The summer had arrived with a commitment that the capital city's architecture was not entirely designed for.
The palace corridors, which had been built in an era when the primary climatic concern was the winter wind that came in from the northern territories and which had accordingly been built thick-walled and low-windowed and dense with the thermal mass of old stone, had discovered, as they did every summer, that thermal mass was an entirely bidirectional property.
The stone that kept the cold out kept the heat in.
By the sixth week of the delegation's visit, which was the sixth week of the summer and the sixth week of Gerffron walking between the administrative wing and the formal session rooms and the prime minister's office and the diplomatic reception areas at a pace that the formal liaison protocol described as brisk and which Gerffron described as I have been doing this every day for six weeks and I have found the optimal route, the corridors were warm in the specific, dense way of old stone in summer.
Gerffron had adjusted.
He had adjusted his coat weight. He had adjusted his pace to account for the heat. He had adjusted his internal schedule to move the most physically demanding portions of the daily route to the early morning when the stone had not yet accumulated the day's thermal load.
The Prime Minister had not adjusted.
This was partly a matter of age — Deldric Harren was in his late fifties and had the specific, compact, slightly round build of a man who had spent thirty years at a desk managing things that required the brain rather than the body, and whose body had accordingly focused its energies on the former at the expense of the latter.
It was also, Gerffron had concluded over six weeks of working alongside him, a matter of character.
Deldric Harren did not adjust.
He had opinions about adjusting, and the opinions were that adjustment suggested inadequacy of original preparation, and that original preparation was his professional responsibility, and that any admission of its insufficiency was therefore a professional failing.
This meant he walked at the same pace in summer as he had walked in spring, which was the pace of a man who had not fully registered that the temperature had changed.
He was currently behind Gerffron.
He had been behind Gerffron for approximately four minutes, which was how long they had been walking from the third session room to the prime minister's office, which was a distance that Gerffron covered in seven minutes and which Deldric covered in eleven.
"Slow down," Deldric said, from behind him.
"We have the briefing in thirty minutes," Gerffron said, without slowing.
"I am aware of when the briefing is."
"Then we should perhaps—"
"I have been managing the briefing schedule for this court since before you were born," Deldric said. "I have never missed a briefing."
"That is an impressive record," Gerffron said. "I would hate to see it broken today because of the third-corridor heat differential."
"The third-corridor heat—" Deldric stopped. He caught up approximately three feet and then fell behind again. "You know, when I first heard that the court had appointed a ducal consort as the Veldrathi delegation liaison, I thought: this is either the most inspired thing the court has done in twenty years or the most catastrophic."
"And the verdict?" Gerffron said.
"Inspired," Deldric said, with the grudging quality of someone making an admission they find structurally inconvenient. "Against all reasonable expectation. Inspired."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me. It's not a compliment to you, specifically, it's an indictment of everyone else we considered for the role."
"That's a very nuanced way to say the same thing."
"I am a nuanced person," Deldric said. "Also, slow down."
— — —
The prime minister's office had the quality of a room that had been accumulating paper for three decades and had made its peace with the accumulation.
Not disorder — the paper was organized, managed, the specific arrangement of a man who knew where everything was because he had been the person to put it there. But present, in the specific, comprehensive way of a working life that had been lived in a single room for thirty years.
Gerffron had been in this room many times over the past six weeks.
He had also, over those six weeks, been quietly and without announcement rearranging the document management.
Not the documents themselves — not their content, not their arrangement in the larger filing system. Only the working documents, the ones that moved through the room daily, the ones that the prime minister was required to read and respond to and sign and distribute and which had previously been organised in the specific way of a system that had grown organically over thirty years rather than having been designed.
Gerffron had redesigned the daily working system.
He had done it with the specific, methodical competence of a man who had spent two and a half years reading everything he could find about the empire's administrative structure and who had arrived at the prime minister's office with a thorough theoretical understanding of how it worked and a very clear-eyed view of how it could work better.
He had also brought, from the knowledge accumulated in a different life in a different world, the specific tools of a twenty-first century business student — the frameworks, the summary methodologies, the chart-and-graph conventions that his world had developed over a century of organizational theory and which this world had not yet developed because this world was, in administrative terms, approximately the seventeenth century.
The first time he had presented a briefing document in the new format — compressed to two pages from the original fourteen, with a summary chart at the top and colour-coded priority sections — Deldric had looked at it for a long moment.
He had read it.
He had read the whole thing in four minutes.
He had looked up.
He had said: "I have been reading fourteen-page briefings for thirty years."
"Yes," Gerffron had said.
"They are now two pages."
"Two pages with the same information."
"The same information," Deldric had said, slowly, "in two pages."
"The chart at the top gives you the overview. The colour-coded sections let you find the priority items immediately. The supporting detail is in the appendix if you need it, but in my experience most briefings at this level require only the overview and the top three priorities for the initial decision, with the detail available on request."
