The great bronze doors of the Great Hall of Justice were eight inches thick, cast four hundred years ago from melted battle armor and hung upon hardened iron pins that needed two grown men to swing. Tomas Reed stepped across the high granite threshold. Then, the clamor of the crowded city outside was cut off instantly, swallowed by the cavernous, chilled stillness of the court nave.
The hall was vast. Sixty soaring limestone arches rose fifty feet overhead into the shadowy vaulting, where tattered heraldic banners of long-dead kings hung motionless in the cold, stale air. Beneath the high window row lancets, forty-eight judges of the King’s Bench sat in tiered oak stalls on either side of the raised court dais, their scarlet robes trimmed with black miniver, their white linen bands stiff and starched beneath weathered, lined jaws. In the center of the stalls sat the Master of the Rolls, his brass sand-shaker and inkstands gleaming in the gray light.
At the center of the high bench sat Chief Justice Lord Maren. He was nearly eighty years old, his back bowed by half a century of lawful scrutiny, his hawk-like nose and cold gray eyes surveying the well of the court with the unreadable severity of ancient granite. In his right hand, resting flat upon the sheepskin blotter, lay the three-inch ivory mallet of supreme turf.
