Rasheika's Trial III

“Rasheika, you are accused of breaking your parole and trying, yet again, to take over the world,” Kerma announced, sounding more exasperated then condemning.

“It wasn’t my goal to take over the world this time, I was just playing, it’s just you fools don’t know the difference,” Rasheika said. “Then you go and bring these complete morons in to judge me guilty and call it a fair trial.” Tom, barely, managed to resist the urge to beat his head on something. Court had been in session for all of three seconds and Rasheika had already made a mockery of it, and called the jury morons. This was going to be a bad day, he could already tell, even worse then he had thought it was going to be.

“Do we have a charge of contempt of court like they do below ground?” Kerma asked Frendral.

“I wish,” he replied, glaring at Tom rather then Rasheika. Tom wilted, he knew he was supposed to keep Rasheika in check and he had failed, but it was so hard. He never knew what to expect from Rasheika, she was very smart and everyone knew it, so he was always taken by surprise when she burned all of her bridges on purpose. It wasn’t usually something a smart person would do. The conclusion that he usually drew from such behavior was that she was insane; something that all the evidence was in favor of, though a very special and dangerous type of insanity it had to be.

“How about you shut your mouth before the mob shuts it for you?” Tom hissed to Rasheika, looking at a now even more hostile court.

“I can’t shut my mouth if I’m supposed to be telling them how guilty I am, stupid,” Rasheika told him back, in a normal voice. “You can’t talk for me all the time.”

“I wish I could,” Tom said sincerely, something that only seemed to amuse her.

“Rasheika, you will speak with respect,” Frendral ordered. “Continue.”

“I did everything you listed except try to take over the world,” Rasheika said. Frendral’s tone of voice had warned her that she truly was treading on thin ground and he had been known to hang people from the ceiling by their wrists for days, back when he was a bandit.

“So that would be a plead of guilty. John you can question her,” Kerma said.

“What for?” Rasheika demanded. “I said I did it, what else do you need to know?”

“You’re not in charge here,” Frendral snapped.

“We need to know the details of what happened so we know what to do with you,” Kerma explained more reasonably. Rasheika was still her friend, in spite of everything.

“In front of all of these fools,” Rasheika said, motioning at the audience and the jurors. “You’ll make me blush. It’ll be bragging to talk about my genius in front of the crowd.”

“Sometimes I hate you Rasheika,” Tom told her, this time loud enough for the whole court to hear, he didn’t care anymore. If Rasheika was going to commit verbal suicide he wanted nothing to do with it. She was sounding less repentant of her crimes by the second and that wasn’t going to win over anyone in the jury.

“Anyway,” said John awkwardly, painfully aware that he was on the other side as his boss for the first time ever. “Rasheika, you were aware that you were violating your parole?”

“Of course I knew that. You buffoons tell me the conditions of my parole every five minutes; I couldn’t not know them by now.”

“So you knew you were committing a crime. How did you gain power over the people who you recruited to join you?” John continued his line of questioning. Tom shook his head, as John’s boss he wanted to tell John that that would never work but he couldn’t in this situation. John would just have to learn that Rasheika would never talk about any of her methods.

“Well that’s a trade secret isn’t it?” Rasheika said, smiling slightly. “Can’t tell everyone that or I would be out of business.”

“War isn’t a business,” Kerma moralized from the platform but Rasheika only smiled up at her.

“You are on trial, you don’t have the right to keep a secret from the court,” John told Rasheika.

“If you can make me tell what I did then you can know. Not that you idiots are vicious enough to make me say anything. Even try to talk to my old followers who were with me in The Mound, they won’t say anything either. Loyalty and fear, a fine combination,” Rasheika said. Not a single mind didn’t start speculating on what someone with a reputation like Rasheika’s would have done to make people fear here, the mental pictures weren’t pretty. Tom was the only one out of the group; he had been the first into The Mound when it had fallen, to know that this time Rasheika had inspired true loyalty from her troops. They had honestly tried to protect their leader, they weren’t the fear driven peasants that Rasheika was suggesting they were. Tom wondered if she wasn’t trying to protect them by making them out to be victims of her manipulation. He remembered the reprisals against the Abdico when Rasheika had last lost a war and wondered just how much those reprisals had actually hurt Rasheika. No one was ever killed in the school but it still hadn’t been pleasant, and it had driven one boy to commit suicide. Of course there had been a school investigation into the boy’s death and he had been written off in the end as being the victim of bullying, part of a long list of things that the school officials understated. The school officials could never understand that the school involved true politics.

