The Paladin Archives Book Two The Withering Falseblade

by Jason Psilopoulos

  "Then who was on my ship?" Donavan's question was ignored. His face read of annoyance. "What about the Falseblade?" Donavan asked, his tone a little more even than the rest of them. Vincent flipped a page in his notes, as though he'd known that question was next.

  "The reported attack on the Triumphant has been found to be a fabrication that is in line with Marcus's wild claim about Darius March being a Manticore and the vehicle collision. Again, this invalidates your testimonies. It has been suggested that Marcus had the report fabricated so as to corroborate his own story. Since we have had the opportunity to study the Triumphant Engine room, we-" Sage sounded off suddenly.

  "Wait. Wait. When did you study my engine?" Vincent looked up, a little perturbed at being interrupted.

  "What was that?" he asked. Sage continued. He didn't care about Vincent's comfort.

  "You said you studied it. When? I've been there for the past week, refitting the entire system. I would have seen a paladin review board in my engine room. You guys aren’t exactly inconspicuous." Vincent did very little to defend himself on the point. "For that matter, when did you examine my ATV? I had that bumper and the passenger’s side fender removed and repaired the very next morning, BEFORE the full report was submitted. If you wish, I still have the old fender and the door with Mister March’s handprints in it.” Cristoph balked at that, snorting derisively. “And how did you determine that Perilisk and Darius March were not one in the same? I hear a lot of very practiced language and some hearsay made to sound like fact. But I have yet to hear any real evidence other than a shady death note from Sha-Nor."

  "We have ways, Mister Cortez. We were aboard the Triumphant, and you are out of line." Sage slammed a fist on the u-shaped table, rattling the water glasses.

  "You were on my ship, in my engine room without my permission, and I’m out of line?" he growled. "We have ways. That sounds like something a Dread would say." Vincent stood up, his anger at the accusation readily on his face. Sage met his stare with equal measure.

  "How dare you!" Vincent growled.

  “Sit down, Sir! Your grandstanding does not intimidate me.” Sage gritted his teeth. Vincent clenched his fist tightly, trying his best to not lose his temper.

  "Who do you think you're talking to?"

  "Someone who doesn't know the difference between a comm station and a train station.” That got a chuckle out of Jack.

  “We are not entertaining any sudden defenses in this proceeding. We have not granted you the floor,” Cristoph burst out suddenly, rising to his feet. Sage stepped up to his face and stared right into his eyes.

  “I am allowed the floor Sir. General Mandate forty-seven b. No paladin shall be denied a proper defense after a deterrence has been declared. General Mandate forty-seven c. No evidence or testimony shall be denied that has bearing on the current declaration of deterrence. All evidence will be weighed before it is dismissed. General Mandate forty-four a. No testimony will be stricken from the record due to friendships or personal associations. You are out of line. Take a seat.” Sage held his gaze firm, allowing his elven eyes to bore into the elder paladin. After a moment, Cristoph looked down at the desk before glumly resuming his seat.

  “We will not deny Marcus his defense, if you can provide one,” Vincent said evenly. Sage nodded slowly, finally removing his eyes from Sir Lefein. Cristoph kept his head down.

  “I will be filing a grievance about this alleged inspection of my engine room and the Ironhorse. Neither is under your direct jurisdiction. The Ironhorse is a private vehicle and was not on the campus grounds at any point." Vincent looked about ready to pounce, when Sage pulled his data pad from his pocket. "You want to throw around facts. Fine. I've been compiling evidence for days. Fact: The Triumphant engine room was overhauled after the events of several days ago. Most of the damage was repaired before you had that report in your hand. It was designed to be modular and quickly repaired. What you saw was the result of a sixteen-hour repair effort, if you saw anything at all.

