The inner circle of the Hall of Witness was marked by a band of pale, polished marble inlaid into the dark limestone flagstones. For sixty centuries, that circle had served as the ground where no magistrate could claim precedence of rank over the man who had bled beneath his judgment.
Marshal Kett stopped two paces inside the marble band. His iron-studded boots stood parallel, his gloved right hand remaining firmly pressed against the silver torque at his throat. He did not look at Noll Vey, nor did he look at Lord Auditor Vane sitting in bitter isolation on the upper tier. He looked at the three figures standing in the lantern light before him.
Noll Vey watched from the witness balustrade, his single granite palm resting on the coping stone. The blue light within his fractured chest pulsed with a low, steady cadence, illuminating the dust motes that hung suspended in the subterranean air.
Kett halted first before Renn.
The retired miner stood with his weight balanced upon his right hip, his left leg exposed from the knee down. The limb was not flesh and bone; it was a carved column of pale, translucent quartz-crystal, veined with hairline fractures of blue mineral light that pulsed in slow synchronization with the deep rhythm of the mountain.
