The senior clergyman's name was Aldas.
Of the three eastern clergy who had filed the regional council challenge, he was the oldest — sixty-seven years, forty of them in the Church, twenty-eight as senior clergy of his city, a man who had built his institutional identity so completely around the suppression apparatus that Dael's pattern documentation described him as the node around which the other two organized.
Not the most aggressive.
The center.
Remove the center and the organization loses coherence.
Dael had documented this pattern across seven similar institutional structures in twenty-two years of observation through a cell wall and a monitoring field that occasionally let through enough of the ambient System architecture to read.
