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Everyone in the Temple wakes up when the bridge falls. Zale turns over in bed, thinking sadly of the tiny edge of warmth around their limbs that’s taken half the night to achieve. Then they get up to see what they can do.
Outside, it’s bitterly cold and the Temple’s own lamps are the only pools of light in the darkness. As Zale steps out of the cloisters, they stumble in the downdraft of six paladins on the descent. Either the Saint's chosen grabbed more lanterns on the way out or it’s just their general holy luminosity, but Zale can suddenly see what’s happened. Three of the five stone bridge arches have gone, crumbled into a pile of wreckage sticking out of the water. The Elkinslough River in this season barely deserves the name, ambling its muddy way around mounds and boulders of ice, but Zale wouldn’t want to fall into it from that height, or be pushed into by an insistent piece of masonry. The paladins pull out the couple of people who were on the bridge itself as it failed, and the Rat’s people turn their attention to those caught between the rubble. Zale hurries down there with the others, finds themself pushed firmly away from big-rock duty and set to passing around hot cups instead.
“Don’t burn your hands,” the Bishop says, between shouting instructions at everyone who walks past. “Oh, my, there it goes.”
Zale follows her gaze to a stone representation of… something. Possibly a gargoyle. In times of trouble Zale's mother used to invoke the Hanged Mother’s strangulated tits. Possibly it's those. Whatever it is, it’s just fallen off the part of the bridge that’s still standing and almost sent Galen wherever good paladins go.
“It’s meant to be the Rat’s head,” the Bishop says, while Galen yells things about lower-down parts of the Rat’s anatomy. “The Archon made the city’s corps of engineers finish up the construction in about five minutes and they were very appreciative of the Temple’s coffee and biscuit supply. They put that thing up in gratitude.” A pause. “Do you think He’ll mind if we don’t put it back?”
“Not if He loves his servants,” Zale says. “Anyway, you always say we shouldn’t attempt to answer theological questions at five am.”
“That does sound like the kind of thing I always say,” the Bishop concedes. “Go back to bed, Zale. Plenty of work for us all in the morning.”
There is plenty of work for them all in the morning. The first day is busiest for the Rat’s healers; the second, for the Temple kitchens; the third, regrettably, for the Rat’s bail fund. The girl who fell in the deepest part of the freezing river shocks everyone by living through it. And once the injured have been tended, the hungry fed and the looters gently reprimanded, Zale is given a small but urgent caseload.
“Quick as you can,” the Bishop says. “If you want anything in there looked at in the next six months, get it issued before the year’s turn.”
“I’ll try,” Zale says. The legal year ends one day after the calendar year, which gives them until last thing tonight to get it all done. They’ve done worse in service. “Is that it?”
“Take a paladin with you, it’s messy out there today,” the Bishop says. “And… hmm.”
“What?” Zale asks.
“On second thoughts.” Beartongue shakes her head. “I don’t want to predispose your mind.”
Zale stands in the Temple courtyard and stares at the woman whose intellect has been the guiding light of their adult life. It takes her a moment.
“Right,” she says. “Too late to worry about me doing that. Just… think about He asks of us.”
She ambles off towards her office without waiting for a response. Zale bundles their cold hands into their sleeves and notes the resemblance to white paws. “Your servant as always,” they say, in no particular direction, and go to find somebody that clanks.
*
The first call doesn’t begin auspiciously. For client confidentiality reasons, Galen stays outside to menace the architecture while Zale raps on an open door. “You!” shouts a man from inside. “Tell this asshole he’d hang his own mother to save on temple tithes!”
“Ah,” Zale says, and the man realises how he just spoke to a Rat’s servant and looks gratifyingly embarrassed.
“My apologies, priest,” he says. “It’s been a stressful morning. Come inside.”
Zale follows the man through a low passageway and gets their bearings. They’re in a covered courtyard behind a metalworkers’ workshop, which must be under different management, judging from the sort of items strewn around this place. Strings of lanterns, dyed ribbons, feathered hats. The asshole in question is an unremarkable man in his forties, with greying hair and mild cow’s eyes. “They’re just decorations, for the gods’ sake,” he says. “And what kind of idiot wants them in the dead of midwinter, anyway? The same kind of idiot who orders forty-two frog centrepieces and then runs out on his own daughter’s wedding!”