  “Fact: The Falseblade was in my possession for the past six months before it was removed violently from the Triumphant’s engine core. I was using it as an energy source for the Triumphant when Elza Burke and a Falseblade Wraith attacked the ship and removed it forcibly.” Sage tapped a few buttons on his pad. “This is the repair report. This is the installation report, and these files are the video documents that I recorded about the Falseblade and its installation into the crystal sphere core. I was making sure to document all of my findings before submitting this object to the Paladin’s keeping.” Files and images flashed past at a furious rate as Sage laid the entire of his research before them. “Marcus had it for only a few days, as did Ellis Burke, Mary Wyllder, Uther Un'Hok Tol, Jack Roykirk, Ian Sodaro and Rebekah Norik, AFTER keeping it from being stolen by a Dread Paladin. You're going to have to throw us all in jail for possession if this is the case you're pursuing." Vincent didn't look comfortable with that idea. "And for the record, the law states that I can possess whatever I choose. I possess a crossbow of my own design. But I don’t like shooting people. The law against the use of magical artifacts states that any artifact must be proven to have been used for ill purpose. And I know for sure that you cannot prove that." The room grew strangely quiet as Sage assumed the floor. He stepped up beside Marcus and began typing commands into his digital pad.

  "So, let's get to the business at hand. Fact: Darius March a.k.a. Perilisk the Untouched did in fact attack my ATV. The reason that is true is because of this." Sage did a quick upload and showed his evidence on the wall monitors.

  "Darius March a.k.a. Perilisk the Untouched, attacking my ATV with extreme prejudice.” The camera was jittery as Sage’s driving was in evidence. The camera showed Darius grasping at The Ironhorse’s fender and bumper before Sage’s maneuvers pulled him under the wheels. “Clear in the camera view is Rebekah Norik, injured on the side of the road as we stop, BEFORE we exit the vehicle. Also, notice the two headless bodies. Analysis will show them to be Rand Alquiza and Skeel Follin. Both dead BEFORE Marcus even opened the door. This is no forgery, and any computer in the world will confirm that for you. So, a count of wrongful death is invalidated. And with Rebekah Norik unconscious, her spine injured, her ability to kill these two men is unlikely." The council watched as Sage replayed the events of the battle with Darius in alarming clarity.

  "Where did you get this?" Vincent asked.

  "The Ironhorse has a lot of features that I designed. One of them is surveillance equipment. It recorded the entire thing. I am willing to bet your examination of my ATV didn’t turn up this. And since the Ironhorse was having its fenders realigned until yesterday, I doubt you even got close enough to do more than make a cursory diagnosis." The file ended, and Sage turned back to the Council. "As for the possibility of March being an imposter, I can only point to his intimate knowledge of Rebekah Norik and her relationships. No amount of research or magic can give anyone that kind of clarity. And a death certificate is easy to fake. His real identity doesn't really matter. The fact is he was here.

  "Fact: Marcus Kasidyne has been a loyal and faithful paladin. At no time did he do anything outside of your vaunted rules, despite the official listing in his record that he is to be considered a maverick.” Marcus sighed. He needed to get people to stop thinking that about him. “Fact: If he'd given you the Falseblade, it would have been boxed, cataloged and carted off to the Vault beneath the Holodrome. Fact: It was too dangerous to just hand over to you. This is the sticking point gentlemen. It was too dangerous because someone here is a mole." The entire room went silent. A round of puzzled face looked about, wondering if the person next to them was pretending to be someone they weren't.

  "That's a pretty bold claim Mister Cortez. How do you plan on backing that accusation? Hearsay and rumor?" Cristoph asked calmly. Sage smirked a little. He reached into the backpack he always had with him and retrieved a book from it. The cover was green with gold lettering.

  "Simple deduction. I don
’t practice deception like some on this council.” Jack ‘Ooooohed’ as Sage said it, which got a smirk out of Marcus. “So, I will be starting with this. This is Jennifer Burton's Green Grimoire." Sage tossed the book onto the table, the tome landing with a jarring thud. "It's been selling like hot apple cider in winter around the campus. Something I figure this council would be worried about. But somehow, it has escaped your notice, accidentally or by design, despite the somewhat controversial nature of its content." Sage opened the book to a particular page he had dog-eared.

  "This's from the introduction. It reads: I have found that the things I can learn through meditation are of great worth to me. It's not the same as prayer. My mother, who was a paladin of note, held firm to her prayers every night. For a long time, I did too. Until I lost Kier. But I have found prayer to be a misguided form of communication with Deity. Prayer is a child's form of communion with the divine. Truly enlightened individuals will naturally forgo prayer and the selfish begging it is comprised of for loftier and less literal forms of communication with the gods." Sage closed the book and watched the Council squirm for a moment.

