Aloê exhaled, then, more reluctantly, inhaled.

“I assure you, these things were not human—merely machines for turning food into shit, as the saying goes. What can I do for you, my dears?”

Aloê said, “I wanted to urge you to swear a self-binding oath so that you could be released from this hellhole.”

“I’m afraid I can’t, my dear,” said the smiling, blood-stained old man. “Before either of you were born, I had a counterspell against binding spells engraved on my collarbone. That prevents me from swearing a self-binding oath; you can ask Lernaion about it, if you like.”

“Ur. Well, maybe we can find more acceptable quarters for you.”

“These quarters are perfectly acceptable to me. I’m not particular about things. Perhaps you’re thinking about the nightmares from the decaying fungus, but really I don’t mind them. If you ever get to be my age, which I do not wholeheartedly recommend, you’ll understand how pleasant it is to have a vivid dream, even a nightmare, awake or asleep.”

“If some of the upper floors are intact, I’m sure you can have your nightmares and cleaner air to go with them. We must have you alive to testify, Bleys.”

“I’ll drink to that, as your husband might say, my dear. Yes, I can’t wait to testify. The sooner young Illion is done with healing the Witness Stone, the better I’ll like it. Shouldn’t you be helping him, Noreê, instead of playing chief jailor to an old man?”

“I intend to,” Noreê said quietly.

“Wonderful.”

“You could tell us something of what you have to say now,” Aloê observed.

“But would you believe it? Should you believe it? I would not recommend it, if I were some third person with your best interests at heart (as I am not, of course). No, you will have to wait. Because it’s very important that you believe what I have to say.” Bleys absentmindedly wiped his hands on his white mantle of office. “I wonder what’s for supper?” he said wistfully. “Could one of you ask about it for me on your way out?”

Bleys got his wish a pair of months later. They were very long months from Aloê’s point of view. Most of the vocates started recruiting personal forces of thains, and many had companies of them marching through the streets.

Aloê and Jordel watched them pass by one day from the second floor of his house.

“I suppose they all have to swing their feet at the same time,” Jordel said, “if they’re going to walk so close with everybody’s elbow up everybody else’s ass. But I tell you, Aloê. . . .”

“Tell me, J.”

“I think that they’re doing it to threaten people.”

“I think they’re doing it because they’re afraid.”

“I think that we’re saying the same thing.”

Fear was in the eyes of the thains marching, and fear was in the eyes of the Guarded, watching from the windows in their houses and towers, and fear was in the eyes of the vocates marching at the head of their companies on the long-awaited day of Station.

Since Lernaion, the Summoner of the City, had been charged with Impairment of the Guard, it fell to the vocates to summon themselves to Station. But when Illion gave word that the Witness Stone was healed, Noreê sent her thains as messengers to summon the members of the Graith. Whether they loved Noreê or hated her, the vocates obeyed. Many whispered to each other that she would be chosen as the new summoner, to fill the place left vacant by Earno’s murder.

On the chilly summer day of the Station, Aloê rose before dawn. She was staying with Jordel again because the empty ancientness of Tower Ambrose distressed her. They walked together, without a single thain-attendant, to the Chamber of the Graith. They met Illion, also walking without a thain, and Styrth Anvri, Sundra, Callion, and Keluaê Hendaij, who contented themselves with a single thain-attendant each.

But the streets adjoining the Dome were a solid mass of gray capes and clashing badges. Aloê was idly considering the possibility of making her way through the crowd on stilts when Jordel began to shout, in a shocking stentorian roar, “Make way for the Graith’s vengeancer! Make way!”

The thains-come-lately looked over their shoulders aghast and pressed back against those nearest them. Cracks opened up in the wall of gray capes, and the vocates plunged into them. Jordel continued his shouting, and soon they could hear his brother Baran doing the same in another part of the crowd, and Illion began shouting it, too, and no one in recorded history had ever heard Illion shout anything, and eventually they were on the other side of the crowd, climbing the stairs into the Chamber.

A few vocates were standing before the open double doors to the Chamber proper: Rild of Eastwall, resplendent in purple leggings; Gnython the Rememberer, wearing a green armband on both arms; Kothala of Sandport, sporting a red cap, and a few others.

“Fine ladies and gentlemen,” Jordel rasped (his voice still ragged from shouting), “perhaps you could tell your underlings not to block the streets. There’s more than one way to impair the Guard,” he added.

That spurred them to action; it takes fear to motivate the frightened, Aloê thought. They rushed away to give orders to their disorderly followers.

The pale sun had climbed more than half way up the cool blue sky before the vocates were assembled at Station, and the Guardians accused of Impairing the Guard stood, with folded hands, awaiting the Graith’s judgment. Aloê was obscurely pleased that Naevros had rallied for the occasion. If his clothes were not new, they looked it. His wounded hand looked almost healthy, except for the angry red line where it had been reattached to his arm. He held himself like a person who mattered. But he did not wear the red cloak of his office, and neither did Bavro wear his gray cape.

Lernaion did wear his white mantle of office, however, and Bleys presumably did, too, but it was hard to tell whether the oldest Guardian’s cloak was actually white. His clothes were filthy; his person was filthy; Aloê could smell him from where she stood at the Long Table, halfway across the great Chamber of the Graith. If he was at all embarrassed by his condition, he didn’t show it.

Since the Summoner of the City was among the accused, Noreê stood forward to convene the Station. No one objected to this—at least not out loud. But Aloê could not have been the only vocate who thought their peer was taking too much on herself.

“Vocates,” she said, actually rapping the Long Table with the silver staff of exile, “stand to order! We are come here to settle the fates of our members, accused of Impairment of the Guard and murder of the Guarded. I called you here because the Summoner of the City is among the accused and may not speak here, except in his own defense. If you prefer that someone else preside here, I will stand back.”

Silence.

“Go ahead, Noreê,” suggested Gyrla.

“Thank you, Guardians,” Noreê said. “I call on our vengeancer, Aloê Oaij.”

All faces in the room turned to Aloê. She’d thought much about this moment. It was a chance to wax rhetorical, to magnify herself in the minds of those who are impressed by torrents of well-chosen words. The last trial for Impairment had happened around the time she was being born, but she had read about that case and many others.

In the end, she eschewed any attempt to soothe or startle her listeners with rhetoric. She stated plainly what the conspirators had done and how she had discovered it. She concluded by saying, “The only witness I see who is not present is Ulvana, late of the Order of Arbiters. She was under guard at the High Arbitrate; perhaps she could be sent for.”

“That won’t be possible, I’m afraid,” Noreê said. “I received word from the High Arbitrate last night that Ulvana had committed suicide.”

Aloê felt a sudden stab of grief and pain at this. She was also angry: that the message had come to Noreê and not her; that Noreê had not bothered to tell her until now. The pale cold Guardian loomed over them all these days, sole ruler of the Wardlands. It would have to be stopped somehow.