With the Outer Threshold Grace Window sealed behind the heavy oak leaves of the main doorway, the Hall of Witness held only those whose names or offices were bound to the final ink of the settlement: Noll Vey kneeling at the rail, Eske standing beside the suspended charter with three-legged Bristle on its boot, Prit on the riser with his slate, Cale at the clerk’s table, Tessa Dene at the north lever box, Sella Rusk at the upper stair arch, Ossa Flint by the gallery stove-bench, Lady Serit beside her closed coffer, and Lord Auditor Orin Vane on the guarded eastern stone.
Down along the inner curb beneath Noll’s basalt knee, the frost-white letters of the first statutory option—ALTERNATIVE ENTERED. YIELD CORE AS INERT RECORD. ACCOUNT CLOSED.—pulsed once, waiting for the debtor’s touch.
Noll Vey looked down at the neat, painless line. Then he lifted his right stone hand and rapped his limestone knuckles twice against the scarred oak of the witness bar, three inches away from the archive clause.
“Strike the conversion offer from the curb, Clerk Cale,” Noll said.
His voice had lost the thin, elevated quiver that always crept into his throat when he was trying to sell a crowd on a miracle. It sounded remarkably like his father’s voice forty years ago in the back room of the Greyford tailor shop, when the old man used to lay the iron shears down on the cutting-board at midnight and agree to pay the wool-merchant two shillings a…
