The inside of the Charter Hall was vast, somber, and ancient. He was built on a scale designed to remind mortal men of the permanence of the realm and the fragility of their ambitions. Twelve giant stone pillars of Caen limestone supported a soaring rib-vaulted ceiling fifty feet above the flat stone slab floor, their stone surfaces darkened by two hundred years of charcoal smoke and winter incense.
At the far end of the nave, raised six steps above the floor on an oak dais, sat the Great Bench of the Twelve Chief Justices. The chairs were carved from black heart-oak, their high backs adorned with the royal crest and the Latin motto of the First Dynasty: JUSTITIA FUNDAMENTUM REGNI. Justice is the Foundation of the Kingdom.
Tomas Reed stood at the central petitioner’s bar, a heavy oak rail worn smooth by the hands of a thousand litigants. Before him, arranged in four neat rows upon the green baize evidence tables, were forty cedar chests banded in blackened iron. Atop each chest rested a circular brass closure seal, three inches in width, engraved with the rock-solid mark of a closed town claim.
Beside Tomas stood Hester Quill. Her glasses were tied firmly around her head with catgut, her desk covered in seventy-two approved parchment folios. To her left sat Nessa Vale, her brass sound tube set on a wooden stand, her sharp-angled survey charts spread out across two drafting easels like battle maps. And standing at the end of the…