“Perhaps,” Zale says, “we could begin at the beginning.”
It takes some doing. But one of the shouty men has an apprentice, who goes into the artificers’ to beg some cups of tea on a tray. She brings them out and gets three nearly-intact chairs all in a row, and that concentrates everyone’s mind. It seems that the first shouty man, whose name is Octavian, recently contracted shouty man number two (whose name is Dilwyn) to provide a number of ephemeral artworks on the occasion of his, Octavian’s, youngest daughter’s nuptials.
“Ephemeral artworks?” Zale repeats.
“Ice sculptures,” they chorus.
The difficulty, Zale learns, is that the wedding is today, this very morning, and the said ice sculptures have not been delivered. “The nearest bridges upstream and downstream are footbridges,” Dilwyn explains. “We need a wide cart, and flat roads all the way along. Even if we’d trundled two miles down the bank, the cobblestones would have shattered them on the way.”
Zale doubts that a man with this degree of investment in the decorations has really run out on his daughter’s wedding. “But it hasn’t taken place after all?” they ask Octavian.
Octavian shakes his head. “My cousin Georgie,” he says. “She was one of the people on the bridge span when it fell. She’s doing well, thanks to the Rat’s healers. But it didn’t feel right to put the party on.”
“I understand,” Zale says. “So why did you ask for me?”
“The problem,” Octavian says through gritted teeth, “is that this ass”—Zale raises their eyebrows—“person. This ass person. Wants his gods-damned money. Despite how he never delivered the goods.”
“I made them, all nice and neat to order, last night!” Dilwyn yells. “It’s not my fault I couldn’t get them over the river! And you got your frogs!”
“Nice and neat to order? They melted!”
“How could they have melted?” Zale asks, motioning around at the bright but desperately chilly day. Ice is usually a difficult-to-obtain commodity in Archon’s Glory, but not when it’s forming on people’s eyelashes while they sleep. “The sculptures, not the frogs. Not the frogs?”
Apparently not the frogs. “Direct sunlight,” Dilwyn says, “thank you, Louisa”—who, judging from the direction of this latest bit of anguished yelling, is the apprentice. She shrugs at Zale and heads in to see the artificers, presumably to warm up or find love or run away to become a pirate.
“Gentlemen,” Zale says, trying to get this under control. “My name is Zale. I am a lawyer and a priest of the White Rat. I’m here to help, if you want me to. But as your interests conflict, I can’t act for both of you. One of you may engage me, and another of the Rat’s lawyers will assist the other.”
“Oh,” Octavian says. “We thought you could, you know. Just tell us which one of us was right.”
“I’m a lawyer, not a judge,” Zale says patiently. “And strange as it may seem, we can’t just haul judges out of bed and demand they get dressed and judge things. You need two lawyers, a lot of paperwork and advance notice for that.”
“It’s not enough money for that,” Octavian says, finally at a normal volume. “You folk are everyone’s lawyers when they’ve done murders. You’re not doing it for free for table centrepieces. Are you?”
“No, we’re not,” Zale says. “Reasonable rates, if you do want us, and we light a candle for you either way.”
“Right,” Dilwyn says, also quiet. “But I’m not suing him. He didn’t knock the bridge down. It was always shoddy.”
Zale nods. It seems like these two might be friends when they’re not screaming at each other over statuary. And it’s not the statuary, anyway. Octavian probably isn’t the first man in the history of the Rat’s purview to displace his anxiety for his family onto table centrepieces.
“It would’ve been a nice wedding, that’s all,” Octavian says, after a moment. “She was so excited about it. Can’t be helped.”
Zale, who has taken capital cases in their stride, feels abruptly depressed about their profession. The Temple of the White Rat fixes things. It puts food on bare tables and power in the hands of the dispossessed. But some things just happen, and can’t be fixed. There’s a girl in this city who was excited to be getting married today, and it’s not a tragedy like death or hunger, but it can’t be fixed.
“If you’re sure you don’t need my services,” Zale says, and the men both shake their heads.
“Light that candle, eh,” Octavian says. “Ask the Rat if I could have sons, my next go round. Or ones like you, tell Him I’m not fussy.”
Zale smiles as they stand up. “Just out of interest,” they say, smoothing down their robes, “what were they sculptures of?”
