The room Ruvuk gave me for the night before the Grand Assembly was the most comfortable I had had in all the Hegemony. A real bed. A washbasin. A window with a large, surprisingly clear, sheet of glass.
I sat at the room's single table with the Truth Stone closed in my hand and started trying to think through the possibilities that tomorrow might bring.
What could I hope for? Tomorrow Ruvuk would have me hold the Justice Stone to evaluate whatever charges he made against the Strategoi. If the stone answered the way he needed it to, all the Hoplite delegates in the Grand Assembly Hall would unseat the existing Strategoi and members of the High Tribunal. I would be his Helot for the rest of my life, just another line in his inventory. My services would be necessary for years yet, while his army swept nation after nation ahead of him and, eventually, Olympos itself. Bastien would keep the freedom Ruvuk had granted him, for as long as I stayed worth being generous about. The rest of my men would go on being detainees instead of corpses. And Heliqar would be Carth's vassal until the day Carth finally fell to the Hegemony. A Carthian slave might be slightly better off than a Helot of Spartova, which meant the whole arrangement only bought my city a longer road to the same destination.
Certainly the Strategoi wanted Ruvuk dead before any of that could happen. They had already tried once, through Drakov, and I was the only reason it hadn't worked. They had tried a second time through the kitchens, and only some extra caution had kept me from eating what left a man in the gatehouse and several others violently ill or dead. The Strategoi could not be reasoned out of their self-interest. If Ruvuk walked into that hall tomorrow and lost, it would not end in some tidy demotion. It would end the way my breakfast very nearly had.
Ruvuk was not a good man. He was willing to kill people in cold blood. Human life meant nothing to him beyond its use. For him, every person was not an end in himself but simply a tool, like the woman who swept the passage outside my door, like me. A source of blood to feed the endless hunger of the Eternal State of Spartova.
The problem was that in Spartova, these were the virtues of a patriot, not the vices of a monster. Ruvuk had told me as much himself: that Heliqar survived on nothing but the accident of good men choosing well at the right hour, over and over. That was just luck. He was not wrong about that, which was the part I had not managed to ignore since. And in my experience Ruvuk was an unusually honest man. His greatest desire was for the Hegemony to claim what he believed was its birthright and Xondor's pure teaching: all humanity, kneeling. His own life was as worthless in his eyes as everyone else's.
I had found, over the years, that it was better to think a problem all the way through in scenarios rather than to guess at which outcome was likeliest and stop there. Life had a way of making the unlikely true, and a man who had only prepared for the probable might just as well have not prepared at all. It was, I realized somewhere in the middle of this, that I had made a mistake. I had believed if I thought long enough, hard enough, honestly enough, I would find the branch where no one had to be used to pay for it. I had actually deluded myself into thinking I would just be lucky.
Suppose that I did to Ruvuk tomorrow what I had done to Drakov six days ago: read him privately with the Truth Stone, find whatever he kept hidden even from the room he controlled, and hand the Justice Stone a charge built to convict him instead of the Strategoi. I had material enough. A man does not plan a coup without leaving some part exposed. But the Strategoi who would inherit that hall if I did this were not gentler than Ruvuk. Drakov had been afraid of something even Ruvuk didn't know of, some reserve the Strategoi and the Tribunal held in common for exactly this kind of event. I had no way to weigh a danger I had only ever seen the outline of in someone else's fear of Xotok. If the Strategoi won instead of Ruvuk, I would not walk out of that hall a free man. At best I would have traded a predictable master for an unpredictable one. At worst my men and I would cease being useful and be treated as such in the Spartovan fashion.
Or suppose that I simply let the Justice Stone stay dark in my hands. I turned this one over a while longer than I should have, because it was the only scenario in which I did not have to choose between two masters. It did not work. If Ruvuk decided what he was holding was a broken tool rather than a converted one, he would simply go into that hall without me. My men would not survive the inconvenience of my failure.
I could try to leave Spartova alone. The hall was probably poorly guarded and Ruvuk probably wasn't expecting an escape attempt. My men were held under guard on the far side of the compound, and there was no version of tonight in which I climbed out and also brought a company of foreigners out through a locked barracks door. Ruvuk would certainly kill them and he knew that I knew it. Even if I were willing to sacrifice them, Spartova's immune system would ensure I wouldn't survive the trip to the Red Sand Sea, let alone get across it.
