The silence at the gatehouse lingered while the wind whipped dry cedar ash across the threshold.
Master Serit did not lower her Great Seal coffer. Her knuckles remained white against the banded iron casing, her eyes fixed on Prit with the severe, unyielding intensity of a magistrate whose court had just been contradicted by an apprentice scribe.
“Read the line again, Prit,” Serit said, her tone clipped and dangerous. “Read the entire clause, without omission.”
Prit took a half-step forward onto the apron, keeping his boots carefully behind the fort’s boundary line. His hands trembled as he opened his slate pouch and drew out a thin rectangular piece of grey shale, scored with three columns of neat, microscopic script. He raised the slate before his squinting eyes, his chin tucked into the heavy woolen folds of his oversized shawl.
“The third tablet of the Foundation Inscription,” Prit said, his voice gaining firmness as he read the words he had traced with lamp-black in the dark cellar. “At the third lintel of the descent: Whosoever answers a summons before the stone circle shall bear into the ring all measures, tallies, weights, tokens, and recording instruments whereon his claim or defense is grounded. No party shall be compelled to speak from memory alone where physical tallies exist; nor shall any court exclude the ledger upon which an oath was sworn, lest the record be falsified by omission.”
