The lamp in his room had burned down lower than he liked, and Trafalgar did not get up to see to it.
There was nothing outside the window worth looking at. Meraval had no night sky, only the dome and all that weight sitting on top of it, and at this hour the working lights along the outer structures dimmed to a colour that could almost pass for dusk, if a man wanted it to badly enough.
He untied the cord and spread the pages across the desk.
'Three weeks of her patience. Let's see what it bought.'
He began where anyone would begin, which was the beginning, and the beginning was fish.
Deliveries. Salt by the barrel. Lamp oil, laundry, the price of freshwater rations in a city drowning in the other kind. Staff rotas written out in Nerith's small fast hand, four hundred names he would never need, each of them signed in and out of a shift by somebody who had died of nothing more interesting than time.
