The Yoke: The Quill, #3

"The pen breaks. The Code burns. Count your days, counters." Seven words on a scrap of coarse paper – and for the first time in a century the machine of the Ink Court cannot find the right column for a disaster.

Velmar is held together not by armies or gold but by the written line. The entered exist; those left out are not lifted from the rafts in the flood and not struck off after death.

Orm Kes has carried the Great Seal on his chest for forty years and long ago understood it is not a crown but a yoke. Senior scribe Nel Doln believes the pen is the only dam standing between people and blood. Young Gers Krin sharpens the line so the dam will crack in the right place at the right hour.

And from below, from the rotting rafts, rises a man who has no use for the pen at all: he was never written into the books, and he is coming to burn them.

Book three of The Quill: what it costs to hold another man's life on the tip of a pen.