The second candle of the night had burned down to its brass socket, drowning its wick in a pool of clear animal fat before Auditor Varo Nenn finished the third revision of Article One. In the quiet of the back kitchen, the only sounds were the slow breathing of the four planners, the muffled murmur of the Gray Rush against the river piers outside, and the dry, nonstop scrape of Nenn’s bone knife smoothing the thick parchment fibers.
“Listen to the text as it stands,” Nenn said, picking up the heavy leaf and holding it close to the hurricane lantern. His thin, office voice lent a strange, unmoving gravity to every syllable, transforming a piece of parchment into an unbreachable wall.
“‘Article One: Of the Sovereign Civil Status of Visiting Specialists. Section One: Inviolable Personhood. It’s hereby enacted by the Municipal Senate of Lathmere that every natural person entering the civic territory through the sky-slit known as the Courtesy Arch shall be recognized in law as a visiting sovereign person, possessing all rights of life, liberty, bodily strength, and personal dignity recognized under the Common Law of the Valley.’”
Nenn looked up over the rims of his iron glasses. He tapped the desk with the handle of his bone knife. “Notice the legal phrasing: ‘natural person.’ That single legal term severs two hundred years of academy jurisprudence. Under academy doctrine, anything produced by a summoning circle is an ‘ghostly projection’. A simulated mind without independent moral standing. By defining them…
