The iron gavel’s echo died away into a silence so dense the wind through the white granite benches sounded like a rasp on dry bone.
Lin Ke stood with his hands behind his back, looking up at the judgment bench.
“Not guilty,” Lin Ke said.
The response was not a shout. It was two words delivered with the dry, flat indifference of an engineer acknowledging an errant log entry.
Across the arena, in the gold-trimmed pavilion of the Grand Fortune Clan, Zhao Wuji rose slowly to his feet. He took three languid steps to the pavilion stone railing, resting both manicured hands upon the carved rosewood rail.
“A predictable denial from a cornered thief,” Zhao murmured, his voice projected effortlessly across the tiered arena by the wind-gathering formation at his throat. “Chief Judge Lu, the Grand Fortune Clan doesn’t deal in rumors. We deal in ledgers, receipts, and unchanging records.”
Zhao gestured with two fingers.
His chief barrister—a stooped, hawk-nosed scholar with ink-stained nails—marched into the center of the ring. He held a four-foot scroll of stiff thick parchment bound with gold cord.
