The door to Justice Oswyn Creeke's room stood ajar, and the darkness within was the absolute darkness of a space that had been empty for some time. The candle on the bedside table had burned down to a pool of wax, and the bed itself was untouched, its coverlet stretched smooth and tight as a drumhead. A faint smell hung in the air, the smell of old paper and something sharper, something chemical. Judicial ink, Thaddeus thought. The same residue that had stained Dr. Grubb's sleeve.
Septimus Creach entered the room first, moving with the silent, deliberate tread of a man who had spent years navigating spaces where noise could be fatal. Honoria followed, her pistol drawn and her face set in an expression of cold determination. Thaddeus brought up the rear, the bronze eagle clutched in his hands like a talisman.
“He is gone,” Creach said, stating the obvious with the flat affect of a man who had learned to suppress his emotions. “The window is unlatched. There are footprints in the frost beneath it, leading toward the beck.”
Honoria crossed to the window and examined the sill. “The frost has melted at the edges. He left an hour ago, perhaps two. He could be anywhere on the moor by now.”
Thaddeus looked around the room. Justice Creeke had traveled light, bringing only a small valise and the leather folder containing his great-grandfather's journal. The valise was still there, open on the dresser, its contents undisturbed. But the leather folder was missing. And on the dresser, propped against the mirror, was a sheet of paper covered in that same cramped, secretive handwriting that Thaddeus had come to recognize.
The letter was addressed to no one. It read:
“‘You will not understand. I do not fully understand myself. I came to Drearhaven to lay the past to rest, to confront the place where my great-grandfather committed the act that has shadowed our family for six generations. But the ground here does not permit rest. The ground here remembers. When I saw Dr. Grubb with his vials and his notebooks, prying into the soil, I saw a man who would expose the truth before I was ready to face it. I acted in a moment of madness. I cannot undo what I have done. I can only follow the path to its end. The tribunal is still in session. The ledger must be corrected. I am the last of the Creeke judges, and I will carry out the sentence, even if the sentence is upon myself.’”
Thaddeus read the letter twice. The words were a confession, but they were also a warning. The judge had killed Dr. Grubb, but he had not finished. The tribunal was still in session. The sentence had not yet been fully carried out.
“He has gone to the site,” Thaddeus said. “To the excavation. He means to destroy it, or to bury it, or to do something that will ensure the truth never comes to light.”
“Or he means to do something worse,” Creach said quietly. “My brother has always been a man of rigid principle. He believes that the law is sacred, even when the law is monstrous. If he has concluded that the excavation threatens the foundation of the legal order—the precedents that govern military service, the statutes that define the boundaries of duty—then he may believe that destroying the evidence is not enough. He may believe that the witnesses must also be silenced.”
The implication was clear. They were the witnesses. All of them.
The walk to the excavation site was a journey through a landscape that seemed to have been drained of all color. The frost had thickened during the night, and the heather crunched underfoot like crushed glass. The sky was beginning to lighten in the east, a pale, sickly yellow that did nothing to warm the air. The beck, usually a gentle murmur at the edge of the field, was running high and fast, swollen with meltwater from the higher moors.
Parkin and the Groat brothers were already at the site when they arrived. Parkin was standing beside his theodolite, his breath pluming in the cold air, his face ashen. The Groat brothers stood at the edge of the new trench, the circular depression that Parkin had discovered the previous day. Their spades were idle in their hands, and they were staring down into the excavation with expressions that Thaddeus could not immediately read.
“He was here,” Parkin said, his voice shaking. “The judge. He came an hour ago. He said he needed to examine something in the trench. He climbed down, and he was down there for a long time, and then he climbed out and walked toward the beck. He did not speak to us. He did not look at us. He moved like a man in a dream.”
“What did he do in the trench?” Honoria asked, already moving toward the edge.
“I do not know. We did not watch. We were preparing the equipment for the day's work. But when we looked again, he was gone, and there was something—” Parkin swallowed convulsively. “There was something in the trench that was not there before.”
Thaddeus and Honoria reached the edge of the trench and looked down.
The depression was not a grave. It was a chamber, a circular room dug into the peat and lined with stones, the remains of some ancient structure that had been buried by centuries of bog growth. The floor of the chamber was paved with flat slabs of local granite, and in the center of the floor, arranged in a pattern that was unmistakably deliberate, lay a collection of objects.
