The chapel of Fort Karst had ceased to be a house of prayer three weeks ago. It was now the office heart and defensive safe hall of a besieged republic of starving men.
The heavy oak pews had long since been hacked into firewood to warm the shivering wounded in the south aisle. The altar of veined snake-like marble was piled high with supply boss manifests, cracked iron helms, and baskets of moldy hardtack crusts. Under the smoke-stained frescoes of forgotten northern saints—their painted eyes staring down through peeling lime wash—thirty men and women were gathered in a dense, agitated ring around the chancel steps.
Before Ren arrived, the air in the nave had been thick with bitter, desperate argument.
Master Garrow and the lowland merchants wanted a sovereign prince because without a recognized high-born seal, every promissory note, land-deed, and mortgage they carried in their brass-bound wagons was nothing more than spoiled paper. Conversely, Thomas Miller and the draymen distrusted any man who wore silk, recalling how the Imperial Duke’s tax-court guards had stripped their fathers’ farms to build fancy fountains in the capital. But fear of the Obsidian Legion’s leftover artillery had forged an uneasy, terrifying consensus among them all.
