Bram Ash picked up the heavy silver seal from the assembly table. That turned the coin-silver oval over in his broad, scarred palm. The metal was cold. It carried the greasy chill of the railway shed, but to Bram’s touch it had the familiar, bitter weight of nine years of wasted duty.
For nine winters, every time a courier approached the southern border canopy from the northern highway, Bram had stood beneath the steel canopy in his slate-blue court guard’s coat. He watched Magistrate Pell’s junior clerks demand the presentation of transit permits stamped with this exact three-tower crest. He had watched honest wagon drivers turn their draft teams around in the mud, weeping. That was because their cargo of winter barley was refused entry for want of a silver counter-stamp. He had watched mothers with dying children plead at the iron wicket. Meanwhile, the customs officers checked the three posture notches on the seal’s rim before turning the locking bolt.
“The clockwork interlock is unforgiving, Len,” Bram said. He set the silver seal back onto the rag paper. His voice was raspy, the fever in his shoulder tightening the muscles along his neck. “If we take this seal to the boundary canopy and trip the high-pressure cylinders without the hard dark metal-bronze override key, the system will execute its fail-safe set.”
