21 · Those Who Said Otherwise

spoke the soldier's name, one suit of armour lowered its sword. She went on with the cook, the supervisor, the supervisor's wife, who admitted signing without being present. Each testimony was given room, then ceased to attack.

Serik held off those that remained. Teren saw him accept a cut to the cheek to keep a blade from reaching Neris. No sacred light surrounded the shield. There was a man calculating how much pain he could endure without moving aside.

One statement belonged to the magistrate who approved the dykes' closure. Neris wanted to leave it until last. The board was whole, and it was easier to take the crumbling ones first. That was what she told herself.

The nearest iron raised its sword.

The gnome rested the board across both knees. The magistrate claimed the lower neighbourhoods were already lost. If they kept the passage open, the flood would reach the granaries where twelve thousand people had gathered. He knew families remained, but the crew chiefs disagreed on how many.

He wrote: “I decided with the count I had.”

On another board, a messenger testified that he had brought a corrected figure. They made him wait outside the chamber. His mother's house was among the flooded neighbourhoods.

Serik took a blow on his shield's edge. His forearm was numb. He wanted to tell them to hurry. The words he had heard stopped him: “They disagreed on how many.” Every minute of reading was a count that could leave him on the other side too.

Neris looked up.

“If you can't do any more, say so.”

He nodded without answering.

The gnome continued the messenger's testimony. The boy went back for his mother. He found her on the stairs and tried to lift her. She refused: seven children were in a neighbouring courtyard. He must take them first. When he returned, his mother was gone.

There was no final sentence from her. The son had kept nine versions of the argument in his head before he could write one down. He

admitted he did not know which words were actually spoken.

Teren knew that erosion. He had repeated conversations with his dead father so often that some tones already seemed borrowed from other people. Memory grew more certain as it moved away from the body that held it.

Ivara found a statement in a spy's name. She was accused of handing over the eastern access. She admitted passing plans to the besiegers but claimed they included an exit for evacuating civilians. They did not know whether she lied. Beneath was a note in Madruga's own hand: “Ask her why she did not draw the schools.”

“She could doubt our own,” the mage murmured.

She had made Madruga the owner of a clean truth. Now she discovered a woman trying to ask questions within disaster, not yet knowing which accounts would survive as heroic.

Maera threw a stone to deflect a blade seeking Serik's neck. The metal turned and split a root. White shoots contracted like fingers.

“We need that roof!” Beran

shouted.

He looped his rope around the damaged root to keep it from falling on the tablets. The task did not suit one hand. Ivara bent to help and dropped her lamp. The glass broke. The room went dark except for the light from the stairs.

Neris went on reading from memory what she had just seen. She got a surname wrong. The nearest guardian took a step.

“Correct it,” Teren said.

He did not say “go on.” The gnome felt for the board until the mage lit another light. She read the true surname. The guardian stepped back.

They did not demand a beautiful account. They demanded that those speaking could recognise when they did not know.

At the end of the magistrate's statement, Neris added aloud that no one had been able to question him afterwards. He died in the flood he ordered contained. That death proved neither remorse nor innocence. It only closed a chance to ask.

One suit of armour let its sword fall. The sound

was so small Teren could hardly believe how much they had worked to hear it.

The last board was broken. Only a child's statement remained: “I didn't see who closed it. I saw who came back for us.”

Neris read it three times, once for each illegible name at the foot.

The guardians became still.

Maera finished clearing the exit and sat against the wall.

“Next time we find a tomb with ordinary thieves.”

No one laughed until Beran gave a short, pained chuckle. His dressing had shifted. Teren adjusted it without rising from the floor.

They stayed there through the night.

Teren woke to the scrape of a pen.

Ivara was still copying. She had reached the statement of a soldier who used the evacuation to take his wife out before other families. Afterwards he returned and rescued seven people. He died seeking the eighth. The official copy called him a hero; a witness called him a thief of places.

The mage kept both terms in the margin.

“Which

will you put?” the cleric asked.

“First, the name.”

He sat opposite. His leg hurt. They had lived with wounds so long he was beginning to fear one of them would stop reporting when one worsened. He checked Serik's dressing without waking him. Then he looked at the medicine bag and calculated what remained.

Ivara saw the gesture.

“We can go back to the city after this.”

“If they let us.”

“If they don't, we still have to try.”

The phrase made him laugh without pleasure. They had begun by seeking a document that could end an argument. Now they needed whole cities to keep the document from becoming another thing held by those in command.

The mage laid down her pen. She wanted to ask whether he believed the gods heard them. Instead she asked whether he missed the valley.

Teren thought of the mill, the way Lina watched the windows when it rained.

“I miss knowing what I can do when I arrive at a house.”

“You know

here too.”

“Here there's always something missing I don't understand.”

Ivara leaned against the wall. For years she thought being prepared meant knowing more than those who could throw her out of a room. She never came to feel safe. Every new question threatened to prove she had been admitted by mistake.

“That happens to me in every house,” she said.

The cleric did not answer with a blessing. He passed her Sura's cup. The water was cold. They held it between them until they stopped pretending to work.

In the morning, Neris found one sheet stained by the cup's rim. Ivara wanted to copy it again. The gnome asked to keep that copy as well as the new one. Not as mystical proof of friendship: the stain covered an important word and would remind them why they needed more than one legible version.

The mage agreed. She was learning not to call every sign that hands had been alive upon the paper carelessness. Neris copied the statements. Serik helped

with erased words without proposing a more heroic version. Ivara added the stories of those called traitors because of their blood.

When Teren asked what she would do with so many incompatible accounts, she answered:

“What we do with the living. Find where they tread on one another, and don't kill the one who doesn't fit.”

The exit led to the Sanctuary of Voices. Before entering, Neris laid her cleanest sheet beside the child's board. It seemed unjust to have taken so much without leaving somewhere someone could keep writing.