Blindfold

Beside him, Maximillian loomed tall and stiff, ready to block anyone who approached his master too closely, though Dokken preferred to remain camouflaged within the crowd. He didn’t want Tharion or the others to know he had come to see Troy Boren brought before the Truthsayer.

Dokken wanted to watch the crowd, see how they reacted. He enjoyed observing how all the threads tangled together. He had begun to calculate the earliest possible time when he could disappear for a few weeks on another sojourn. He felt tired already.

“Behind schedule,” Maximillian said, glancing at his chronometer.

Dokken pursed his lips. “Don’t be such a slave to time.”

“Plenty to do back at the villa,” Maximillian pointed out. “Another shipment of pine logs coming in this afternoon. And there seems to be some problem with the fish farm. Your presence has been requested to check it out.”

“Yes, yes,” Dokken said impatiently. “Let’s just watch the show and see how much they think they know.”

Maximillian’s expression was flat and unreadable. “They know nothing about what I did.”

“Of course not,” Dokken said. “I certainly wouldn’t bring you here if they did.” He raised his head as the ship doors opened.

The hapless prisoner stumbled out in chains, escorted by the elite guard. Dokken scrutinized this lanky man who moved like a pigeon. Troy Boren was fidgety and nervous, his hair curly brown, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as he swallowed repeatedly.

“They think he killed Cialben?” Dokken breathed a short laugh. “That’s funny. He doesn’t look like he has enough courage even to harvest vegetables.”

Maximillian nodded with no change of expression. “You never can tell,” he said. “Sometimes people surprise you.”

v

Troy stood alone on the open platform above the crowd. His hands and ankles were wrapped in firm bindings, though he wondered where they expected him to run, how they thought he might attempt to escape. He shivered.

Above, the sky was a bowl of clouds the color of cast lead. Stray breezes hurled the mutters of the crowd toward him like a slap in the face. Troy hunched his shoulders, trying to appear small. He didn’t want all these people staring at him. He had never wanted to call attention to himself, just to do his job and make a living, maybe help his family’s situation improve.

The noise of the audience rose higher, and he realized what their hopes were. They wanted him to be found guilty. They were eager to see another criminal sentenced. They would be disappointed when he was found innocent.

Troy did not dare look out across the crowd. His family was probably out there, watching for him. He knew they would resent having to stay several days in First Landing; they didn’t have the money to afford such luxuries. He would try to make it up to them—especially Leisa—once all this was over. A new blanket for the baby, perhaps, or special confections from a sweetshop. Even Rissbeth would enjoy that.

The sol-pol elite guards stood back at the edge of the platform, keeping order through intimidation. Troy remembered the guard asking him if he had a guilty conscience, and he tried to clear his thoughts and think straight—but now the idea of guilt had fixed itself rigidly in his mind.

He knew he was innocent, but that meant the real killer was still on the loose. Troy had stumbled upon the body of the murdered man … there had been so much blood. If he had arrived an hour earlier—even fifteen minutes—the killer might have caught him as well. Troy shuddered. If only he hadn’t botched those manifest sheets in the first place. If only he hadn’t gone back to fix his mistake, creating an even bigger error in the process. He had changed what would have been a private (though still disastrous) reprimand into a murder trial.

The image danced across his mind: the dead body, eyes wide, two capsules of the Veritas drug, the wound where the blade had stabbed between the ribs and up into the heart.

And the blood. The dark blood spreading across the concrete floor.

So much blood!

Troy squeezed his eyes shut. He just wanted this entire ordeal to end. He gulped, hunched down even further, and waited for the Truthsayer to come out and free him.

vi

The promenade doors to Guild Headquarters split open, leaving Kalliana to stand in their center. A thin fingernail of cold breeze scraped along her white cotton robe. She straightened her green sash around her narrow waist. Her translucent skin flushed in the chill air as she stepped barefoot toward the plaza. The gold ceremonial collar felt heavy on her shoulders.

