From the very second the black-clad warriors of the Mirror Bureau stormed into the courtyard, Justice Sterling had begun a frantic mental inventory of his many sins, trying to discern which specific transgression had finally brought the wolf to his door. He was under no illusions about his own character; he was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a righteous man. If one were to lay out every crime he had committed throughout his long career, he would have been sent to the executioner’s block a hundred times over.
However, in a society where the law was often a tool wielded by the powerful, Sterling believed his status as a third-rank official provided him with an impregnable shield. He was especially confident that his darkest secret—the cultivation of a forbidden entity—remained saf
