoi wanted a Polemarch who owed them, not one whose subordinates were developing their own position on the Code." I paused. "Orso was a liability to that arrangement whether you prosecuted him or not."
Ruvuk was still.
"The network was not coordinated," I said. "Each of them was building separately. Kramov's arrangement was one node. Your petition's allocation records show the others had their own. The command structure has been answering to particular men rather than to the Code for at least a generation, probably several." I stopped. "That is what the stone will confirm at the Grand Assembly. Not corruption in isolation. The Hegemony's own army is factional. That is the danger."
Ruvuk looked at me for a long moment.
"Yes," he said. "It is."
He stood, straightened his tunic, and moved to the door. He told the guard that I was to remain for a quarter of an hour while the documentation was transferred, then returned to my cell. He left without looking back.
The scribe gathered the parchment and followed. The three Hoplites filed out. The guard took his position at the far wall.
I sat with my hands on the table and the Truth Stone closed in my right fist below the table's edge where the guard could not see it.
I considered the second mode.
What had happened in the corridor had happened. Both guards received the result simultaneously. Each had experienced the other's purpose as well as his own. That was what had stopped them. The sudden mutual legibility, the experience of being exposed completely in front of someone who was also being exposed completely. It had lasted three seconds and left both men standing in a silence they could not explain.
I did not know what the mode would do with one guard in a closed room. It might produce confusion or alarm. The corridor had been accidental and I had gotten lucky. I could not assume the same outcome with a single man alone.
I set the thought aside. The mode was not a question I could answer safely here.
I turned the stone inward and read the guard's purpose quietly, the private mode. His attention was administrative. He was tracking the time remaining in his assignment, the position of my hands, and the sound of the corridor. He was not afraid of me. He was not alert in any way that suggested suspicion. He had been told I was a cooperative foreign national awaiting transfer and that's what he believed.
The corridor had two minds receiving simultaneously. I needed subjects who could experience the result without being able to act on it in a way that harmed me, and I needed more than one of them. I turned the stone over in my hand.
Bastien was in the garrison block. The travel chest had gone into the Spartovan baggage system with my men's effects when the column split at the city gate, separate from me and separate from the stones Ruvuk had returned as instruments of my function. Danio's mechanism was in the false bottom. If they had not discovered it, Bastien was closer to it than I was. He would stay closer to it.
Both stones were in my hands. The second mode existed and its conditions were beginning to resolve. The constitutional gap Orso had described had never been tested.
Ruvuk had never wanted a broken tool. He had wanted a converted one. He had still made no progress on that project. He believed, after this morning, that he had.