Standing behind the center magistrate’s chair on the Guild Hall dais, Lady Signe Lorr looked down at the two broken halves of the purple-and-gold imperial wax seal resting in her left palm, and then at the unfolded vellum sheet of Dispatch Forty-Four in her right.
For twenty-two years on the northern circuit bench, Signe had carried the Provincial Statutes in her saddlebags through snowdrifts, sheep-dip disputes, boundary feuds, and mining collapses. She had entered the law as a young clerk in the capital believing that the Crown’s seals were the mortar that held civilized walls upright against the dark. Even when the Chancellery’s special auditors began claiming emergency exemptions along the border six years ago, she had clung to the stubborn, orderly conviction that if a magistrate kept her inkhorn clean and cited the exact subsection of the code, the machinery of the state could be forced to obey its own rules.
Then she had lived through the twelfth return in Harth valley—awaking to find that a bronze furnace beneath an innkeeper’s beer barrels had been devouring tax-paying households out of the parish rolls and planing their very names out of their neighbors’ skulls, while the Third Sub-Ministry of the Interior sent trebuchets and pitch-pots to burn the survivors alive so the ledgers in the capital would balance.