There’s a long, painful pause. After a minute, Octavian says, “My husband. He came from down south, originally, near Morstone. They have, uh. Fertility cults. Down there. Big ones.”
“Ah,” Zale says, feeling slightly dizzy. “I see.”
They do see. They go back into the bright daylight, and head in the direction of the collapsed bridge before Galen, their faithful paladin, steers them away.
*
There are two more calls on the morning list: a woman who wants to see her divorce papers written up before the new year even if they can't yet be sealed, and another one, who needs to go to the city guard to give evidence, before the civil courts can aid her with hers. Zale hates those ones.
On the way back it’s chaos. There’s a cow in the river and bakers are throwing unsold loaves to the crows. Down by the water’s edge another solicitor-sacrosanct is shouting, “No, you bastard, it’s an incorporeal hereditament!” at someone in a half-beached boat, and people are committing crimes for milk and eggs. Zale, squeezing past a bunch of schoolchildren on the footbridge, remembers in despair that they only have today left to issue any claims that actually need issuing, and in the meantime everyone round here seems to have misplaced their livelihood, their ice phalluses or their wits.
“Twisting your whiskers, priest,” says Galen, unexpectedly, and Zale’s thoughts stop racing. “None of it can be helped. What’s an incorporeal whatever?”
“Don’t ask,” Zale says. “You’ll need a vigil and I’ll need a drink and I already need a drink. Let’s go home.”
It takes a while - the Hanged Mother’s priestesses are trying to clear the Archon’s people out the way of the Archon’s carriage while the Archon’s people want him to stuff it up his Glory--and when they get to the Temple the queue of petitioners snakes out into the street. Lunch is worse than usual—no milk or eggs—and Zale is prevented from getting any paperwork done during their free hour by a series of almighty crashes coming from the direction of the Elkinslough. Apparently the Bishop has spent the morning shouting at the Guild of Engineers, who seem to recall the bridge was built in a hurry at the Archon’s direction about ten years earlier and that no account was taken of the weight of winter ice. The paladins are swinging shovels at the icicles hanging off the part that’s still standing, in hope of preventing the entire thing descending into the water. It’s very sensible and it sounds like a migraine feels. Zale tries writing, In Case [XXX] in the Consul’s Court at the top of a page and then gives up. Galen is on shovel duty, so it’s Wren who comes with them on the afternoon call.
This one involves another artificer’s workshop, on the Temple side of the bridge. It’s larger than the one attached to the wedding centrepiece establishment, and is full of… things. Zale shades their eyes, trying to make sense of it. Half of the floorspace is covered in small clockwork creatures, with mysterious pointy parts sticking out in all directions. Some of them are moving. Wren, mighty and fearless paladin that she is, jumps backwards and then looks at Zale apologetically. “I don’t like it,” she says. “Things that skitter.”
“They’re not alive,” Zale says, dubiously, not committing themself so far as to step inside. “I think.”
“They’re not,” says someone impatiently. The responsible artificer, judging from the leather apron and expression like granite. She comes through from the outer door into the workshop, steps carefully around whatever the things on the floor are, and pulls a stool out from under a table. “Take a seat, priest. Paladin, I know you’d rather stand. Clem, Lucy! The Rats are here.”
In answer to the summons, two more women come in from the courtyard, blowing on their hands to warm them up. The other side of the workshop, Zale notes, is empty of clockwork thingamajigs. Instead the floor is covered with sharp powder that shimmers in the light.
“Glass,” says the artificer in the apron. “That now takes up a very different amount of surface area than it did previously. Shall we tell you all about it?”
“Please do,” Zale says, pausing to indicate Wren. “If it’s a matter of commercial sensitivity, my friend here can step out.”
“Won’t hear of it,” the artificer interrupts, her expression as stony as before. “No woman visiting this establishment will be sent outside like a dog.”
Zale nods and settles in, Wren stands at parade rest and they both listen to the story.
The artificer’s name is Antimony, and Clem and Lucy are glassblowers. The three of them have shared this workshop for years; the items they manufacture require both clockwork and wonderwork-toughened glass and the arrangement works well for all of them. A week ago, they were all at the final stages of their batch processes. Prices had been agreed with the distributors. The clockwork items were hanging off hooks on the roof, and the glass pieces were on the wire shelves waiting for the wonderwork to cure.
