The machine spoke of living witnesses as though a dead man were an empty knapsack dropped beside a milestone on the road.
I listened to the brass whine coming from the wheeled chassis near Lord Auditor Orin Vane’s elbow. It was the same high, thin pitch a field gun’s bronze barrel makes when the second powder charge has been driven home too hot and the metal begins to stretch before the breach-block blows. Across the dome above our heads, the yellow blocking warrant flickered with the cold, sterile certainty of a Morren chancery clerk who believed that if you threw enough quicklime over a mass trench, the arithmetic inside the dirt would cease to balance.
WITNESS QUALIFICATION VOID, the glowing runic script repeated across the stone ribs, each letter pulsing with the arrogant authority of the Great Council. NO LIVING WITNESSES TO THE HISTORICAL EVENT SURVIVE TO MAINTAIN THE CLAIM.
Vane was smiling. It was a very small, tidy smile—the expression of an examiner who has caught an apprentice misplacing a decimal in the third column of a tax schedule and knows the penalty cannot be evaded. He stood with his fingers lightly resting on the polished oak rim of his wheeled desk, convinced that the kingdom’s law was a fortress with iron doors, and that he held the only set of keys that could ever turn the tumblers.
