WHACK.
Prit brought the iron-bound corner of his slate down onto the oak lip of the clerk’s lectern with every ounce of force in his small bone arms. The crack echoed off the vaulted limestone ceiling louder than a sergeant’s halberd butt striking a guardhouse floor.
Before the Greyford corporal and young Fennik could take three strides up the aisle steps toward the courtyard doors, the three-foot bone imp vaulted off the lectern base, landed squarely on the middle stone riser with his moth-eaten coat-tails flaring, and planted his slate crosswise against their shins like a turnpike bar.
“Sit down!” Prit snarled, his hollow eye-sockets blazing with cold blue core-light as he brandished his grey audit chalk stub like a bailiff’s truncheon. “Sit your reckless, porridge-headed carcasses back down on those benches before I mark the lot of you down under Voluntary Default!”
The corporal blinked down at the bone steward blocking the stair, the grin still half-frozen on his soot-stained face. “What’s biting you, little fellow? We saw it with our own eyes! The Envoy put the big seal in the groove, the thing drank the steam out of the rafters, and the black tables shrunk!”
“Shrunk by four feet, you innumerate turnip!” Prit snapped, whirling around on the step and rapping his grey chalk stub against the large public tally-slab mounted beside the witness rail.
