Grand Justice Gormayne

With the Summerking's freedom came the Summerking's law, and Grand Justice Gormayne is its instrument. He progresses endlessly between the grand courts with his solemn retinue, convening assizes in roofless great halls and pronouncing judgment on every matter brought before the bench: disputed titles, broken oaths, questions of precedence and etiquette. The courts receive him with dread ceremony, for his authority flows from Ushoran himself, and even abhorrant kings have knelt to hear his rulings.

Gormayne's true function is stranger than jurisprudence. The crime he prosecutes above all others is lucidity: the stray moment in which a courtier glimpses the ruin and the hunger beneath the dream. Such unfortunates are tried with full pomp, pitied as madmen, and sentenced with a mercy that is never described the same way twice. In this the Grand Justice serves the delusion as a surgeon serves a body, cutting away each doubt before it can spread. The great dream of the courts has no fiercer guardian, and the realms no judge whose verdicts are more reliably final.