The Will to Battle (Terra Ignota, #3)

by Ada Palmer

Do images of our statue survive to your day, reader? Justice, Temperance, and Reason, sketched by Thomas Carlyle and translated into stone outside his courthouse here in Romanova? In darker ages Justice stood alone before courthouses, but in Carlyle’s vision her sister Temperance stands to one side holding back her sword, while from the other side Reason lifts away her blindfold, so Justice can finally see the contents of her scales.

There was a third option in Homer’s Greek between active and passive verbs, the middle voice, a subtle space between the doer who creates or kills and the recipient who is created or is killed. Between these opposites lies he who causes but does not do the deed himself. The patron touches no stone, yet builds the cathedral; the judge wields no sword, yet strikes off the traitor’s head. Martin says nothing, yet this conversation is his creation, born from the conjunction he has carefully assembled: MASON, Spain, Madame. Even when Odysseus planned the horse, he did not saw the boards himself. Martin expected something, something worth making his Emperor come here.