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The Tablet was an object of power. Faced with it, even the King felt humbled.
"The decision still troubles you, sire?"
Wekalis turned around, to see a familiar and reassuring figure standing on the doorsill, just like he had. This time not out of hesitation, but respect; it was custom that one could not enter the room where the King stood without express permission. A silly custom, if you asked him; but he knew his advisor Bode well enough that he realised sticking to etiquette even in private was one of his ways to express his deepest respect, and Wekalis wouldn't have deprived him of that.
"Enter, old friend," he said, with a smile and a gesture. Bode nodded and stepped forward with his right foot, eventually coming to stand next to the King, both gazing enraptured at the Tablet.
"I can not come to a decision, Bode," finally lamented Wekalis, shaking his head. "It is truly too much for these old shoulders, that perhaps never should have carried the responsibility of power. I lament my indecisiveness."
"What you call indecisiveness is just due consideration, my King," replied the counsellor. "It is a heavy burden that you carry indeed, and I do not envy it of you. Still, better for it to be carried by someone who can appreciate it. You will come to a decision in the end, as you always have; and it will be all the better for it."
The King smiled at those comforting words, though fearing within his heart they may be more the product of respect than truthfulness. He had made mistakes, during his long reign, and regretted many things. But this one decision, he'd left for last, until now, when he was at death's door; because this legacy would outlast him more than anything else he'd done. The treaty with La'Hari would expire, and the damages of the crushing defeat at Ras Mawak repaired, and the magnificent palace of Qar crumble into dust, and still, what he would write on the Tablet would survive all of that, forever.
"The Law has done much good for us," murmured softly the old King, as if to himself. "And yet sometimes I wonder if it is not a wicked thing to bind our descendants to our words, no matter how wise."
Bode shook his head. "Every coin has two sides, sire. Justice bears the risk of injustice with itself, yet kingdoms need it to exist, imperfect as it may be. The Tablet Law is forever and absolute, but the Common Law can cause far more suffering if it goes awry, and yet it is often treated as the lesser of the two. After all, what is best, to not be able to do something, or to be able and then be cruelly punished for it by an unjust law?"
"You make the Common Law sound as if it is the will of men, and the Tablet Law as that of gods," replied Wekalis. "Yet both are in my hands."
"Only to a point, my King. You may proclaim up to three Tablet Laws, but not enforce them. The gods who gave us the Tablet do that for us."
"I wonder sometimes if giving us the Tablet was a trial, and we failed it. And perhaps our punishment is just to have to live with what we have bound ourselves to."
"That may be so; the gods think in mysterious ways, and if the stories are to be believed, not always in just ones," said Bode. He made a gesture towards the walls of the chamber, where aside from the front and the back, each of the remaining thirty side bore a fresco representing the making of one Law, or was left empty waiting for its turn. "But to reject those decisions would be to reject the very foundations of this Kingdom. This is the legacy you bear and pass on. In the end, we do not live as gods; we live as men."
The King nodded at those last words, and followed Bode's hand as it guided his gaze along the walls. The history was familiar to him as the palm of his hands, yet every time he gazed at those paintings, he felt like they revealed a bit more of them to him. Their very styles evolved as one moved from the distant to the more recent past, painters developing new techniques and pigments, fashions changing. The first ten were the most homogeneous. The first three concerned the First King, Gehan the Wise, proclaiming the Greater Three Laws; and then his son and grandson commuting the Minor Three and Lesser Three from Common to Tablet Law, according to the will Gehan had left behind, completing the set of the Nine Laws that had made the bedrock of the Kingdom's legal system. It must have been easier for them, thought Wekalis. It must have been comforting to have lived in the warm shadow of that great man, some say the son of a god who received the Tablet as a coronation gift from his father. The Nine Laws were simple and hard to dispute. They had outlawed murder, theft, bribery, desertion, fraud, and other crimes that no civilised kingdom could stand to suffer. They had brought peace and prosperity to Nomes, and if there had been a good time to stop, it had been after them.
