The air in the Great Round hall smelled of crushed frankincense, beeswax candles. The subtle, cloying sweetness of boiled away marrow.
Two hundred feet above the polished red stone floor, the ribbed dome curved outward like the shell of a gold-trimmed turtle. The sound shape was flawless. Every rustle of ermine trim, every shuffle of velvet slippers, and every stroke of a gold dip-pen echoed through the tiered galleries with crisp, amplified deep ring.
Five hundred licensed scholars, high notaries, and prelates of the Board sat in nested tiers of polished cedar. They wore robes of dyed saffron wool, their shoulders draped in stoles of white ermine that denoted thirty years of tenure within the archives. Above them, in the private boxes of the upper gallery, sat the plenipotentiaries of the Grand Duke. High-born men and women in iron-threaded brocade, sipping chilled spiced wine from crystal goblets.
At the center of the hall, raised upon a circular dais of white marble, stood the Grand Censor.
Malachai wore the formal vestments of the Arch-Redactor. A floor-length cassock of stiff black damask edged in silver lace. His silver-plated reading glasses rested upon the bridge of his narrow nose. It caught the flicker of four hundred animal fat tapers. Before him, suspended above a massive bronze tripod fire bowl, hung the Seal of Perpetual Accord—a disk of beaten gold-silver metal six feet in width, inscribed with the foundational charters of the city.