There was the curse tablet, the one that had been stolen from the farmhouse, its lead surface gleaming dully in the pale morning light. There was a leather-bound journal, open to a page covered in the handwriting of Judge Malcolm Creeke. There was a pen case, the judicial pen case of the Creeke family, its silver fittings tarnished with age. And there was a length of cord, coiled neatly, its fibers dark with old stains.
And there, in the center of the arrangement, was a human skull. It was old, yellowed with age, its jaw missing and its eye sockets staring up at the sky with the blank, patient gaze of the long dead.
“It is my great-grandfather,” Septimus Creach said from behind them. His voice was barely a whisper. “Judge Malcolm Creeke. He was buried in the family vault in Millstone City. But that is his skull. I would recognize the dental work anywhere. My brother has exhumed him. He has brought him here, to the place of his crime, and laid him out with the instruments of his judgment.”
Honoria knelt at the edge of the trench, her osteological instincts overriding her shock. “The skull shows no signs of violence. The cranium is intact. The teeth are worn, consistent with an elderly individual. This man died of natural causes, or at least not of trauma. He was not murdered.”
“No,” Thaddeus said slowly. “He was brought here to bear witness. The judge is reenacting something. The original tribunal of 1783. He is placing the judge alongside the condemned, the instruments of judgment alongside the evidence. He is trying to understand what his great-grandfather felt. Or he is trying to atone for it.”
“Or he is trying to repeat it,” Creach said. “With himself as the final victim.”
The search for Justice Creeke began immediately. The Groat brothers, who knew the moor better than any of the others, fanned out across the heather, following the beck downstream toward the Murgatroyd Mire. Parkin, despite his trembling hands, set up his theodolite and began to methodically survey the surrounding landscape, calculating lines of sight and potential routes of travel. Honoria remained at the trench, cataloguing the objects that the judge had placed in the chamber, searching for any clue to his intentions.
Thaddeus and Septimus Creach followed the beck upstream, toward the higher ground where the peat gave way to outcroppings of grey granite and the wind blew with a ferocity that numbed the face and snatched the breath from the lungs.
“He will go to the hermit's bothy,” Creach said, his voice raised above the wind. “The Anchorite of Murgatroyd. My brother visited him once before, years ago, when we were both young men and still on speaking terms. He said the hermit possessed knowledge that could not be found in any library. I did not think much of it at the time. But now I wonder.”
“What kind of knowledge?”
“The hermit is said to be the last surviving member of a religious order that was suppressed during the Insurrection of the Western Shires. The Order of the Divided Heart, they were called. They believed that the Lex Muneris was a blasphemy, that the division of service was a sin against the natural order of creation. They preserved the records of the Roman purge, the 1783 tribunal, and every other instance of the law's application. They believed that one day a man would come who would overturn the law and restore the unity of service. They called him the Integrator, the one who would make whole what had been divided.”
Thaddeus stopped walking. The wind howled around him, and the cold bit into his bones, but he felt suddenly, terribly alert. “You knew about this order. You knew about the hermit. You have been tracking this for twenty years, and you never thought to mention it?”
Creach turned to face him. His slate-colored eyes were unreadable. “I told you, Mr. Mire. My family has been bound up with this matter for generations. I have spent my life studying it. But I am not the Integrator. I am a Creeke. The blood of the executioner runs in my veins. I can study the law, I can document its atrocities, but I cannot overturn it. The Integrator must be someone who has suffered under the law, someone whose life has been shaped by its injustice. Someone whose name appears on the roll of the condemned.”
Thaddeus felt the scroll in his coat pocket, the ancient list of names with his own name at the bottom. Thaddaeus Mirus. The one who would make whole what had been divided. The words of the curse tablet echoed in his mind: “Let those who divided the service be divided in death.” And now a counter-prophecy, spoken by a hermit on a windswept moor: the Integrator, the one who would restore the unity of service.
“You believe I am this person,” Thaddeus said. “This Integrator.”
“I believe the hermit believes it. And I believe my brother believes it too. That is why he came here. Not just to confront the past, but to confront you. To test the prophecy. To see whether the law he has served all his life is stronger than the man whose name was written on a death list two thousand years ago.”
