The avenue leading from the botanical gardens to the Middle Walkway was paved in polished white red stone, lined with marble statues of the seven founding notaries of Val-Khorat.
At the narrowest neck of the avenue, where forty-foot marble retaining walls rose on either side like the walls of a canyon, Magistrate Kaelen had built his slaughterhouse.
It was an iron barricade eight feet high, built of overturned high-born carriages, iron garden gates, and spiked chevaux-de-frise laced with barbed wire. Behind the barricade stood two hundred elite Iron Guards in full lacquered plate, their visors down. Their three-foot repeating was heavy steel crossbows resting on the low roof wall.
Mounted on the stone piers of the retaining walls were two heavy clockwork giant crossbows, their steel bowstrings cranked back by hand-winches, each armed with six-foot iron-headed bolts designed to pierce siege mantlets.
In the center of the barricade, standing on the footboard of a gold-trimmed carriage, stood Magistrate Kaelen.
He was a tall, angular man in his late forties, wearing a stitched damask mantle of deep plum over a polished breastplate of blackened steel. His thin, aquiline nose supported a pair of gold-rimmed glasses on a black silk ribbon, and in his right gloved hand, he held an ivory baton tipped with the three-quill seal of the High court.
