The iron collar broke with the sound of snapping chains.
Chief Justiciar Malvane tumbled forward across the shattered oak desk, his face hitting the flat stone slabs of the dais, his fingers clawing at the dust.
The pine-tar bandages and cosmetic charms were fully gone. Exposed to the harsh daylight and the relentless scrutiny of five hundred witnesses, the true nature of his condition was laid bare in all its rotting, ugly horror.
From his neck-vein notch to his right earlobe, his flesh had turned into a weeping, black-green ulcer crusted with jagged, irregular quartz crystals. The four transplanted glass-like grafts—stolen from the bodies of end-post children at the Voss Sanatorium—were shaking in violent sour note, rejecting his failing tissue, tearing through his neck-artery sheath like jagged pieces of broken bottle glass.
Blood—dark, dark-blood, and smelling of bitter almond rot—poured across the First Charter of Khorat. It pooled around the base of the Lead Scales.
Malvane couldn’t breathe. He curled onto his side. His hands grabbed his neck, his single good eye rolling back into his head as the phantom lead of forty years of corrupt sentences filled his throat pipe.
“I... I took them!” Malvane screamed, his voice no longer a man’s voice. But a shriek of total, soul-destroying agony that echoed off the broken rafters. “I took twenty-four of them! The children from the low wards! Dr. Voss... Dr. Voss brought them in pine boxes! We cut their wrists in the cellar... We ground their bones for the…
