Bram Ash picked up the third sheet from the pine frame stand table with fingers that felt cold, stiff. Then he strangely detached from his wrists.
His joints ached with the wet chill that always gathered in the lower pantry before midday. For twenty years, he had worn the blue wool coat of the town court guard corps, its pewter buttons polished every Sunday with chalk paste. Its high stiff collar held his chin level through three hundred public inquests, seventy eviction orders, and twelve years of midnight curfews. The hickory stave in his left hand was smooth as worn saddle leather, darkened by the sweat of his palm where his grip had rested through thousands of hours of street patrol.
Now, his left thumb slid along the brass metal ring of the stave. Meanwhile, his right hand unfolded the heavy, folded sworn paper bearing the purple notary stamp of the Highbank District Court.
He knew the man who had signed it.
Twelve years ago, before the sky had turned to black slate and the bells had begun to take the work of living men, Ansett Rill had been a twenty-four-year-old junior land-mapper attached to the Citadel’s high-pressure building office. Bram remembered him clearly. A gaunt, round-shouldered youth who wore knitted gray wool mittens with the finger ends snapped off so he could turn the brass thumb screws on his transit level. Rill had carried a wooden sliding rule tucked into the side of his right boot, its boxwood varnish…
