In the cold gloom of the Hall of Witness, ninety-four hours before the Last Guest’s maturity clock ran to zero, Ossa Flint set three octagonal sheets of polished speculum brass on the stone balustrade.
The metal caught the dim blue luminescence of Noll Vey’s core where it filtered up through the floor grates. Overhead, the public debt ring hung suspended from the vaulted ribs like an iron wheel dipped in phosphor, its letters burning quietly in the dark air. At the center of the ring, the heavy glyphs of the tenth debt—the nine-day maturity span of the feast—glowed with steady precision: NINETY-FOUR HOURS REMAINING.
“The math is plain enough,” Ossa said, her rasping voice echoing off the limestone benches. She adjusted the brass wire harness that held the magnifying lens over her right eye. “This chamber was chiseled out to hold four hundred souls in judicial comfort. Down in the valley, Vane has eight thousand infantry, four hundred cavalrymen, sixty siege carters, and twelve hundred townsfolk in Mere. If you ask every one of them to walk up the hill path and take a seat, the line will stretch past the river bridge, and half of them will freeze to death in the snow before your clerk has dipped his pen.”
