The grand central aisle of the Senate of Skulls stretched two hundred paces across the black iron floor. It was flanked on either side by huge dark rock statues of the First Patriarchs holding unrolled scrolls of stone.
Ren Vale walked alone down the center of the avenue.
Every step of his felt-soled boots sounded with terrifying, magnified clarity in the vast sound dome of the tiered arena. Above him, rising thirty tiers toward the shadowed ceiling, sat the five hundred dead rulers of Val-Khorat.
They didn’t move. They didn’t whisper.
Five hundred pairs of hollow eye sockets, lit up by the sickly green flicker of corpse-candles, followed his progress down the aisle. The smell in the room was overwhelming. A choking mixture of old mummification thick tar, dry powdered bone-dust, rancid animal fat. The sharp, coppery tang of packed spiritual pressure. The sky weight of five hundred years of high-born tyranny pressed down upon Ren’s shoulders like a slab of lead, threatening to drive his knees into the iron flat stone slabs.
Ren kept his chin up. He kept his eyes fixed upon the eight-sided dais forty paces ahead.
On the dais stood Cardinal-Judicator Vane-Krell.
The towering lich stood nine feet tall, his lead headsman’s cowl gleaming under the green torches, his nine-foot war-mace resting across his iron-plated knee. Hovering above his head, the twenty-foot glowing purple scroll of the Universal Act of Perpetual Annexation pulsed with sickening, rhythmic light.
