From his place at the oak witness rail, Jon Hale watched the five prisoners below the dais as Lady Signe Lorr opened the freshly inked sentencing folio that she and the four guild trustees had signed in chambers at dawn.
No trumpets blew, and no black cloth was draped over the bench, for no man in the room was being sent to the churchyard pit. Yet the absolute, un-rewound finality of the moment weighed heavier on the prisoners’ bench than any drumhead court-martial Jon had ever witnessed across the loops. Whatever was read out from those rag-paper leaves would not be washed away at six o’clock tomorrow morning. It was the shape of the rest of their lives.
“Valen Ors, formerly Marshal of the Northern Host,” Lady Signe read, looking down at the grizzled commander strapped upright in his pegged oak wheeled chair. “By your own admission and the sealed parchment before this bench, you subordinated your oath as a commander of soldiers to the directives of an unlawful Chancellery experiment. You issued the order that locked Master Cooper Ben Rill of the North Quay and the granary detail inside a burning storehouse as a tactical decoy, and you led three thousand men against a civilian parish whose non-belligerence was known to your scouts. Because the injuries sustained when the core girder fell during the manifold rupture have permanently deprived you of the use of your lower limbs, you cannot work with pick or shovel in the ditches.”