Deldric had looked at the two-page document for another moment.
He had said: "In thirty years, nobody has done this."
"In thirty years, nobody had been reading your documents from the perspective of someone who had also read the administrative theory literature," Gerffron had said.
"And where did you read this literature?"
"Library," Gerffron had said. "I had considerable time."
— — —
Their working relationship had developed, over six weeks, the specific quality of a relationship between two people who had found each other professionally useful and had discovered, in the process of the utility, that they also found each other interesting.
This was the thing Gerffron had not expected.
He had expected professional respect — had earned it and extended it and found the exchange clean and functional.
He had not expected the specific, slightly combative warmth of a man like Deldric, who had opinions about everything and delivered them with the blunt confidence of someone who had spent thirty years being right often enough that he had stopped softening the delivery.
They argued about the meeting minute format.
They argued about it with the specific, productive quality of two people who cared about the same thing from different starting positions and who were arriving, through the argument, at something better than either had started with.
"Your summary format loses the procedural record," Deldric had said.
"The procedural record is in the full transcript, which is archived and retrievable. The summary format is for decision-makers who need the decisions, not the procedure."
"The procedure is how the decision was reached."
"The procedure is how the decision was reached and it lives in the archive where anyone who needs to understand the reaching can find it. The summary is the decision itself, which is what the next person in the chain requires."
"You are separating the decision from its reasoning."
"I am separating the decision from its reasoning for the purposes of the person who needs to act on the decision, while preserving the reasoning for anyone who needs to understand or challenge it."
Deldric had looked at him.
He had said: "How old are you?"
"Twenty-six," Gerffron had said.
"I have spent twenty-six years," Deldric had said, "trying to explain that exact principle to the court's administrative staff. Where did you come from?"
"A library," Gerffron had said.
"I need a different library," Deldric had said.
They had an ongoing argument about the stairs.
The stairs were central to the daily route between the session rooms and the prime minister's office, and the stairs were three flights, and three flights were Deldric's primary grievance with the current arrangement.
"They could put the session rooms on the second floor," Deldric said, on the Tuesday of the sixth week, arriving at the office landing slightly winded.
"The session rooms are on the second floor," Gerffron said.
"There are three of them."
"Yes."
"I am suggesting more of them should be on the second floor."
"There are three session rooms. They are all on the second floor."
"Then why," Deldric said, "are we always on the third?"
Gerffron looked at him.
"Because the Veldrathi delegation is on the third," he said. "For security purposes. The session rooms on the second floor are the public ones. The third floor rooms are—"
"Are inconvenient," Deldric said.
"—are the ones we use for diplomatic sessions that require a higher level of access control."
"Access control," Deldric said, setting down the document stack on his desk and pressing the small of his back with both hands in the way of a man with a thirty-year-old professional grievance. "A concept invented by the young to justify making the not-young use more stairs."
"Security is a concept invented by the—"
"Do not," Deldric said, "give me the security argument. I have heard the security argument. I have heard it from forty years of administrators who used it to put things on the floor that required the most walking to reach. It is the default justification for architectural inconvenience."
"The architecture predates the security concern," Gerffron said.
"Then the architecture should be revised."
"You could propose that to the renovation committee."
"I have proposed that to the renovation committee. Eleven times. Do you know what they said?"
"Security concerns?"
Deldric pointed at him.
"Security concerns," he said.
He sat down.
He looked at Gerffron with the specific expression he wore when he was about to say something he had been thinking about and had decided to say.
"The assistant position," he said.
Gerffron looked at him.
"The offer stands," Deldric said. "When the delegation concludes. If you want it." He opened the top document on his stack — the two-page summary format, the one with the colour-coded sections. "The court spends considerable resources training administrative staff who then produce the kind of work that takes forty-seven minutes to read." He looked at the summary. "You produce this." He looked at Gerffron. "I would like this to continue."
Gerffron looked at the window.
He thought about the Wadee estate library.
He thought about Wren and Oswin and Selfi and Sera.
He thought about the east tower and the long years of reading and the specific quality of having found, through the strange, involuntary route of a court appointment he had not sought, that the reading had been preparing him for something.
He said: "Let me think about it properly."
"That is what you said last time," Deldric said.
"I know."
"You have been thinking about it for three weeks."
"I think slowly about important things."
"You think fast about everything. I have seen you think fast about everything."
"I think slow about the things that are important enough to think slowly about," Gerffron said.
Deldric looked at him.
He said: "The stairs," he said, "are genuinely too many."
"I know," Gerffron said.
"I want you to know that my legs are twenty years older than your legs and they feel the difference on every landing."
"I'll walk slower tomorrow," Gerffron said.
"Don't patronize me."
"I was being sincere."
"I know," Deldric said. "That's worse."
He went back to the document.
Gerffron sat in the adjacent chair and went back to his own stack.
The summer continued outside the window.
The stone held the heat.
Neither of them mentioned the stairs again until the following morning.