Aldric Thornmoor's Arc

Chapter 15 of 16

The clerk's pen scratched, asking who would speak for the accused. Aldric turned toward the guilty councilor's bench and found it empty. Two guards stood at the ends of nothing. The councilor was gone. A side curtain still swung where he had slipped through during the reading. Aldric knew where he was going. If he reached his supporters before the council convened, coin would decide the verdict, not the record. Aldric could not shout a warning. He had no voice. He grabbed Wanda's sleeve and pointed. Wanda read the empty bench in one glance. "He ran. He'll buy the vote." She was already moving toward the curtain. "The record means nothing if his friends are paid before they sit." Lyra spoke from her copper basin. "He came through the east passage. It bends once. Take the bend and you meet him." She did not lift her head. "Go now." Aldric ran. Wanda kept pace, her charred hands loose at her sides. The passage was narrow and cold, lit by weak lamps. Ahead, footsteps slapped stone. The councilor's shape appeared at the bend, a fold of papers clutched to his chest. He saw Aldric and stopped. "You have no standing here," the councilor said. "You have no voice. Step aside." Aldric did not step aside. He could not answer, so he did the one thing his training left him. He drew a breath into the trained pit of his chest and forced sound through the curse. It came out as a raw, tearing note, not words, but loud. It rang off the stone and carried back down the passage into the chamber behind them. The void chef poured out of the dark, its starry body low along the floor. Its bright eyes fixed on the papers. "Favors," it said. "Signed. I can taste ink from a room away. Tuesday's ink. Bribes drying." It looped once around the councilor's feet, blocking the passage. "You are not going anywhere with those." Guards came through at the sound Aldric had made. They saw the councilor pinned against the wall, a fistful of signed favors pressed to his chest. Wanda plucked the papers from his hands before he could tear them. She held them up to the lamplight so the guards could read the names. "Bribes," Wanda said. "Written today. Every name he meant to buy." The eldest councilor arrived last, breathing hard. He took the papers. He read them. His thin voice did not stumble this time. "These enter the record too," he said. The guards closed on the councilor's arms and turned him back toward the chamber. Aldric leaned against the cold wall. His throat burned from the sound he had forced out. It had not been words. It had not returned his voice. But it had been loud, and it had turned the guards around, and the verdict could not be bought now. The council would decide on the record alone. His title still hung out of reach. The bribe did not.