The eastern wing of the Grand Punishment Trial was a long, cavernous hall of grey mountain slate, lit at ten-pace intervals by brass oil sconces that cast flickering amber crescents against the damp stone walls.
For two hundred years, this wing had housed the Regional Checker office. The office rig tasked with overseeing the boundary pylons, grain warehouses, and smelting hearths of the outer territory. In practice, the office had long decayed into a quiet sinecure where aging deacons sipped bitter tea, rubber-stamped falsified transit manifests, and collected quarterly bribes from country merchant families.
That comfortable stall ended at dawn on the fifth day of the eleventh month.
Lin Tao walked through the high archway. His heavy iron-shod boots struck the slate flags with the flat, steady beat of an unbending metronome. At his chest hung the star-gold Golden Phoenix Medallion, its polished edge resting cold against his coarse charcoal linen tunic. At his right hip, the heavy box-shaped token of Chief Regional Checker swung with every step, the dense star-iron clinking against his four-inch land-mapper metal pen.
Behind him loomed Tie Shan. The giant moved with silent, feline grace despite his massive frame, his twelve-pound cold-drawn iron pry-bar resting horizontally across his bronze upper back muscle. A broad crimson sash, stitched with the silver cranes of the Marshal of Arms, bound his waist. He held a pair of heavy iron wedges and a coil of waxed leather cord.
