The census riders were forming at Orel's station when Batu crossed the central ground that morning. Three of them, tribute enforcement men from the western patrol line, receiving their assignments in the flat functional manner of riders who had been given a job and wanted to understand it before they left.
Orel was walking them through the format. What they counted, in what order, how they recorded a disputed figure. The exchange was brief and specific. It was already working.
Batu went inside and sat at the table.
Mersek arrived before the first hour was out.
He came to the entrance and stopped there. Upright, broad through the face, with the bearing that had once read as confidence and had later read as something else and had since resolved back into what it probably always was.
He looked at Batu across the table.
"The restriction has held," Mersek said. "What it was meant to contain is gone. Siban is under your command. The network's closed."
