The spirit-thick parchment was wet with the memory-ash of two billion ghosts.
Ren Prime didn’t wipe the surface clean. In careful conservation, a stain was not an imperfection to be scrubbed away. A stain was physical evidence of the environment that had produced the document. He picked up his mammoth ivory awl, dipping the silver metal ring into the fresh black gall-ink on the hard speckled rock stone base.
Across the stone, the Man Who Returned was still trembling, his hands clamped over his eyes, his breathing ragged as the four-hundred-year settling faded into pale grey smoke.
“We have inspected the history of your performance, Respondent,” Ren Prime said, his voice steady, cold and exact, and relentless. “Now we must audit the instrument that brought you here.”
He pointed the ivory awl at the jagged eight-inch shard of gold-silver metal and mirrored glass resting beside the ink-well.
“This weapon,” Ren said. “The Shard of the Seventh Mirror. Across your breast, the binding clause burns: UPON RELEASE, I WILL KILL REN VALE. Let’s deconstruct the working syntax of that sentence.”
The older man lowered his hands slowly. His face was pale, his mirrored eyes hollow. But a flicker of his ancient, defensive stubbornness returned to his jaw. “The syntax is total, Conservator. Subject: myself. Verb: to kill. Object: you. Condition precedent: my release from the Seventh Void. There are no sub-clauses. There are no exceptions.”
