Warden Tomas Brecht’s laugh was not loud—with two hundred pounds of Alden Bram’s knee driving his ribs into the cold flagstones and his left collarbone cracked, he had barely enough breath in his lungs for a wheezing rasp—yet in the freezing, resonant hum of the charging taproom, every syllable carried like iron scraping across slate.
“Stop laughing, you venomous snake, or I’ll drive your teeth through the stones!” Master Baker Dunstan Harl snarled, hauling upward on the iron shackle-chain until Brecht’s shackled wrists creaked behind his black broadcloth back.
Brecht did not even wince at the wrenched shoulder, nor did the fractured radius and ulna of his left forearm draw more than a shallow twitch from his bloodless cheek. Turning his bruised, oil-streaked face against the wet flagstones so his pale, heavy-lidded eyes looked straight across the two-yard gap into Jon Hale’s face, the Overseer of the Special Third Chamber smiled with thin, grey-lipped satisfaction—the look of an auditor who had balanced a ledger in blood and knew the page could never be audited.
“Twist the chain all you like, baker, and break the other arm if it pleases the crowd,” Brecht whispered, his breath steaming white in the rapidly chilling air as the red-and-gold light from the cellar seams reflected in his pupils. “Lock me in your wagon-irons. Let Lady Lorr write twenty pages of High Assize indictments on her sheepskin roll, and let your fifty peasants press their red wax thumbs onto that charter on the desk. In…