But history had not stopped, and the Tablet still had twenty-one slots. Other times had come, and not all rules as deserving of the appellative of Wise as Gehan had been. The fifteenth to seventeenth panels were painful to look at; they depicted the insane attempt of the Ninth King, Goroth the Cruel, to overthrow the Nine Laws. He had repelled the Greater Three, and left a testament that encouraged his descendants to do the same for the Minor and Lesser. During his accursed reign, murder had came back to the kingdom; ironically enough, it had also been his undoing, as both he and his designated successor died of knife and poison. His nephew succeeded him, supported by the nobility as a champion of the return to tradition. But sadly, only a Tablet Law could repel a Tablet Law; the Tenth King had to waste his own three slots to repel the previous three, and so six of thirty, together with many innocent lives, ended up sacrificed on the altar of Goroth's madness.
Of the other laws, some had more merit than others, but none seemed to Wekalis to be so bad that it deserved being repelled. Even the one legacy of the Thirteenth King, Tripalis the Wondrous Fool, was hardly worth wasting a precious slot over. His outrageous but ultimately innocuous vanity had led him to decree the Thirteenth King of Nomes shall never be referred to in speech or writing as anything less than Tripalis the Wondrous , and to overlook the obvious loophole in that wording. The result was so ironic it now made for an excellent story to teach children about the weight of words, and there was no point in getting rid of it.
No, avoiding Tripalis' folly was not the greatest lesson to take here. Wekalis had delayed and delayed the moment he would proclaim the laws that were his right using the last three slots; but he must use them. He was childless, and his successor was to be a distant relative, a Duke that he did not hold in particular esteem or spite. That was not enough. The one thing that the Kingdom could not risk was the coming of a second Goroth - one whose foolish mistakes could not be repealed any more, once the Tablet was complete. The Nine Laws must be protected.
"Our legal scholars have long considered these matters," suddenly said Bode, as if reading the King's thoughts. They were no secret; they had discussed the problem many times already. "I have not brought it up until now, but if you wish, there are many proposed notions of useless laws that will never need be enforced, and can be used to safely waste slots."
"No," said the King peremptorily, letting some of the threat and majesty that came with his role seep into the harshness of his words. "I will not let my legacy be tied to such drivel. And not even our best scholars can predict all consequences."
"I do not know if that is any reason to worry. I am sure no citizen of the Kingdom may touch the Moon never need be enforced," commented Bode with a chuckle.
"Funny as that may be, my word on this is final," cut short the King.
"As your majesty wishes. I have discussed the other option with our scholars - they say it should be doable."
The King's eyes gained some shine at that, but quickly they sunk deep in thought again.
"Ah, that is - good news," he said. "Still a heavy decision to make, but perhaps the lightest of those at my disposal. What precise formulation should be used?"
"Nothing complex. They agree that no King shall inscribe any further Law in the Tablet after this should do well enough. It is well defined enough, and it does not affect the Tablet, but the people who might inscribe it, who are surely fair game. We already know the previous Laws apply to Kings as they do to everyone else. And anyone who is not a King is already unable to inscribe Law, so this should cover all possible cases. If you have two other laws to inscribe, it may even be used in the thirtieth slot; it would be redundant, but in no way invalid."
"I don't have two; I may not even have one," murmured the King. "I just wish to preserve what we have as it is."
Bode nodded. "If you wish so, of course, you can make the rule the twenty-eighth Law, and it will be the last. But I would invite you to consider that some more. You said you may not even have one; does that mean you're thinking of something?"
"One thing," said Wekalis. "It may not be much, but I believe it would do good, and no evil I can think of. The sort of law that no one would willingly break, and we all follow already, except by mistake; and if we don't, we suffer the consequences and curse ourselves for it. Making it Tablet Law would only be a help."
The counsellor smiled. "I understand. That seems a good choice to me; perhaps the best way to use the Tablet. Let us go talk about it somewhere else, though. I am sure your Majesty's divine blood makes this a trifle, but I must say, as a common human, I am suffering how cold and drafty this old room gets."
The old man laughed. "Well, you are right. Even my divine blood is getting chilly, and that takes some effort. We can go to my chambers; I have a cosy fire to sit by, and wine to warm us down to our bones."
He tried taking a step, but found that the cold and damp air had given his junctures a deep ache and stiffness that made every step torture. Holding back a cuss that would have ill befit his royal demeanour, the King gestured towards his friend for help, and found a supportive shoulder to lean on. Together, they walked to the room's entrance, and Bode stopped there, making sure that the King was holding onto him steadily enough. Then they both took a step forward with their right foot, and left the room.