  "That doesn't sound like a Paladin doctrine to me. I thought prayer was a necessity. Surely the Paladin Council would have had this book banned from the campus bookstores. It’s not even hidden. That was from page three." Vincent was quiet and confused for the first time since Sage had begun. "I did a little reading, because I like to study all sides first. Blame the scientist in me." Sage turned to another page, and tapped his data pad to show the same page on the monitor.

  "What're we looking at?" Ian asked, curious beyond himself.

  "This is page two twenty-four. It's in a chapter called the math of life. I was intrigued, so I read a little deeper. Miss Burton points out the divine and orderly nature of math, as it relates to God and Gods. Fascinating, but her grasp of basic math is a little pedestrian.” Marcus grimaced. He remembered trying to tutor Jennifer in math. It hadn’t been a good idea since his grades didn’t qualify him to help. It had been an excuse to see her years ago. “I ran her figures, and they didn't make any sense in the context of her subject." Marcus looked at the page on the monitor. It was entirely covered in math problems. All of it was in untidy scribbles, like someone had photo-copied a piece of scratch paper.

  "Miss Burton stated that she had been doing a little meditation, and that when she came up from that experience, she had been compelled to write these formulas on a piece of loose paper. I ran each of the problems to see what she was referring to. The first problem's solution is B to the twenty-fifth power.

  "The next several problems are tied together with some very considerable double speak. Makes it all sound important. But the word Fencer is spelled out. FNCR. Then the word Spider, SPDR followed by Craft, CRFT, a bad math segment here with Resort, RSRT, Street, ST, Xenophobe, XNFB and one last botched problem with Twilight, TWLT." The room was lousy with puzzlement. "To the layman, that seems like a bunch of words without any meaning or purpose. And with all the scrambled mess that is Jennifer Burton's commentary and her poor math, it is easy to dismiss them as such. Except, they were the verbal pass code I used to lock Noganus Xandra’s Phantom Gauntlet in my quarters. And B Deck, section twenty-five is where that particular vault is. Or was, before Elza Burke tore through the wall of my quarters."

  "A vector key?" Mary asked. Sage nodded.

  "Someone planted a code in the math that was fed into Miss Burton's mind. She wrote it down dutifully, not knowing that she was a vector for a pass key that only I knew. Or so I thought. How it was acquired has not been determined. But with this, anyone with a basic knowledge of math and a motive could access records on the Triumphant's computers and track the usage of this code to my room. It would seem like a jumble of words in the lines of programming to most people. But a skilled technician would know what to look for and could track the code back to my quarters. The Triumphant’s main computer system was experiencing an odd bandwidth problem. We all thought it as a mechanical problem. It is reasonable to assume that an aggressive root scan was running in search of the locking mechanism. A computer search could easily determine.

  "Now, that's all well and good, except that the book in question was not in distribution. It needed to be published. Fall Memoria Publishing seemed to take a particular interest in the book. So naturally, they printed it. Ten thousand copies were distributed to stores on this continent within three days of acceptance. I did some checking. It seemed a little fast for a company that hasn't published a book in ten years. Fall Memoria got out of the publishing business a decade ago, and has been defunct ever since. They are a company in name only. Their former publishing practices had been that a manuscript needs to be considered for at least nine months before publication begins. And printing that many copies and distributing them is a massive undertaking. One has to wonder how they did it, when they didn’t have the whole manuscript to start with.

  "It is reasonable to assume that Fall Memoria was feeding the manuscript into Ms. Burton's mind through her meditations, and the liberal use of meditative witchery. With that being the case, they'd already have it written and published before acceptance. Jennifer Burton was a dupe in this, used to distribute a highly controversial text to millions of people. And with this book carrying her name, it would be picked up by anyone who had even a passing interest in her. Dangerous, don't you think? I mean, a million-people taking her word on prayer and other divine doctrines, when she has no authority to dispute an established and necessary doctrine. A lot of people are going to start taking this stuff to heart." The room was quiet. Even Marcus was enraptured by Sage's information.

