The words hung in the cold air of the cut like an unanswerable measurement from a land-mapper’s level. Jarek Thrum looked down at the melted rock waste rake in his hands, then at Bram Ash’s unbuttoned coat, and finally at the oak cellar door where the faint sound of weeping had ceased, replaced by the silence of a man who realized his life had been spared by the thinnest hair of a courier’s stubbornness.
“What court?” Jarek asked, his voice low, rough, and drained of its screaming edge. “Morn controls the high citadel. The judges on High Street are his cousins and his clerks. If you take Pell to the Survey Office, he’ll be drinking brandy in the governor’s parlor before midnight.”
“Not the Survey Office,” Bram Ash said. He stepped down to the bottom riser beside Len, his left hand coming to rest on Jarek’s leather-clad shoulder. The gesture was surprisingly gentle for a former court guard whose name had scared the ward for a decade. “When the sky-high dawn breaks—and it will break, Jarek, at seventeen minutes past six tomorrow morning—the court will sit on the loading platform in Tram square. Not in an oak-paneled chamber behind closed draperies. In the open air, where every weaver, every kiln stoker, and every carter who lost a son can bring his family ledger to the table.”
