Chapter 19: Final Hearing

A little over an hour later, the main hall of the Tribunal was already ringing with Aaron's anger.

"You knew something like this could happen in this damn city?! We could have died without even understanding what was going on!"

His voice rose to the vaults and came back down on us. Leaning over the long table, both fists planted against the wood, he faced Gondovald as though he blamed him personally for the existence of the full moon.

Gondovald let him get his anger out before answering.

"None of us knew that rule existed. I never claimed to know every law of Aubecour."

"How long have you been living here? Two, three months? You couldn't have looked into it a little?"

"Four months, exactly," Lina corrected from the back of the room.

The correction irritated Aaron. He thought better of it at the last moment, probably remembering that he had kept things formal with her ever since they met, and swallowed his reply in a muffled curse.

I stayed close to Aria. Aaron was voicing loudly what some of us had to be thinking; adding my voice would only have prolonged the quarrel. Since the restaurant, information had been piling up faster than we could understand it: previous Editions, a city that deliberately suspended its own laws, and a summons set for exactly the moment everything was going to start.

Eriska finally cut in before Aaron could start up again.

"Yelling at each other won't change anything. We should be thanking Casimir, Aria and Chrome for warning us before the full moon began."

A few faces turned toward us. I wasn't very comfortable being thanked for simply passing along a piece of information; Aria took the recognition much better. Chrome was already waiting for the discussion to come back to something useful.

After the restaurant, we had rejoined the others as fast as we could, and everyone had gathered at the Tribunal. Romulus had come with us, then stopped in the hall to keep watch on what was happening outside. Ever since he had explained the rules of the full moon, his usual confidence had almost entirely evaporated.

"Eriska is right. Thank you for warning us," Gondovald added.

"We weren't going to keep that to ourselves," Aria answered.

"Now, what I'd especially like to understand is why a city this strict allows a night without any law at all," Eriska went on.

Since our arrival, Lina had been filling her notebook with methodical patience, putting the facts in order before we even knew what to do with them.

"It surprises me too," she said. "No one told us about it. Without their warning, we might have understood too late what was happening."

"And what's this business about previous Editions, anyway?" Silas asked.

"The quest information only says that the stars assigned to territories depend on the mortality rate recorded during those Editions," I explained. "It doesn't say how many there were, or what happened to the participants."

Eriska was the first to spell out what that revelation implied.

"So other people went through the Bloc before us."

Nina shyly pulled the folds of her cape tighter around her shoulders. Her first words came out clearly; the ones that followed grew tighter as she went on.

"But... if we really are criminals, and if the ones before us were too, why send us here... instead of locking us up in a normal prison?"

"Your age excuses your ignorance, kid, but the prisons have been empty for nearly a century. Nobody gets sent there anymore," Aaron shot back.

The remark made Nina lower her eyes. Lina closed her hand around her sister's, a silent answer far less kind to Aaron.

The way Aaron had just spoken to Nina faded into the background in front of the information he had let slip.

"From what I remember, the inmates all vanished. That's what the news said," Silas went on.

"They can't have been sent here," Milo objected. "That would mean the Bloc already had this technology almost a century ago. It doesn't hold together."

"Not with what we know today," Eriska corrected. "Someone brought us here because they consider us criminals," she continued. "Nothing proves this place has always looked the same, or even that it has always worked the same way. If the prisons of our world were abandoned around the time their inmates started disappearing, we can at least consider a link. But it's only a hypothesis," she stressed.

Still, I couldn't rule out that hypothesis. Too many impossible things had already happened since we woke up for that argument to be enough.

"And the participants of the previous Edition?" I asked. "When did they arrive? If they're still here, maybe we could meet them."

A deep voice answered us from the back of the room.

"They arrived a hundred years ago, ladies and gentlemen."

All conversation stopped. An old man in a long black tunic stood in the shadow of the judge's seat, a smoking pipe between his fingers. I hadn't heard him come in. Neither had Gondovald: all his attention had just left our discussion.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"Claudius. Prosecutor of Aubecour and guardian of this Tribunal in the name of the king."