Then the bridge fell, and everything else fell with it.
“It was like the wrath of a god,” Antimony says bleakly. “Not yours, perhaps, He doesn’t do that sort of thing. One of the noisy ones. We came running down here and found the glass in smithereens and the clockwork all knocked out of joint. That’s why they look like they’re moving,” she adds, pointing at the spasming objects. “Cogs catching on other cogs when they shouldn’t. It was the force of the impact that broke everything.”
Zale remembers how everyone in the Temple woke up, including the dormice in the walls. This workshop is another hundred paces closer to the bridge, and given the number of crashes, bangs and wallops since, it’s a wonder any of these people have managed to get anything done at all.
“But what are they?” Wren asks, with a glance at Zale to check she’s allowed to talk. Zale is getting very fond of her. “The items you keep talking about.”
There’s a long, awkward pause, while the artificer and the glassblowers look at each other and then at Zale.
“We didn’t want to mention that,” Clem says at last. “Seeing as you’re a priest.”
“A Rat priest,” her friend says. “They’re not like the others. And she’s not a priest”— pointing at Wren—“and she asked the question.”
“We’ll tell them,” Antimony says, with Beartongue-like decision. She gets up to fetch an intact item from a drawer. Zale peers at it curiously. It’s a single piece of blown glass, a long cylinder with a rounded tip and a clockwork device visible inside. Antimony taps it and the clockwork vibrates. Held loosely in her palm, it slides smoothly up and down across the skin.
“Oh,” Wren says. “Oh, it’s one of those. For putting up your—"
“Yes,” Zale says. They’re wondering if it’s their god or their bishop that’s fucking with them. “I believe they’re very popular with the southern fertility cults.”
“They are,” Antimony says, with some asperity, “but also with people a little closer than that. Our city distributors sell a dozen a month and come back for more. The Hanged Motherhood don’t like it, but your bishop always helps us out with that.”
Of course she does, Zale thinks. One of the healers at the Temple spends eight hours a day handing out silphium powder to people who want to avoid a certain kind of problem, and raspberry leaf and rue to those who want to get rid of one. The White Rat would call this another practical solution.
“This has all been very educational,” they say sincerely, “but I’m afraid I don’t understand what you need me for, if the Temple is already helping you with priests of the Hanged Mother.”
“Ah, yes,” Antimony says. “Dolly.”
“Dolly,” Clem says. “Our landlady. We’re behind on the rent.”
Right, Zale thinks. After all of that, it has to be that simple. “You can’t pay it, because you couldn’t sell your last batch of goods, and she’s threatening to evict you.”
“Got it in one,” Antimony says. “She’s being unreasonable when we just need a little time. And it’s not like she could even re-let the place without clearing out the broken glass, and that alone will take a fortnight.”
“It’s not our fault,” Clem says, with real emotion. “Not like we slacked off and didn’t supply the goods on time. She’s just as unlucky as we are to live next to that damn bridge, but for some reason it’s us and not her who gets screwed over. We thought maybe you could help.”
Zale nods. “My name is Zale,” they say, having failed to introduce themself earlier. “I’m a lawyer and priest in service of the White Rat, as you know. I’ll help you if I can. Let me see a copy of your lease.”
Antimony finds it for them, and they read it while Wren pops out to fetch some tea. Dolly lives in the same building, on the top floor in a winter-battered attic that feels like the deck of a sailing ship. Zale goes up there to speak with her, and hears about her recent departure from the Hanged Mother’s service, after it all got so strange and violent there, and about her girls in Anuket City who can’t always send money home. By the time Wren gets back with the tea, Zale is back in the workshop and is pretty sure there’s nothing they can do here.
“It’s called a force majeure clause,” they say, while Wren hands out the cups. “It means… act of god, or gods. Something that really couldn’t be predicted by either party to an agreement, and so will discharge it for both of them. But that means invasions of giant clockwork monsters, or the death of the Saint of Steel. Not a bridge falling.”
“The bridge was always on the verge,” Clem says, annoyed. “Some dignitary the Archon wanted to impress in a hurry. Very pretty dignitary.”
“But none of that matters,” Antimony says, to Zale. “If the Dreaming God turned up and the roof fell in, then we’d be fine. Right? That would be fine, but not this.”
“As a customer?” Wren asks. “Does the Dreaming God need… that sort of thing?”
