THE DEVIL'S REALM
"Judge Graves," it said. "At last."
Alphonse did not answer.
He was looking at the gallery. Forty-one seats in six rows, the third one on the end still split where a clerk had dropped a strongbox on it eleven years ago. It was white. All of it was white. The wood, the stone, the brass on the clock, the light coming through windows that were not showing anything.
But the split was there.
It has the seat with the split in it.
"You are admiring the room." The thing on the bench sounded pleased. "You should. I rarely have one of these. Gardens, mostly. A great many white spaces, which are frankly a failure of imagination on the part of my guests." It laid the staff across its knees and folded its hands over it. "This one is a pleasure. I should like to conduct it properly, if you have no objection."
"Where am I."
"You know where you are." A small movement that might have been a shrug. "Say it, if you would prefer to hear it in your own voice. Most do."
Alphonse put his hands on the rail of the dock.
"You're the devil."
"That is what your people settled on." It seemed unbothered. "I would say we make deals. But I have lost that argument for thousands of years and I do not intend to reopen it with a lawyer. Oh, pardon me. I mean a judge."
It lifted the staff, and set it down again once, on the flat of the bench, the way a man calls a room to order.
"Alphonse Graves. Do you understand the charges."
"…What?"
"The charges." It was patient.
"I haven't been told the charges."
"Oh, I apologize. Let me correct it. There are three."
It raised a finger.
"Count one. In twenty-two years of practice you have not broken a single law of this kingdom. Not one, not once, not in a small way." The finger stayed up. "The question before the court is who that was for."
"That is not a charge, that is…"
"Count two." A second finger. "On the fourteenth of April a letter was delivered to your chambers, written by a man who was dead before it arrived. It has been in the second drawer of your desk for four months. You have put a roster on top of it every morning and you have not read it."
Alphonse said nothing.
"Count three, at approximately twenty minutes to twelve, on the roof of that building, you asked for me. Out loud, in your own head, with both hands. You did not ask what it would cost. You did not ask what I would want."
The clock above the door made no sound. Alphonse had listened to that clock for eleven years and it had always made a sound.
"How do you plead."
"…Not guilty."
"To which."
"To all of them."
"Very good." It settled back. "You may sit, if you prefer. Nobody ever does."
He did not sit.
"To count one," Alphonse said, and his voice had steadied, "A man is not required to justify obedience to the law. That is the wrong way round. The law does not ask why you kept it."
"It does not," the devil agreed. "I am asking."
"Then the answer is that I kept it because it is the law. Not for advantage. I have taken no bribe in twenty-two years, I have never once ruled to please a house, I have made enemies of the four wealthiest families in this city and I could name you the exact rulings."
"I am sure you could."
"And I did that while the alternative was available to me every single day."
"That is a good answer," it said, and it sounded like it meant it. "It is also not an answer to the question, and you know that, because you have taken it apart in men on that side of the rail a thousand times. I did not ask what you refrained from. I asked who benefited."
Alphonse's jaw worked.
"The people of this kingdom benefit from a judiciary that is not for sale."
"Name one."
"That is not…"
"Name one man in Nauz who is warmer tonight because Alphonse Graves has never taken a bribe."
Alphonse stood in the dock with his hands on the rail, his face showing a growing irritation.
"You have had this put to you already today," the thing said, "and I am aware that it is unsporting to raise it twice. But you did not answer him either, and I am obliged to record something."
It made no note. There was nothing on the bench to write with.
"To count two, then. The letter."
"That is my private correspondence."
"It is."
"It has no bearing."
"Then let us find out." It lifted its chin very slightly. "I will have it read into the record."
"No."
The word came out of him harder than he intended. It went up into the white ceiling and came back.
The devil waited.
"…You may not have it read," Alphonse said. "It is mine. Whatever it says, it was written to me and it is mine, and I will not have it read out in a room by somebody who did not know him."
There was a pause.
"That is your right," it said.
And it moved on.
Alphonse stood there for a moment with his mouth slightly open.
"To count three," the devil said.
"A thought is not an act."
Alphonse had it ready. He had been assembling it since the second count and it came out clean.
"There is no jurisdiction on this earth that convicts a man on what went through his head in extremity. I was standing on a roof forty minutes after the worst hour of my life. A man in that condition cannot form intent, and he cannot be held to a bargain he could not have understood. There was no offer in front of me. No terms. No consideration. Nothing I could have read. And I was put into that state deliberately, by somebody who wanted me in it."
He had both hands flat on the rail now.
"Duress. No terms. No capacity. It fails on all three and it fails on any one of them alone."
"In twenty-two years," the devil said, "how many men have stood where you are standing and told you they were not themselves at the time."
Alphonse did not answer immediately.
"A great many."
"And how many did you acquit on it."
The clock above the door did not tick.
"…The defense is available. It is not often made out."
"That is not the question I asked, Judge, and you would not have let it stand in your own room." Its voice did not sharpen. That was the worst part of it. "How many."
"Two." Alphonse's jaw was tight. "In twenty-two years. Two men."
"Out of how many who ran it."
"…I don't have the figure."
"You have the figure."
"Several hundred."
"Several hundred." The devil nodded slowly, as though a point of procedure had been settled to everyone's satisfaction. "So you have spent your working life listening to broken men explain that they were not themselves, and you have believed two of them, and today you are the three hundredth."
"That is not the same."
"No," it agreed. "It is not. In your case it happens to be true, as it did for many you didn't spare."
Alphonse did not move.
"I did not accuse you of making a bargain with me," the devil said.
It let that sit.
"I accused you of wanting one, you did not weigh it. You did not price it. You did not ask what it would take out of you or who it would take it from, and you are a man who has never in his life signed his name to anything he had not read twice." It straightened. "Forty seconds. That is how long it took. Do you plead to that, Judge Graves, or shall I put the question again."
