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The thrones—I counted seven—were empty, but the space at the foot of each throne was already crowded with people, all but a very few dressed head to toe in black. No one was milling around. No one appeared to be in conversation. A hundred or more people stood in all but total silence.
“A congress of messengers,” Messenger said.
This was not a particularly helpful explanation, but I was fascinated by what I saw around me as we joined that assembly. Here was every expression of the human genome—Asians, blacks, whites, and all the hues of each. There were men and women in roughly equal numbers, and ages ranging from quite old to my age. There were no young children, only teens through the elderly.
No one, not even those who by their look would be in their eighties, seemed feeble in the least. These were strong, erect people, who stood with squared shoulders and composed expressions. It seemed that messenger status conferred health and good looks—the only positive benefit I had yet discovered. Part of me wondered if I would be physically transformed when I became a full messenger. Would I have the terrible beauty of so many I saw around me now? And was that physical transformation somehow necessary or was it just the pleasure of the goddess Isthil to make her minions attractive?
Among this black-clad crowd I spotted a sparse sprinkling, who, like myself, were dressed in colors or in white. They could only be my fellow apprentices. And these, too, were a cross-section of humanity. I was surprised that men and women in old age could be apprentices like me. I saw only two others who were close to my age, one a girl, the other a handsome boy with blunt-cut blond hair. He was perhaps twenty feet away, too far for me to speak to him, too far to overhear if he spoke. His master was also a teenager by appearance, a severe young woman who must have come from the Indian subcontinent, and who still wore the forehead jewelry called a bindi, common to her culture. Like Messenger, she appeared to be at most nineteen or maybe twenty years old. But also like him there was a sense of unapproachability about her.
The boy, the apprentice with the golden mane, turned and looked at me. He stared for a moment, then smiled. It was not a genuine, spontaneous smile, but I appreciated it nevertheless—this was not a gathering of the happy-go-lucky fun lovers of humanity, and anything warm or even polite was like water in a desert: welcome, even if the taste of it was off.
A very tall woman messenger with long gray hair strode to the front, mounted a few steps of the platform, bringing her to where we could all see her. When she spoke it was with the same eerily intimate voice Messenger used, a voice that seemed at once grand and formal, and to be a whisper made directly into my ear.
“We are called to judge one of our own,” she said without preamble. No one showed any surprise. “The accused will step forward.”
At that the young messenger, the master of the blond boy, moved to the front and mounted the steps to stand just below our grim master of ceremonies.
“This messenger, whose own name is Chandra Munukutla, is accused of attempting to alter the fabric of time.”
Messenger sighed softly and the muscle of his jaw twitched.
“The facts of the case are these,” the spokeswoman said. “This messenger was sent to address a wrong. She found a victim and rather than confine herself to her sacred office, she shifted time in such a way as to free the victim.”
My head swirled sharply to Messenger. “I thought that was impossible,” I blurted, though I had the sense to whisper it. The temporarily abandoned apprentice shot me a look. Not angry or even appreciative, just interested. I ignored him and hoped no one else had heard me.
“Silence,” Messenger said quietly.
The gray-haired messenger went on. “We are given great powers, but those powers are only to be used to uncover truth, to understand what has occurred, to offer the game and to discover and then impose the punishment that wickedness has earned. We hold those powers in sacred trust from Isthil; they are not ours to use.”
Again, there was no surprise, no whispered commentary, no pointing of fingers, just stolid, silent attention from the messengers.
“Speak, if you wish.”
The Indian messenger, what was her name? I remembered Chandra only because I know a girl at school by that name. Chandra spoke.
“I acknowledge the facts,” Chandra said in true messenger style, minimal yet intimate, with very little emotion discernible. “But in this case the victim was an eleven-year-old girl who would be burned by acid, permanently scarred, disfigured . . .” And now the facade of emotionlessness slipped a little and passion crept into Chandra’s voice. “Her face would be a mask of horror, her lips would be so badly burned that she would be unable to eat in the presence of others. All because she had run away from home rather than be married to a man of fifty years. I saw a way to make a very small change in the time line that would save her. She would never be attacked, and thus those responsible would not need to face the game or the doom.”
Now I felt tension in the onlookers. Who among these messengers had not faced a similar dilemma? If I could somehow kill the demon that had taken Graciella’s father and thus cause his many sins against that girl never to occur, would it not be far better than punishing those who had wronged Graciella later in life?
“These are the temptations that come to all messengers,” the spokeswoman said. She wasn’t pitiless, she did not argue that it was evil to save the girl, and I am morally certain that each of us, certainly I myself, believed she had done something essentially good.
“These are the temptations,” the spokeswoman repeated. “But the law that governs us is clear.”
“Who saves a life saves all the world,” Chandra said, an edge of desperation now all the more clear and heartbreaking for the restraint with which she said it.
I had heard the saying before. I believed it was from the Bible. But the gray-haired messenger corrected that misimpression. “Thus say many great traditions, Chandra, including the Talmud of the Jews, to which people I was born. But messengers must set aside all other faiths and serve only the balance maintained by the Heptarchy, under the oversight of great Isthil. We serve Isthil and the balance. We are not gods, we are servants. It is not ours to choose when and when not to obey.”
I bridled instinctively at that. What system of morality could possibly condemn one who had saved a girl from a lifetime of pain?
I wondered, if it were put to a vote, how many of the men and women, the boys and girls present would deny the essential goodness of what Chandra had done.
I glanced at Messenger and read nothing but sorrow and grim determination on his face. My heart sank. I realized then that we were not a jury, but mere witnesses.
The gray-haired messenger waited as though she expected someone to speak. But no one spoke. The facts were not in dispute. The “accused” admitted her guilt, if guilt can possibly be the word applied to an act of simple, human decency.
When no one spoke, the gray-haired woman said, “I ask for the judgment of Isthil.”
11
