The Grand Tiered hall of Immutable Decrees had been hollowed out of the living white granite of Mount Khorat during the second century of the empire. It smelled exactly as a court of total power ought to smell. Cold limestone, beeswax, old thick parchment, and the faint, bitter tang of dried blood that two hundred years of town mopping had never entirely washed from the mortar.
Tier upon tier of curved marble benches rose like the ribs of an upturned galleon toward a vaulted dome eighty feet above the floor. Light didn’t enter through ordinary glass. It filtered down through long slit-windows glazed with polished plates of semi-clear white chalk-stone. It cast a pale, shadowless glare across the twelve hundred dignitaries assembled in the hall.
There were red-robed prelates of the High Synod, their cowl edges stiff with silver bullion. Country consuls in fur-trimmed mantles from the grain-bearing Marches. Master merchants of the Upper Canal Trade group with golden abaci tucked into their sashes. And along the outer edge, standing at motionless parade rest, sixty void-court spear guards clad in lacquered black iron. In the high private loggias carved into the second tier, shaded behind bronze filigree grilles, sat the anonymous scribes of the Black Cabinet. Their silver-mounted bone styluses shone in the gloom.
