Chapter 2: The Senate Sits in Marble and Pretends the Marble Is Not Cracking

The gavel came down at the ninth hour, as it had come down at the ninth hour for four hundred and eleven years, and the sound of it against the Tessavar-granite podium was indistinguishable, Senator Valdren Solume had always believed, from the sound of a man convincing himself he is not afraid.

He had presided over forty-seven emergency sessions in his tenure. He had presided over what the official record would later designate the forty-eighth with the same precise arrangement of documents before him—the Concordance Procedural Index on his left, the session's filed submissions in order of receipt on his right, the small leather notebook of personal annotations centered above both—that he had maintained since his second year in office, when his senior aide of that period had observed that a man who controls the surface of his desk controls, in the estimation of those watching, something considerably more significant. The aide had meant it as a courtesy. Solume had received it as instruction and never forgotten it.

The chamber was full in the way a hall is full when its attendees are demonstrating attendance rather than exercising it. He counted, in the opening sweep he permitted himself before calling the first order of business, eleven empty seats on the primary tier—eleven senators whose absences had been filed as procedurally excused, which was the form the word resignation had taken in these final months before it became willing to call itself by its proper name. Those who remained occupied their positions with the precise, performative alertness of people who have been told the meeting is important and have not yet decided whether they believe it.