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I took another drink of the wine. Sometimes a bad taste in your mouth makes some things easier to say. ‘Hazidan, the woman I mentioned who recruited me? She. . . she started to ask me questions.’
‘Questions?’
When I set the bottle back on the table, I noticed my hand was shaking. Usually I’d have assumed Corrigan had poisoned me, but I recognised this trembling. I got it every time I remembered those days.
‘A Paladin Justiciar’s job is to investigate supernatural atrocities. We go in, figure out what happened and track down the perpetrator.’
‘And execute them without a trial,’ Corrigan said bitterly.
‘There’s always a trial. We’re just not the ones who set the verdict.’
‘Who does?’
‘Technically a Glorian Arbitrator, but they just do whatever the Lords Celestine tells them. Whenever one of us apprehended a rogue wonderist, we’d bring them to an arbitrator, who would pray for guidance. But it wasn’t like sitting there watching someone mumble to themselves with their eyes closed and their hands making silly prayer gestures. We could hear the voice of whichever Lord Celestine they were talking to. That voice. . . Corrigan, it’s not likeanythingyou’ve ever heard. Every word is a poem, every inflection a melody. It’s as if the universe itself is revealing its own inner workings to you. There’s no questioning that verdict, not whether it’s too lenient or too harsh, because you know– youknow– the sentence is perfectly just.’
Corrigan was staring at my face now, eyes narrowed. He looked perplexed. Troubled. ‘Except youdidstart to question.’
‘It was Hazidan’s fault. She started going over recent cases with me– not just mine, but those of other justiciars. We noticed that some of the worst perpetrators were being set free by the arbitrators, and others, whose crimes were nowhere near as vile, we were being ordered to execute.’
Corrigan’s lip curled. ‘You’re saying the Lords Celestineweren’tdelivering perfect justice to our sad little world?’ But though he tried to mask it under his usual biting cynicism, I could tell that even he was shaken by the possibility that the Glorian Justiciars could have been corrupted.
‘Deals were being made,’ I said, and paused to down another mouthful of the foul liquor. Turned out, it really did help. ‘Some of the wonderists we caught entered into contracts with the Lords Celestine, and I thought they must have some hidden potential for redemption that I couldn’t see yet. I didn’t notice the pattern until it was too late.’
‘What the fuck would a Lord Celestine want with a wonderist who commits the kind of massacres that attract the attention of the justiciars in the first place?’
I turned the nondescript green-glass bottle in my hand, suddenly feeling an urge to smash it against the table, to let the shards cut into my hands, to watch the blood seeping from wounds in my palms, an all-too-familiar feeling.
‘Well, it turns out, not all massacres are created equal.’
‘By all the pink-arsed perverts in the hell—?’
‘There’s a war going on, Corrigan, and it’s been going on for a long time. Everyone knows that. What I hadn’t understood is the first thing you discover the day you walk onto a battlefield where two armies are doing everything they can to slaughter each other.’
Corrigan grabbed the empty bottle and hurled it against the wall, sending shards of glass all over the cottage floor. Then he picked up the next one, tore the wax seal from the top and took a long drink. ‘There’s no such thing as justice in wartime.’ He set the bottle down between us as if he were planting a flag in the ground. ‘So you start getting queasy about the job and one day they send you to kill some dumb wonderist going about his business and you refuse?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘Who was it?’
Reflexes born from years on the battlefield brought both our hands up, spells on our lips even before either of us realised we were reacting to the sound of footsteps approaching the open door to the cottage.
‘Hello?’ Galass asked, peaking her head inside.
Corrigan and I both breathed in deeply at the same time, forcing our hands to relax back down to our laps. We chuckled at each other.
‘Is this a bad time?’ she asked.
‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘What can I do for you?’
She glanced from me to Corrigan, then back again. ‘I was hoping I might have a private word with you, before. . . before we go back to the fortress.’
‘Sure. I’ll come see you in a little while.’
She smiled, and for a moment looked almost like the seventeen-year-old girl I’d met mere weeks ago rather than the blood mage with whom I was about to go into battle.
‘What’s that all about?’ Corrigan asked, arching an eyebrow.
‘Nothing like what you’re thinking. She just wants to tell me that when the fight starts, when people start dying, that if it comes down to a choice, if I can only protect one of them, she wants me to save Fidick instead of her.’
