Ren Vale stepped out of the courthouse roofed porch into the grand square of Val-Khorat. Then, the city was waiting for him with open arms.
Ten thousand people filled the cobblestone expanse from the courthouse steps to the river docks. Flags of the tanners’ guilds, the bargemen’s associations, the brickmakers, and the weavers’ brotherhoods fluttered from every balcony and lamppost. Women tossed autumn chrysanthemums across the granite steps. Dockworkers shouted until their voices were hoarse. And a brass band from the canal quarter was playing a raucous, celebratory march that echoed off the grey stone facades of the town buildings.
It was the greatest civic triumph the city had witnessed in two hundred years.
To an ordinary young man of nineteen, it would have been a moment of dizzying, intoxicating glory. The kind of triumph that ballad-singers immortalized in verse and tapestries depicted in vibrant silk threads.
To Ren Vale, it was a painful, desolating nightmare.
Because of the Exclusion Axiom sealed. Just then, he had bound Magistrate Ren—because he had permanently burned his court future to ash within the Speculum—Ren was fully, irrevocably blind to all visual glamours, cosmetic charms, and superficial illusions.
He couldn’t see the golden sunlight. Where other men saw warm autumn light bathing the limestone columns in amber, Ren saw only the harsh, monochromatic glare of an overcast sky dragging heavy rotten-egg coal-smoke across the rooftops. The air was not golden. It was a mid-air of soot specks, crushed stone dust. Then it boiled away…
