The High Criminal Court of Crown-Reach had cleared its docket for the trial of Regional Guildmaster Brandis. The former office director of the Northern Heavy Trade ring who, three weeks earlier, had ordered the incineration of the Regional Records Storehouse at Mount Sunder in a desperate try to destroy forty years of fraudulent mining and water ledgers before the commoner audit commission could seize them.
The vast stone courtroom of the King’s Bench was packed from the polished oak floorboards to the high galleries with stonecutters in patched leather vests, weavers from the South Ward, and apprentice clerks holding copies of the newly printed public gazette. In the heavy iron prisoner’s dock sat Brandis, his once-luxurious velvet coat stripped of its gold-stitched facings, his hands shackled to an iron waist-chain, and his high-born face pale with bitter, desperate arrogance.
On the long evidentiary table before Chief Justice Lord Ronald sat three blackened, water-damaged iron boxes and sixty charred parchment folios that had been pulled from the roaring flames by common miners who had formed a bucket chain from the mountain river.
Chief Justice Lord Ronald struck his heavy boxwood gavel against the sounding block, the sharp crack cutting through the low murmur of the crowd. “The court resumes the inquest into the State versus Brandis. Master Arbiter Tomas Reed will take the witness stand and present the technical analysis of the recovered evidence.”
