Chief Justiciar Malvane looked at the Lead Scales of Khorat sitting on his desk.
He looked at the unrolled First Charter, at the black beeswax seal of Duke Valen, and at the two matching faces staring back at him. One nineteen years old, ink-poisoned and wiry. The other fifty-eight, scarred and draped in the lead stoles of a judge.
The old judge didn’t surrender.
When a man has spent forty years living as a god of the state—when he has signed away the lives of ten thousand people with a stroke of his pen—he doesn’t step down into the dust like a common thief. He burns the world before he gives up his throne.
A high, frantic shriek tore from Malvane’s ruined throat.
With a violent, convulsive jerk of his shoulders, he reached into the secret spring-recess beneath the court bench.
His clawed fingers emerged gripping a weapon that had not been drawn in two hundred years:
The Obsidian Gavel of State.
