Prit stepped through the inner archway with his slate tucked flat against his ribs, his grey audit chalk poised between two claws, and his small bone tail twitching with professional suspicion.
He had expected a dungeon vault. In sixty-eight years of service across six dead cores, Prit had audited seventy-three sub-cellars, thirty-nine treasure crypts, and four imperial ossuaries, and every single one of them had smelled of damp limestone, green mold, and the sour grease of dead men’s tallow candles.
The outer Hall of Witness smelled of dry cedar shavings and river silt dried in the sun three hundred years ago.
The chamber opened vast and high beneath the mountain, carved from the living slate of the valley bedrock. Overhead, the vault rose forty feet to a central acoustic rose where nine narrow stone speaking-flues converged like the spokes of a wagon wheel. Along the perimeter, tiered benches of grey freestone descended in five concentric rings toward a sunken circle of white marble flags.
Prit halted at the head of the third tier, his hollow eye sockets widening as he looked down at the carved stone benches.
In the royal courts of the southern capital—where Prit had once stood trial as an unlicensed imp alongside his third master, the orchard core Gilt-Root—the King’s throne was raised twelve steps above the chancellors, twenty steps above the bailiffs, and forty steps above the common carters who brought the wheat. Here, carved into the lowest tier directly bordering the white floor, nine plain…
