Chapter 19 - Predicament (Patreon)

The interrogation room was surprisingly spacious and well decorated. A copy of the letter sat on the table. A man wearing the pauldrons and striped tabard of a captain was reading a copy of another of the identical letters.

“Captain Mandez? Here she is,” one of the guards escorting her said.

“Hm? Good. Have a seat, Mirian.”

Mirian sat. Captain Mandez was silent as the other guard left and shut the door behind them. She heard it lock and expected Mandez to start interrogating her, but he was silent. She looked around the room. There was a nice vase in the style favored by Palendurio artisans, and the two glyph lights illuminating the room were of the latest design. The table was a nice polished oak, and the carpet an import from Akana Praediar. It had the sparse, simple designs they favored. Mirian thought it was ugly. She much preferred the complex geometric designs of the carpets out in east Baracuel.

Captain Mandez set the letter down at looked calmly at Mirian. Mirian’s heart was beating out of control and her hands were trembling. Gods, how had she been so stupid? Of course there was a simpler explanation for ‘predicted a murder’ than prophesy, and that was ‘did the murder.’

“So, did you ever figure out who was breaking into all the Academy buildings?” Mirian asked.

“I don’t know,” the man said casually. “Why don’t you tell me?”

“Akana Praediar spies,” she said.

“Ah. Of course.” The captain smiled at the letter in his hand that mentioned the Akanan attack in five days. Then he was quiet again.

“Aren’t you supposed to ask me questions?” she said.

“Sure. What would you like me to ask you?”

“How about ‘did you do it?’”

“Did you kill Platus?”

“No.”

Captain Mandez gave a sad smile again. “I find that quite hard to believe.” He sat there, staring at her again.

“I don’t actually have anything to hide. I’ve never been to the room. Didn’t interact with Platus except in the dueling room. I knew he would die because it happened last time, just like the attack happened last time. Probably, it was one of the spies that killed him because he knew something. If you act now and start evacuating Torrviol, call in the Baracuel Army, you’ll save thousands of lives. Maybe more, I don’t know how it ends. But no witness or evidence will tie me to that room. The Gods gave me a prophesy. I don’t know why, but I have to try to stop what’s coming.”

Captain Mandez lounged back in his chair. It was a nice, cushioned chair, dyed a rich blue. “I have two witnesses who will testify they saw you enter the building in the morning.”

Mirian’s heart raced. “That’s a lie,” she snapped.

Mandez leaned back farther and knocked on the door behind him. The guard entered. “Did you see Mirian enter the Alchemistry building this morning?”

“Yes, sir,” the guard said.

“Very good.” The guard closed the door. Mandez leaned forward. “That’s the eye-witness testimony of a sworn officer of the king’s justice. We both know you did it. Give me the details, sign a confession, and I’ll tell the magistrate you’re a sympathetic figure. Driven mad by… something, I suppose, and after a few years of hard labor and treatment by the clerics for whatever ails that mind of yours, you’ll be able to live out the rest of your life. Not in peace, mind you, that guilty conscious will follow you wherever you go. But the alternative is execution.”

It was supposed to scare Mirian. And it did. But it also made her angry. “Officers of the law aren’t supposed to lie before a magistrate! When my letters went out, there was a reason I didn’t give the guards one. Are you corrupt, or just incompetent and lazy!?”

Mandez was unfazed by this outburst. “How many of these letters did you write?”

Mirian narrowed her eyes. “And why would you care? That doesn’t affect the case at all!”

He gave a dramatic sigh and stood up. “Oh, just idle curiosity. Well, when you’re ready to tell the truth, let me know. I’m going to… go have lunch.” He knocked on the door again. “Throw her in the cell. Not gently.”

“I am telling the truth. You just can’t handle it! Fucking incompetent bastards, if you were doing your job you would have caught the Akanan spies and prevented this disaster!” As the guard dragged her down the corridor, Mirian shouted, “The blood of the innocent is on your hands!”

When the door was closed on her cell—which was not nearly as nice, it contained a chamber pot, a cot, and a tiny barred window—Mirian finally cried. They’d searched her and confiscated all her things—her notebook, her glyph pen, her writing supplies, even her coat!