Tay'Wa had just arrived at the Arcane Terminal in the Nomean capital and was simply flooded by all the sights. The shiny building was a triumph of magitech; mana ran through glimmering wires that were woven in a complex tapestry laid out all over the curved ceiling, a massive dome of flawless jadestone that could not have been carved from any natural vein, only transmuted. He was so busy looking upwards he barely paid any attention to his surroundings; and that was how he reached the border gate, tried to step in, and found himself tripping on something , something that pushed him back and caused him to end up splayed on the floor with his butt taking most of the hurt.
"Oh my gods!," shouted an alarmed voice. "Are you alright?"
"Just fine, thanks," grunted Tay'Wa, still without raising his eyes. "You guys shouldn't really leave stuff in the middle of doorways, though."
"What stuff? There's no stuff."
The voice sounded slyly amused, and Tay'Wa raised his eyes ready to give the person a piece of his mind, a desire which entirely vanished when he saw the face of the border steward who had come to his help. She was... pretty, to say the least. And about his age. And very pretty.
"The, uhm, the something I tripped on," he said, much more accommodating. "Though I'm sure I should have watched where I put my feet."
"Or which feet you put," commented the woman, which sounded just like nonsense to him. "Do you need any help getting up?"
Tay'Wa didn't, the pain was already almost over. "I may," he said. "Can you offer me your arm? I'm worried my foot may be broken."
"Sure, here it is," replied the other. She extended a hand, which Tay'Wa grabbed, and pulled him up with notable strength. Once Tay'Wa was standing, though, she let go. He remained there, perfectly able to hold his own weight on his own two feet.
"Look at that," she said. "Your feet are fine!"
"Apparently so," replied Tay'Wa, rather less enthusiastic than you'd expect from someone who finds out they did not suffer any fractures. He turned to the doorframe of the border gate he'd tried to cross earlier. It was perfectly empty.
"Uh, you were right," he said. "There's nothing there."
"Did you think I was lying?"
"No, I didn't want to imply - I mean -" Tay'Wa stuttered, and the woman replied with a chuckle. Then she pointed at a sign.
" That is what you should have paid attention to," she said.
The young man followed the hand and read the sign. It had a couple stylised drawings of feet crossing a doorsill, one with a red cross next to it, the other with a green tick. The text read: ALWAYS CROSS DOORWAYS WITH YOUR RIGHT FOOT . Under it, small print informed everyone that the message was endorsed by the Thirty-Second King and the People's Parliament of Nomes alike.
"I don't understand," said Tay'Wa, stumped.
"You're in Nomes now. You know about our Tablet Laws, surely?"
"The laws that the gods enforce in your country, sure. Every child knows that," he replied, piqued.
"And which laws do you know of?"
"Well, I know about the Nine Laws, and I know there are," his eyes glazed over, and he made a circular gesture with his hand, "others..."
"Yes, there are. There are other twenty laws, or nineteen if we don't count the last one which only says there can't be a thirtieth. And the twenty-eighth says, every doorway on the territory of the Kingdom shall only be crossed right foot first. You stumbled because you tried to enter into the country but started off on the wrong foot - literally ."
"What a strange law," said the man. He walked to the doorway again, and tried pushing forward his left foot, this time slowly and carefully. He must have looked spooked out when he felt indeed a slight push against it, as if he was trying to kick an invisible wall, because the woman chuckled again. If this was how this crazy country worked, he was sure the locals must have found watching foreigners fumble around a national pastime. He tried again, this time with his right foot, and he was through with no effort.
"I'll never get used to this," he mumbled, still perplexed.
"You will too, and in no time. After a while it's second nature," reassured him the other. "How long do you plan to stay?"
"Just a day. I'm travelling to La'Hari, really, and I just thought I'd stop by to see a few sights. Otherwise I'd have read up more on the country."
"Aw, pity. This is a really nice city. I wouldn't change it with any other in the world. I hope you visit properly some day. Say," she said, smiling at him, "are you up for a coffee later in the day? I'll get off work in three hours."
Tay'Wa blinked. "Uh, sure. If it's all right with you. Are you always so quick to-"
"Don't say more. Yes, of course I am. I live in Nomes. Knowing that no one can lay a finger on you even if they wanted to really changes how you live your life. I can't imagine how scary it would be to live elsewhere. You guys are always so guarded."
"We manage," the young man shrugged. "And we get to enter doors with whatever foot we damn like."