“Did she jump or was she pushed?” Aloê snapped back.

“If I understand you, Vocate Aloê, you are suggesting that the High Arbitrate may have killed Ulvana in secret to prevent her testimony today.”

“It seems possible, at least.”

“It seems irrelevant, at best. Unless her testimony is key to your case.”

“No. I have stated my case. It is time for the witnesses to ascend to the Witness Stone.”

“May I speak?” Naevros called up from the floor.

“You may speak in your defense after you testify on the Stone,” Noreê said.

“That’s just it. I don’t intend to present a defense. Neither does my junior colleague. We will accept death or exile at the Graith’s choosing, or your vengeancer’s alone.”

“Hm.” Noreê allowed herself a cold smile and turned to Aloê. “What do you say, Vengeancer?”

“I’ll abide by the Graith’s decision, or exercise the prerogative if we can’t come to an agreement. But I think the accused should stand together in punishment; they are all equally guilty.”

“We can save part of a day if the summoners also waive their defense,” Noreê said, without much sign of hope. “Lernaion, what say you? Do you admit your guilt?”

“I defer to the judgement of my elder peer,” said Lernaion.

“Bleys: will you admit your guilt?”

This was the moment that horrible old man had waited for. He did not speak at first, but pretended to consider. Then he lifted his head high and cried out, “Waive my defense? I might do so for the good the Graith and the Guard, to which I have devoted the entirety of my very long life. But I will not waive, for the convenience of you, my fellow Guardians, or for the well-being of anyone in the world, my defense of the Wardlands. Everything, everything that the dedicated young vengeancer has told you is true. And it is not all. I have many secret deeds of blood and fear to my credit. I have killed—extorted—threatened—seduced—corrupted—stolen. These are crimes, if you please, if we stood in one of the courts of the unguarded lands. But we do not. All that I have done, all that I have ever done, was done to maintain the Guard.”

“Summoner Earno,” said Noreê coldly, “you may speak in your defense after you testify on the Stone—”

“Is that a threat?” shouted the red-faced old summoner. “I tell you, young Noreê, that I have come here expressly to testify on the Stone! I will speak, not in my defense, but in the defense of the Wardlands and in defense of my colleagues too shamed and bemused to speak for themselves. I have suffered; I have been beaten; I have endured night and day the torments of nightmares in that hellhole you consigned me to; I have kept the thin, fragile thread of life unbroken in my ancient body for this, and this alone: to speak and be heard where I could not be silenced! Lead me to your Witness Stone and let the Graith read the truths written in my heart!”

His voice broke on the last word. Aloê, glancing around the Long Table, saw that many of her peers were visibly moved at Bleys’ performance. That was the first time she suspected that the murderers of Earno would escape exile.

“The Stone is in its usual place,” Illion pointed out mildly. There were a few laughs at this, but most of the vocates still seemed taken with Bleys’ dramatic performance. He strode over to the dais of the Witness Stone and laboriously climbed the steps to reach it.

“You will wait for us to establish rapport with the Stone first, Summoner Bleys,” Noreê called down the Long Table.

“Take your time,” replied the great seer calmly.

Illion was standing next to the Stone: he placed a hand on it, and his eyes began to glow with rapture. He held out his other hand to Baran, who stood by him. Baran took the hand and closed his eyes. In time, he too showed the signs of visionary ascent.

It did take time, but one by one the vocates, of varying levels of skill, joined the rapport with the Stone. The only exception was Gyrla, who jumped down contemptuously without saying a word.

They were one, in the end, though all were different, and Noreê spoke in them and through them, saying, “Put your hands on the Stone, Bleys, and accept rapport.”

Bleys smiled—they felt rather than saw it—and placed one finger on the stone. Rapport was instantaneous; he was already in the visionary state.

Bleys said with his mouth, “I am innocent of Impairing the Guard. All I have done, all I have enlisted others to do, I have done to defend the Wardlands.”

They heard the words only vaguely with their ears. They knew them for truth in their hearts.

All stood separate in their shared mind for meditation then. Aloê had time to think: What he believes is true is different from what we may know to be true. He may have Impaired the Guard without intent. But she also knew that most of her case against him was already undone, irrelevant in the face of his shocking admission.

“Why did you murder Summoner Earno?” she finally found the strength to ask.

The great seer turned his attention toward her, and it seemed that she was alone with him.

“I have been waiting for someone to ask me that, my dear. Thank you. Once when I was walking the long roads in the empty lands east of the Sea of Stones, I met an odd entity, a sort of unbeing. . . .”

Aloê later learned that others had asked the same question, or a similar one, and that all the vocates had been drawn into Bleys’ meditation as if each alone was in rapport with him.

It seemed to her that she could see with his eyes, that she ached with his feet, grew short of breath and chill as shadows rose from the dusty earth of the empty lands. She knew somehow that it had been many years ago—shortly after the death of the Two Powers in Tychar.

The unbeing came upon Bleys as he was making a fire to warm himself. He sensed it with his insight. It tried to kill him with a weapon that had no name—but she recognized it. It was a kind of mist that came from nowhere and everywhere. It began to break down Bleys into his component selves, as acid breaks down a piece of meat.

But Bleys was not a piece of meat. He stepped outside of his body into vision and let his body dissolve and reform itself in the presence of the deadly fog, unconcerned with its fleshly agony.

In vision, Bleys saw-without-seeing the unbeing who attacked him.

He wove a path of vision around it in fifteen dimensions so that the unbeing was bewildered and could not dispel his mind as it was trying to dispel his body.

For a timeless time he meditated on the unbeing and its nature. Then he struck back, causing a little fog to condense in the locus where the unbeing presented itself.

The presence of physical matter distressed and excited the unbeing very much.

Bleys realized that the unbeing was the same type of entity that Aloê and Ambrosia had encountered in those same lands. (There was a side corridor of memory in Bleys’ meditation where Aloê saw herself as he saw her, and the cool, ironic lechery of his regard made her feel greasy.)

They duelled that way for a long time with weapons of being and unbeing, of making and unmaking. But eventually their duel became a kind of conversation, where actions bore symbolic meaning.

Bleys learned that the unbeing was only one element in a class of unbeings beyond the northern edge of the world. They had once been in it, but the advent of sun and of material life had driven them out in repugnance and hatred for the new-made world. The Two Powers had been fashioned as an experiment in destroying material life, but had failed because the unbeing sent to keep them in balance had succumbed to materiality.

Bleys revealed that he was a member of a class of beings, some of which had defeated the Two Powers.

The unbeing reiterated its urgent need, shared by all of its cohort, to wipe the slate of the world clean of physical life. Because it had no thought that information should be withheld, it shared various scenarios of world-cleansing.