The Litigatrix, page 3
Sui-Wei happily made her escape. But as she was about to leave the house, she realized with dismay that one of the lenses of the telescope had been caught in the folds of her voluminous sleeve. She picked up the smooth, curved glass, and hesitated. She did not want to go back, but it would be wrong to deprive Aguda of a chance to fix his instrument because of a missing piece. Reluctantly, she turned around and walked back to the storeroom.
As she prepared to knock on the door, she heard shouting voices from within.
“How could you have been so careless as to leave it out in the open? We aren’t even supposed to have met till the old man died. She’s very clever.”
“You were the one who insisted on sniffing after her like an eager puppy. What game do you think you’re playing?”
For a moment, the noise of blood rushing into her ears drowned out all other sounds. Sui-Wei forced herself to calm down. She carefully backed herself down the hall into the room next door, a pantry for sacks of grains and potatoes, and put her ear to the thin wall.
“… tabs on what she knows.”
“You should have stayed away. Let the stupid magistrate hang the maid.”
“She’s beginning to suspect Yeon-joo, and I nudged her a bit. If he hangs, even better.”
The pantry was stuffy and dark. But there was a small window high up, and a slanted shaft of light, through which a million dust motes floated, cut through the darkness.
She had no coherent thoughts. Idly, she held up the lens into the light. It cast a fuzzy image of the scene outside the window onto the opposite wall. She stared at the image but could not make any sense of it. She remembered that Ben-Ni had explained that this was because the light was not in focus.
“Buy Yeon-joo’s license as soon as possible, as we planned. If she accuses him and he is convicted, it will escheat to the state.”
Sui-Wei moved the lens so that the image fell on her opened palm. She moved the lens up and down, trying to make the image clearer. As the rays of light were focused into a single bright point, she almost cried out. The point of light was so hot that it burned.
But the pain also cleared her mind, brought it into sharp focus. An image of the hearth spirits miming a drum dance, lifting an imaginary buk drum high overhead, came unbidden into her head.
“Are you confident that you can save Kyoon?”
Sui-Wei nodded.
Yeon-joo shuffled awkwardly for a bit. “I can’t actually pay your fee right away, as I have very little cash and you insisted that I not sell my inventory and license to Aguda. I’m grateful for your hospitality. It just seems unfair when I am supposed to be paying you.”
Sui-Wei had insisted that Yeon-joo move into her house from Aguda’s before the trial, despite the gossip such a move created. She had explained that she needed to consult him often to prepare for the trial. She was much relieved when he complied.
Magistrate Wu emerged from the door at the front of the yamen courtroom in his formal robes and hat. The bailiffs, standing in two lines along the front of the courtroom, pounded their staffs against the flagstone floor rhythmically as he ascended the dais to take his seat behind the bench. The murmuring among the audience quieted down. Sui-Wei looked around and saw that both Aguda and Ben-Ni were in the crowd.
The Magistrate slapped his hardwood ruler, the symbol of justice and his authority, against the surface of the bench in a loud snap that rang around the room. The court was in session.
“Now we hear the case of the murder of Hae-wook Lee. My staff and I have diligently investigated the matter and concluded that the cause of death is arson, committed by one Kyoon, maid of the Lee household.”
The Magistrate surveyed the audience with cold eyes as two of the bailiffs brought Kyoon in shackles. She was made to kneel before the bench.
“On the day of the fire, you stole valuable jewels from Hae-wook Lee and did mischief in the kitchen to start a slow fire that would grow out of control after you left the house. You had the motive, the means, and the opportunity. How do you plead?”
Sui-Wei stepped out of the audience and stood beside Kyoon. She bowed deeply. “Your Honor, I am Litigatrix Sui-Wei Far, here to speak for the accused. We plead innocence.”
“Very well. What do you have to say?”
“You think she kept a low fire going in the kitchen, but I can prove that the fire did not start there.” She reached into the folds of her sleeve and retrieved bits of crumpled paper, and handed them to one of the bailiffs to bring up to the bench.
“These were found lodged in the holes in the lower sections of the scholars’ rocks in the Lee courtyard. A burning fire pushes hot air away from itself on top, and replenishes itself by drawing in cold air below. So these bits of paper were blown into their refuge by the cold air currents fueling the fire before it had spread to all the rooms. The accounting records and letters clearly came from the study, on the east side. And the red paper rooster was the kind of charm commonly hung on the wall of the kitchen for New Year’s. Together, they show that air was drawn out of both the east and west sides of the courtyard at the beginning of the fire. The murderer started the fire not in the kitchen, but in Hae-wook’s bedroom.”
