The hearing sat at the eighth hour and did not rise until the lamps had been changed twice.
Ithanne convened it in the great chamber rather than the sealed one, so every faction attended and nobody could claim afterwards they'd been kept out.
Ondrek came with eleven of the Ancients. Corvyn came with Kesh at his shoulder and half his staff behind him. Maela Sorrel sat with four heads of Canal Houses and did not smile once.
The observers took the eastern wall. Trafalgar sat apart from them, in a chair in the middle of the floor.
Nobody in that room wept for the dead.
That was not their way and he hadn't expected it. What filled the chamber was colder and more dangerous.
Meraval was theirs. The gates, the rings, the whole machine of a city holding back kilometres of ocean existed because Myrrhvale built it and Myrrhvale held it. Somebody had reached inside that machine and turned it on them.
The dead were a figure. The breach was an insult.
