At half past three in the afternoon, the trial turned its attention to the second defendant.
Halden Pell was brought forward to the bar of the tiered arena by two town constables. The former Senior Judge of Customs, Transit, and Quarantine looked thoroughly ruined. His amazing purple velvet cloak, which had once been lined with Arctic fox fur and trimmed with silver braid, had been stripped of its ornaments by the prison warders, hanging in limp, greasy folds around his stooped shoulders. His fine Holland linen shirt was crumpled and stained with brown cabbage broth from the Tram cells. His soft, fleshy complexion—nurtured for twelve years beneath the humid, artificial warmth of his private citrus greenhouses—had turned a sallow, blotched grey from two months of ordinary cellar air.
As he reached the iron witness railing, his knees buckled. He collapsed onto the dark rock gravel, clasping his trembling, manicured hands together before his chest in an agony of begging on their knees supplication.
“Mercy, Your Honors!” Pell wailed, his voice echoing shrilly off the curved granite tiers. “I throw myself upon the royal mercy of the Crown! I wasn’t the author of the dark! I was a subordinate civil officer bound by oath to Chancellor Morn! I never designed a channel. I never operated a governor! I was an administrator following the town charter!”
