The light was not the warm amber of tavern hearths, nor the cool azure pulse of Noll Vey’s core chip. It was the blinding, sterile white of a magnesium flare ignited in a dark cellar—a flat, shadowless radiance that stripped the color from stone, wool, and human flesh until the entire amphitheater looked like an uninked woodcut.
The roar from the portable register was deafening. Inside its brass chassis, Collar Anchor Two spun with a high, screaming whine like an iron circular saw biting into a granite lintel. The silver filaments of the chorus circuit, having tasted the master siege charter’s royal sheepskin, whipped through the air like incandescent needles, anchoring themselves directly into the carved mortar joints of the floor flags.
Lord Auditor Orin Vane stood hunched over the clerk’s table. His fingers were locked around the heavy brass handle of the master stylus, driving the steel nib into the wax-and-silver record plate with furious, hysterical violence. His face was bathed in that cruel, blinding glare, his teeth bared in a grimace of absolute, unbending fanaticism.
“I strike it out!” Vane screamed, his voice competing with the mechanical shriek of the gears. “I strike out the One-Year Mixed Compact! I strike out the pension pool! I strike out the testimony of the miners, the deserters, and the disgraced marshal! Under Article Ninety of the Imperial Chancery, any covenant signed under duress from an illicit cognitive anomaly is legally void from the moment of inception!”
