The aftermath of the entry hall breach had left the Granite Hall of Verdicts smelling of ozone, burnt lamp-oil, and cold wet mud.
Outside, Captain Thorne’s city court guards had managed to re-establish a fragile cordon around the entrance. They pushed the roaring crowd of two thousand citizens back into the public square. But the bronze doors had not been replaced. They hung crookedly on their twisted iron pintles, allowing the icy autumn draft and the persistent chanting of the mob—“Nullify the Scale! Open the books!”—to whistle through the chamber like an approaching storm.
Inside the well, thirty Iron Templars stood in a tight, bristling square of axe-spears around the witness platform.
At the center of that square, wheeled into place by two court guards wearing thick asbestos gloves, sat the Dampening Cage.
It was a tube-shaped cage four feet in width. It was built from heavy upright ribs of lead-plated cold iron. Around the outside ran four nested hoops of etched brass inscribed with sound null-runes, designed to suppress the deep ringing hum of glass-like minerals.
Inside the cage sat Mira Vale.
The construction of the Dampening Cage was an exercise in office sadism.
Its four nested hoops of etched brass were connected by copper grounding wires that trailed across the floorboards to two heavy zinc grounding rods driven into the mortar between the granite flat stone slabs. To an ordinary observer, the rig appeared to be a standard scientific solitude cell designed to protect the court from dangerous…
