The message from Aldas arrived three weeks after the eastern deployment.
Not through the oversight board's formal channel. Through Hael — the former Grand Inquisitor had maintained communication with the Venmere senior clergy since the conversation that had stopped the deployment, the relationship having developed into something that Hael described in his update notes as productive institutional cooperation and that the content of his notes suggested was more accurately described as two men who had spent decades on opposite sides of the same problem discovering they had more in common than the sides implied.
The message was brief.
