Chapter 357 --357
Elara looked at him.
She thought about Fen’s notes in the margin of the tactical assessment document. Fen, who had spent three years watching problems accumulate from a position that couldn’t address them, and who had just been given a different kind of position.
"Add Lord Castin’s road complaint to the northeast regional administrator review file," she said. "And find out what else is in that file. Everything that has passed through that administrative chain in the past fourteen years and not been resolved."
Demerti wrote this down with the practiced efficiency of a man who had learned that when Elara said find out everything, she meant everything.
"The new staff members—" he started.
"Teva and Dorin report to the guard integration office tomorrow morning. Fen reports to me."
He wrote this down also.
She started walking again.
The palace closed around her — the familiar weight of it, the smell of it, the specific quality of a large and complicated building that was always in motion even when it appeared still, the continuous hum of several hundred people going about the business of maintaining the machinery that made everything else possible.
She walked through it and she thought about the outer districts visible from the upper road, about the Solt chain and where it ended, about Tarven’s forty-three people and the supply allocation that should be arriving within the week, about Samuel’s grey eyes and the curriculum she needed to review, about Mahir and Ken in whatever they were doing now that the dungeon door had opened, about Fen’s margin notes and the problems that had been accumulating in Lord Castin’s district for three years.