The Great Council Hall of Parliament in Crown-Reach was a huge vault of dressed black dark rock and English oak, built five hundred years ago during the reign of the warrior kings. Two hundred feet long and sixty feet high, its ribbed timber ceiling was supported by twenty massive granite arches carved with the heraldic shields of the ancient earldoms. Below, arranged in a vast semi-circle of tiered oak benches, sat the three estates of the realm. The Lords Spiritual and Temporal on the right in their ermine-trimmed scarlet mantles. The Town Burgesses and Guild Delegates on the left in their dark wool doublets. And the Ministry of the Crown at the high dais beneath the gold-trimmed canopy of the Empty Throne.
At noon on the tenth day of winter, the great brass-banded portal at the rear of the chamber opened with a dull, ringing groan. Into the center aisle stepped Tomas Reed.
He didn’t wear court velvet. He didn’t wear an academic gown. He wore his worn charcoal-gray cart driver tunic, patched at the elbows with tarred canvas, his calfskin boots caked in dried river mud, his oiled leather porter harness strapped crosswise over his chest. His left wrist brace was buckled tight around his scarred forearm. Across his broad shoulders rested his ash-wood pack-frame, loaded not with weapons, but with the two lead-lined satchels containing the checked master registries of Sector One and the intercepted sedition warrant.