She sat on the filthy cot and cried more, feeling sorry for herself. She’d ruined it all. She’d been given a second chance, and not only was the attack going to still kill everyone, if she did manage to escape, her reputation and career was going to be over. She’d be expelled from the Academy, her family would be disappointed, and Platus had died for nothing. And when the attack came, she wouldn’t even have the spellrod she’d designed just for that purpose! The Gods had wasted their time on her. Mirian punched the stone wall, which hurt a lot, and didn’t really make her feel any better.

A few hours later, she’d cried enough and was starting to get both bored and hungry. “Hey, do prisoners get food and water, or are you also violating the king’s decree on the fair treatment of the accused?” she yelled through the door.

The answer, apparently, was ‘yes.’ The door was solid oak, reinforced with metal bands and, she guessed, strengthening glyphs and wards on the other side. She used the chamber pot to pee, and instantly regretted it. The smell permeated the whole smell, and the tiny window did nothing to alleviate it. Then, she spent some time thinking about how she had promised to teach Selesia again today and then go have dinner. She’d been looking forward to that. Now she’d screwed that up. There was nothing to do and no one to talk to, so Mirian stewed in self-hatred for a bit before she tried to distract herself. She started passing the time by reciting magichemicals and their formula, then got bored of that and went through all the myrvites she knew and what special organs they had, then got bored of that and noticed it was getting dark.

Mirian pounded on the door again. “Even prisoners get a meal and water! King’s decree! Even a child at primary school knows that!”

Still no response. There wasn’t even a blanket on the cot. This was Torrviol, not some frontier dungeon! What was wrong with these guards? They were just straight up violating the king’s law.
The smell of piss may not have been able to escape the room, but the winter chill easily made its way in. Mirian didn’t sleep at all, she just spent the night curled up on the nasty cot, shivering.
She was exhausted and miserable as the sky brightened, and she kept drifting off to sleep then immediately waking up wracked with cold, teeth chattering. And she was thirsty. Gods she was thirsty, she hadn’t had anything to drink since the morning before her first class!

Finally, the door opened. A woman dressed in a thick red coat, decorated with gold embroidery, looked down at her. “Captain Mandez, what in the five hells are you doing?” she said, and it took Mirian a moment in her sleep-deprived haze, to realize she wasn’t the one being yelled at.

“Hm, must have been an oversight,” he said.

“It wasn’t,” Mirian whispered hoarsely. She wasn’t sure if the woman—clearly the magistrate of Torrviol—had heard her.

“She’s a student of the Academy. We are not barbarians, Vicent. Does the king’s law mean nothing to you?”

“It was an oversight,” the captain said. “I’ll see it’s fixed. Even murderers get fair treatment, right?”

The magistrate’s voice got cold. “It will be my office that determines that. Do not overstep yourself. Are we clear?”

Captain Mandez looked bored by the whole thing. “Of course, your honor.”

After that, Mirian got water, food, and a blanket, though she was sure they’d chosen the nastiest wool blanket they could fine, and the stalest bread. She ate it all ravenously, then slept.

***

The days passed, and Mirian got increasingly more frustrated. Occasionally, one of the guards would stop by and ask her if she wanted to confess. None of it worked the way she’d learned in secondary school. Investigators were supposed to get at the truth, not try to force confessions on people! She’d seen that one guard talking with the Akanan spy before she was sent back, and that first guard she’d talked to hadn’t reported the obviously suspicious thing up the chain. Now she had all the validation in the world that she’d been right to trust her instincts. Was it really the entire Torrviol guard in on it? At least the magistrate wasn’t also conspiring. Probably.

On Secondday, the day before the attack, Mirian went to her cell window. She clasped the bars—which were freezing—and pulled herself up so she could see what was going on. People were just walking about like normal in the street she could see. She could just make out people fishing at the cleverly named Torrviol Lake, and a few people weeding the farm fields on the edge of town.

Mirian tried shouting at someone, but they didn’t even start. When she looked closer, she found, to her dismay, there were tiny glyphs preventing the movement of sound through the open window. That was just needlessly cruel. Installing a glass pane was twice as cheap and then it would keep the room warmer! By then, her arms were trembling from the effort of holding herself up, so she dropped down.

