For six years in the capital’s High Chancellery, Lady Signe Lorr had read royal writs of confiscation, attainder, and martial impressment written in gold leaf upon purple vellum. She had always believed the clerks of the Privy Seal used that archaic, rigid phrasing—verbs without subjects, property schedules without human names—merely out of bureaucratic tradition.
Standing before the scorching smoked-quartz window in the aqueduct gallery beneath Harth, she understood for the first time that the clerks in the capital had not invented the grammar of the Crown. They had copied it word for word from the machine buried beneath the realm.
Across the inner bevel of the three-inch quartz lens, reflection-locked to the pulsing Returner Seal on Sir Cael Ardent’s chest, burned a block of incised imperial gold lettering. There were no ornamental borders around the words, no royal lions or heraldic flourishes. The characters formed directly inside the crystalline lattice of the quartz as if etched by a red-hot diamond point:
PURGE FOREIGN CLAIM
Signe did not step back from the heat radiating off the bronze housing. She tucked her wool cloak tightly behind her left elbow, opened her oilskin magistrate’s pocket-book against her forearm, and raised Object #11—her six-inch carved bone stylus with its fine silver tracing nib—to within an inch of the glowing quartz surface.
