Within the Grand Assembly compound was a trial hall. It was smaller than the enormous cylinder that was the heart of the place, but still large enough to hold a couple hundred Hoplites on tiered benches facing a central dais. The lamps were lit and the benches were full.
They put me right of the dais with two guards in a familiar arrangement. Ruvuk was positioned as an advocate and a single judge occupied the dais. He was a stern figure, even by Spartovan standards, with deep wrinkles and a heavy brow. A scribe sat to his side.
The accused was a Polemarch. His shoulder studs put him at equal seniority to Kramov. He was not as old as the judge but not young. He stood tall, as if his rank would naturally cause this inconvenience to work out in his favor.
The judge read the charge that Polemarch Drakov was accused of conduct unbecoming of his rank. Specifically, he was accused of attending a session of the High Tribunal without summons and obtaining information pertaining to an active petition before the Grand Assembly and transmitting that information to a third party.
Drakov acknowledged his name and rank.
Ruvuk built his case as methodically as ever. He presented records showing Drakov's presence in the Tribunal on two occasions without sanctioned business. There was deposition from a clerk who had seen him. And there was a dispatch record to someone in Spartova timed just hours after an unsanctioned visit.
Then he turned to me.
He read the charge aloud. I stood, and directed the charge towards the stone. It gave its answer: a dim pink.
It was so dim that it could barely be seen from the benches. The color meant that he was possibly guilty but there were reasons to believe otherwise. Drakov had performed the actions he had been accused of, but his purpose was pretty legitimate as far as the stone was concerned. He did not understand himself to be acting outside sanctioned bounds.
The judge studied the light. "The stone's finding is insufficient to support the charge." He looked at the scribe. "The accused is not convicted on this count."
The Hoplites on the benches squirmed.
Drakov was unmoved. He was not exonerated or convicted. He simply waited.
The judge turned to Ruvuk. "Does the advocate wish to pursue the matter further?"
Ruvuk paused. He was recalibrating. I used the pause.
I had been watching the stone operate for months and I had been wrong about its mechanism for most of them. I had understood it as a verdict device. A question goes in, a color comes out. But that was not what I had just watched. What I had watched was two hundred Hoplites lean forward to read a dim light, and what the dim light told me was something about all of them, not just about Drakov.
The stone was reading the room.
Every mind present, weighted by what each mind knew. The Hoplites on the benches understood Spartovan military law extremely well since they'd lived inside it their entire careers. The judge understood it the same way but with decades of additional experience with the nuance of various situations. Drakov himself carried in his own mind everything he understood about the facts of the case from first hand experience. The stone was synthesizing all of it simultaneously: the collective legal knowledge of every person present, weighted by expertise, applied to the facts as those same minds understood them, including facts no one in the room had spoken aloud.
Which was why the charge had returned pink.
The room's collective legal understanding was divided on whether a Polemarch attending an unsanctioned session constituted conduct unbecoming. The law on the matter was genuinely ambiguous. The Hoplites in the benches knew that. Some read the regulation strictly, some read it with the latitude experience produces. Their uncertainty weakened the verdict. Drakov's own mind compounded it. He had simply answered a superior, and the absence of any internal doubt was in his mind as clearly as the dispatch record was in the clerk's deposition, and the stone was reading both.
The pink was not just a weak guilty finding. It was an accurate reading of a genuinely divided room on a genuinely ambiguous charge. The stone had done exactly what it should have.
A correct charge had to be one the room could agree on, or would agree on once they knew the facts in question. Its answer needed to be a clear fact in Drakov's own mind, not a contested interpretation of a regulation. I did not yet know what that fact was. I needed to find it before Ruvuk's pause ran out.
I turned the Truth Stone toward him, quietly, below the bench, giving nothing to the room.
What came first was sharp and immediate: Drakov was party to a plan to kill Ruvuk.
It was a plan without hostility, specific and in its final form. It was assigned to him and others, just waiting on timing. He was simply an instrument, the way everyone the Strategos Xotok called on was an instrument of something he had not chosen for himself. Someone above him, someone close to Xotok's authority, had given Drakov a role in removing a man who was a threat. Drakov carried this without any of the doubt that had clouded the first charge. There was no ambiguity in his mind about what was being asked of him, only the discipline of a man waiting to be told when.
I held the stone steady and let it keep going.
Beneath the plan against Ruvuk was something larger, and Drakov's fear of it was so much greater than his fear of the assassination. It colored and enveloped everything else in his thoughts. I couldn't dig into the details it was overwhelming. There was something, an organization, perhaps, within Spartova. It answered to the Strategoi and the Tribunal together and to no one else, held in reserve for emergencies. Drakov feared that the Hegemony itself was at risk of tearing apart in the streets. Drakov did not want to know more about it than he already knew.
I pulled back from it before I understood any more than that. Whatever it was, it would have taken more time to read and my face wouldn't have contained it with two hundred Hoplites watching me.
The plan against Ruvuk was enough.
I watched Drakov's composure. He simply looked like a man waiting for a different danger entirely.
The stone, when asked the right question, was going to find it.
The guards moved me back toward my bench. In the process I passed within two paces of Ruvuk.
I spoke quietly. "A pink verdict on a man with nothing to fear from this charge. Ask him about his intentions for your life."
I kept walking. The guard steered me to my position.
A long moment.
Ruvuk's face did not change, but something in his body language afterward told me the words had landed exactly as intended.
"The advocate has a question for the court," he said to the judge. "The charge as filed addresses an act already past. There is a more pressing matter before this Tribunal." He paused, and for the first time since I had known him I heard something that was not quite uncertainty but was its nearest neighbor. "With the court's permission, a new charge."
The judge granted it, his patience thinning but his curiosity winning out.
Ruvuk turned to me. He spoke the charge slowly, building it as the words came, watching my face for confirmation he was not yet certain he would receive.
Ruvuk finished the charge: was Polemarch Drakov a party to a plan, sanctioned by authority within the Strategoi Council, to assassinate the advocate currently bringing charges before this Tribunal?
The hall went still. Two hundred Hoplites understood, all at once, that the advocate standing in front of them had just asked the stone whether someone in the room was planning to kill him.
I stated the charge aloud and held the intent.
The stone flared red.
Brilliant and immediate, no hesitation. The light came back from the ceiling and settled across the bench rows.
The hall registered it the way it registers something it cannot un-see.
Drakov's composure did not break, but his face rearranged. He had expected this trial to end in an unconvincing technical charge, not exposure of something Ruvuk couldn't know about.
Ruvuk spoke again. "The stone has confirmed a plan, sanctioned within the Strategoi Council, to murder an officer of this Hegemony in the course of a lawful proceeding." He turned to the full bench, and the deliberate calm of his delivery did not fully cover what was underneath it. "This is no longer a question of factional loyalty or misused authority. This is conspiracy to commit murder against a sworn Officer of the Code, sanctioned by the body that is supposed to be its guardian. The Grand Assembly must convene immediately. No lesser body has standing to hear it."
The judge was on his feet. Order did not come; the hall simply became loud, two hundred men reacting to a thing that had no precedent in any of their careers.
I sat very still and understood. I had just handed Ruvuk something that might keep him alive.
I had given him a warning, wrapped inside a charge that also happened to be the most damning evidence yet assembled against the Strategoi.
But I didn't understand the thing that frightened Drakov. I did not know what it was. Neither did anyone else in the room. Only Drakov had the outline of it.
They returned me to my cell before I could use the Truth Stone on him again. I sat on the sleeping platform and held it, turning it over in my hand.