Chapter 75

The compact's legal review opens on the sixth of March and by the ninth it has produced its first casualty, which is not a person but a date.

"Nineteen ninety-one," Adaeze says. She has three screens open in the Greymantle council room and has not left it since Thursday. "That's where it fails."

"Fails how."

"The proxy defect goes further back than Halla's audit." She turns a screen. "She started at 1978 because that's when the current protocol numbering came in. But protocol 6.1 is a restatement. The instruction mechanism itself dates to 1804 and it's never been repudiated, which means every standing instruction issued under it that was never formally withdrawn is still live."

Joon-Ho, from the far end: "How many."

"I don't know. Nobody knows. There's no register of standing instructions because nobody ever built one, because until last Wednesday nobody had any reason to think it mattered." Adaeze rubs her eyes. "I've found eleven so far between 1804 and 1978. Two of them are attached to seats that still exist."

"Which seats," Veira says.

Adaeze does not answer straight away, which is itself an answer.

"Convener," she says. "The Kin convener's seat carries a standing instruction issued in 1889 and never repudiated."

"Solvieg."

"Solvieg has been chairing this Assembly under a hundred-and-thirty-six-year-old instruction from a woman whose name is Ingibjörg Halldórsdóttir and about whom I can find nothing at all." Adaeze sits back. "Which means the convener's rulings are potentially void. Which means the adjournment is potentially void. Which means"

"Which means the session might still technically be open," Joon-Ho says.

The room goes quiet.

"That cuts both ways," Sebastien says, from the door. He has been standing there for some minutes; he does that now, since the observer gallery, and Veira has noticed and decided she likes it. "If the session's open, Croft's motion isn't dead. It's suspended."

"It's dead," Adaeze says. "It was carried on defective proxies."

"It was carried on defective proxies and ruled admissible by a convener whose own authority is defective. Two nullities don't cancel." He comes into the room. "They create an argument. And in six months, when the review reports, somebody is going to run that argument, and it will not be Croft, because Croft's advocates will be busy, and it will not be us."

"Then who," Veira says.

Nobody has an answer.

She looks at the screens. Eleven instructions between 1804 and 1978. Two attached to living seats. A convener chairing under a Victorian directive from a woman nobody can trace.

"Adaeze," she says. "The 1889 instruction. What does it instruct?"

"That's the thing." Adaeze pulls it up. "It doesn't. It's four lines and it doesn't specify a position on anything. It instructs the holder of the Kin convener's seat to withhold ordinal restoration in perpetuity."

The room stops.

"Say that again," Roman says. He has come in behind Sebastien and nobody heard him.

"Withhold ordinal restoration in perpetuity."

Roman crosses to the screen. He reads it. He reads it a second time and puts one hand on the back of Adaeze's chair, which for him is the equivalent of shouting.

"That's the renumbering," he says. "Ordinal restoration. Somebody in 1889 issued a standing instruction to the chair of the Kin Assembly to permanently prevent the restoration of the original bloodline numbering."

"Which means in 1889 somebody knew it had been altered," Veira says.

"Which means in 1889 somebody was trying to restore it." Roman's voice has gone quiet. "Instructions of this kind are not issued speculatively. They are issued in response to a live threat. Somebody attempted to put the zero back, and Ingibjörg Halldórsdóttir stopped them, and then made certain no successor could undo it."

Veira looks at four lines of Victorian Kin legal notation on a screen in Edinburgh.

"Then the compact has known what the hybrid line actually is," she says, "since at least 1889."