His dry voice wasn't particularly loud, yet nobody tried to talk over it. Even Aaron waited.

Silas took advantage of the calm to go straight to what interested us.

"Do you know why we were all summoned here?"

Claudius left the question hanging. Next to me, Milo was still repeating the previous piece of information under his breath.

"A hundred years..."

"Every hundred years, new strangers banished from their world appear here," Claudius continued.

A murmur ran along the benches. I tried to put a little order into what that sentence implied. One group before us, then another before that one. People who had arrived in the same territories, in numbers large enough that their deaths were still used to rate Aubecour today. Yet Claudius had just appeared out of nowhere with an answer none of us could verify. I refused to turn it into a certainty simply because it filled a gap.

"That would confirm there were several Editions," Gondovald observed.

"How many?" Milo asked. "Two? Three? More? Nobody lets a system like this run for centuries without a reason."

Lina hadn't stopped taking notes. The chronology had just opened a new lead for her.

"If your information is accurate, the Bloc existed before the prisons of our world disappeared. Unless time doesn't flow the same way here."

"You're finally starting to ask the right questions," Claudius answered with quiet amusement. "When you say 'the Bloc,' young lady, do you mean this entire world?"

"That's how it was presented to us," Lina answered carefully.

"Then your words don't match ours. Aubecour has nearly eight hundred years of history, and the oldest documents kept in our archives go back two centuries further still."

"I'm going to go insane, I swear," Aaron muttered.

I wasn't far from it myself. Eight centuries of history, nearly a thousand years of archives, and Editions supposedly spaced a hundred years apart, when our world had abandoned its prisons much more recently. Either someone was lying, or we still didn't have the right way to measure what surrounded us.

Aria's hand found my forearm almost mechanically. The contact reassured me as much as it betrayed what she was trying to hide.

"It's beyond me too..." she murmured. "I almost need to get outside."

Chrome brought the discussion back to the only problem capable of killing us before we'd solved the one about centuries.

"The age of this world can wait. We came to understand the summons and to find a way to survive what begins in less than an hour."

He was right. The centuries could wait; the people of Aubecour could not.

"So I'll ask again. Do you know why we were all summoned here?"

Claudius finally answered in the tone of a man reciting a well-known procedure.

"My role is to judge those the guard brings before me. Now, you have been banished from your worlds for crimes you keep no memory of. You can neither explain your actions nor provide the slightest proof of your innocence. Under the old procedures of Aubecour, strangers captured at Point A were brought here, locked in the cells of the Tribunal, then tried. If their guilt was confirmed, the sentence could go as far as execution by guillotine."

That word alone silenced the room.

My attention went to Aria before I even realized it. She was still standing beside me, straight and silent, her fingers tightened around my wrist. For a moment, the centuries-old procedure disappeared behind a single image: a blade falling on her for a crime she couldn't even remember.

I squeezed her hand harder. Around us, the wood creaked as several people drew back on their bench. The word had been enough.

Unlike us, Claudius spoke of the guillotine as a mere administrative detail.

"However, you did not answer your summons immediately. You visited the city, ate at the restaurant and, for some of you, enjoyed the baths. The full moon will begin before I can open a regular hearing. From five o'clock on, the Tribunal will no longer have the authority to initiate this procedure before dawn."

"Charming invitation. You could have mentioned it might lead to the guillotine," I said, without letting go of Aria's hand.

"In the past, Point A served precisely to hold strangers until the guard came to collect them," Claudius explained. "It was a known practice in Aubecour."

"Brilliant method you had," Aaron sneered. "Once the place was liberated, we could simply have walked out through Argemira."

"Yet Gondovald and the twins were locked in there for nearly three weeks," Eriska pointed out. "Nobody came for them."

"Because later generations forgot what the place was for," Claudius answered. "Point A kept fulfilling a function that no one here knew how to interpret anymore."

The explanation held together, but Claudius kept answering just enough to give shape to our questions, never enough for us to verify what he claimed.

Gondovald returned to the immediate problem without dwelling any longer on Claudius's reliability.

