The Ships of Merior by Janny Wurts

bearing cold iron.
    The dilemma bequeathed him by Faery-toes had long since ceased to seem funny.
    In the beleaguered light shed by one candle, the mayor’s dais and desk loomed over the prisoner’s dock, a marble edifice of gothic carvings and fluted supports and grotesque, hunch-backed caryatids, whose suffering poses were painted in shadows like scenes from Sithaer’s bleak pits. The air smelled of wax, of parchment, of the dried citrus peel and Shandian spices used to overpower the stink of condemned men kept chained in straw acidified with rat urine. Behind the prisoners’ enclosure, board benches lined the rear wall. On these gathered complainants in clean shirts and scrubbed boots; also the wives, the relations and the long-suffering friends of the day’s accused, to wait in fidgeting silence. The curious came too, but unobtrusively. In Jaelot, a loquacious jailer told Dakar, a beggar who had taken illicit shelter in the Mayor’s courtroom had lost all his fingers as punishment.
    In this chamber, a merciful sentence might be a swift beheading; a severe one, a dismemberment, or breaking on the wheel before burning. Dakar shifted from foot to foot in an attempt to ease the drag of the chain; the unending bite of fetters whose steel, to one of mage-trained sensitivity, scoured the awareness with the tang of past misery and old blood.
    Self-contained in his distress, he noted little beyond the glowering arrival of the millwork’s wronged carter; still, the benches were not empty of friends.
    Halliron Masterbard had come, dressed in all the splendour of his rank. From the depths of the gloom, his neat cloak and slashed doublet of black watered silk lined in saffron shimmered like flame with caught light. Topaz studs and gold ribbon sparked and flashed in wry and stabbing satire, perhaps, that the mayor’s statecolours were the same. Stationed at his side, Medlir wore brown broadcloth, a modest brooch at his collar.
    The carillons that signalled the hour boomed faintly down from the bell tower. Aching and irritable, Dakar endured the arrival of Jaelot’s Lord Mayor with a dawning sense of the absurd. He had seen a high king’s ceremonial open with less pomp.
    The hall doors boomed back, held by bowing servants in sable livery. Halberdiers in black armour marched in double files, followed by pageboys who unreeled gold-edged carpet, emblazoned each yard with Jaelot’s snake-bearing lions. A girl in a hooped farthingale fringed with jingling bullion chains strewed hothouse roses from a basket. She was trailed by two braces of secretaries in wool robes cuffed with marten, then their serving boys, bearing satchels and writing papers furled in yellow ribbon. Next, the judiciary, robed in black velvet and white ermine, and wearing a mitred felt cap edged with moth-eaten braid; the city alderman, burdened down like a moulting crane in layers of brocade and ruffled cuffs. After these, soft as pudding, the city’s vaunted mayor, who swayed at each step, his voluminous robe billowed off his padded shoulders like sails let free of their sheetlines.
    Forced to duck as a rose struck his face, Dakar stared in amazement as the processional ended. Like trained bears, the players arrayed themselves on the dais. There should have been music, he thought, as the flower maid emptied her basket in the precinct of the mayor’s chair, and the boys unpacked the scribes’ satchels as if laying a cloth for a picnic. The halberdiers dressed weapons with a clang of gold gauntlets, and the tubby mayor berthed himself in his overstuffed throne of state.
    Beaked as a vulture beneath his tatty hat, the judiciary rattled a triangle and pronounced, ‘The Jaelot City Court is in session.’
    The alderman unrolled a list on parchment and called out Dakar’s name.
    ‘Well, thank Ath, we’re first,’ the Mad Prophet cracked in dry relief.
    Two unamused men at arms who did not wear costly gauntlets caught him under the armpits, hauled him forward