The Magistrate stared at Sui-Wei. “But how could that be? Yeon-joo saw his father’s bedroom after Kyoon already left, and there were no signs of any fire. No one could have entered the house during the relevant hours.”
“I will show you.”
Sui-Wei placed a piece of paper on the floor of the courtroom.
“This is called a lens,” she said, and took out the glass lens that she had kept from Aguda’s telescope. “It has the ability to bend light rays and focus them.”
She held the lens over the paper, adjusting the distance until sunlight from the windows along the southern wall was focused into a single bright point on the paper. Soon, the paper began to smoke, and a tongue of fire began to dance on its surface. The crowd gasped.
“On the day of the fire, there was already a lens at the Lee house, ready to do mischief as the sun reached the proper alignment.”
From the sky. From the floor.
Sui-Wei raised her voice to be heard above the excited crowd. “Your Honor, I will prove my claims. But first, you must immediately detain the merchants Aguda and Ben-Ni for conspiracy to commit murder.”
As Magistrate Wu watched, Sui-Wei directed the bailiffs to carry out the ice sculptures of the drum dancers from the cellar.
“Since Hae-wook refused to sell Korean silk to Ben-Ni, both Aguda and Ben-Ni desired to get the old man out of the way and force his son to sell the silk license cheaply to Aguda. Combining their knowledge of optics and ice, they planned murder for profit.
“The greatest advantage of using an ice lens to start a fire is that the instrument would be destroyed by the heat, leaving no evidence. And the murderers would not need to be nearby, giving them good alibis. But the disadvantage of such a method is that it is unreliable, and success depends on the right weather and more than a bit of luck. That is why they made multiple statues, so that if one should melt and fail to ignite, others could be gifted to Hae-wook to try again.”
The Magistrate walked gingerly around the ice drum dancers, as if they could burst into flames at any moment. “But where is the lens?”
Sui-Wei pointed to the buk drums over the dancers’ heads.
“Aguda has discovered the art of creating ice sculptures in layers that would reveal themselves as darker ice melted before light ice. He hid a clear lens inside a drum made of dark ice.”
Carefully, Sui-Wei melted the layer of dark ice with her hands dipped in warm water until the clear ice lens emerged.
“The murders knew that Hae-wook would be left alone at home most afternoons. They calculated the angle and focal length of the lens to bring the heat of the sun to a single burning point on the paper floor of the bedroom when the sun was high in the west. Then, Aguda installed a statue outside Hae-wook’s window as a gift. They only needed to wait for a warm day to bring forth fire from ice.”
“Litigatrix Far,” Magistrate Wu said, his voice gruff, “ignore the gossips. Your father would be proud to see you today, and I shall always be honored to have your assistance in my court.”
Sui-Wei bowed deeply and hid her surprised tears of gratitude with her sleeves.
As Magistrate Wu read out the formal charges against Aguda and Ben-Ni and placed them in shackles, he seemed to have forgotten about the bag of jewels that made him suspect Kyoon in the first place. And that was just fine. Not all truths needed to be broadcast. A good litigator knew when to be discreet.
Yeon-joo stood protectively next to the freed Kyoon. Now that Sui-Wei knew the truth, she could easily see the family resemblance.
“She’s your flesh and blood!”
“I’ve done all I can for her.”
“Not nearly enough.”
The hearth spirits had been repeating a fragment of the argument between Yeon-joo and Hae-wook. Yeon-joo was endeavoring to pay for his father’s sins in secret, to recompense the girl ignorant of her own paternity without bringing shame to the family.
Both of them, she realized, were working to preserve the legacy of their fathers, one by uncovering the truth, the other by hiding it. Some day, she hoped, Yeon-joo would find the courage to tell his sister who she really was.
Kyoon stepped away for a moment to be embraced by her parents.
“Litigatrix,” Yeon-joo said, bowing to her. “The Lee family is in your debt.”
“There’s a satisfaction in giving the truth its due that is sweeter than anything else,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “Now, would you come with me to welcome your hearth spirits into my house, until you can rebuild a house of your own?”
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Copyright 2013 Ken Liu
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Giganotosaurus is published monthly by Late Cretaceous and edited by Ann Leckie.
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Ken Liu, The Litigatrix
