For five full breaths, nobody in the Hall of Witness said a word.
Up at the top of the stone steps, the open courtyard doors let in a thin, slanting drift of sleet that melted on the upper flags with a soft hiss. A crow called twice from the scorched timber scaffolding above the kitchen roof. Any sensible rogue, Noll thought—any healthy, ordinary pickpocket or card-sharp who had just been handed an unguarded staircase out of a room containing eight hundred angry neighbors and an eight-foot famine in a pewter coat—would have been halfway down the goat track to Mere before the stone clips finished clicking shut on the table.
Lord Auditor Orin Vane did not climb a single step.
Slowly, stiffly, Vane took his boot off the first riser. He stepped back down to the flat limestone beside the evidence table and placed both of his bare, ink-stained palms on the cold brass lid of the impounded register chassis, right beside the pinned vellum roll of the siege charter.
“You may close the upper doors against the draft,” Vane said. His voice had dropped back into its soft, courteous register, as level as if he were ordering tea in the Survey House parlor. “I shall remain at the table.”
