The fourth dawn of the trial broke over Val-Khorat with the dull, dark glow of an iron fire.
Inside the Granite Hall of Verdicts, the heat had plummeted to near freezing. The shattered western doors had been temporarily barricaded with heavy railway sleepers and iron chains. But the howling autumn wind whistled through the gaps. He carried the smell of coal soot, wet stone floor. The restless roar of five thousand citizens who had surrounded the courthouse outer edge since midnight.
The Granite Guillotine was not an ordinary instrument of civil execution. It was a relic of state terror engineered during the Reign of Duke Valen the Third.
Its uprights of blue-black Karst dark rock had been quarried from the same underground seam that formed the foundation of the courthouse. Along the inner channels ran twin grooves lined with cold-rolled bronze, greased with rendered whale animal fat to ensure the sixty-pound black glass blade dropped without clockwork friction. At the base of the frame, the wooden lunette was carved from five-inch heart-oak, stained a dark, indelible dark wood from the bright red blood of two hundred carried out scribes, counterfeiters, and heretics.
Ren Vale stood in the prisoner’s dock. His careful eye measured the clearance of the lunette.
