In thirty-one years on the High Assize bench, Lady Signe Lorr had listened to seventeen self-proclaimed prophets, forty-two counterfeiters claiming alchemical transmutation, and nine border commanders who swore that ghosts had burned their supply wagons to cover the sale of royal grain on the black market.
She had a simple rule for testing impossible testimony: a liar or a madman always spoke in grand, smoky generalities about fate and visions, whereas a witness reporting an actual administrative crime knew the exact weight of the nails, the wording of the sub-clauses, and the cost of the grease on the axles.
Looking across her mahogany table at Jon Hale, Signe observed the man with the unsparing eye of a crown prosecutor.
He was thirty-eight years old, broad-shouldered in a clean wool waistcoat and a flour-spotted linen apron, with grey threading his dark hair at the temples and ten distinct, circular white scars banded around the bases of his ten fingers. Despite the extraordinary nature of the words he had just spoken, his pulse at the side of his throat beat at a slow, steady sixty strokes to the minute. His hands did not tremble; his eyes did not dart toward the bolted door; and since the moment he had stepped within five feet of her desk, a strange, crystal-clear stillness had settled over the air of Room 2—a sensation that reminded Signe of standing inside the ancient vaulted charter-crypt beneath the Old Law Courts in the capital, where the oath-stones made a…
