The execution writ had a body, and the body was seven wax-and-core seals in a rack behind the registrar's bench. A national order is an idea until somebody has to hand an officer the thing that lets him act.
Ardent's officers along the wall had spent nine days as the most dangerous objects in the room. With the mandate at zero and the champion gone west, they held lawful steel under no lawful instruction.
Two of them left the chamber before the session was called back to order. The rest waited on a marshal who had stopped answering the tribunal's channel entirely.
Vasa had read the seal procedure on the second day of the hearing and had said nothing about it since. Every enforcement instrument in the capital carried a physical seal per represented jurisdiction, because an order that reaches a chartered city has to be answerable somewhere.