“He has his paladins for that,” Zale says. “I’m sorry. I can speak with the Rat’s mediators. Perhaps they can sit you three down alongside your landlady and work something out. But I’m afraid there’s no legal recourse here.”
Which is another way of saying, can’t be helped. Otherwise you’d sue the ice and be done with it.
“I understand,” Antimony says, in a tone that suggests that’s all she expected. “Thank you for your time, priest.”
She shows Zale and Wren out, and Zale tries not to notice that Wren now has a little shopping bag containing packages that clink. They trudge back to the Temple in a dejected half-dream, thinking about gods and acts of gods.
“You did your best,” Wren says softly, pulling them back from being run into by a handcart. “It’s all you could do.”
That’s twice in a day Zale has been comforted by a sweet paladin of a dead god. “It’s not like that,” they say, sharply. “I’m not like Piper, who does a real job that he's too decent of a human being to do. Galen has to tell him all the time that there’s nothing he could have done. I’m only a lawyer.”
“Then what is it?” Wren asks curiously. “Because Galen said you didn’t see the funny side this morning, either. Even though that case also involved, uh.”
“Cocks,” Zale says absent-mindedly. “No. It’s how it’s not their fault. Why it's no one's fault.”
*
Back at the Temple, Zale remembers they need to light some candles. They thank Wren for the escort and go to the chapel beyond the cloisters, one of the ones that isn’t open to the public. Under the familiar dancing imagery of the Rat, the rows and rows of candles burn with butter-yellow light. Zale takes their time picking unlit stubs from the basket and finding tinder. They ask that the Rat walk beside Octavian, a man who cares well for his family, and that He clear the way for Antimony, Clem, and Lucy, fine craftswomen doing honourable work. They think of the paladins, out in the cold and battered by the ice, but they don’t light another candle; if the Rat’s servants can’t tend to their own without divine help then they’re no such servants. When that’s done, Zale bustles past a group of healers and priests coming in and heads back to their office. Maybe, before the year quite turns, they can get some paperwork done.
Or maybe not. There’s someone in their office. Zale pauses at the door and says, “Can I help you?”
“I apologise,” the man says, looking lost and confused. A petitioner, then. “I must have gotten turned around. If you could direct me—”
“What are you petitioning for?” Zale asks, and then, quickly: “Does it, in any material respect, involve penises?”
“Uh… no?” the man says. “Is that a problem?”
“No!” Zale says. “That is wonderful news! Excellent! What can I do for you?”
“Looking for a job,” the man says, which Zale can handle. They did petitioner intake work when they were an articled clerk and they know what questions need to be asked.
“Have you had one before?” they say.
“Yeah, until last week.” The man shrugs. “It’s just I can’t make it to the foundry on time any more. Can’t get my boy to school and then go the long way round without the bridge.”
“I see,” Zale says. “Can you read and write?”
The Temple can help him find a job either way, but it lets Zale know which end of the building to send him to.
“I was learning,” the man says, with real pride in his voice. “The master at the foundry wanted everyone to know how, for the engraving on the bells. I stayed late two nights a week and she’d teach us all. I couldn’t do it properly, though. Not yet.”
“Right,” Zale says. “Upstairs, two turns to the right, ask for Mistress Mur.”
The man thanks them effusively and departs, and Zale waits for him to disappear entirely before they kick the wall. Mur will help the man get a job, Zale is sure, and he’ll take his child to school and make it to work on time. He can keep up with his reading on his own, if he can, and come to the Rat for help if he can’t. That’s an old, familiar story, and besides it can’t be helped. To write your first words with pride in iron and see them carried through years on a temple bell – would be another story. Can’t be helped, that that’s now another story.
"Sorry," they say, to the rats in the wall.
There's no answer. Zale stands there for a minute longer, just thinking, until they’re pushed to one side by the same crowd of healers and priests they saw coming into the chapel. The healers were there for the girl, Octavian’s cousin, who fell into the deepest water and was pulled by the paladins out of the ice. It seems she did her best, in the circumstances, and lived until almost the end of the White Rat’s year.
*
Bishop Beartongue is by the water’s edge, sitting on a blanket thrown over a tree stump with her papers balanced on her knees. Stephen and Shane are standing hip-deep in water, swinging heavy shovels at the last icicles hanging down from the arches. Zale scurries across the piled-up masonry still sticking out of the water and comes up to her from the river side. “I need to talk to you.”
