The hearing hall seated its own officers before it seated any of the parties. Every one of them wore a state blade at the hip and stood where the wall met the floor.
The tribunal had ruled the room secure, which in the capital's grammar meant secured by Ardent's people. No one who had walked in with Nox counted toward that word.
He counted eleven armed officers along the walls and read the arithmetic without needing Vasa to price it aloud. The room called their steel lawful and his guard's steel a threat, with the whole difference living in the seal above the door.
The walls were bare stone and the benches plain wood, stripped of anything a party could claim or a relay could seize. Even the light came from fixed capital lamps that answered to the hall and not to the people standing under them.
