Bastien had found the relay operator on the same afternoon I asked. He told me about the encounter the following morning. The Imperial man had seen the device, had understood what it was, had held it a long moment and taken it away. He had not been seen since.
Once he took it back to the Imperial facility, he had several options to choose from. He could have reported it to a superior and surrendered the device. Or he could have destroyed it quietly and said nothing. Or perhaps he did as I asked, sent the message and then put as much distance between himself and Bastien as he could. From my perspective there was no way to know which he had selected. It was likely that the Helot girl had been spared any further attention from him.
Bastien was with me and I was lifting a bowl of petow for breakfast when I stopped.
The petow was the color it always was. But I looked at it again and it was not quite right. The cell lighting couldn't quite account for it. The levet shortage had meant a slightly different preparation than previously. Perhaps the amount of water mixed with the petow was off. Perhaps this load of petows had experienced slightly different growing conditions. There were a number of reasons a bowl might look marginally different on a given morning. I held it and did not consume any.
Bastien was watching me.
"The color," I said.
He looked at the bowl.
"Yes," he said.
I set the bowl down.
We sat with the bowl between us. We had both had plenty of experience with Spartovan petow and knew the color of it very well. Something in my body had decided, before I had, not to eat it. If we were wrong, I had refused breakfast on a marginal suspicion and would be hungry until midday. If we were right, the bowl had been about to go into my mouth.
Neither of us said anything.
After some time there was a knock on the door. It opened without waiting for an answer, the Spartovan way. It was one of the men I recognized from Ruvuk's retinue. He looked at the table, and looked at us.
"Don't eat the petow," he said.
He picked up the bowl.
He and Bastien left together.
An hour later Bastien came back from his morning rounds with the information that a man in the gatehouse had taken ill overnight. A minor compound functionary, not Ruvuk's staff. But he wasn't alone. Several others had come down with identical symptoms. They were being tended somewhere and the nature of the illness was not being discussed widely.
The Strategoi didn't need to reach my cell. All it took was a point in the kitchen chain they could access. The functionary in the gatehouse quarter was not their intended recipient. He was collateral evidence.
Ruvuk had known about the possibility of an attempt on the food chain. And he had a counter-measure in place sufficient to act on that knowledge in time. Probably he had arranged that my food be served after others. He hadn't bothered warning Bastien or me. He had set up an observation network where he needed it and let the attempt run to the moment before it concluded.
What I knew was that the Strategoi were willing to kill, not just Ruvuk, but me, and had now demonstrated it. Ruvuk was the only person standing between me and their next attempt, and it was questionable whether he had any interest in me past the Grand Assembly. The protection was effective but it was entirely on his terms. It would last exactly as long as I remained a tool he needed.
Ruvuk had goals for the Grand Assembly. I didn't need the Truth Stone to deduce what they were. He wasn't trying to become a Strategos himself. What he wanted was to throw the Strategoi out and probably the High Tribunal as well.
He wanted the Grand Assembly, the body of Agoge-trained delegates from every garrison in the Hegemony, to overthrow the men who had spent a generation corrupting Xondor's pure teachings. He wanted the Hegemony of Spartova to return to the thing the Code was actually supposed to be: an unwavering commitment that the entire world should kneel below the Spartovan boot. The Strategoi had turned it into a mechanism for their own comfort.
He knew it would be messy. Even with my help. He wouldn't have spent so many years dreaming about how to do it otherwise. He must have spent many years dreaming or he wouldn't have been able to come up with a plan in three seconds once he saw me, the missing piece in his puzzle.
I tried to imagine being one of the Hoplites of the Grand Assembly.
The Agoge takes a seven-year-old child and spends thirteen years making the Iron Code into something his body believes because he can't imagine anything else. He has been beaten, hungry, cold, and stripped of everything that was his own. The Code is not an external imposition but the structure of himself. Now he sits in the Assembly and sees, confirmed by the stone in a proceeding he cannot dismiss, that the men above him have been routing the State's goods to buy personal loyalty from the command structure.
That they have been living in the private luxury Article VI of their own Code forbids. That they have built an army that answers to themselves as individuals rather than to the document his entire body has been shaped to serve.
Orso had been clear that the delegates cannot act against the Strategoi. The Assembly votes, it does not act; the distinction is constitutional, the heart of the Code. For over a thousand years, this was unchanged. Ruvuk was trying to change the unchangeable, and he needed something big to do that.
He was gambling that a betrayal confirmed in the room by the stone would be sufficient to collapse the psychological distance between a vote and an act in men whose entire training had prepared them to respond to a betrayal of the Code with their bodies. He was using the Agoge's own product against the people who had corrupted its purpose.
My role was to hold the Justice Stone and operate it as directed. I also had the second mode of the Truth Stone, which I had produced once by accident and had not had the chance to try again. A mode that I could not practice with was not a mode that I could use.
Xotok had not been wasting time. There had to be more going on than the attempts to assassinate Ruvuk and me. At the Drakov trial I had seen something in Drakov beneath the assassination. There was a body answering to both the Strategoi and the Tribunal together, held for emergencies, something Drakov had been shown the outline of and then deliberately not permitted to know more about. He had been afraid of the Hegemony tearing apart in the streets. The reserve was what he expected to prevent that. Ruvuk did not know I had seen it. I had not told him. I did not yet know enough about it to know whether telling him served me.
The treaty I had crossed the Red Sand Sea for was as out of reach as it had been the day I left Heliqar. Ruvuk's interest in what happened to Heliqar's caravans was zero. A reformed Assembly restoring Xondor's constitution would not revisit the question of men taken from the trade routes. We would serve Spartova whether alive as Helots or as dead men. That mission was over.
I still didn't have enough.