POV: tensoon
Summary
TenSoon begins another day inside his prison pit. He has no eyes — could grow some, being old enough for it — but without a skull the eyes would only be crushed against his own muscle when he shifted, and there would be nothing useful to see in any case. He is a heap of translucent muscle in a grated stone hole barely large enough to hold him. He can taste the air through his skin, and the air tastes of his own waste, sluiced periodically out a drain in the floor and replaced with thrown food and a splash of water through the grate above. He thinks he has been in the pit for months. He is not certain.
He has the Blessing of Presence to keep his mind in order, and so he cannot lose himself to madness as a way out. On bad days he curses the Blessing. He focuses, because focus is what he has. He is here because he confessed. He had already broken his Contract — gone against the will of his master and helped another instead, with the result that his master died — and breaking Contract is an offence punishable by death. If his crimes had ended there, the Second Generation would have killed him quietly and that would be the end of it. They have not. His testimony to them, in closed session, named a second offence: he gave away something his people have spent centuries holding in secret. He told it to someone outside their kind. He does not know to whom he told it; he is not sure if he knows what he himself meant by telling it. What he does know is that as a result of his confession the kandra may all yet be enslaved again — not as in the old days, but in some new way, made into bodies that are not their own. He has done this. He should hate himself for it. He cannot quite manage to: he still believes he did right, which is its own small horror.
He shifts. Then he feels footsteps through the floor and arranges his bulk in the bottom of the pit, lifting the centre into a depression to catch whatever slop they may throw down. Nothing comes. The grate is unlocked instead, dragged back. Hooks reach in and lift him; the iron pulls bruisingly through his muscles and tears a few. He is dumped out across the floor of the prison and lies a moment, sprawled and shaking, while his body remembers what space feels like.
The next thing he tastes in the air is acid — thick, gold-lined acid in a bucket, ready to pour. The Second Generation have given up on finding out who he told. They are going to be rid of him. Then something hard lands on him: he reaches out, runs muscle along it, tastes round bone and curve and edge — a skull. The First Contract requires that a kandra facing execution be given the chance to speak in their own defence, and so they have given him a skull. He understands at the same time why: the guards have orders to kill him before he can use it. They are following the form of the law and ignoring the intent.
Most kandra take hours, even days, to form a body. TenSoon has been on more Contracts than anyone else in the Third Generation; an easy life teaches one very little, and his life has not been easy. He sheathes the skull in skin out of an internal store, builds a tongue and a lung and a windpipe in seconds, and the acid begins to come down over him just as he gets a mouth working. He shapes a word and forces it through the new trachea — "Judgment!" — and the pouring stops.
A voice, somewhere close, whispers at him to be a fool no longer — to accept the death the First Generation have granted him for his years of service, and not to harm the kandra further by forcing a public trial. He hears what is not said as well: a trial will publish his crimes to every kandra who hears it, and his name will be cursed forever, where a quiet acid bath would let him keep a measure of the respect he once had. A trial cannot save him; his own confessions have already damned him. There are pits in this same room, he is sure, where his people keep the truly inconvenient ones — minds preserved by the Blessing, minds that the centuries finally break anyway.
He knows this. He says the word again. Not to defend himself. For a different reason. "Judgment," he whispers, and the chapter ends with him having forced his trial.
The chapter closes on a further excerpt of "the Hero of Ages": the writer, holding the Well's power, was overwhelmed not by what he could do but by how much of it he did not yet understand — and feared, like a child given great strength, that pushing too hard might leave the world a broken toy beyond repair.