SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 883: Cause Undetermined

The hearing sat at the eighth hour and did not rise until the lamps had been changed twice.

Ithanne convened it in the great chamber rather than the sealed one, so every faction attended and nobody could claim afterwards they'd been kept out.

Ondrek came with eleven of the Ancients. Corvyn came with Kesh at his shoulder and half his staff behind him. Maela Sorrel sat with four heads of Canal Houses and did not smile once.

The observers took the eastern wall. Trafalgar sat apart from them, in a chair in the middle of the floor.

Nobody in that room wept for the dead.

That was not their way and he hadn't expected it. What filled the chamber was colder and more dangerous.

Meraval was theirs. The gates, the rings, the whole machine of a city holding back kilometres of ocean existed because Myrrhvale built it and Myrrhvale held it. Somebody had reached inside that machine and turned it on them.

The dead were a figure. The breach was an insult.

The first four hours belonged to paper, and the paper was not kind to Rhavel Sorn.

No detention order existed anywhere in the record. Two crossings had been sealed from the sixth hour on a maintenance notice no maintenance department had issued. The rotas for that grid were cleared the same afternoon by an instruction that named nobody. Twenty-one men had gone underground with no posting order on file for one of them.

Then Kesh Varlan stood and handed over the Tide's own duty registers.

He did it without being compelled, and thoroughly. Rhavel had drawn no detail, requisitioned no transport and filed no operational notice. Every man with him had been taken off the general watch by the commander's word and nothing else.

"He acted outside his authority," Kesh said. "The fleet asks the court for no indulgence on this. Whatever he was doing, he was doing it alone."

Trafalgar watched a man surrender a subordinate with total composure and felt nothing about it except mild professional respect.

'Correct move. Rhavel's dead, so he costs nothing, and handing him over buys The Tide four hours of goodwill.'

The afternoon went differently.

Corvyn stood up around the fifth hour with nobody's notes in his hand. He didn't sound clever. He sounded like a man who had been sitting on a question since breakfast.

"Right. Can I ask the thing nobody's asking?"

"You may put a question," Ithanne said.

"Twenty-one men." He turned to face the chair in the middle of the floor. "Sixteen of them in that junction with you, by your own account. All dead. And here you are."

"That's correct."

"My people went as far as the bulkhead port and looked through it. So explain to this chamber how one man walks out of that when a commander of my fleet and sixteen soldiers don't. Self-defence usually means somebody bleeding in a corner. That isn't what this is."

The chamber noise changed. Ondrek's people were nodding.

'And that,' Trafalgar thought, 'is the only intelligent thing anybody has said all day.'

"I'm a Morgain," he said. "Trained since I could stand, and one of the few SSS Talents in this world. Your commander knew both of those things and came down with twenty men and no paperwork anyway. That should tell the chamber how certain he was of the outcome."

"It tells me you're very good at killing my people."

"It tells you he expected to win, but unfortunately, it seems you can't kill me with expectations."

Corvyn considered that for a moment and then, to his credit, nodded and sat back down.

"Then explain the dome," he said from his seat.

"It was set. Four charges, laid in sequence along the curve of the ring, and they went in order, from the junction outward. That isn't a structure failing."

"Says you."

"Says me. I watched Commander Sorn take a detonator out of his coat, and I was moving to stop him when it fired."

"Where's the detonator now?"

"Underwater, with him."

"Right." Corvyn spread his hands, not unkindly. "So you're the only living man who saw it, and the only evidence sits somewhere we can't reach for I don't know how much time. You see my difficulty."

Trafalgar saw it perfectly. He could describe the charges, the sequence, the intervals, the way the second and third tracked outward toward the dome wall. Every word of it was true, and not one word could be corroborated until that sector was dry.

For the first time since he arrived in this city, he had no paper at all.

"Call the second observer," Ithanne said.

Toran walked out to the floor with the stiffness of a man who has dreaded something all day and is relieved to have arrived at it. He gave his name for the record, Ithanne wrote it down, and Corvyn sat back in his chair.

"You were present at a reception days before these events," Ithanne said. "Describe what you heard."

Toran described it, in order and without ornament.

Lord Morgain had been talking with Aldis Brenn of the Canal Houses about the glass consignment for the fourth ring domes.

Brenn said the shipment came through the north locks during a closure. Brenn said nothing moves through a sealed sector unless the fleet signs for it. Brenn said that in the year in question it happened constantly, and everyone paid.

"And Lord Morgain's response?"

"He said he'd take Brenn's word for it. Then he talked about the weather for an hour."

Toran paused, and then kept going without being asked.

"If it helps the court, I've been at nearly every official function with him since he arrived. That's my job and I've done it properly. We stand at the edge of the room together and we watch, and we talk about what we're watching, and that's all either of us has ever done. I've never seen him do anything an observer shouldn't."

Somebody at the back of the chamber shifted.

Corvyn's people tried to have the reception set aside. A misheard exchange at a party. So Ithanne called Aldis Brenn.

Brenn stood on that floor with every faction in Meraval watching and confirmed every line, because there was nothing else he could do with Toran sitting eight feet away. He looked ill by the end of it.

"Then the record shows this," Ithanne said. "Before he was taken underground without an order, the Morgain observer was told in public that cargo moved through sealed sectors on Tide authorisation. Whatever else is unclear tonight, Commander Sorn had reason to want that line of enquiry closed."

The ruling came late, with the lamps low.

On the detention: unlawful, without order or authority. On the assault: initiated by Sorn's command, and Trafalgar du Morgain's response fell within self-defence in every particular. No charge would lie against him, and none would be heard.

On the dome, Ithanne chose her words with care.

"The cause of the breach cannot be determined until the sector is recovered. This court finds it undetermined. It does not find it accidental, and it does not find it attributable to any person present."

Which was not an acquittal, and everybody in that chamber knew it.

Trafalgar walked out a free man, into a corridor where half the people he passed didn't look at him and the other half looked too long.

Zafira was waiting at the end of it with her arms folded, and she had clearly been standing there a while.