The Admonishments of Kherishdar
M.C.A. Hogarth

FALSE WITNESS

naimeqet [ neye meh KEHT ], (adjective) — legally antiquated; used of customs, laws or traditions that are held over from earlier times and are not strictly consonant with existing custom.

      I should have known I'd be caught. I'd never heard of anyone getting away with a lie this big. But even as the Guardians took me from my shop, I nursed a fierce satisfaction. She'd been an uppity Noble and I'd gotten her stripped and chained up in a public square. They'd take me to our Regal, now, and I'd get a sharp talking-to, but it was all worth it.
      But then the Guardians marched me out of our district.
      "Where are we going?" I asked. None of them answered.
      I started sweating. I'd committed a wrong, yes. And it was against my Noble, so it was for our Regal to administer the Correction.
      So where were we going?
      I asked again later that day, when they put me in a coach. And again, when we stopped at a roadside inn. After that, I stopped asking, but I was afraid.
      We went through a Gate, all the way to First World.
      To the capital.
      To the plaza in its center... and there was a pedestal there, waiting for me. By the time the Guardians hauled me onto it and tied me with my back exposed, I was too stunned to object.
      "This male has been found guilty of false witness, a testimony which incurred a Correction on an innocent," a voice said with the sharpness of a scourge snapping, shocking my ears, the plaza, the witnesses who gathered. "For this crime, he will be bled in wine."
      I jerked my head up, eyes wide.
      And then the lash licked my spine, stripping the skin with it, and I screamed.
      I screamed.
      Oh ancestors, I screamed, I couldn't stop, and it went on and I couldn't bear it but I couldn't stop it and the silence all around me made me hear my own flesh squelching and the blood hitting the stone and and and
      stop—oh, god, is it ove—
      Smell of wine, bright, bright wine soaked with citrus peels, how amazing it smells, fruit and cloves and crisp and
      it's splashing on my open back

      When I come to, I am on a pedestal. I think it is the same pedestal but... no, the wounds are distant and my body is clothed though my memories are patchwork, stitched with fever.
      I am home now. I recognize these faces. And they... they recognize me, but there is something in their eyes when they look at me. No, not something there.
      Something missing.
      They no longer trust me. They know.
      And she is there, too, the Noble against whom I spoke my spiteful lie, watching me from the back of the throng. I expect hate, but the grief I see instead... my eyes narrow, spill.
     What have I done? I tell her from the prison of our silences. What have I done to us both?


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© 2007, M. C. A. Hogarth