Chapter 13: Solume Requests a Private Audience with the Queen of Nubis

The communication went through three intermediary relays before it reached Nubis.

This was not standard practice. Standard practice, which Solume could recite from memory in the particular way he could recite all things that had once seemed permanently fixed and had since become the furniture of a room he was no longer certain he inhabited, was direct senatorial correspondence routed through the Concordance diplomatic registry with a three-day processing delay and automatic notation in the Bureau of Parliamentary Communication. He had used this system for four decades. He had, on occasion, taught junior senators how to use it efficiently. He had, on one documented occasion, composed a brief monograph—never formally published, circulated only among the chamber's senior clerks—on the history and proper maintenance of the registry's archival protocols.

He did not use the registry.