Cardinal Vessen read the response from the pulpit at the seventh bell and did not raise his voice once.
The Grand Cathedral was three-quarters full — standard Ordinsday attendance plus an additional two hundred who had come specifically for this. Word had traveled through unofficial channels — the Crucible's distribution network had sent the response to parish priests four days ago with instructions to read it at the following Ordinsday service, and four days was long enough for the content to leak from parish offices into the guild halls and forge workshops and the tavern conversations where institutional news became common knowledge before the institution finished printing it.