“By stepping into this court you are promising to tell us the truth and give us the information we need in the hope of lessoning your sentence,” Kerma pointed out. “If you aren’t helpful you are bringing everything down on your head,” there was a pleading note in her voice.

“Go ahead,” Rasheika said, glaring all around her.

“Wait a minute before you listen to her,” Tom jumped in. “She says that she’s guilty, that she knows it and won’t help us with anything, that’s all pretty bad. However, I would like you to show me, in writing, where it was that Rasheika agreed not to get involved in politics again.”

“You were at the trial, that was the deal that you two made with Frendral, you were there,” Kerma said, clearly confused. Over in the other box John wasn’t so confused, Tom had trained him carefully and he instantly understood what his boss was getting at.

“Do you have any proof that that deal was made? Eyewitnesses are easy to buy and tell what to say. Do you have any document of this agreement you claim exists?” Frendral glared daggers at Tom but Tom had been glared at by the best and while Frendral was good, his skill was wasted in this case. Tom liked danger, it was one of the reasons he had created a job that was dangerous. The idea of dancing on a knife’s edge and besting his ruler was one that he enjoyed. Of course after this trial it might be a good idea to find himself something to do far away for a while Tom told himself.

“It was a verbal agreement, no paper in the town,” Frendral admitted, looking like he had eaten something that tasted bad. Tom had known that all too well, Frendral had wanted a paper agreement and had sent Tom all over town to look for paper, he hadn’t found any. Had Rasheika’s original trial been held in Ferndale things might have been very different in this trial but it had been held in one of the other cities. One of the mostly illiterate other cities of the school, Tom mentally added to himself gleefully.

“So what you are saying is that you’re trying Rasheika on something that you have no proof she even promised. If it isn’t actually a law, and I don’t remember seeing any law against being involved in politics or all three of us would be in trouble, you can’t punish her. I call for her to be set free on the grounds that she didn’t break a law.”

Frendral and Kerma knew that Tom was right; there was no way that they could hold Rasheika on the charge now that he had put it like that. Ferndale’s laws had been put together with no planning or thought behind them by a group of eleven year olds and no one was better at taking advantage of that then Tom. On the other hand the crowd in the courtroom wasn’t going to take this well, they very obviously didn’t care about the intricacies of the law so much as they wanted Rasheika to be punished.

“I regret Adrian,” Kerma felt a little better to see Tom wince at the use of his true name, “that you seem to be right. With no proof we can’t complain about her breaking the rules.” A storm of angry shouting poured across the courtroom, it looked like Rasheika was about to be lynched. John jumped across the railing of his box to join Tom in protecting Rasheika, leaving his unused witness in the box.

“I always get in trouble like this with you,” John told Tom.

“Don’t worry, I planed for this,” Tom reassured both John and Rasheika, though Rasheika didn’t look worried. The ceiling slats above them in the Town Hall were moved and a rope dropped. All three climbed up it, leaving Kerma shouting at them that they were going to pay for any damages they had done to the roof.

“A timely rescue,” Tom complimented Liz as she pulled the rope back up. He glanced down at the seething angry crowd, before he decided that that would probably just make them angrier.

“Let’s get out of here for a while; I hear some interesting things are happening in Pleasant Valley, something to do with bandits taking over. Should be watched just in case it becomes something permanent I would say. Want to join us Rasheika?” Tom added.

“Doesn’t seem safe here right now, I’m not one of your foolish puppies but it might be fun.” Both John and Liz looked mad at being called puppies but they all climbed down the outside of the building and snuck out of town before anyone caught on they were leaving.