She saw the crowd, saw the accused, and was reminded again of Eli Strone—but this skinny young man looked so different, so quiet and lost, like a terrified waif. He insisted he was not guilty. However, Strone had also been certain of his own innocence, convinced that he had done nothing wrong. A Truthsayer could not judge on the basis of outward appearances. Because Troy Boren looked so unlikely, he seemed paradoxically more suspect.

Kalliana came forward and waited as one of the Guild chanters listed the case and the details, describing the crime of which Troy had been accused. As the chanter summarized, the crowd booed and jeered. Kalliana frowned. They needed to be reminded that the accused was innocent until she pronounced him guilty.

If she pronounced him guilty.

She came forward, an angel in white, holding the power of this man’s life in her hands. She received one of the sky-blue capsules of Veritas from its ornate brass-and-copper box, the small pill that protected Atlas from the deceptions of criminals. She popped it into her mouth, cracked it, and swallowed, taking a deep breath.

“If you’re innocent,” she said to Troy Boren, “you need not fear the truth.”

He drew a quick breath and answered in a quiet voice that no one else could hear. “I’m not afraid,” he said. “I am innocent.”

Kalliana tried not to show that fear engulfed her as well. She hoped that her exposure to Strone hadn’t set up echoes in her mind that might dampen her telepathic abilities. She felt the power of the Veritas surging through her, but she had difficulty focusing her thoughts.

Kalliana reached out and placed both of her hands flat against Troy’s temples. She closed her eyes as he blinked up at her like a wounded and confused animal.

She worked to sharpen her truthsaying ability into a usable tool, then went inside Troy’s thoughts, tentative and skittish. She brushed the surface of his memories, unwilling to go deep—and there she found it sitting like a black stain on the top of his mind: a guilt, a fear.

She probed deeper, feeling herself stiffen and grow even more wary, afraid to see—but it was her duty. She was a Truthsayer. She had to see.

She looked into Troy’s memories for just a glance, a snatch, a vision—

—and saw the sprawled body, saw the blood, heard the scream echoing in his mind. My God, there was so much blood.

The body lying there in the dim orange light.

The blood.

The overpowering guilt.

Kalliana froze, trembling until her shuddering became so violent she could not go deeper. She didn’t have the strength to probe for clearer details of the actual murder, but the answer was obvious to her. Too obvious.

She pulled back, jerking her hands away and cried out in a hoarse gasp. “Guilty,” she said. “Guilty!”

Troy’s face drained completely of blood. “No,” he whispered. “You’re wrong.”

But Kalliana staggered away, hiding from him. She did not wish to see any more. “Guilty,” she said again, then fled into Guild Headquarters, to safety.

vii

Guild Master Tharion leaped to his feet as the crowd yelled.

“That can’t be right,” he mouthed, but caught himself before saying it out loud, knowing the terrible consequences if he, the Guild Master, accused a Truthsayer of making a faulty judgment, of distorting the truth … of finding an innocent man guilty! That simply could not occur. On Atlas it would never happen. The Guild would fall apart if the faith of the public faltered.

Qrista grasped his wrist and squeezed so tightly that her fingernails bit into his skin. Tharion looked down at her, his face devastated. How would he be able to remedy this? He couldn’t announce that he knew Kalliana’s judgment was in error. He couldn’t admit how he knew.

“You can’t let this happen,” Qrista said, her words stabbing like knives.

“I can’t do anything about it,” Tharion said. “Not at the moment.”

He looked up to see a pair of familiar figures in the crowd: bald Maximillian, then Franz Dokken with his blond hair and ageless face. Both Dokken and his manservant looked bewildered by the outcome, and Tharion wondered what could have gone wrong. Had Kalliana intentionally given a false verdict? Was she involved in the black market sales somehow? He realized that someone in the Guild might be a link—but Kalliana? The possibilities swam in his mind, making him dizzy.