The Great Lecture Hall of the Summoners’ College was built to inspire terror in seventeen-year-old boys. Its tiered oak benches rose steeply toward a ceiling paneled in dark bog oak, carved with seventy-two heraldic beasts whose gold-trimmed eyes caught the cold daylight filtering through tall lancet windows. In the center of the hall, upon a raised dais of polished black dark rock, stood the Master’s Lectern. A heavy, eagle-clawed timber stand from which ages of High Summoners had expounded the divine right of human intellect to bind the prime elements.
Today, the lectern was empty.
Standing before the dark rock dais, at floor level where the students usually waited for reprimands, stood Corvin Hest. He wore no velvet stole and no gold-stitched academy chevron. He wore a plain gray woolen robe with clean horn buttons. Beside him, Kel Dorr stood next to a flat wooden worktable upon which sat a single six-inch square block of gray sandstone, a cup of spring water, and an unlit animal fat candle.
Eighty-four junior summoners, teachers, and apprentices filled the rising tiers. The silence was complete, save for the nervous rustle of woolen cloaks and the occasional scratch of a goose quill. The arrest of Master Sorell and the public disgrace of Master Davin Sorell had shattered the academy hierarchy. The students sat in stunned confusion. They looked down at Hest like sailors whose flagship had sunk beneath their feet.
