For the first three days of our journey to the east, the horizon stayed a flat, shimmering line with the undulations of the dunes gradually blending together. Our lives acclimated to the new rhythm: wake before dawn, travel until noon, shelter and rest until the heat broke, travel again until the sun set below the horizon, and camp for the night. Each day, our water dropped a little lower, and so did our sanity.
Bastien and Olen handled much of the logistics. They rationed the water, fed the tuspaks, and distributed the hardtack and jerky. I had plenty of time to think as I walked in the shade of the wagons, but it was too hard to read for very long and awkward to use the lexicon.
It was during the six hours of paralysis from the day's heat that I did my work. While the men and tuspaks dozed in the shade of the wagons, I utilized the abundance of natural light.
I sat under the awning extended from the side of the wagon with my belongings. The awning was arranged to maximize the breeze, but there wasn't much, and the air was dry as a kiln.
I had the two stones in front of me; the white Truth Stone, as it was labeled in the poem, was now a partially known quantity. I turned my attention to the black Justice Stone that seemed to absorb the light around it and my sweat-stained copy of the poem:
Four thousand ninety-six tridecahedrons, black,
_The Justice Stone, the final ??????.
It rests upon a dark and heavy base,
Its word is given to the human race.
The intelligence of low-weight will show the truth to read,
The stone is sure about the act and title document.
But when the ???? turns slowly into night,
The stone is lost, unsure of ????? or clockwise.
If low-weight is gone, an empty muscular organ exists.
I rubbed my eyes, working out the sand. Was "low‑weight" really the right definition? The alternate definition had to do with igniting a fire. Metaphorical weight made no sense.
The poem was probably correct, but I was missing something, like a hinge‑word. I could feel that I was close.
I rubbed my temples and decided to move on. There was another poem in there that I tried to translate, hoping that it would help me decipher this one.
The Judgment of Color
Behold the colors, where the three goddesses reside,
A fiery **Red** means nowhere left to animal skin.
With ???? and ???? high,
Severe ???? beneath the watchful eye.
An Orange hue, though ???? of the ????,
Shows weakening factors, gently spilt.
A **Yellow** burst, the ???? still great,
But counter-blows or well-wishes dictates the rate.
When colors shift to gentler, misty shades,
The ???? of judgment softly disappears‑gradually.
The **Green** light means the ???? is likely negative-one,
But leaves a space for a ???? or two.
A cooling **Blue** shows intentions plied,
With ???? conflicting in the mind.
Then **Indigo** reveals ????, ???? shown,
A moderate ????, for the ???? they've known.
The final shades announce the alcohol‑strength,
The stone retreats beneath the mind's distant‑emotion.
A Violet haze suggests they might not be clockwise,
Not alcohol‑strength enough to make the word-sequence long.
With Magenta hue, possibilities must move‑through‑air‑with‑wings,
Another suspicious-person stuck beneath the sky.
A fainter **Pink** suggests the accused is clockwise,
???? action bathed in pale, soft ????.
And last, the beacon of a pure ????,
A White glow bright, for all who now believe.
No ???? of ????, no crack-in-the-ground to ????,
The ???? ???? of any shame.
The translation was terrible, but like the white one, this wasn't a magic rock. If the Truth Stone could read intent, then the Justice Stone had to do something judicial. As a geologist, a crack in the ground was appealing, but an alternate definition was a defect in a mechanism. I thought about Danio's little device. So intricate. I hoped that this wasn't some indicator that the stone would malfunction like Danio's might.
A shadow in my peripheral vision caught my attention, and I looked up. Olen was standing at the edge of the shade. He carried a piece of iron, part of a wheel bent into an unnatural curve.
He handed the metal to me.
"We must have hit an invisible inselberg," he said, tapping the metal in my hand.
"We have spares," I said. "Do we need to stop for repairs?"
"I already replaced it," he replied. "I just wanted to show it to you. A bad casting would have snapped. It took the stress and saved the axle. It's a fault in the road, not the metal." He started to walk away. "Do you want to get moving again before we lose the light?"
I jumped to my feet. I had made the leap. The word "fault" echoed in my mind. A crack in the ground was a flaw; a defect in a machine was a flaw in it. A flaw in behavior that is blameworthy was a fault. The concepts were connected.
The same thing for low-weight. The lexicon insisted that it was the opposite of heaviness, but the other word was kindling a fire. The words were related. Weight was how difficult it was to lift something. Things that were low mass were easy to bring up high and visible. A fire gives off the critical thing that both have in common: light.
"LIGHT!" I announced my discovery. "Not low weight. And FAULT instead of crack in the ground."
The lexicon had followed a culture that collapsed these steps into a single root:
low‑weight → lifted → visible → bright → illuminating
intelligence → clarity → unobscured → bright‑faced → bright
clockwise → sun‑following → east‑to‑west → proper‑sided → right
The poem made some kind of sense now. But poor Olen looked at me with puzzlement.
"Sorry, Olen." I've been working for quite some time on the translation of this poem, and you just gave me some badly needed help."
"Anything I can do, my Prince." He replied with a slight bow. "But I would like to know if you'd like to stop here for the night or continue on."
"We need to move." I answered, shifting my attention to the map, half buried under the poem and lexicon. "We can't wait here for our water to run out. Let's pack up."
Olen went to tell Bastien to make the announcement to the men. I looked back at the poem. Apparently there were two dimensions involved. There would be some kind of glow or color change. It would decree that a cold-blooded murder was Red. But like metal that bends under stress, a desperate act of self-defense would be Yellow. It could tell the difference between a malicious lie and a mistake: Green.
It would make the user a perfect judge: objective and incorruptible. But a hypothetical translation of a poem was not solid data. I needed tests.
Outside, my canopy the camp was quiet. I couldn't just walk up to Olen and ask, "Are you guilty of murder?" Presumably, the stone required an act or "title document" to judge.
A crime would be ideal, it was about justice, but a crime was out of the question. I would trust my men with my life, I was, in fact doing just that. I wondered if it would work on a dispute. Of those we had already had several. A caravan of tired, homesick men and tuspaks would inevitably have greater friction the farther we got from home and the more stress we were under.
The hypothesis was formed, the variables were identified. Now I just needed to wait for an opportunity to experiment.