Alphonse looked at his hands on the rail of his own dock.
He did not say anything.
"So noted," said the devil.
He had never in his life argued better than he argued in that room, against a thing that had come to take everything off him.
And at the end of it he was still standing in the dock.
"Do you wish to call evidence," the devil said.
"I have no evidence to call. There is no one here."
"There is one."
It raised the staff and set it down.
A man was standing at the front of the gallery, a broad white man with long arranged blonde hair and small eyes.
He was very old and he was slightly stooped and he was wearing the black he had worn every day for thirty-one years, and there was a spot of ink on the second finger of his right hand that had been there for as long as Alphonse had known him.
"Edward," Alphonse said.
"He cannot hear you. He is not here. You understand the distinction, I think, better than most of my guests."
The old man looked at nothing in particular, the way he had always looked at things when he was working something out. Then he spoke, and it was his voice. Not close to it. It.
"I was glad when it happened."
Alphonse's hands came off the rail.
"Thirty-one years," the old man said, in the mild way he said everything. "Do you know, I could not sleep for the last four of them. I would go down to the archive at two in the morning and read my own judgments and look for the year it stopped. It doesn't stop anywhere. There isn't a year. It was always like that and I was always in the chair and I was always going to be, and I could not find the day I should have done something differently, because there wasn't one. It was every day."
He was quiet a moment.
"And when the man came into my chambers I was frightened for about six seconds and then I was relieved."
He turned his head, in the general direction of the dock, still not seeing anything.
"I chose you because you are like me. That is the whole of the reason. You will sit in it very well and you will change nothing at all, and you will die at eighty being called a good man, and it will cost them another thirty years."
"THAT IS NOT HIM."
Alphonse was shouting. He had not shouted in a courtroom in his life.
"THAT IS NOT HIM, HE WOULD NEVER. He never once said. You made that, you built that out of nothing, that is NOT…"
"No," the devil agreed. "It is not."
The old man was already going, from the feet upward.
"But do you think it is what he was thinking? At two in the morning, in the archive, in the fourth year he could not sleep?"
Alphonse did not answer.
"May I tell you why you are here," the devil said. "It is a courtesy. You may decline it."
"…Say it."
"The man on the roof told you that I come to those whose resolve is greatest." It let that sit for exactly as long as it needed to. "His reasoning was incomplete."
"Then why."
"I come when a person stops believing they can solve it themselves." It said it without any weight at all, which was how it arrived. "That is the whole of the criterion. Hundreds of thousands of invitations and not one of them has been to a strong man. You were not standing on that roof at your best, Judge. You were finished. That is your qualification and it is the only one I accept, because at the edge of existence, when a man loses the ink and pen to write his life, is when he truly is ready to take my deals."
Alphonse looked at his own hands on the rail.
"So I'm here because I gave up."
"Yes."
"Now," the devil said. "The court has some questions, and I would ask you to answer them properly, because I am going to hold you to them. Also make it quick. I don't want a bulk of text each question, answer briefly and precisely."
"To what end."
"To the end of drafting. Answer."
Alphonse straightened.
"What is the law for."
"To prevent men from doing to each other what they would otherwise do."
"Not to punish."
"Punishment is a tool of prevention. It is not the purpose. Anyone who tells you otherwise is enjoying himself."
"Who should decide a man's guilt."
"Not one person." It came out of him instantly. "Never one person. One man deciding alone is not law, it is appetite with a robe on. Guilt is found by a process that does not belong to anybody, on evidence that can be examined by people who disagree."
"And if the process is slow."
"Then it is slow."
"And if the guilty man walks out of the room because it was slow."
"Then he walks out of the room," Alphonse said, "and I do not get to fix that by becoming him."
The devil smiled.
"How do you establish that a man is guilty."
"You prove it. You find what is true and you show that it is true, and until you have done that he is not guilty, he is only accused, and there is no lawful thing you may do to him."
"Nothing at all."
"You may investigate him. That is all you may do. You may look."
"And when it is proven."
"Then the process authorizes what follows. Not me. Not the man holding the sword. The finding authorizes it, and the authority is exactly as wide as the finding and not one inch wider."
"And death."
Alphonse was silent for a moment.
"Almost never," he said. "And never on the judgment of one man. If a life is to be taken, then it is taken because the record itself demands it, and the record must be so heavy that no honest person reading it could reach any other conclusion. If there is a reading in which he lives, he lives."
"And mercy," said the devil. "What conditions attach to mercy."
"None." Alphonse's voice did not move at all. "Mercy is not a finding. You do not have to prove anything to be allowed to help someone. That is the one door that stays open."
The thing on the bench sat with its hands folded on the staff for a while.
"Judge Graves," it said, "you are the best answerer I have had, and I want you to remember that you said all of it freely, and that every word of it was yours. You decided your curse, and crafted your power with your own mouth. I will simply build it after you."
He stopped for a second. Alphonse waited for him to continue.
"The court finds as follows."
It stood. It was very small standing up.
"On count one, that the accused kept the law immaculately for twenty-two years, and that no living man in Nauz is warmer tonight for it because he is delusional. On count two, that the letter is in the drawer and remains unread because he is a coward. On count three, that he asked for me in forty seconds and did not ask the price because he is ignorant."
It set the staff down.
"Guilty on all counts. Sentence deferred."
"…Deferred."
"Suspended, rather. It is being served presently and will be served for the remainder of your life." A slight movement of the head. "Now. To the disposal."
It came down off the bench, one step at a time, and it walked to the front of the dock, and it was so short that it had to look up at him.
"I am going to offer you the thing you asked for." It put a hand up on the rail.
"Your curse is: The Magistrate's Trinity."