Across the thirty-foot deep gap of the spillway, Inspector Korr Var, Sergeant Vane, and four town guardsmen watched through their brass spyglasses as Davin Sorell tore the scarlet safety ribbon from his technician’s hand and hurled it into the torrent.
“Did you witness that, Sergeant?” Korr Var asked, his voice dropping into a register of icy, total finality.
“I witnessed it, Checker,” Sergeant Vane replied, writing in his official guard book with an ink-pencil. “Master Davin Sorell did knowingly, willfully, and with malice aforethought, assault a sworn town mechanic and destroy an emergency safety signal during an active flood crisis. That’s a capital felony under the Great Charter of minus-sixty.”
“The man is no longer a Chief Summoner,” Korr said, snapping his spyglass shut. “He’s an armed outlaw in illegal possession of a town floodgate. We have no legal duty to obey him, no office duty to negotiate with him. No skilled reason to preserve his power. Our only duty now is to extract those three men and starve his machine until it falls into the mud.” On the platform, the act of tearing the red tab had achieved the opposite of what Sorell intended. It had stripped him of every shred of human legitimacy. He was no longer a master. He was just an old man screaming in the rain.
