Location:Seven Peaks — The Hall; The East Terrace
Date/Time:TC1857.05.28 – TC1857.06.22
Revision ten made a noise when Thorne put it on the table, which revisions one through nine had not.
It was the sound of a document that had stopped being a draft: thirty-one leaves, sewn at the spine rather than pinned, with a cover sheet of the heavy stock the Empire used for things it expected to still exist in fifty years. It came down flat, and it did not shift afterward, and everybody in the room looked at it and then looked at each other, and somebody down the table laughed once, very briefly, without meaning anything by it.
"He's sewn it," Marcus Vale observed.
"He's sewn it." Raven put her hand on the cover and did not open it yet. "That's a message, and it isn't to me. That's what a thing looks like when it goes in front of the Emperor."
***
She read it that night and most of the next day and came back to the Hall in the afternoon with three fingers in three places.
