Shen Bao confirmed the audience date through the scheduling record: Master Cheng was to be received at the third hour of the following morning.
This was the kind of information that, when it arrived, had a strange quality to it. I had been working toward this moment for months — had been, in a longer sense, working toward it across multiple lives, through iterations and failures and the particular education that only loss could give. And now it was fixed to a specific hour. Tomorrow morning, at the third hour, an old man would walk into the private chambers of the Emperor and present a case that, if properly received, would change the configuration of power in the court and protect the thousands of people that power touched.
I sat with that for a long time.