“Talk to me while you ogle some paladins,” Beartongue says, waving around a rolled-up piece of paper. “Do you think the right to run a ferry would be a kind of hereditament?”
“An incorporeal one, I believe,” Galen remarks, clanking past them and out into the water.
“It’s just, it’s no one’s fault,” Zale says, hardly listening. “No one can sue anyone in negligence, because it’s no one’s fault. Not the Guild of Engineers, they were contracted with the city to put the bridge up in a certain timeframe. And it’s not the landlords, or vendors, or employers, or people just doing their best.”
“No,” the Bishop says, her tone very different. “None of those.”
“But we have to do something,” Zale says, desperately. The rocks are shifting underneath them; possibly the whole world is. “We can help them with jobs, and mediation, and somewhere quiet to die. All the things we normally do. But that’s not justice. That’s only mercy.”
“Sometimes, the last remaining thing,” the Bishop says gently. “Sometimes, we can only be the last remaining thing.”
“No,” Zale says, standing on the rocks while the last of the daylight bleeds out. “It’s not enough.”
“You’re right, it isn’t.” Beartongue’s hands are in her pockets, her eyes the same colour as the water. “That’s why I’m going to sue the Archon.”
It’s a sentence that lands in a wintry silence, that has its own weight and moment.
“What,” Zale says, “you can’t”— but then there’s a lot of shouting, and Beartongue and Galen are both yelling their name, and something is creaking and coming away from broken stone. In the half-second before oblivion, Zale has time to think, firstly, that it's bad enough that the corps of engineers stuck one grossly-malformed bust of the White Rat’s head to the side of a bridge, but two is quite unnecessary, and secondly, that this must be what it's like to die for one's god.
*
The god has other plans.
*
Later, Zale is lying on a bench in the Temple courtyard, wrapped up in blankets with a couple of pillows under their head. The infirmary is currently reserved for people who’ve had bigger bits of a bridge land on them, and the on-duty healer checked that Zale could spell their own name and recite the Rat’s quarter days before telling them to lie down and rest somewhere else.
“It turns out all that ice erosion made the thing mostly hollow,” the Bishop says, pacing up and down on the cobbles. “Galen says he can put it up in your room if you like.”
Zale shudders, feeling under their hair for the bump and long cut that the healer sealed. “No, thank you. The city guard can use it for target practice.”
“Are you sure your head is okay?” she asks worriedly. “Can you tell me the Rat’s quarter days?”
Zale rolls their eyes, but obliges her. “New Year’s Day. Lady Day. Mischief. Midsummer. My head is fine.”
“Good,” Beartongue says, still pacing. “I have need of it.”
Zale nods to themself. It’s dim and shadowy out here, the lanterns casting yellow puddles of light on the frost. There's no sound except the occasional drift of voices, and the deep-beneath slosh of the river. “You want to sue the Archon.”
They feel strange saying it, even within the Temple’s sanctum sanctorum. Treason in this city is a capital offence.
“I don’t want to assassinate him,” she says, reading their mind. “I only want to sue him. Why shouldn't I do that?”
Zale pauses, trying to think through the bang on the head, and starts with the easy one. “He doesn’t have legal personality,” they say. “Not if you mean him as the city, the city that built the bridge.”
“I was worried about that, too,” Beartongue says. “More of a problem in Anuket or Morstone. This is the city of Archon’s Glory.”
"He'll refuse service of the documents."
"Plenty of ways to deal with that.” She waves a hand. “When I was a child the solicitors-sacrosanct used to send me out to cry on defendants. I was lost, you see, but my daddy's address was on the piece of paper if they’d just take it from my hand.”
Zale smiles. “But there’s more to it than that,” they say. "It’s not tort, delict, contract, any other cause of action. Are we just inventing a new one?”
“Why not?” Beartongue says, mildly. “Break this natural world into its particles, review each of them one by one, and find me any trace of the ones we have already. I think we can assume someone invented them all sometime.”
“You won’t get much in any case,” Zale says, while Bishop Beartongue the litigator notes the enormous concession they just made. “Say damages, or specific remedy. You wouldn’t get wedding decorations or lost rents or sex toys--”
“Oh, I do hope Wren had a nice time.”
