The Court of the King’s Bench was housed in the ancient Great Hall of the Palace of Justice. There, the high stone walls were hung with faded heraldic banners and the narrow lancet windows admitted only a dismal, gray twilight.
Behind the raised oak bench, three senior judges sat in high-backed chairs carved with the royal lions. The head justice was Lord Barrist, an elderly jurist with heavy jowls, watery gray eyes. A court wig of powdered horsehair that was yellow with tobacco smoke. To his left sat Magistrate Vance, a younger man whose family held extensive warehouse properties along the north wharves, and to his right sat Magistrate Lord Garrow, whose nephew was an under-treasurer in the High court.
Before them stood Hester Quill, her black scholar’s gown stiff with dried rainwater, her ivory folio-knife laid flat upon the cedar bar of the court beside a shattered fragment of the limestone gargoyle that Sile had smuggled from Weaver’s Row in his coat pocket.
“The evidence is unbeatable, my Lord,” Hester argued. Her voice ringing was sharp and clear through the cavernous hall. “At twelve minutes past two bell, a five-pound stone-built element snapped from the four-hundred-and-twenty-foot top stone ledge of the Great Sky-Spire and fell into a public market. The striking force exceeded eight thousand foot-pounds. It crushed an oak cart and sent shrapnel through three occupied dwellings. Master Surveyor Vale has checked by sight transit that the western shaft of the tower has deflected nineteen minutes of arc…
