The council chamber of the Harth town hall was cold, smelling of old vellum, wet limestone, and the stale beeswax used to polish the long walnut table. Four hours before dawn on Day Four, two iron candelabra flickered with smoky tallow, throwing shivering yellow blades of light across the municipal tapestries that hung from the oak wainscoting.
Sir Cael Ardent stood at the head of the table, still wearing his gray wool campaign tunic and boiled-leather arm-guards. His right collarbone was heavily bandaged beneath his linen shirt, but his posture was rigid, military, and unyielding. Resting beside his clenched left hand on the walnut wood was the great seal of his royal commission, its gold chain coiled like a dormant adder.
Opposite him stood Lady Signe Lorr, the imperial observer. She wore a tailored velvet riding gown the color of dried plums, her dark hair bound tightly in a net of silver wire, her pale, aristocratic face completely impassive. In her right hand she held her slender bone stylus, turning it slowly between her fingers with the quiet, detached rhythm of a magistrate weighing evidence in a capital trial.
Between them on the table lay Alden Bram’s linen-backed blueprint of the False Gate, weighted down with four lead surveyor’s weights.
