The Maahes who broke the Court of Scales. A gold city on the desert edge had grown rich on the trade in gold dust, and a brood had taken root in its weighing-houses, where every grain of gold passed through its hands. It called itself nothing. The Pride named it the Court of Scales.
Dinga-Sey spent twenty years on it. He did not try to storm it. He learned its weights and measures, which houses it fed and which it owned, and which of the city's families knew what they served. He freed the ones who did not know, and he warned the ones who did. When the court's last supporters had left, he went in himself, at the age of seventy-six, on the night of the new moon.
He killed the court's three eldest in the weighing-house, and was killed by the fourth. The Roll says he went down smiling.
What he left behind: the destruction of the Court of Scales, and the first city of the Sahel cleared of a brood.
