It occurs to me I've not been putting up Trochiabite Boy episodes lately, and people seem to enjoy them, so here's the latest first half a chapter or so. When I check my page 99 site, people keep giving this story good votes, so yay about that.
CHAPTER 25: The Trial
Jallin only barely got to know any of the people held in this peculiar prison. Every day at noon, someone came into the grassy courtyard and announced they wanted someone to go with them. It seemed a complete lottery as to who they would call for and how many and whether or not the crimes committed were related. Mallini and Gelzor were gone suddenly and nowhere to be found. What puzzled Jallin more than anything was the fact he could not say how people came and went from this place. They entered through one cell on one day, and left through another, with no apparent doorways or openings to allow them entrance or exit. Jallin had been in several of the cells and pressed against the back most walls. He’d even tried digging some of the bricks out, managing only to bend a couple of his fingernails backwards and scrape his fingertips.
They came and went only out of unoccupied cells, but how they knew which were unoccupied at the time Jallin could only assume was magic of some kind, perhaps something similar to the magic in the house where he was arrested.
Because all the people Jallin had spoken with were gone now, Jallin didn’t bother making friends with any more people; they would leave or he would leave soon enough. He watched them though from the edge of whichever cell he picked for himself that day. A big kinto-shah with one ear was marched in and immediately removed the next day. A kunjel in big heavy gauntlets, called rage gauntlets, lurked in the corner for three days, and Jallin moved his quarters as far away as possible from him. He was a wayward, likely arrested for going into a rage in public. Jallin was surprised he wasn’t killed for it outright.
Instead, he spent his time waiting to be fed and pondering what sort of defense he would give for his actions. What exactly had he been caught doing? Robbery? Consorting with trochiabite wizards? What would happen if he confessed to such things? Would they try him as a slave if Counselor Dursus had papers on him? Should he even mention the trochiabites? Would they find out anyway?
He’d heard somewhere, maybe from Stasser before he died, that if a person confessed to things, they would be treated better. He’d heard they would not throw him into the dark dungeons far under ground where people became blind animals. They would merely reprimand him and send him back to his master, wouldn’t they?
The more he thought about all of these things, the sicker he felt inside. Legends circulated about Sarkoshian courts. He didn’t remember who it was, but someone he’d heard talking said they made people confess things without the accused even knowing they were on trial. They could make a person torture themselves until they were willing to say anything to anyone about anything.
Putrights could drain out a person’s mind, read it like a book from a library, then toss it away and give the person a new brain. They could lock a soul in jars and use the soul’s desires to escape to power machines. They could torture a mind, send it into labyrinths of insanity, and force it to live in a world filled with the soul’s deepest fears and horrors.
And he’d heard worse.
If they found out he was a trochiabite, associated with the temple and hospital, he would know nothing for the rest of his days but terror.
When they called his name, he didn’t respond the first time. Nor the second. Nor the third. It wasn’t until they sent a gremlin to look for him. Apparently, they trained trackers here, and the gremlin found him inside of a few moments of being sent. It stood outside the door of his cell and sniffed at him, stretching its neck as far as it could go. Its nose wriggled, and its whiskers shivered like Kir-Tuko’s whiskers did when he was sniffing the world. It wasn’t even as big as Eja. Its eyes were large and serious-looking, as though it might eat Jallin after finding him. It did not come into the cell, however, but lingered at the doorway. Then, it jumped backwards and barked at Jallin, so suddenly Jallin jumped and hit the back of his head against the wall. Jallin pinned himself against the back wall of the cell. They were coming for him.
They were not rough with him, not like the ones who arrested him. They stood behind the gremlin. A large kunjel in royal livery attached a leash to the gremlin’s collar and pulled the gremlin further back away from the entrance to Jallin’s cell. A narg guard stood just next to him, like a planet.
A woman separated them from Jallin, and she bent over at the waist as though too tall to enter without stooping. “Hello? Are you Jallin from Ki-L’yasuna?”
“Where’s Ki-L’yasuna[JG1] ?” Jallin asked. “I’m from the kinto-shah district.”
The woman giggled as though Jallin had made a very clever joke, the way proper ladies laugh at a gentleman’s flirtations.
She was a brown-haired human woman with dark eyes and bright red lips. She might have had kunjelic in her somewhere; her ears were slightly pointed and stood out at a sort of attractive angle from her head. She definitely didn’t have any l’wii or t’wii in her background though. She was too tall and too thick in the body, too…Jallin looked at her chest. He’d heard a word for this, but couldn’t remember it. More than anything she lacked the proper extra set of black ‘elf eyes’ just on either side of the ridge of her nose. The reason he worried about elf background was simple: they were very good at detecting lies in people and were said to have powers over people’s minds.
She did not demand he step forth, nor did she send the brutes in after him.
“You are just the one I have been looking for. Will you be so kind as to come out and join us?”
“Where are you taking me?” Jallin asked. “What am I accused of?”
The woman reached into a little pouch on her hip and pulled out a rolled up piece of grellum. She looked at this as though it were the first time reading through a grocery list.
“I am taking you to receive a physical examination. Will you submit yourself to be examined? We must ensure that you are well. After this, you will be mentally and spiritually examined. Then, you will be tried as a thief and vandal by a Sarkoshian judge in good standing. Do you object to this treatment, Jallin?”
“I don’t understand. If I am a thief, then why should I get a doctor?”
“You do not want a doctor?”
Jallin felt like this was a trap. People had attempted to be nice to him in the streets, trying to catch him up, even while his mother was still alive. The kinto-shah orphan-catchers, sijok-selkoa, were particularly notorious. It was illegal to be an orphan among them. But others, like narg guards and putrights would try and catch vagrants and ‘do something’ with them, too. Some of them, like this woman seemed to be doing, used gentle words and friendly expressions to snatch up people they thought had no better place than in some prison or guild house doing near slave’s labor. They might put the ones they catch in the galleys of ships, or down in a grist mill, or chain him to a table and make him build things until his knuckles bent forever to one task.
“I don’t think I am sick,” Jallin said.
“Then, we will see. Will you step out from there, and we will proceed?”
Among them, he waited for them to club him to the ground, to twist his arm behind his back and kick him, but the fists and feet never came. The gremlin, which had playfully found him, sat on its rear end and licked the palms of its hands and ran them through its hair like a small child preparing for an adult party. The kunjel looked disinterested, working on something in his teeth with his tongue, occasionally looking over his shoulder at the wayward in the corner opposite. The narg was just an impersonal mountain of rocks in the middle of a grassy field.
The woman swished forward ahead of Jallin, her body sliding inside the peculiar silk dress she wore. It was dark and smooth, and looked as though at any moment it would slide away from her body, and Jallin watched her and wished it would. But the impossible dress was designed to draw men’s eyes, to tempt them. Jallin was entirely unprepared for such things, for women who drew men’s eyes on purpose to their bodies, hypnotizing them.
When Jallin loitered, the woman turned and gestured playfully for him to keep following her.
They crossed the lawn and passed beneath the overhanging tower into one of the cells, which was empty. Apparently she had stationed a guard there to make sure the cell stayed empty, and Jallin himself was not allowed to go inside the cell with the woman. The guard by the door, a bored-looking human, held up his hand. He didn’t look at Jallin, but seemed to take every opportunity to watch her instead.
[JG1]The Name of the Kinto-Shah District. It was named for the Kinto-Shah ambassador to Sarkoshia who brokered the deal for the land and established the slave ports there. He freed himself by negotiating proper slave trading procedures through the district and the slave ports and helping establish some of the kinto-shah slaving laws in Sarkoshia.
No comments:
Post a Comment