The cell was, like most of the things in Torrviol, hundreds of years old. They hadn’t bothered to wash the sheets on the cot—something had been busy biting her in the night, and she itched fiercely—but that also meant they’d been too lazy to take proper care of the walls. Professor Holvatti would be so disappointed in them for ignoring natural erosion.

She found a place in the stone wall where the mortar was missing and cracks lined the stone. She smashed that corner with her boot until a piece chipped off the wall, then dragged her cot over so she could stand and reach the window. It didn’t take much to break the key glyph in the sequence. All of a sudden, the sounds of the world poured into the cell. She was annoyed at herself for not realizing the sound-ward was in place sooner. No wonder no one had responded to her shouting.

Mirian started shouting. “The Akanans attack tomorrow! Torrviol must be evacuated!” She kept this up for some time before a guard finally entered the room and told her to shut up. She’d seen him before, though still didn’t know his name. He was the taller, muscular man with a short, well trimmed beard. She’d seen him plenty of times on patrol, and now several times when her food—well, slop, really—was delivered.

“Charge me with disturbing the peace,” she said. “Put me before the magistrate. I’ll confess to that crime before her.”

The guard slapped her in the face, hard, which send her stumbling back, clenching her jaw.

A fury rose in her. She clenched her jaw, then said, “Fine. Tell Captain Mandez I’ll confess to the murder if he puts me before the magistrate. I’ll tell her and her only.”

The guard didn’t say anything, he just closed the door and left.

Mirian went back to screaming at passersby, only she added in that the guards were corrupt and violating the king’s justice decrees. After a few hours, she’d screamed herself hoarse and sat back on her cot, thinking.

It was dark by the time the guard she’d talked to entered her cell again. “Will you shut up,” he snapped.

“Is the magistrate ready for me?”

“I haven’t talked to the magistrate,” he said.

“It’s been four and a half days, and I haven’t even been properly interviewed. Produce any evidence that I—”

“Shut up,” the guard said again, and raised his hand threateningly.

Mirian recoiled, but then said, “Where’s Captain Mandez?”

The guard didn’t say anything. Something was bothering him.

There was exactly one piece of evidence even tying her to Platus. “Where’s the letters I wrote?”

The guard still didn’t say anything, but by the muscles twitching in his face and the way he glared at her, she knew that had something to do with it.

A realization struck her. “He ran, didn’t he?” Mirian suddenly wondered if Nicolus knew. That was twice now he vanished without a trace. Nicolus was well connected. Had other well-connected people started fleeing? She said, “I recognize you. You patrol between the station and the market. You watch the train depart. How many other people have run?”

There was a silence as the man ground his teeth. Then he said, “Word is the Baracuel Army is on its way. The train has been commandeered for that purpose. No one is leaving town anymore.”

Finally! After all this time, she was vindicated. “You have to order the evacuation of Torrviol. Get people moving south along the cart path. There’s still time.”

“I don’t have that authority.”

“No one with any authority has done shit,” Mirian spat. “The governor, the commander of Fort Aegrimere, the Archmage, the professors, no one. You think they’ll start now? Tell the magistrate what you know. Tell the mayor.”

“The other guards… look, I trust the captain,” the guard said. “They want to wait for his word.”

“What’s your name?” she asked. The conversation had turned weird. It was like the guard was looking for permission from her to act.

“Roland,” he said. “Look, the captain’s last order was that you stay locked up. I’ll talk to the other guards. Give us… give me a few more hours.”

“Baracuel needs you,” she said. After he closed the door again she muttered, “I’ll just wait here then, shall I? Prophets, I wish they’d change out the chamber pot.”

Eventually, she slept. She woke with a start. There was some sort of commotion outside the jail. She raised herself up to see, but dawn had only just started to lighten the sky, and everyone was wearing cloaks to ward away the chill of the winter morning.

The door suddenly burst open. The guard—Roland, Mirian remembered—said, “You’re free.” He looked scared. He shoved a wrapped bundle at her that included her cloak and other things, then left the door open.

The jail and the adjoining guard headquarters were deserted. Everyone, it turned out, was outside.

“Mirian!” she heard someone say.

When she turned, it was Lily. Next to here were Selesia and Xipuatl.

“Gods it’s good to see you all,” she said.