“—or even remediation of the bridge.” Zale takes a breath. “Maybe the Archon did build it in a hurry and didn’t care it would be used by his own people for a decade afterwards. It was his fault and we show that. It would still be too little, too late.”
“No.” Beartongue stops pacing and turns, her robes sweeping the cobbles. “Not too late for the next bridge that falls. The next time an Archon’s prisoner jumps. The next time those who rule the people should care for the people.”
It’s so quiet. Drip, drip, drip, from the Temple’s own icicles. Someone is laughing on the street outside.
“But you still can’t,” Zale says softly. “You’re the Bishop of the Temple of the White Rat, suing the Archon of Archon’s Glory. You’re not inventing a whole new form of justice, if it’s one that only people like you can use.”
“I’m a Rat’s servant,” Beartongue mutters, “a Rat’s foundling”—but they’ve got her. Zale has played this game a thousand times, one lawyer pacing out their arguments, while the friend heckles and holds them to the fire. Here amid the settling frost, it’s not a game. Beartongue holds in her tracks, her hands up. Zale has her, and she’s lost.
And that could be the end of it. Zale looks at the sky and wishes it were upon someone else, to be that last remaining thing. “You don’t have standing,” they say. “But I do.”
A long, long pause. Zale mimes something landing on their head from a great height. They look at each other.
“You’d be ideal,” Beartongue says slowly. “Reasonably foreseeable harm, directly attributable to the bridge collapse, and two impeccable witnesses.”
Zale nods. “A bishop and a paladin, and a priest for a claimant.”
“You’d get all the aggravation, the inconvenience,” the Bishop says, her mind coming back up to speed. “All the Archon’s personal animosity. No damages, no remedy. Not a thing.”
“We’d know if it could be done,” Zale says.
“Yes,” Beartongue says. “We would.”
Another one of those long pauses. Zale swears a bit, because it seems necessary, and they’re in service to a practical god.
“If you choose to do this, it would have to be as a private citizen,” Beartongue says carefully. “With the assistance of the Rat’s servants.”
“Of which you’re one,” Zale notes.
“Since I was old enough to pull a tail.” Beartongue sits down on the bench and Zale draws up their knees to give her some room. “Zale, my name is Beartongue. I’m a lawyer and priest of the White Rat. I can help you, if you want me to. Do you want me to?”
Zale thinks about it. The bishop is quite right: this will be dangerous, inconvenient and exhausting, and of no benefit to them personally. If they win, and they won’t win, the Archon will be held accountable to his citizens in the matter of one shoddily-built stone bridge in one district of the city, but it probably won’t be enforceable, and it doesn’t matter anyway because they won't win. The Temple of the White Rat fixes things, but sometimes it just picks up the pieces. In the matter of three bridge arches’ worth of masonry, perhaps it should just pick up the pieces.
Zale isn't god-touched. But there it is, a brush of fur against their cheek, and a voice that sounds like their own.Not this time, but next time. Not mercy, but justice.
They bow their head. "Yes."
Beartongue ruffles their hair and gets up to go inside. “Thank you. Wait here.”
There’s another life where she’s a bandit queen, Zale thinks, dazed. Plenty of people refuse the god’s call. Beartongue would’ve done it and then put the land to the sword. In this life, she comes back with a sharpened quill and sheet of foolscap, and a tea tray to lean on. Zale looks over her shoulder as she writes. A clean clear hand for an initial statement of claim: background, harm, distress, appendices and exhibits.
“And a lovely exhibit he is too,” she says, about Galen, turning the page. “Someone will need to sketch that damned gargoyle.”
Zale signs where she indicates. They’ve never signed on the claimant line before. The Bishop signs in Zale’s usual place, leaving off any indication that she’s anything other than a lawyer.
“There,” she says. “I’m taking this down to the registry to issue. You can’t come.”
Because the client usually doesn’t. Zale is about to say the court registry won’t be open at this hour, but of course it will be; tonight is everyone’s last chance to issue. Beartongue puts the statement of claim into a folder and tucks it under her arm. Zale would follow her into battle, into ice. When she’s disappeared into the darkness, Zale goes inside to light a candle. For a Rat’s servant, trying her best to fix this world, on this last lamp-lit night of the White Rat’s year.