“No, I think I have an idea,” Adrian said slowly. “But I need some time for it to work.”
One of Lady Redvers’ maids came back into the alcove where the brothers sat. “Oh, Esmond, I was so frightened—” she began, speaking a pure upper-class Emerald.
Then she saw Adrian, and froze. Esmond went defiantly to her side and took her hand. “Brother, this is Nanya. Formerly of a citizen family of Penburg.”
Adrian bowed gravely; Penburg had been sacked after a revolt six years ago, while Wilder Redvers had been governor of Solinga Province. Every adult male sent to the pole, the rest sold into slavery. His eyebrow lifted: Do you know the risks you’re taking? it signaled. If Lady Redvers found out . . . being flogged to death was the best Nanya could expect. Killing a free resident of Solinga like Esmond wouldn’t be legal . . . but that wouldn’t stop the lady, and she’d get away with it, too.
“And, when the gods allow, my wife,” Esmond went on.
Nanya looked up at him with adoration, her large brown eyes going soft. Adrian closed his eyes. Give me strength.
We will, son, Raj’s voice spoke silently.
* * *
Vanbert’s law courts had grown with the city. The highest of them—the Assembly Courts of Appeal—were housed in a new marble complex not far from the Temple of the Dual God, on the Spring Hill. The building was in an exaggerated form of the classic Emerald style, adapted to the needs of Confederate legal institutions. Two square blocks on either side held long halls where advocates, clients and hangers-on could walk and speak and deal; they were plain as Emerald temples, surrounded by giant columns supporting a Confederate invention, a barrel-vaulted roof. That was coffered and gilded, and tall windows ran around the eaves just below it. Even on a cloudy winter’s day like this the light diffused off the hammered gold leaf in a shadowless glow, lighting the pale marble of walls and column and floor.
Joining the two halls to make a square C-shape was a connecting bar, with a covered amphitheater in its center. Juries in Confederate cases were huge—in theory any citizen could sit, although the requirement for a purifying sacrifice excluded the poor—and they sat below the advocates and judges, like spectators at a games fight. Adrian had often thought that the comparison had merit on more levels than one; though more subtle, the clash of wit and quotation below was just as savage as sword and spear, or tusk and fang. The expressions on the jurors were similar too. Except that nobody was paid to attend the games, while jurors received a stipend, not counting bribes of money or patronage.
An important case could be almost as expensive as a municipal election.
Adrian gathered his plain white mantle around him and strode towards the low symbolic metal fence that surrounded the sun disk inlaid in mosaic on the floor of the court. The acoustics were wonderful; he could hear whispered conversations on the top benches, and even sleepy belches from the inevitable seedy hangers-on taking a nap.
A man with a ceremonial whip and axe stopped him at the entrance. “If you come to speak, proclaim your citizenship,” he said in a bored voice; his equipment was meant to indicate the magistrates’ power to punish and kill, but it had been a long time since they were used on the spot.
“I come not to speak, but to speak the words of another,” Adrian said, pitching his voice in the way Center had trained him to do. The computer had also eliminated the last trace of the soft Emerald accent; now his voice had the slow, crisp vowels of a native Confederate—the upper-class city dialect, at that.
“Pass, then,” the usher said.
Adrian advanced, his soft kidskin sandals noiseless, and made a deep bow before the panel of judges. They were all older men today, he saw, seamed hard faces with tufts of chinbeard and disapproving eyes.
“This seems to be in order,” the senior magistrate said, examining the scroll which deputized Adrian to speak for a citizen advocate. “I suppose we have to let the little Emerald speak. I don’t know what Vanbert is coming to. A girl costs more than a sword, a pretty boy more than a tract of land, a jug of imported fish sauce more than a good plow team, and they let foreigners speak in the courts of law where Confederate gentlemen once showed their mettle. They’ll be allowing them into the army next. Go on, Emerald, go on.”