The Great Hall of the King’s Bench was lit up by three hundred beeswax tapers when High Chancellor Lucian Vane was marched through the center aisle under the custody of six Crown Marshals. His velvet coat was soaked through with river water. His silk breeches were torn and mud-caked from the water-gate boat ramp. But his head remained held high with the rigid, poisonous arrogance of a man who had commanded the royal finances for thirty-five winters without ever answering to a judge.
Behind the prisoner, twelve river draymen and six city watchmen hauled eighteen iron-bound chests up the center aisle, placing them in two neat rows beside the thirty chests already seized from Vault Four. Scribe Nessa Vale right away began marking each padlock with red sealing wax, enrolling them into the court records as Sovereign Exhibits One Hundred and One through One Hundred and Eighteen. The recovered cargo represented sixty thousand freshly minted gold sovereigns and ninety thousand crowns in foreign bearer bonds. The liquid fortune Vane had tried to smuggle past the harbor boom.
Left alone at the prisoner’s dock, with his counsel left and his stolen gold bullion impounded upon the court table, Vane looked around the packed courtroom with utter disdain. His high-born gaze stayed upon the commoners who filled every bench. The stonecutters with granite dust ground into their skin, the weavers with acid-stained fingertips, the canal wagon drivers in oilskin vests. To Vane, they weren’t citizens of the realm. They were mere cattle…
