The seventh fragment is an original authorisation for a collar batch, held on paper inside a building nobody enters without an invitation. Six fragments sat closed in the corridor vault by the thirty-sixth hour, forensically finished, worth nothing until the seventh named a signing hand.
Regina Vance put her proposal on the gatehouse table as a single page with a heading most of the room misread.
She had written the words shareholder session across the top, then a date, then an hour. Luna Marr read the second page first out of long habit, found there was no second page, then read the first one twice.
An armed entry into the Ivory Tower had been drawn four times that week by three different people.
Every version cost between nineteen and thirty-one fighters against nine floors with a standing house garrison inside them. Blackforge fields thirty-one in total, so each drawing ended in the same subtraction with an empty district behind it.
