"The Emperor Himself," she said. "With me as His agent."
"And who is the accused?"
"His Majesty's Representative from Vasthold, Senator Nara Oxham." The dead woman pointed as she said the words.
Nara's felt a surge of emotion in the room, and her fingers went to her apathy bracelet automatically. But she forced her hands to her side again. She had already precisely adjusted her empathy. The capital hovered over her, a volatile presence focused on every word spoken here, but its emotions were in check. After weeks of furious calls for immediate revenge, the solemn ritual of a trial had focused the mob into a respectful audience. The people of the capital had long been trained to revere tradition.
The Senate's guard-at-arms strode up to Senator Oxham now. The young man was the only person allowed to carry weapons in the Forum. This was another position Nara has always thought honorary, but which had become suddenly very real.
The man took her arm.
"This one?" the guard asked the prelate.
"Yes."
The guard-at-arms released her, but stayed close, as if Nara might try to run.
"Who will speak in defense of the accused?" Drexler asked, his eyes sweeping the whole of the Senate, daring them to stand against the Emperor.
"I will speak for myself," Nara said. Her own words seemed disembodied, a result of both amplification and the incredible situation. It was hard for Oxham to believe that was she speaking to hundreds of billions, and to history, and that her own life depended on her words.
"Then let this Honorable Senate begin to hear the accusation," Drexler said, and sat on his chair of stone.
The dead prelate rose again, and walked to the fore of the Dais.
"President, Senators, citizens," she began. "The Emperor has been betrayed."
The trial had begun.
The prelate went on, as sonorous and repetitive as prayer. The rit-ual phrases rolled over Nara. all the words of blood oaths and bloody payment for broken promises. The war against death, and of the Emperor's great gift of immortality, all made its suffocating way into the prelate's narrative. Every iota of childhood conditioning was triggered, until even Senator Nara Oxham found herself appalled at what she had done. How dare she break faith with the man who had bested the Old Enemy death?
She steeled herself. Let them play all their cards now. Let them invoke every ancient superstition. The Emperor would fall all the harder when his secret was revealed.
"This woman was called to give the Emperor counsel in time of war."
Finally, the real charges.
"And having taken an oath of secrecy," the prelate continued, "she betrayed the Emperor's War Council. She broke the duly invoked hundred-year rule. Nara Oxham turned traitor."
The proof came next. The Great Forum darkened, and the airscreen above the Low Dais came alive. Puram Drexler would have had to crane his ancient neck to see, so instead he stared out at the audience like an alert teacher whose class was watching a synesthesia lesson.
The Senate listened in solemn silence, although these facts and images had been broadcast throughout the Empire for the last two weeks. In the newsfeeds, of course, each piece of evidence had been reduced by repetition to a single signifier: an image of her and Zai at the party, a few words of warning in her voice, a long shot of the palace's east wing where the War Council met. But here in the Senate, the scale was stretched in the opposite direction. Time slowed to a crawl. Each mark the Oxham/Zai affair had left on the public record now consumed long minutes of explanation. Their first conversation was studied frame by frame like a crime caught fleetingly on a security camera; ten years of short missives were read aloud in the dead prelate's dolorous cadence; quietly made plans were revealed with dramatic flourishes, as if their love had been a conspiracy from the start.
The last few messages between Oxham and the Lynx were read out, having been stripped of privilege by an overwhelming Senate 303 vote a few days ago. Her single-word message, Don't, was associated with Zai's refusal of the blade of error. It was all edited in the name of security, and slanted to make her the aggressor in the relationship. Nara was glad that they weren't going after Laurent. Over the last two weeks, the Apparatus had walked a fine line with the hero Zai. His propaganda image had been weakened, but not destroyed--he was now a once-strong Imperial warrior weakened by the influence of a scheming woman.
Thankfully, Laurent's final message to her was absent from the evidence. Zai's subterfuge had worked. They still didn't know that Nara Oxham had the Emperor's real secret in hand.
The litany went on, slipping into irrelevancies toward the end. Oxham's antiwar bill, the one withdrawn before she'd taken a seat on the council, was revealed. Her old votes in the Senate were isolated and given new significance; the accuser even found sinister components in acts that had passed the legislature unanimously.
And this was simply the opening statement. This slow crawl was the merest outline. The Emperor's accuser apparently planned to present an insuperable mountain of detail over the days ahead. The two hundred minutes of the accusation, half the first day of trial, seemed like years.
Finally, Nara Oxham was called to make her own opening statement.
The Senate President held up his cut-off switch and warned her before she began.
"The secrets of the Realm are sacred, Senator Oxham. Do not attempt to reveal them here in the Great Forum."
"I won't, President Drexler." Of course, the old solon had only been briefed about the Emperor's planned genocide, the issue covered by the hundred-year rule. If Laurent was right, the real secret, the one His Majesty had been willing to murder those millions to protect, was unknown to any person, living or dead, outside the conditioned drones of the Apparatus.
According to the Rix mind's story, even the Apparatus could not to speak of that secret. It brought them pain to hear it mentioned. She hoped that part of the tale was true.
Nara finally understood why the Empire was built on fear and bribes, on intimidation and loyalty conditioning, on the superstitious babble of some pretechnology mystery cult.
It was all because the Empire was built on a lie.
She turned to the Senate, prepared to undo it all.
For a moment Nara couldn't speak. The weight of the Empire's attention was too suffocating. She feared for a moment that she herself might be conditioned, bound from uttering the words by some deeply buried imperative. But she breathed deeply, lightly touched her bracelet for luck, and let the fear pass. Her anxiety was simply anticipation of how this speech would feel empathetically; she was about to take a wild and dangerous ride on the nervous animal that was the Empire.