"Regardless, there are ten of us, and in a few minutes your laws will stop applying. You won't be able to hold us."

"I have no intention of doing so. Judarans have a particular sensitivity to openly malicious intent. When a person truly means to cause harm, they can often sense it before the act. In my case, the faculty goes a little further. I sometimes glimpse the direction an intention is taking. Nothing precise, only a tendency. And most of you lean toward something positive. It is rare to see so many strangers show such a prospect after so little time in this world."

"I think you forgot Aaron, sir," Lina pointed out with perfect seriousness.

"Go to hell," Aaron answered with an insolent grin.

"Thanks for confirming. I'd remind you I'm a middle schooler, though," Lina shot back.

The reply drew a laugh from Silas and even relaxed Aria briefly.

"A little flattery now and then always feels nice," she commented.

"I am not the one who instituted the night without laws," Claudius continued, not lingering on the joke. "That decision came from the king. After the portals closed, Aubecour began running short of resources. He judged the city could not support its population indefinitely and let that night become a means of reducing it."

"Not long afterward," he went on, "the king was declared missing. Yet a law still forbade publicly questioning his state or his absence. The citizens obey. So no one asks where he is, or even whether he is still alive."

"A law that stops people from looking for the only man who could abolish the others. Not very smart of him," Eriska noted.

For the first time, Claudius's confidence cracked. Barely, but enough for me to notice.

"That is precisely why I summoned you. I want to put an end to this practice, but I lack the power. Only the king can revoke his own laws."

"Help me find him. If we succeed, I promise you justice will be done."

Nobody committed on the spot. Claudius's request seemed fair, but above all it meant going back out at the worst possible moment.

"What exactly does this search involve?" Aria asked. "We're not going to run around the whole city at random on a night when anyone can try to kill us."

"Several testimonies claim the king was last seen near the underground passages south of Aubecour," Claudius explained. "An old station lies there. If he took refuge in it, he may have left traces... or the insignia that would establish his identity."

"I know that access," Gondovald cut in. "A quest took me as far as the station. I wasn't able to explore its depths: the tracks warp, some distances don't match what you've just walked, and several sections lead back to the same point. But I can take us there."

"Our third quest is precisely to discover that station," Lina added.

"That's not a good enough reason to send everyone there," Chrome cut in.

"Finally, someone reasonable," Aria approved.

"Ending a night of massacres justifies taking the risk," Chrome continued. "Not abandoning the rest of the city."

"If we do this, let's divide the roles before we leave here," I suggested. "One group looks for the king. The other holds a position and stops the residents who come to the Tribunal."

"That suits me," the prosecutor answered. "The Tribunal also houses the weapons confiscated by the guard and the vault of Aubecour. At every full moon, some residents take advantage of the absence of law to try to plunder them. We cannot simply knock on their doors the next morning and ask them to return everything."

"We could just pass someone off as the king," Aaron proposed with the seriousness of a man who had just solved the problem.

The suggestion drew a few nervous laughs, except from Lina.

"I thought of that too," Lina admitted.

"A mere resemblance would not be enough," Claudius answered. "The residents have rarely seen the king's face. They recognize him mostly by his tunic and the insignia it carries. Without those, you would only be impostors. And a Judaran would quickly sense a malicious intent if you tried to deceive him in order to seize power."

"So we look for the king, his clothes, or any proof he passed through," Silas summed up. "While the others keep people from emptying your vault."

"Exactly," Claudius confirmed.

Aria came back to our own group and quickly ran through Casimir, Milo and Silas.

"For us, I suggest Casimir stays here. Milo too, to watch the streets and spot threats. Silas comes with me to the station," she said, before turning to the others.

"As for the rest, it's up to you. We just need enough people on both sides, and above all, nobody should end up alone."

"I'm staying at the Tribunal," Chrome decided. "If several groups attack at the same time, Casimir and I can hold the entrance."

Gondovald vaguely pointed toward the station, already focused on the route.

"Since I know the way, I'll come with you."

"Nina and I too," Lina added without waiting.

Aaron let out a sigh, more resigned than truly opposed.

