The reaction in the gallery was not merely shock. It was the sudden, collective realization of an entire city’s ruling class that their defenses had failed.
For decades, the High Court of Judgment had operated behind an impregnable wall of legalistic mysticism. Ordinary citizens who entered this hall were overwhelmed by the vaulted heights, the golden chains of office, the Latinate formulas, and the terrible majesty of the Granite Guillotine. They bowed, they confessed, they accepted whatever sentence the bench handed down. That was because they believed the judges were vessels of divine order.
Now, in less than two hours, a nineteen-year-old boy from the tanneries and a matching ghost in slate-grey wool had dismantled their foremost witnesses like cheap clocks.
Lieutenant Voren had vomited on the witness rail, weeping over fifty-sovereign bribes. Dean Kaelen had collapsed in convulsions. It screamed that his four-thousand-sovereign expert report was a pre-made lie written by Lord Malakor’s clerks.
The spectators were no longer looking at the high bench with awe. They were looking at Chief Justiciar Malvane with the sharp, hungry suspicion of a mob that smells blood in the water.
The court guards dragged Master Scribe Kaelen through the side door, the disgraced academician’s crimson robes trailing across the flat stone slabs like a discarded butcher’s cloth.
