The Municipal Bond Trial of Bellwether sat in the west wing of City Hall, beneath a huge vaulted ceiling of blackened chestnut beams that had stood since the founding of the city.
The air in the filing hall was cold. It smelled of damp wool, ink gall, and the dry, sweet dust of crushed foam-stone. A row of six raised clerk desks, carved from dark oak and fenced with polished brass railings, separated the public registry from the working floor. Behind the desks, under-registrars in black wool gowns stamped tax dockets, signed cart hauling permits, and tallied town fines with the slow, indifferent rhythm of men who measured their lives by the turning of hourglasses.
Tomas Reed stood before the central bench at exactly ten o’clock.
He wore his clean cart driver’s tunic of undyed gray wool, brushed free of lint, with his leather porter harness buckled squarely across his chest and the brass Last Claim badge pinned over his heart. At his right side stood Hester Quill, holding an armful of legal folios bound in clean red ribbon. At his left stood apprentice Olla, carrying the sealed copper metal tube of Docket INF-021-F4.
Behind them, seated on the public oak benches, sat thirty men from the Melted rock-Heap Quarter.
