Voss called the meeting for the third hour of the afternoon, the hour he preferred for matters that concerned the collection rather than the Concord. By then the morning's council business had concluded, the petitions had been heard, the routine disputes settled or postponed, and he generally knew which questions required an answer before evening and which could be left to another day.
Thrane arrived precisely on time, as he invariably did, with the effortless punctuality of a man who arranged his own schedule around everyone else's. Liora was already seated with her catalogue ledger open and the pen she reserved for collection meetings uncapped beside it. Several years earlier Voss had discovered that having her record these discussions spared him the inconvenience of relying on memory for decisions he was prone to reconsider weeks later.
"Dalkara has someone watching the dock," Voss said without preamble.
