Inside the vaulted stone guardroom of the north gatehouse, Captain Dain’s sergeants stripped Warden Brecht of his judicial accoutrements with the methodical thoroughness of custom-house searchers unloading a smuggler’s brig.
Jon Hale stood by the narrow oak table with the Bound Common Charter resting under his hand, watching as each item taken from the Chancellery overseer’s person was laid out upon a square of clean bleached linen before Lady Signe Lorr and Sister Oda.
First came the hollow five-inch black steel needle that Cael had wrenched from Brecht’s embroidered left cuff, together with its tiny brass spring-sheath and a spare glass ampoule of greenish-black night-adder venom stitched into the lining of his velvet waistcoat. Next came a heavy gold Chancellery privy signet ring, a silver-mounted pocket sand-glass calibrated in thirty-second intervals, two iron skeleton keys stamped with the War Ministry’s ordnance mark, and a flat leather dispatch valise locked with a triple-tumbler brass hasp. Even the high heels of Brecht’s polished riding boots were pried open with a cobbler’s pincers, yielding two thin saws of tempered clock-spring steel coiled in oiled sheepskin.
“No second needle in the collar or the boot-heels,” Captain Dain reported, straightening up from the stone bench and wiping his hands on a coarse toweling rag. “He’s clean down to his wool smallclothes, Magistrate.”
