Three days had passed since the incident with the Quartermaster and the men continued to tire.
I walked along side the lead wagon and felt the stones in the fabric of my tunic. The white stone required focused intent but the Justice Stone was still enigmatic.
I pulled my mind away from the heat and back to the puzzle. The poem's fragmented translation looped in my head. "Its word is given to the human race." I had turned that phrase over a thousand times in the lantern light of my tent. Elias's lexicon was invaluable but incomplete. It might have been a mistranslation but if I had gotten it right, it suggested a fundamental condition of operation. The stone needed a stage. It needed the collective gaze of a "race" or a community to validate its function.
It was a hypothesis that terrified me. I certainly didn't want a crime to test it. Our caravan was a small, fragile bubble of life in a vast ocean of death. A crime might be something we couldn't survive. But the desert has a way of providing tests you didn't ask for. As Olen had muttered last night, "The Empire's law stops where the sand begins." We were entering a place where paper treaties meant nothing, and only power dictated truth.
A violent crack tore through the red haze, the kind of sound only dry wood makes when something enormous panics. It was immediately followed by a shout of pain.
I ran toward the rear of the caravan. Red dust was being stirred up into clouds that made the source invisible. Then through the haze, I saw the slate-gray bulk of Titan, our largest bull, trashing wildly.
"Hold!" Bastien yelled, holding his sword.
Titan was a gentle beast, bred for endurance. He was a mass of muscle with a layer of thick gray hide with a heavy beak and two curving tusks. He bucked against his harness and shattered his heavy wooden yoke.
"Get back!" Olen screamed, waving everyone away.
A young handler lay in the sand, holding his shin. His face was pale and his teeth were gritted, but he was cursing rather than screaming. Screaming would have been a sign that the injury was dangerous rather than painful. Probably a scrape rather than a blow that would give us a man to nurse instead of one to drive the wagon.
Titan bellowed again and swung his head. A crate of hardtack was smashed into splinters by his tusk sending our biscuits tumbling into the sand. We'd have grit in our teeth for the rest of the journey.
"He's mad," Olen continued pointing a long spear at Titan. "Take him down!"
One of the men stayed in front, prepared to brace his spear in the ground, to impale Titan using his own body weight. Another went to the side of the neck to force an exposure of a soft target. The third was prepared to thrust and make the kill.
Titan pawed at the sand, his stubby tail twitching.
"Kill him!" the Quartermaster yelled. "Before he charges the water wagon and kills us all!"
It was an unfolding disaster. A valuable animal was about to be killed and the crew's morale was falling apart. It was both a tragedy and a perfect testing ground for an experiment.
"Stop!" My voice croaked. I forced volume into it. "Lower your spears and back away!"
"He's a killer, Prince Elyan!" Olen argued, not lowering his spear. "We can't trust him! It's not safe."
"We do not destroy state assets without cause!" I said it before thinking. The words were so much like the ideals of the Iron Code of Spartova, they tasted bitter in my mouth. I saw Bastien flinch a little at the phrase but I was responsible for commanding authority, especially in times of stress.
"Bastien," I ordered, "Form a secured perimeter and see to it that the leg is looked at. No one strikes unless I give the command."
Bastien hesitated, eyeing me, but in the blink of an eye he moved and shouted for the men to grab their shields.
I turned to face Titan. His sides heaved as he watched me.
I reached into my pocket and took out the black Justice Stone. It felt heavy and cold. I held it high to ensure that all eyes could see it, testing the public state hypothesis.
"We need the truth," I said. "Whether this is malicious or not."
I focused my mind into the frame of a city magistrate and asked the question aloud: "Is this tuspak guilty of the crime of assault against its handler?" It wasn't just a question, it was a shout to the men, to Titan, to the desert itself.
For a heartbeat nothing happened as I stared into that strange black emerald. A dim and murky, but distinct light beamed from the center of the black crystalline lattice. It was Indigo.
Then once everyone had a chance to register what they'd seen, the stone returned to black.
The men murmured in confusion.
"What is this?" Olen spit, still pointing his pike. "The beast is mad and needs to be put down!"