They found the bothy an hour later, tucked into a fold of the moor where the wind was slightly less merciless and a thin trickle of water ran over a bed of dark stones. It was a crude structure, built of unmortared stone and roofed with turf, the kind of shelter that shepherds used during lambing season. A thread of smoke rose from a hole in the roof, and a faint light glimmered through the single window, which was covered with a piece of oiled cloth.
Thaddeus approached the door, his heart hammering in his chest. He did not know what he expected to find inside. A mad hermit, a dying judge, a final confrontation that would resolve the tangled threads of two thousand years of injustice. He raised his hand to knock.
The door opened before his knuckles touched the wood.
The man who stood in the doorway was ancient, impossibly ancient, his face a map of wrinkles and his eyes clouded with cataracts. He wore a rough wool robe, tied at the waist with a length of rope, and his bare feet were blue with cold. But his voice, when he spoke, was clear and steady.
“You are Thaddaeus Mirus,” the hermit said. “I have been waiting for you since before you were born. Come in. There is much to tell you, and not much time. The judge has already been here. He has taken the book.”
“The book?” Thaddeus asked.
“The Book of the Divided Service. The complete record of every man who was killed under the Lex Muneris, from the Roman era to the present day. The names of the condemned. The names of the executioners. The evidence that the law was a fraud, a cover for a crime that began two thousand years ago and has been perpetuated by every generation since. The judge has taken it. He means to burn it.”
The hermit stepped aside, and Thaddeus entered the bothy. The interior was a single room, furnished with a straw pallet, a rough table, and shelves lined with books and scrolls. A fire burned in a small hearth, and the air was thick with the smell of peat smoke and old paper. On the table lay a single sheet of vellum, covered in writing that was still wet.
“He left this for you,” the hermit said. “He wrote it before he departed. He said you would come, and that you would understand.”
Thaddeus picked up the vellum. The handwriting was Justice Creeke's, the same cramped, secretive hand that had written the confession in the farmhouse. But this letter was different. It was not a confession. It was an indictment.
“‘To Thaddeus Mire, known in the ancient rolls as Thaddaeus Mirus,’” he read aloud. “‘You are the last of the condemned. Your name appears on the roll of the Ninth Legion, and on the conscription list of 1783, and on the pension ledger of the present day. The law has pursued your family across two thousand years, and it has never caught you. You are the loose thread, the uncorrected entry, the man who refuses to be classified. If the prophecy of the Divided Heart is true, you are the one who will overturn the Lex Muneris and restore the unity of service. But I cannot let that happen. The law is my inheritance. The law is my soul. I have killed to preserve it, and I will kill again if I must. I have taken the Book of the Divided Service. I am going to the Murgatroyd Mire, to the place where the forty-seven were executed, and I will burn the book and myself with it. The ledger will be corrected. The law will endure. This is the verdict. There is no appeal.’”
Thaddeus lowered the vellum. His hands were shaking. “He means to destroy himself. And the book. And all the evidence it contains.”
“Yes,” the hermit said. “But the book is not the only evidence. You are the evidence, Thaddaeus Mirus. Your life, your name, your refusal to be erased. The judge can burn the book, but he cannot burn you. You must go to the Murgatroyd Mire. You must stop him. And you must make a choice.”
“What choice?”
“The law is a living thing. It can be changed. It can be overturned. But only by someone who has standing, someone who has been injured by its application, someone who is willing to stand before the highest court in the land and demand that the ledger be corrected. The Book of the Divided Service contains the proof that the Lex Muneris was founded on a lie. If you can save that book, you can change the law. But if you save the book, you may not be able to save the judge. He is determined to die. You may have to choose between the evidence and the man.”
Thaddeus looked at Septimus Creach, who stood in the doorway with his black coat flapping in the wind. The younger Creeke's face was unreadable, but his eyes were wet.
“He is my brother,” Creach said. “He has done monstrous things. But he is my brother. I cannot ask you to save him. But I will ask you to try.”
Thaddeus nodded. He folded the judge's letter and placed it in his coat pocket, next to the scroll from the eagle. Then he turned and walked out of the bothy, into the wind and the cold, toward the Murgatroyd Mire.
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