  "And then there's this funding issue. The Paladins haven't ever had a funding issue when it came to the Peace Games. They've never had a funding issue for any reason. Ever. But this year was different. Fall Memoria, a company that didn't have an asset to its name, picked up the tab. In return, a deal was struck, allowing them to distribute the book in local shops all around Littlefield, no questions asked. I've seen these books around the campus, and I've heard a lot of talk about it. With no one questioning the content of the book, it was free to be picked up by anyone who wanted to find the vector key inside. And even without that code, this book is going to do plenty of damage around the campus. Not to mention the symbol for Green Tree Publications.” Sage popped up a quick video of the unveiling of the Peace Games sponsor at the Cotillion. “I thought it looked familiar so I checked the symbol against every known magical sign. It is the universal mark of those who practice meditative witchery. And it was on the armor of one of the Manticores in Horthok last year.”

  "This proves nothing," Vincent interrupted. Sage ignored him.

  "Isn’t there a division of the Paladins that specializes in symbology?” Vincent didn’t answer. He glanced at Cristoph, getting only raised eyebrows. “Where have they been? Shouldn’t they have checked this against all known Innovan symbols?” Again, they were silent. Cristoph fidgeted a little, not knowing what to say.

  “The office of symbology was merged with the MPU,” he said, almost ashamedly. “They’ve been reassigned.” Sage shook his head.

  “Typical.” After a moment, Sage continued. “There is also the arrival of Jennifer Burton and the incident during the Power Tumbler. They may not seem connected, but let’s look at them again.” Sage popped up a photo of Jennifer. Marcus cringed a little seeing her. He didn’t feel nostalgic anymore. He actually felt a little sick. “This is a photo of Jennifer Burton from two years ago.” Another pictured popped up beside it. “This is a picture from last week. See any difference?” A round of blank faces stared back at him. “Not yet, but you will. Jennifer, who we have learned is actually Elza Burke, arrived care of a luxury vehicle provided by Fall Memoria some ten minutes before her appearance at the Littlefield Cotillion. She'd made landfall some ten hours earlier, at a dock east of here. Not strange, except the driver's mileage log counts the car having left the docks almost immediately after the boat arrived
, and then took ten hours to drive what by a horse at full gallop, takes some four hours.

  "What happened in those extra six hours?" Sage produced another image on the monitor. "The car never stopped in Norik and no listings were given for any stops in any hotels or cities along the route to Littlefield. The Triumphant was in the middle of a passive sensor sweep, testing out the new system during this leg of its shakedown cruise. It picked up during its sweep, seven distinct dips in barometric pressure, three severe spikes in gamma radiation from the sun, and one traffic jam along the newly reopened highway between Littlefield and Norik." Marcus looked up at the information, seeing it and not processing it.

  "Immaterial," Cristoph said. Sage continued to ignore him.

  "This tie up on the highway lasted for what reports log as three hours. A car had spun out along the shoulder and most of the jam was caused by rubbernecking." The image switched at Sage's keystroke to an image of the highway from a roadside camera. "This footage was taken shortly after the incident. The car in question is none other than Jennifer Burton's vehicle, seemingly caught in a ditch on the side of the road. However, the time index of this shows that the vehicle has been sitting there for more than ten minutes without an emergency response of any kind. With such a high-profile passenger, the driver should have mustered a patrol vehicle or two by then. Not even a crossing guard.

  "Instead, we get this." The camera zoomed in, and three paladins in full regalia walked up from just off-screen and opened the door, pulling an unconscious Jennifer from the cab and carrying her from view. "Clearly, it was a group of paladins who executed a rescue, or so it seems. No CPR. No first aid and no attempt at being careful with someone who might be severely injured." The video continued as one of the paladins returned, pulled the unconscious driver from the front seat and proceeded to break her neck. "Not exactly upstanding paladin behavior.” Sage muttered. “A moment later, Jennifer Burton steps up and climbs in with a new driver. The paladins lift the car from the ditch, the car starts and inexplicably drives off." The room was abuzz now, filled with confusion and lowered speech. "If someone wanted to frame the paladins for kidnapping and murder, this would be a good place to start. But that's not their game." Sage waited for Vincent to say more.