The silence in the watching gallery stretched until the hiss of high-pressure steam leaking from a pipe rim in the lower gallery sounded like a dying beast.
Chancellor Morn looked down at the dark red smear of spit and blood drying across the country seal on the thick parchment scroll. He didn’t shout. He didn’t reach for his iron wrench. He simply picked up the parchment with two grease-stained fingers, walked to the green quartz slit in the floor. Then he dropped it through the iron grating.
The heavy scroll fluttered thirty feet down into the violet pit. Before it had fallen halfway to the humming quartz collector, the blasting heat of the core caught the dry paper. It flared in an instant burst of white blazing bright flame. That left nothing behind but a tiny spiral of gray ash that was sucked away by the roaring draft of the cooling chimney pipes.
Morn stood by the stone railing, watching the ash vanish into the purple churn.
“You’re an obstinate woman, Ivara,” he said, his voice flat, devoid of the desperate heat that had driven his earlier arguments. “You think you’re standing on high moral ground, wrapped in your land-mapper’s strength. You think that if you refuse to sign the order, you force me to surrender to your kitchen committee.”