That left the last unpalatable option.
I had used the stone on Ruvuk exactly once, on the march. There had been no reason to do it again. I knew what he wanted in excruciating detail. I made myself go back to it anyway. Tomorrow I would be standing close enough to Ruvuk, and to whichever Strategos he had chosen to accuse, to read either one of them the moment it mattered, and to push what I found into every mind in that hall at once.
If Ruvuk was losing, if the delegates were leaning toward the Strategoi, toward the plain, comfortable fact that a man attempting a coup dressed as a conviction was the more immediate danger in the room, I could turn the Truth Stone on whichever Strategos stood accused and hand the hall his actual arithmetic: what resources had gone missing into private hands; how many of his own Hoplites he'd let go without supply on garrison duty rather than requisition anything that would show up as a loss on a ledger he didn't want examined. I could make that unbearable to every man in the room in the same instant it had been unbearable to two guards over something so much smaller. Ruvuk would win.
If Ruvuk was winning too well instead, I could not turn the stone on him to show corruption. That was the difficulty with this possibility. Ruvuk completely believed what the Code demanded. Everyone in the hall knew that the Hegemony's founding promise was the whole world kneeling. Cheering that promise from a safe distance was not the same thing as watching me put the actual shape of it into their heads at once: the Great Pyramids of Olympos, massive and certain in a mind that had never once stood in front of them. The city coming down structure by structure, an organized demolition, smoke climbing into clouds that never left the mountain. Its people led out in chains down the Via Triumphus. The Imperial Palace carried off stone by stone.
What they had never had to live with was how soon Ruvuk meant it, and at whose expense. An officer three years from a Strategos's chair of his own does not want the entire tier above him executed in an afternoon and the ladder he has spent a career climbing removed along with it, whatever he privately believes about Xondor's Code. A man who wants the Empire humbled someday, in the fullness of time, after his own sons are grown, does not necessarily want a war with Olympos declared before the evening meal. Some of them would love Ruvuk more for seeing what he really, in his heart of hearts, wanted. The true believers needed no persuading of what the Agoge taught. But others, the ones already halfway up the very ladder Ruvuk intended to burn, would understand that his victory was the last day of whatever future they had spent years patiently building for themselves.
The right truth, pushed into that room in the right instant, would tear it in half: Pragmatists against True Believers. All they had ever lacked was a reason to stop pretending they agreed on anything.
This was exactly what Drakov had been afraid of, that Spartova would simply come apart in its own streets, Hoplite against Hoplite, over which path was worse. I understood now that I was the source of the fear.
If this happened, neither I nor my men were going to be delicately carried back to our cell block to face the evening in peace. My men could be up and moving before anyone thought to stop them. Heliqar's fate would likely not change either way. But I might see it again. That was the whole of what the plan offered, weighed against everything it would cost to reach it: we might go home.
I found myself, somewhere past midnight, ruminating. But this meant that people would die. A lot of them.
This was Ruvuk's great villainy. He believed that a human being was not an end in himself, but only an instrument, a source of blood for something larger. I had said it like an accusation. I had said it like a thing I was not. And here I was, comparing the Grand Assembly Hall's casualties against Heliqar's future.
And this was not the first time I had told myself that something was necessary. I had told myself that when I used the Truth Stone on Bastien without asking him. I justified it, thinking I had a duty to all the men's lives to know. And I had told myself again only hours ago, with a woman who swept a passage and had never done anything to me at all except be standing in a convenient place. Every time I had used the same word. Necessary.
My whole life I believed that a man who thought carefully enough, tested every explanation before acting, refused to let urgency excuse sloppiness, would eventually find the path that did not require using another person as a means to something they had never agreed to be part of. Bastien was supposed to have been the exception. I could name it, confess and grieve and not do it again. But I repeated it. It had apparently become a method.
To deny it was to become Ruvuk. I could not tell myself, the way I badly wanted to, that refusing to choose kept my hands clean. My hands had not been clean since the wagons. They were not going to become clean by my declining to notice that fact one more time.
I said it aloud: "If there is another way, I cannot find it."