Lady Signe Lorr picked up Object #13—Tobin’s bloodstained lead cylinder—between her thumb and forefinger, feeling the rough, raised ridge of the dead courier’s blood where it had dried into the tallow crimp, and stared down at the blue judicial wax counter-stamp at the foot of Dispatch Forty-Four.
She knew the brass matrix that had pressed that seal.
It was not a generic clerk’s stamp from the outer registry hall. It was the Counter-Signet of the Third Desk of the First Chamber of the Ministry of the High Assize—the heavy, octagon-faced brass seal with a hairline scratch across the left scale-pan that sat in the locked mahogany drawer of her own judicial mentor, Chief Justice Vane-Lorr, in the East Wing of the Chancellery. And beneath the blue wax impression, written in the neat, slanting italic script of the chamber’s senior recording secretary, ran the statutory citation that gave the massacre warrant its colour of lawful authority:
Certified compliant with the Doctrine of Necessary Severance (High Assize Precedent 114-B, drafted by Travelling Magistrate S. Lorr, Third Circuit).
Signe felt the cold stone floor of the St. Jude vestry tilt beneath her kidskin slippers, a revulsion far sharper and more sickening than any physical Rollback Shock rising into the back of her throat.
