By the second hour of the afternoon, the main records hall of the Provincial Land Registry had been transformed into an official session of the High court of Claims.
Tomas Reed sat at the master oak counter, his lead-lined audit seal resting beside a fresh roll of heavy royal thick parchment. Flanking him were Master Surveyor Nessa Vale. She held her tuned earth-measuring charts. Old Kaelen Brant, representing the twelve hundred claimant families of Crown Charter 404.
Across the counter stood Registrar Orlo Vane. The old clerk was trembling so wildly that he could barely hold his signet ring. The sight of Caleb Thorne’s recovered copper datum rubbing, combined with Tomas’s unbending recitation of the penalties for treason, had fully broken his will to resist.
“Read the formal rectification, Surveyor Vale,” Tomas instructed.
Nessa stepped forward, unrolling the newly drafted Geodetic Rectification Roll across the counter. Her voice was clear, ringing with the indisputable power of exact truth: “Under the power of the Royal Land-tax Survey Act, the fake eastern map point offset established at East-South forty-two is hereby declared null, void, and fraudulent. The true country boundary of the Southern Resettlement Tract is formally restored to the Western River Spirit vein, anchored upon Caleb Thorne’s Milestone Fourteen at height four hundred and twelve feet on the Green River Bluff.”
