SPIRIT WALKER

Chapter 8: Judgement Day (Part 2 of 2)

Phylomon held three slips of paper. He stroked the middle of his seven medallions, and it began to gleam like a firefly. A Pwi woman gasped at this sign of magic. He read, "Six years ago, I, Molliron Hart, was taken slave in Smilodon Bay. I was walking down the road just after dark when Jassic Goodman and Denneli Goodman caught me and raped me. They carried me to the hold of a merchant ship and sent me here."

The crowd roared in anger. Denneli Goodman, a middle-aged fat man, tried to make a run for it. A woman stepped in front of him, and he slapped her in the head with a mace, cracking her skull. Several men grabbed the Goodman brothers from all sides, disarmed them, and dragged them shrieking and kicking toward Phylomon. The injured woman bled profusely and sat on the ground, stunned, while a dozen people tried to help tend to her wounds.

"Here's the ones that did it!" someone shouted. Wisteria stared with her mouth open. It's started, she thought. It has started. She was not surprised to find that these Goodman brothers were slavers. From her childhood she recalled that Jassic and Denneli were two of the meanest men in town.

Phylomon stepped in front of Denneli Goodman, a tall thin man with a haggard face. Denneli stared at the ground, and he shook as if with a chill. Phylomon asked, "What have you to say for yourself?"

"Does it matter?" Denneli asked. "You caught us. I'm a dead man."

"Dead you are," Phylomon said. He turned to the townspeople and said just loud enough to be heard by all, "When the first Starfarers fell from the skies, there were 312 men and women. You are all descended from them. In the past thousand years your blood lines have crossed and recrossed countless times. You look at the person standing next to you, and though he may be a stranger, you share so many genes that he is as much a brother as if you were born of the same mother. I myself have fathered five children in the past eight hundred years. Most of you could not cite your genealogy without finding that I am one of your forebearers. When you sell one another into slavery, you sell your brothers and sisters. The people I kill this night, are my own children!"

With that he spun and jabbed his sword faster than the eye could see. Denneli staggered back, and at first Wisteria thought that the blue man had missed, but a ragged hole appeared in Denneli's throat; blood spurted as if from a broken pipe. The stricken man began coughing blood.

Denneli's children shrieked, and his wife fainted. Phylomon turned to the crowd: "Does Molliron Hart have any brothers or sisters, any relatives at all?"

One woman shouted, "Me!"

"Then in the morning, you will go to the homes of these men, and take possession. Their homes and everything within them are yours. The families of slavers will not profit from these condemned men's crimes."

Phylomon stepped up to Jassic, a robust man in his mid-thirties with a thick beard. He could not have been much more than twenty when he raped and sold Molliron Hart. Jassic was watching six directions at once, looking for a place to run; three townsmen held him from behind, and one man had put a noose around Jassic's neck. He fought the noose, and white spittle foamed from his mouth.

"Anything to say for yourself?" Phylomon asked.

Jassic's lips trembled. He blurted, "Wait a minute! You can't do this to me! Wait! Grab him, boys!"

Wisteria searched the crowd. Though several men shifted their feet, none of the "boys" came to Jassic's rescue. Both his wife and his mistress covered their faces with their hands. Phylomon watched Jassic's eyes, trying to see who Jassic called to, then rammed his sword up under Jassic's chin and into his brain.

Phylomon read his second letter: "I, Javan Tech—"

Wisteria heard a shriek rise from her own throat, condemning her.