The iron drop-gates of the Granite Hall of Verdicts came down with the thunderous finality of portcullises sealing a besieged castle.
Ren Vale was marched up the limestone stairs for the third morning of the trial. Then, the grand entrance doors of the courthouse were bolted with four-inch timbers. Outside in the public square, a crowd of two thousand citizens, low-city scribes, and off-duty tanners was shouting in fury. Their fists hammered against the bronze-plated oak portals like distant thunder. Inside, the high tiered galleries were fully empty. It on the last days had been packed with five hundred whispering spectators.
Every civilian court guard in blue wool had been stripped of duty and confined to the town barracks.
In their place stood sixty Iron Templars of the Scale. They were deployed in three ranks. Thirty encircling the well with drawn axe-spears, fifteen stationed along the gallery stone railings with heavy cocked heavy steel crossbows, and fifteen forming an iron-hard finger bone at the foot of the court bench. The air in the chamber no longer smelled of rosewater or tea. It smelled of gun-grease, cold iron, sulfur. The choking tension of an armed military trial preparing to execute a summary sentence.
