On Tuesday the Spire Chamber told Crystal City that the aides of former High Chancellor Alden Voss would face probes. The notice was read at the Crystal Heart rite, under banners, through a brass horn. Six names went up. The southbound left at 4:40. The aides were still in the annex corridor when it cleared the lower switch.
The chamber named Nessa Kite, keeper of the records, and Jory Fenn, keeper of the schedule and the payments, and four aides from the same offices. Four counts sat under the names. Festival money had moved on the chancellor's seal, 18,000 bits, in the weeks the rite was being dressed. A contract for southern advice had been billed to the city lamp fund. Three passes in the Crystal Mountains had been entered as open while the road stayed shut for nine days. A winter-stores ledger had left the annex in a visitor's case and had not come back. Voss had no line on the notice. His seal sat on three of the four counts.
Next Steps posted the names at dusk under the single word Looming and set no hour. The Environmental Compliance Board stamped the posting as a front. Under the board's winter rules a front can be declared from any desk, and the ponies who declare it may leave before it makes landfall. Counselor Wynn Pallis read the counts. He had come up with the advisory contract in his satchel. He told the gallery the probes would be thorough, bracing, and brief. He asked a porter whether the second sleeper still had hot mash. His clerk filed the dispatch from the platform bench. The dispatch said Crystal City had received accountability, and that the aides would be asked what they had done with the winter.
The rite closed the things it had opened for its guests. The gallery shut after a visiting princess inclined her head at the vow. The east kitchen banked its fires and sent the extra cooks home. The guest coal exception ended with the ceremony. That exception had released Crystal Mountains coal above the winter ration so the rite could be held in full light.
The annex stayed. The hearing room was locked. Ember Scale, the junior official on the lamps, held a key to the closet. The room key had gone with the chamber's box. The chairs were festival rentals, and they went down the mountain on the same train, stacked and ticketed. Scale was told to keep the room ready.
Lamp coal for a called session can be drawn at the desk. A session entered as looming sits in the ledger between a meeting and a weather report, and the desk fills no order for weather that has not arrived. Scale's order, written twice because the first sheet tore on the spindle, authorized three bricks for the whole annex. In the deep weeks a public lamp on an ordinary night is one brick. The rite had been burning six to a lamp. Three bricks were now the entire readiness of the probe.
Kite stood in the corridor with a folder tied in grain twine. She had tabbed the pages the notice named. Fenn wore the collar he had bought for the hearing. He asked a guard when the questioners would return. The guard said the chamber would come back with the front. No question had been put to either aide.
Mira Toll, who keeps the east granary cut, watched the train out of the yard and went back to the bins. "They read names into a horn," she said. "I have eleven days of oats if the road stays open. I counted."
The annex cornice read minus twelve when the rite ended. By the hour the dispatch would have reached the southern desks, it read minus fourteen. The ordinary ration line moved under the east awning with the lamps at half. Ponies who live in the city through the dark months took their measure.
Ember Scale stayed with the three bricks and the lamp order. "They told me to keep the room ready for a thing that has not arrived," Scale said. "I can hold a lamp for a night on this. After that the room can be ready in the dark."
At midnight the probes were still in the column the Environmental Compliance Board uses for weather that has not yet chosen a day, and the lamp order was still the one line: three bricks, Ember Scale, until landfall.
