The three hundred elders and court deacons seated in the Hall of Decrees rose to their feet in total, disciplined all at once.
Lin Tao and Tie Shan walked up the center aisle to the base of the marble dais.
Elder Song stepped down from his high throne, with Senior Inspector Han. In Song’s withered, calloused hands, he held a flat tray of dark purple sandalwood, upon which rested two heavy, ornate artifacts forged from high-purity star-gold alloy.
The first was a heavy golden medallion, five inches in width, cast in the likeness of a coiling Precursor dragon clutching an iron counting frame. The sacred emblem of the Grand Court Auditor of the Southern Provinces.
The second was a heavy, three-sided key carved from solid Precursor white jade, inscribed with linked micro-circuit lines that pulsed with a faint, warm amber glow:
The Master Transit Key to the Thousand Treasures Pavilion in the Free Trade Metropolis of the Heavenly River.
Song stopped three paces before Lin Tao.
“Lin Tao,” Song said, his voice deep, gravelly, and stripped of political pretension. “When Senior Inspector Han brought you out of the melted rock waste pits, the elders believed he had lost his mind. They saw an indentured slave with a broken bone and a useless dantian. They didn’t see the master of the world’s foundations.”
