The final silence upon the Scales of Khorat was heavier than the roar of the falls below.
Beneath Ren Vale’s boots, the forty-pace circular lead balance bowl swayed with a slow, hypnotic rhythm, suspended four thousand feet above the boiling fiery rift. Overhead, the ninety-pace dark rock balance beam was locked in total, exact level posture. For the first time in six hundred years, the gold-silver metal chains hung perfectly upright, unstrained by stolen spiritual mass.
Cardinal-Judicator Vane-Krell lay pinned against the cast-iron drum of the central water gate winch.
His lead-lined armor had fully crumbled, blown away into the updraft in clouds of fine grey dust. Nothing remained of the sovereign prelate of Val-Khorat except a scorched, brittle ribs of blackened bone. He wrapped a fist-sized soul-gem of dark, faceted amethyst that pulsed with the wild, dying hum of a trapped wasp.
Two tiny purple embers flickered within his hollow eye sockets. He stared up at Ren Vale with a mixture of ancient horror and bitter incomprehension.
“Listen to me... Apprentice,” the Cardinal wheezed, his spectral voice barely a rasp against the hot sulfur wind. “You think you have liberated them... But you have only made them unsafe. The covenants of the Synod were an iron wall. We kept the ancient debts locked in the dark. We built an order that outlasted the emperors! Without us, the First High court will look upon Khorat and see only an uncollected estate. The world above will be an orphan among wolves…
