One True Law

Author: Aria Jenneth

Original post: https://forums.eveonline.com/t/storytime/201045/66

Entry for YC124 New Eden Capsuleer’s Writing Contest in the Prose category.

In a certain land there stood a tower, great and high and majestic, so tall that it could be seen from every town and every village and every farmhouse in the land, without exception, and this was understood to be right and just and appropriate, for this was the Domain of Law, and this tower was the Tower of Law, and at its pinnacle, beneath only the dome of the heavens and the great sheltering parasol that was present, or not, as he willed, sat the Speaker of Law.

From the Speaker of Law the Law flowed, for his will was Law made manifest, and from his high seat went forth to every corner of the land the Deliverers of Law, who brought Law to the people, and also the Hands of Law, who enforced Law and punished transgressors, and the Eyes of Law, who watched always to guarantee compliance with Law.

This was a peaceful land, for by Law to raise one’s hand against one’s fellow was to lose it.

It was a mannerly land, for by Law one who spoke a curse would have their tongue seared with a glowing hot coal, and by Law one who jostled others would be made to stand two days in a dark and narrow box, its sides lined with wicked thorns.

Further, by Law once the Deliverers of Law had carried Law forth-- and, in full, it was voluminous indeed!-- all were deemed to know it and failing to know it by no means excused trangression, and so, too, this was a knowledgeable land-- at least in matters of Law!

And, too, it was a quiet land, for by Law one who by undue shouting and alarum disturbed the neighbors would for a year be gagged, and a repeat offender’s tongue be impaled on a spike, ownerless, at the tower base, there to rot along with the tongues of liars and slanderers.

But for the tongues of those who spoke against Law, no spike awaited; rather, for them it would be their vocal cords severed, along with their necks, by the Grandmaster Hand of Law; and their heads would fall through the air from the very Seat of Law itself, wind whistling in their ears, a full minute, it was said, before their skulls cracked against the wide and winding stair up which ascended the endless procession of those presenting petition-- or presented for judgment-- to the Speaker.

This Grandmaster Hand sat day in and day out below the Speaker on his high dais, and lower than no other save the Speaker’s voiceless attendants when the Speaker wanted his parasol (and they hardly counted). Bound beyond any other by heavy oaths to the ponderous weight of Law, it was his grim duty to carry out certain dictates of the Law and judgments of the Speaker. In a land of many Laws and many penalties, his was a specific and singular duty: the dealing, only, of death. Though he was, in truth, a soft-hearted man and could often be seen to weep as his swift and heavy blade cleaved the bodies of those his duty bade him slay, he never hesitated.

The Grandmaster Hand was head of his order, and the Law had many Hands, but when a single Hand was spoken of, throughout the land all knew it was this one, dread Hand.

Now the present Speaker was a troubled soul who had himself been once a petitioner on the stairs far below, where he had borne witness to his predecessor’s unfortunate demise from a false step while descending the dais. From this dramatic introduction to his high seat he had acquired a morbid fear of heights, and among his first acts as Speaker of Law had been to lay in Law that on pain of death the winds themselves must bear the Speaker aloft should he fall and on no account let him plummet to his splattery doom. The Speaker possessed perhaps some skepticism of his own powers, for he had thereafter sought at every opportunity to persuade himself of them. The Deliverers hurried day and night, the Hands were never idle, and the Eyes kept such constant vigil that their numbers nearly tripled for the purpose (for a sleeping eye sees only dreams).

As for the Hand, his duty was absolute and his Speaker of temperamental disposition. His blade sang through flesh and bone, hewed dog (for the Speaker loathed dogs, the noisy, smelly brutes), woman, child, and man-- and, twice, a horse, lifted to the Speaker’s high seat through great difficulty and by different means each time, only, once cleft in twain, to descend again by the graceful method afforded to all, regardless of rank or station, who dwell at the bottom of gravity wells, and at a rate that much dismayed the line of petitioners waiting in orderly queue on that wide and winding stair at the tower base.

And with every pointless, cruel, and senseless death, the Hand wept. During the daylight hours when the Speaker of Law held court, neither the Hand’s eyes nor his blade were often dry.

Throughout the slaughter, the Speaker took great comfort in his Hand’s unending tears, for the Speaker feared also traitors. Here, at least, was one who wept unceasingly at what he was called to do, yet did it without fail: a servant the proof of whose loyalty trickled constantly from his cheeks and dripped from his chin.

