The summons came the next morning, and it was the first door anybody in Meraval had opened for him since he arrived.
A clerk brought it up to his rooms with the seal of Ithanne's office on it. Recovery planning session, ninth hour, works committee room on the administrative floor. Observers of the Great Houses entitled to attend and record.
Trafalgar read it twice.
He had been refused the sealed chambers. He had been refused the succession council. He had been refused a rope line around a dead clerk in a drained channel.
Now they were inviting him into the one room where it would be decided who got to touch the wreckage.
He went, sat where they put him, and wrote nothing down.
The committee room held about forty people and none of the grandeur of the great chamber. Long table, working lamps, charts of the second ring pinned along one wall with the sealed sector shaded in.
