Lord Auditor Orin Vane did not raise his voice. He did not scoff, nor did he slam his hand upon the polished walnut of his campaign desk.
Instead, he reached for his swan-quill pen, dipped the nib into the purple inkwell, and drew a single, clean horizontal line through an empty margin on his vellum blotter. The gesture was small, mechanical, and infinitely chilling. It was the movement of a man crossing an obsolete inventory item off a storehouse tally.
“A created threat,” Vane said, his tone as flat and even as a winter pond, “has no standing.”
The words hung in the narrow acoustic baffle of the sealed mine drift. The porous sandstone slabs swallowed the reverberation, leaving the sentence stripped of warmth or echo, raw as scraped bone.
“It is not a person, Master Vey,” Vane continued, resting the quill back in its ebony groove. “It is not a tenant, nor is it a subject of the Crown. It possesses neither ancestral title, nor tax obligation, nor baptismal registry within any parish of the realm. It is an unincorporated hazard, generated by your private rhetorical recklessness and sustained by the undisciplined imagination of peasant laborers. Under the Second Statutory Revision of the High Chancellery, an unincorporated hazard possesses no civil standing whatsoever until such time as the state reduces it to an instrument of lawful order.”
