The dusk that settled over Hester Quill’s writing hall was quiet, clear, and cold. The freezing sleet had stopped. Through the leaded glass windows, the stars were beginning to appear in a dark, indigo sky above the chimneys of Bellwether.
Tomas Reed stood in the center of the room. He had unbuckled his pack frame. He set the ash-wood struts against the corner bookshelf beside Hester’s ancient legal codices. Beside him stood Nessa Vale, cleaning her land-mapper’s lenses with a piece of dry chamois. Sile Rook, who was oiling the hinge-pins of his hooked pruning blade by the warm stove.
Suddenly, a deep, ringing tone chimed through the chamber. A sound not heard with the ears. But felt in the marrow of the skull like the shaking of a huge underground bell.
The air around Tomas grew thick, warm, and golden.
In his inner vision, the Parchment Ledger Slate flared with an amber bright glare that filled his entire mind. The monospace iron-gall letters shifted, reforming into the grand, solemn stonework of a raised sovereign rank:
The sixteenth seal burned itself into the dry sheepskin slate of his memory. A amazing, embossed crest depicting an ancient granite keystoned bridge supported by two hands of living stone, surmounted by the balance of the Sovereign Assizes.