And so it might have gone.

Now it was Law that the Speaker’s court was to be held by day, every day, during the daylight hours, and for the most part this suited the Speaker fine, for aside from heights, dogs, and traitors, the Speaker possessed also a morbid fear of the dark, which seemed to him to conceal at every turn a bottomless abyss. Associated ever with the sun, he ascended his dais with the dawn, descended with the dusk, and was ne’er to be found in the dim hours between. On cloudy days he was assisted by a helpful timepiece, the only one of its day, built into the structure of the tower itself. Tuned with precision to the perceived motions of the sun, it traced also the paths of the moons. This device should ever match the cycles of the heavens: this, too, was Law.

And so it was with alarm that the Speaker one morning observed upon his daily schedule a notation that around midday the sky and land would darken for a time. Upon assuming his dais the Speaker proclaimed that he would first see his Timekeepers, and, in accordance with Law, they were brought. The Speaker then demanded of them the cause of this unseemly and disorderly incidence of darkness.

The Timekeeper-senior explained that the cause was a confluence of the moons, most rare and miraculous yet long predicted, in the skies above. Any single moon was too small to hide the disk of the sun, and indeed the passing of one’s shadow across it was a not-infrequent event, and could be observed in the spot of sunlight shining through a pinprick hole or, more directly, through a piece of smoked glass. Today, for the first time in almost two centuries, the moons would converge, all three at just the right time and at the right angles to, briefly, cover the sun.

When the Speaker of Law asked why he had not learned of this sooner, the Timekeepers pointed out that by the Speaker’s Law discussion of happenings in the sky was forbidden, as talk of weather was boring and distracted folk from their proper toils on the ground.

At this, the Speaker, frustrated and enraged, declared that he forbade it, forbade it absolutely, and declared by Law that the Timekeepers must cancel these celestial shenanigans at once.

But this, the Timekeeper-senior explained, was impos–

And proceeded no further, on account of a parting of body and head at the middle of the voice box by the Speaker’s loyal and ever-watchful, weeping Hand. The Timekeeper-junior observed the Senior’s expression in the moment before it tumbled off the platform edge, then haltingly noted that by Law, indeed, the heavens and timepiece must ever match, and hurried off to adjust the timepiece accordingly while the triumphant Speaker got on with his day.

They had cleared a light morning docket requiring only six executions, much to the Hand’s relief, and were in recess for lunch when the light of the fine clear day began noticeably to dim. The Speaker checked the elaborate timepiece dial which, indeed, displayed a brilliant and unoccluded sun. The Speaker then demanded the return of the Timekeeper-senior (recently promoted), who was, in this moment of crisis, nowhere to be found.

The Speaker was frantic. Law forbade the Speaker to descend the dais until sundown, and to re-Speak such firm, established, and weighty Law sufficiently to make descending permissible would take hours, at least! A weird and tainted gloom descended over the land, and with terror piercing his heart like a spike of smoldering ice the Speaker stared into that traitor sky and demanded its death. Bring before me the moons, bring before me the sun, let them all bow before my Hand and taste his swift, sure sword!

The Hand took in the spectacle as these panicked cries of the avatar of Law itself smashed into his duty-hobbled mind-- and like a stone to a glass pane, broke through. Cold clarity blew between his ears, a window he had never known was closed now irrevocably open. His sword, that ugly chunk of sharpened metal, moved, rose, feather-light in his hand, and its ringing sang in his heart as he struck.

They came at dusk, the Hands, their duty-laden boots trudging up the wide and winding blood-stained stair. The day had been calm, with no wind to scatter falling objects, and they picked their way past seven large pieces of fallen meat and eight smaller ones, and ascended the tower.

The Hand, the Grandmaster, knelt, leaning on his heavy sword, now stained with dried blood, by the Seat of Law and the ruined, lifeless form still seated there. The attendants had fled, and the setting sun painted the whole scene in wine-- in white, rose, and red. They gathered round, his students, his disciples, voices rustling like leaves, armor clattering like so many empty cans rolling before the wind.

The Hand of Law hefted himself to his feet, hefted his sword-- his prop-- to his hand. He looked at them, this legion sworn and bound to the old order, and let the sword sway in his hand, feeling its weight-- trivial, paired with his own profound strength.

He looked, then, at the enthroned corpse, and the smile he hadn’t realized he’d been wearing faded, if only a little.

“We must locate his successor,” he said.