"Fine. I'm coming."

Eriska chose to stay at the Tribunal with Milo. Aria counted quickly.

"So six of us for the station: Gondovald, Silas, Lina, Nina, Aaron and me. Casimir, Chrome, Milo and Eriska stay here with Claudius."

The idea of her disappearing beneath the city displeased me before she had even finished her sentence.

I hadn't opened my mouth yet when Aria guessed what I was about to say.

"I'm not going alone, Casimir."

"I want to stay with you, Aria."

I wasn't trying to give her an order. I simply wanted her to stay close to me.

"I don't like this separation either," she answered, lower. "But I'm not going to keep you by my side just because it reassures me. I want to prove myself and show I'm up to it, for real."

She set two fingers against my wrist, long enough to calm some of the refusal rising in my throat.

"You stay with Chrome," she went on. "Like a knight in front of the castle. And you wait for me obediently until I'm back."

I still hated this separation. It just wasn't my place to turn my fear into a reason to hold her back.

"All right."

A dull crash erupted in the hall before we could go any further.

A second blow followed. Then a third, more violent. Voices rose behind the great doors of the Tribunal.

Romulus appeared at the far end of the room, out of breath, his face livid. He hurried toward us; at this rate, the door was going to give way before he finished speaking.

"Sorry to interrupt, but... people are smashing in the entrance."

Aaron didn't know Romulus and didn't even try to hide his suspicion.

"And who's he?"

"Someone who just warned us before the door gave way," Lina answered. "That should do for now."

Claudius cared less about his name than about the reason for his presence. His attention stayed on Romulus, watchful, almost suspicious.

"Why is a citizen of Aubecour here when the full moon is about to begin?"

Romulus opened his mouth, but no words really came out. He was already searching for how to justify himself, how to present his presence without looking even more suspect. I stepped in before his hesitation could work against him.

"He's with us," I answered. "He's the one who told us what was going to happen tonight. Without his warning, we'd still be scattered across the city, each on our own, with no idea what was coming down on us."

Claudius remained wary, but the pounding against the doors left him little time to insist.

Aria, for her part, found a way to steer the tension toward a subject that amused her more. Her seriousness barely cracked when she turned her head toward me.

"He's been following us since the public baths," she said. "You could take a lesson from him and stay closer to me more often."

"Hey, you're the one who wanted us to split up."

"And you let yourself be convinced far too quickly. I suppose you're starting to get tired of me."

"Even on the edge of a massacre, you two still find a way to do this?" Silas teased.

"Don't start, Sunday drifter," Aria shot back without even being rattled. "You already have a punishment waiting for you when all this is over."

Silas looked away with a slightly less confident smile. The threat had clearly been enough.

At least some things were still working normally.

Romulus, however, hadn't come back only to warn us. He was still standing among us, shoulders stiff, face pale, but his eyes had stopped darting away. He seemed to be fighting his fear to keep from backing out at the last moment.

"I didn't come only to warn you," he said. "I want to help you."

Nobody answered right away. Romulus drew a breath before going on.

"I want all this to stop too. I barely sleep on full moon nights. I wake up drenched in sweat, thinking about my parents... about my friends from the academy. They were all massacred because of this madness."

This time, even Aaron found nothing to say.

His voice was still trembling, but he didn't step back.

"I'll do whatever it takes to make sure this night is the last. Even if it costs me my life."

Chrome studied him for a moment, impassive, then answered in his usual calm:

"Just avoid dying for nothing. That alone will already be useful."

Coming from Chrome, it was almost an encouragement. Another shock shook the doors and, this time, the floor vibrated under our feet. Several eyes turned toward the entrance of the Tribunal with the feeling that the solid wood would give way at any moment.

Then, somewhere above us, a bell began to ring. The first toll spread through the corridors, deep and solemn amid the chaos, and then a second followed.

Five o'clock.

The voices in the hall turned into screams. Around us, everyone reacted in their own way: some backed toward the corridors, others turned to the doors or were already looking for a weapon.

The full moon had just begun in Aubecour.