Before Mara Flint could bring the fourteen-pound sledgehammer down upon the frozen iron, Tomas Reed raised his right hand. She stepped between the hammer and the drop-gate.
“Hold, Mara,” Tomas commanded. His voice was calm, measured. He carried the quiet power of an inquest carrier who knew that once physical evidence was destroyed by blunt force, its legal voice was silenced forever.
Mara lowered the hammer an inch, her breath hissing between her teeth in raw frustration. “What are you waiting for, Reed? You want to ask the lock for a signed receipt?”
“I want the record,” Tomas said, kneeling directly before the central padlock. “A shattered shackle proves that someone hit it with a hammer today. It doesn’t prove who locked it sixteen years ago, or when the hasp was snapped shut. If we break it without reading the iron, Krend’s attorneys in Bellwether will claim we brought our own locks down the shaft to stage a fraud.”
Tomas pulled off his right glove, resting his bare palm against the greasy, cold steel body of the center padlock.
The metal was freezing, the black animal fat smelling of rancid mutton fat and sulfur. But as Tomas closed his eyes, centering his breath, the familiar, deep-running deep ring of the Last Claim awoke in his bones. It wasn’t magic that burned with fire or light. It was the quiet, weight-bearing clarity of an unbroken chain of custody, tracing the history of human hands that had shaped, struck. Then it abandoned…
