Story

Soon after his initiation, Hendrik took Talimar to Jonstown.

Tal had heard of its Library. Nothing had prepared him to see it: three storeys of stone, protective signs carved into the very walls and, behind the doors, enough texts to make the idea of “reading everything” suddenly seem absurd.

He had not been there an hour.

A woman in white robes entered the room. Her sleeve was stained with blood.

— I need a Grey Sage. At the House of Peace. Now.

Hendrik closed his tablet.

— Tal. Take something to write with.

Before the House of Peace

They heard the quarrel before they saw the temple.

Two groups of kin and companions faced one another in the street, several of them armed. Between them, a healer of Chalana Arroy guarded the threshold. Behind her lay a badly wounded young man.

A grey-haired woman pointed at him.

— He killed my son.

A man from the opposing group answered:

— Your son died with a weapon in his hand!

Tal tried to impose order on the scene. His status as a young Grey Sage was not enough. The dead man's mother refused to let a boy tell her to leave; the other side was just as unwilling to leave their opponents alone beside the wounded man.

But in the midst of the failure, a voice rose:

— Me. I was there.

The man's name was Darin, son of Korl. The dead man, Beren, was his cousin. According to him, six cattle had been stolen. The two groups had clashed near Old-Stone Ravine. Beren had wounded Karest, then fallen, his spear out of reach.

Darin claimed to have heard him shout:

— “Enough.”

And Karest had struck him anyway.

Almost immediately, the other group protested. Beren still had his knife. Darin had been too far away. He could not have seen properly.

A woman stepped forward.

— I was there too. Closer than he was.

She introduced herself as Enissa, daughter of Torvald. Beren had indeed been down, she said, but he still had his knife and had tried to strike Karest when Karest approached.

Beren's mother called her a liar.

Tal then understood that he did not have two answers. He had two accounts.

What had been settled, and what had not

Tal looked for what the witnesses could actually know. Darin had been twenty paces away or more. Enissa had been closer. The clan tattoos also made it clear that each belonged to one of the two sides.

Then another question emerged: had Beren and Karest known each other before?

Yes.

They had already fought the previous year during another cattle dispute. The matter had been settled before the elders. Beren had paid what he had been ordered to pay.

Enissa added, however, that Beren had boasted about it every time he met Karest afterwards. He sometimes called him “the man who gets paid back.”

— Words, Darin protested.

— Yes, Enissa replied. Words. And Karest remembered every one of them.

Then she summed it up:

“Nothing before the elders. Between them, everything.”

Tal immediately felt a story forming. Perhaps Karest had finally let his rage burst out against Beren.

Hendrik stopped him at that precise point.

It was a possible story. One that connected the known facts well. And that was exactly why it was dangerous.

They knew the two men had known each other, had fought before, and that Beren taunted Karest. They had one witness saying Beren had asked for the fight to stop and another saying he was still attacking.

They did not know that Karest had killed in rage.

Beren's body

Tal proposed examining the body before the funeral.

Beren's mother agreed on one condition: she would be present, nothing would be cut or taken away, and the Sages would tell her what they knew — not what they imagined.

It was the first time Tal had seen a human corpse so closely.

Humakt's Death was no longer a story. Beren's skin had a pallor no living person wore. Dirt still clung to his hair.

The examination revealed little, but what it revealed was clear: a shallow cut on the forearm, marks consistent with a fall, and above all a single deep and mortal wound beneath the ribs, delivered while Beren was lower than his opponent.

A single wound made the image of someone striking again and again in blind rage less plausible.

But it did not say whether Beren had been begging for mercy or still attacking from a low position.

Hendrik stated what the body had actually taught them:

“We have reduced the uncertainty. We have not removed it.”

Tal first wanted to see this as weakening Enissa's account. Hendrik corrected him: Enissa had specifically said Beren was down and still dangerous. The body confirmed the first part and did not decide the second.

A reconstruction that solves nothing

Back at the House of Peace, Tal asked Enissa to show exactly how the scene had unfolded.

She agreed.

According to her, Beren had been on one knee or half-risen. Karest stood in front of him, already wounded in the side. Beren had lost his spear but still held his knife in his right hand. He had struck upward; Karest had avoided the blow and answered once with his spear.

Enissa had been eight or ten paces away.

Tal compared this reconstruction with what he had seen on Beren's body.

It held together.

He had been looking for a contradiction. Greater precision revealed none.

Hendrik asked one last question:

— When Beren was on one knee, did you hear what he was saying?

— I heard shouting. But not his words. I didn't hear “Enough.”

— Are you saying he didn't say it?

— No. I'm saying I didn't hear it.

What truth?

Away from the two groups, Tal finally spoke with Hendrik alone.

All of it looked more and more like what it perhaps was: a cattle raid gone wrong. The laws provided for wergild. Beren could have killed Karest; Karest had killed him. Did every death really require a great divine truth behind it?

Tal finally voiced what was troubling him:

“The truth? But what truth? And what for?”

Hendrik did not ask him to invent a crime.

They were not the judges of all the Orlanthi. Their duty here was narrower: to say honestly what could be established, and what could not.

Perhaps Karest had killed Beren while the fight was still going on. But writing “fair fight” simply because that explanation seemed sufficient would be the same mistake as writing “murder” to satisfy the dead man's mother.

The Truth for which they were responsible might be much less grand:

“We do not know whether Beren had stopped fighting.”

Hendrik added:

“Law does not need us to make the world neater than it is.”

Tal felt a pressure lift.

Since his initiation, he had almost treated Truth as an obligation of omniscience. He now understood something more practical and perhaps more demanding: seek and report only established facts.

And when the facts are insufficient: know how to say “we do not know.”

“At this stage”

Tal returned before the two groups.

He announced what the investigation allowed them to say: Beren and Karest had indeed fought; Beren had died from that fight; but at this stage, nothing allowed them to state that any breach of their laws had occurred.

The investigation would continue if Karest survived and could speak. In the meantime, Beren's kin could begin the funeral rites.

The pause around the words “at this stage” carried weight.

Darin repeated them quietly.

A man from Karest's side tried to turn the statement into an acquittal. Hendrik stopped him:

— We acknowledge exactly what Talimar just said. Nothing more.

The two groups did not reconcile. Truth had not repaired the quarrel.

But the tense mass broke apart. Beren's kin began to tend to their dead. Karest's people remained near the House of Peace. The healer promised to notify the Sages if Karest could speak the next day.

As they walked away, Hendrik said only:

“This time, you said exactly what we know.”