The Assembly had gone silent for Ruvuk's petition. Bastien's hand was closed around my sleeve.
Was he doing it to stop me? To ask me to think? To show his support?
I gave him the moment.
Ruvuk trusted me. My men were alive because of it instead of in a shallow grave. If I did nothing now, if I let my hand stay closed and empty in my pocket and let Ruvuk finish the breath he was drawing, that trust would remain and I and my men could go on living.
Doing nothing bought them that much, but not freedom.
Heliqar would go on not mattering, not today and not in any tomorrow Ruvuk cared about. Eventually Ruvuk's army would take it. My parents would never know what happened to us after the message from Danio. If they even got that message. Somewhere in a city I would never see again, Bastien's daughter would grow up, first as a free person, then as a Carthian slave, then as a Helot. I couldn't know how long those phases would last, but they would happen.
After this moment, I was out of options. I would be swept entirely by the winds of fate outside of my control. No one was coming to save me.
If I obeyed Ruvuk, I lived while I was useful.
If I betrayed him, we might have a chance, however slight, of going home.
I didn't have my men's consent to gamble their lives on this. Nor could I obtain it. I wavered.
Then I felt Bastien on my sleeve. Not pulling away. Just steadying.
I reached into the white Truth Stone. I asked for the truth itself, unshaped by any carefully worded question. I did not know if it would work.
Ruvuk was across the floor, mid-breath, already turning back toward the dais.
I asked it the only question I used with it. "What is your purpose, right now?" Then I did the one thing I had managed only once before on purpose. I pushed the answer out toward everyone in the room, out toward five hundred Hoplites who had no idea a question was even being asked.
My jaw locked around the effort of it. My hand went rigid enough that I would find the print of the stone's edges in my palm for days after. For one endless half-second nothing came. I had spent everything I had demanding a thing the stone might not be able to do with so large an audience.
Then it gave.
I do not know how else to describe what happened to time. Do you know what it is like in that fraction of a second before you fall? When your body already understands what's happening and your mind still wants to argue and find a way out? That is as close as I can describe it.
They saw neither his thoughts nor his speech. No rhetoric that he had spent years rehearsing for. Just his destination. His life's goal.
They saw the Strategoi already sentenced. Executed. Their bodies displayed as criminals, demonstrating what happens to those who betray the Iron Code. There were the High Tribunal members along side them, their seats vacant, awaiting a full board of the Council of Strategoi to be elected by the Grand Assembly to appoint them.
The head of the Legate was on a pike taller than all of them. A symbol of the world made right.
Blood ran down the streets of every city of the world. Both of the conquering Hoplites and of the conquered.
They saw the leash to Olympos cut. The Pyramids that had stood since the founding of the world coming down course by course, smoke climbing into clouds that never left the mountain, its people walked out in chains down the Via Triumphus, the Imperial Palace carried off stone by stone.
Burning, it was the price of bringing the world to its knees. Ruvuk didn't flinch, he embraced it.
No lies in any of it. No embellishment. I had asked the stone for the truth and it had given it whole, to five hundred minds at once, for the first time in its existence or mine.
When the vision ended, I was still looking at Ruvuk. His eyes wider than I'd ever seen them. He knew what had happened.
Every man in the hall had seen his vision for the future. Ruvuk could not stop it. He could not shape it into something he could survive. There was no explaining it away with rhetoric. Twelve years of his patient construction was gone in less time than it had taken him to draw the breath he meant to spend on his petition.
Behind his eyes there was something I had seem before. The same recalibration as when he saw me with the Justice Stone for the first time. This time, the recalibration was compressed into a fraction of a second, because there was no time left to spare.
He understood before I did what was in front of him. The Assembly was not divided anymore. Not leaning gently in one direction.
Nobody moved. The silence lasted only a heartbeat.