On the seventy-fifth morning of the restoration calendar, in the third week of the third month, the Public Court Hearing into the Governance and Administrative Crimes of the Province of Rookvale convened its formal opening session in the great granite tiered arena behind the Survey Office.
The tiered arena had been built eighty years earlier during the first surveying of the province, designed as an open-air academic forum for mineralogical lectures and high-pressure demonstrations. Built into the natural half-round bowl of the northern granite ridge, its twenty-four tiers of dressed stone benches curved down toward a central arena floor of smooth, crushed dark rock gravel.
On this morning, every stone tier was packed to the limits of its capacity.
Twelve hundred citizens of Rookvale sat shoulder to shoulder beneath the cool, unshaded morning sky. Quarry miners in oil-stained moleskin vests. Salt-glass blowers with scarred, mottled forearms. Weavers from the canal apartments. Widows in grey woolen shawls holding their children tightly on their laps. And shopkeepers from the Tram market. The air was dead silent, free of the restless murmurs that usually accompanied town assemblies. The silence was heavy, watchful, and unforgiving. The collective breath of a population that had survived four thousand three hundred and eighty dark midnights. He waited to see whether the law of the wider kingdom was an honest scale or another office fiction.
