The heartbeat ended and the noise resumed: breath let out that had been held too long, boots shifting against stone, a bench creaking somewhere above me as a Hoplite who had gone rigid remembered how to sit.
Ruvuk had not planned this. I had finally managed to surprise him. His recalibration happened remarkably fast. When he spoke, he dropped the sound of well-rehearsed verbiage.
"You have just seen what I really am. What I really want for us."
He took a breath.
"There is no more reason to argue whether I am an honest man or a dangerous one. You've seen what is underneath every charge I have brought before this Tribunal, underneath every sentence I have worked ceaselessly for twelve years to bring to you. I did not choose to show you. I would not have chosen it, given the choice. But it has been shown, and I will not stand on this floor and tell you that we are smaller than what we saw."
Nobody answered him. Even Xotok was still silent.
"You saw the Code's work complete." He said it plainly. "Finished, for the first time since Xondor wrote it. The whole world kneeling, exactly as it was promised to the first Hoplite who ever swore the oath every one of you swore at seven years old. You saw Olympos finally in its proper place. That is not empty ambition. That is your birthright, shown completely to you."
My goal was for the room to stay undecided, evenly divided. But I felt it lean toward him again, and understood, with a cold drop in my stomach, that he was turning this to his advantage rather than his ruin. Framing his own ambition as inheritance, and asking five hundred witnesses to feel the same pride he felt, was a dangerously persuasive thing to watch.
"You have spent your lives training for this," he said. "Every one of you was raised on the promise that the whole world was owed to you. And while you did that, the Empire that fears you has spent generations buying this Tribunal's patience. A Hoplite is forbidden even to want wine, spice, or dyed cloth. Yet these men paid for them with grain we never needed to sell, so that decades more could go by without Xondor's vision being fulfilled." He paused. "I have just shown you, against my own intention, what a leader who was never bought can do."
Then he asked them the only question he had left. "So tell me who you want leading you. The one who takes his wine and calls it peace. Or the one who finishes what Xondor started."
Real silence, this time. Each of them waited to learn who would move first, and what it would cost the one who did.
Watching it, I understood how badly I had misjudged the effect of the Truth Stone on the Grand Assembly.
Ruvuk did not hesitate. He turned to the platform where the Legate sat in gaudy white and gold.
"Ask him," Ruvuk said, "how many years his own merchants have bought this Tribunal's comfort with wine and spice, in exchange for grain his own granaries never once required. Ask him why an Empire that needs nothing from us has spent two generations keeping our leaders fed on luxury instead. Ask him whether Olympos has ever once, in a thousand years, been asked to kneel to anyone." He did not raise his voice, and that was worse than if he had. "When this Assembly decides Olympos no longer stands over us, I will be the hand that finishes it. Gladly. Xondor did not found this Code so his sons could spend a thousand years asking permission to exist."
For such a corpulent man, I was surprised how quickly the Legate came to his feet. His chair scraped the length of the dais. He had seen his own head in that vision, and he did not need Ruvuk to confirm it. Around him, the Imperial Legionnaires of his escort closed toward him, hands finding hilts. If I had to guess, this was something that had not happened in this hall in hundreds of years.
The Legate's fear triggered the assembly. Dozens of delegates were on their feet. They shouted things that did not agree with each other. All shouted at once. The Strategoi rose along their whole tier like a single animal. On the dais, the High Tribunal was calling futilely for order in voices that had never needed to be loud before.
Finally Xotok stood and found his voice. He had been trying, and this time the hall gave him enough silence to be heard. "Seize him!" He pointed at Ruvuk.
Ruvuk did not resist the guards closing on him. He turned to meet them with his hands open at his sides. When he spoke it was not to the men reaching for him but past them, to the hall.
"They are proving me right. I gave you truth. They answer it with murder."
It was not murder yet. But the word was already moving faster than the fact of it, and his own men surged toward the dais on the strength of that single word alone, closing around him before Xotok's guards could close the gap. What could have been an orderly arrest became something without order at all.
Every eye in that hall was on Ruvuk now. Not on the stone. Not on me.
It was exactly what I needed.
Bastien's hand closed around my arm, hard enough to hurt, and this time he did not wait for me to notice it before he moved.
"We're leaving."
"The others—" The words cut out before I could finish.
"That's where we're going." He was already hauling me toward the tier where the rest of the crew stood under guard, and he didn't slow down to see whether I understood. My feet had already decided to follow him.