To an outsider it would have seemed that the politics of Collegium were of least interest to the politicians themselves. There had been some few moments of silence known to fall during the Collegiate Assembly – they had mostly occurred during the war when to speak into that sudden chasm would have been to volunteer. Business as usual was the constant mutter and murmur of deal-making, deal-breaking, jokes and snickering, and a hundred separate commentaries about current affairs. All too often the only person paying attention to the matter being spoken on was the speaker himself. Sometimes not even that was the case.

‘Your big moment soon enough,’ Jodry Drillen observed. An experienced Assembler knew how to utter a few low words, amid that babble, which would carry clearly to someone close by, or even to someone halfway around the great bank of stone seats. Drillen, with a voice honed in the lecture theatres of the College, was such a man. Stenwold, sitting two tiers further down and three to the left, heard him precisely and glanced up to see the paunchy, richly dressed man smiling down at him.

And I am in his party, am I not? Stenwold knew it. Just sitting here was enough to tell people that he had at last cast his lot. He had never actually taken such a step, it seemed, and yet the men above and below and to either side of him were all supporters of Drillen’s faction. The Assemblers were men and women with enough time on their hands to find significance in anything. In the Assembly, just sitting down was a political act.

It went deeper than that, of course, for Stenwold and Drillen had made deals together behind closed doors. Despite the secrecy it was, paradoxically, well known. There had been an expedition dispatched in Stenwold’s name that people had recently started calling ‘the Drillen expedition’. It had, rumour suggested, been a great success. Rumour also preceded the expedition’s return to Collegium by several days.