The Uzama called an emergency session on the thirty-first day.
Adaeze had anticipated it. The sixty-day deliberation window she invoked allowed the council to convene on three days' notice if the Oba's medical condition crossed a specific threshold. Osaze's message through the chancery had established that benchmark, triggering the formal summons.
She received the notice at the second morning hour. She had used the past thirty days well, but the next three would have to be better.
Before the morning meal, Adaeze dispatched five messages through separate channels, each containing distinct instructions. Together, they mobilized everything she had spent a month building: the guild registry entry, the market trading association contacts, the physician network, and Efua's intelligence. When she walked into the emergency session, the Uzama would not find the room they expected.
Chike arrived on the thirty-second day without warning.
He came through the public entrance and asked for the Iyoba on commission business. Staff admitted him under Adaeze's standing order: admit him when he comes. Carrying a parcel wrapped in guild shipping cloth, Chike set it on the receiving room table and looked at her directly, studying her with the same intense focus he gave his materials.
"I worked through two nights," he said. "It is finished."
She unwrapped the bronze. The piece was larger than his first—a third again its size, scaling it from a private object to a public monument. The center figure did not depict the crossroads. Instead, it drew from the palace archive's oldest iconographic tradition: a ruler receiving counsel from a predecessor. The predecessor was rendered in the classic posture reserved for the Iyoba—the positioning of the hands, the tilt of the head, and the ground-pattern indicating her constitutional role beside the throne rather than upon it.
The predecessor's face was Idia's—the face on the pendant, which Chike had cast for four years without knowing her identity.
The figure receiving counsel carried a face Adaeze had never seen in bronze, though she recognized it instantly.
It was Chike's face. He had rendered himself with exacting detail: the slope of his brow, the angle of his jaw, and the intense focus in his eyes.
The pendant against her chest grew warm with familiar intensity.
"You made yourself," she said.
"Yes."
"You have never made yourself before."
"No. The work demanded it." He looked down at the sculpture. "I don't know if it's appropriate. I promised you the second piece, and this is what came."
"It is appropriate," she said. "It is the only thing you could have brought." She studied the two figures—the ancestor advising the holder, the Iyoba's hand extended in a gesture of instruction. "Do you understand what you have made?"
"I am beginning to."
"The Uzama meets in two days," she said. "They will try to establish succession criteria that force a single outcome."
"And you are going to stop them," Chike said.
"I am going to force them to set those criteria through the full council rather than a unilateral declaration." She gestured to the bronze. "This piece proves something impossible to fake—a craftsman's instinctual connection to a six-hundred-year-old subject he never studied. That carries a weight political arguments cannot match."
"You want to present it at the session?"
"I want the right people to see it before the session. Tonight."
Chike looked at her steadily, weighing the proposal the same way he tested materials for grain and tolerance. "All right," he said. "What do you need me to do?"
She placed Chike where he needed to be. Efua arranged for three senior members of the market trading association to view the bronze that evening. Funke processed an update to the palace guild registry, appending a note regarding the piece's iconographic detail.
Meanwhile, the physician network confirmed that the Oba's health was not at the emergency threshold implied by the chancery's notice. The medical parameters had been reported at the extreme edge of their range rather than the center. Osaze documented this discrepancy in writing to the palace medical record office—outside the chancery's authority.
The distinction was critical. The emergency session's legitimacy depended on that medical threshold. By documenting that the data was stretched, Adaeze created a record of procedural aggression that could be cited in future proceedings as evidence of the Uzama misusing emergency protocols.
She was not attempting to stop the session. She was building a paper trail.
By evening, her preparations were complete. The bronze would be fresh in the minds of key figures, the medical record was corrected, the guild registry was updated, and Efua's network was ready.
She knew she would not win the session. The Uzama held constitutional authority, procedural mastery, and the momentum of an institution preparing for this succession since Emeke came of age.
Even so, she could alter what the session produced.
The pendant remained warm throughout the evening. Adaeze viewed the heat as the presence of a six-hundred-year-old predecessor watching her hold the line—not with force, but with patience and strategic information delivered in precise sequence.
If you can see this, Idia, she thought, I hope it is enough.
The warmth stayed steady. She took it as an affirmative.
The Uzama convened at the third morning hour in the hereditary chiefs' formal chamber—the oldest room in the palace and the site of every significant succession proceeding in the kingdom's history. Its history weighed heavily on every discussion, reinforcing traditional outcomes.
Adaeze took the Iyoba's designated seat at the far end of the table, positioned to view every member of the Uzama simultaneously without turning her head. It was the room's sole architectural nod to her office: a seat designed to observe everything unseen.
Chief Omonoba led the session. At seventy-one, he had waited twelve years for this moment, since Emeke came of age. That patience showed in the rigid set of his shoulders. He moved through the opening protocols quickly to reach the fourth agenda item: the evaluation criteria.
Omonoba proposed four requirements designed to establish Emeke as the only qualifying candidate: a documented palace registry, formal lineage attestation from a senior Babalawo, established institutional relationships, and a thirty-day verification process for any candidate not registered at birth.
The thirty-day requirement was designed to run out Adaeze's clock.
She waited through the proposal, letting the silence hold. Then she spoke. "The fourth requirement targets candidates not registered at birth. What is the charter basis for this distinction? The third protocol distinguishes candidates by lineage, not registration date."
Omonoba met her gaze. "The administrative basis—"
"Is not the charter basis. I am asking about the charter." She kept her eyes on him. "Section four of the third protocol. Will the recording officer read section four aloud for the record?"
The recording officer read the section. It confirmed her point, leaving the chamber silent.
The session lasted two more hours. Adaeze did not defeat the proposal entirely, nor had she expected to. Instead, she reshaped the terms. By the time the meeting adjourned, the verification period was cut from thirty days to fifteen. While still a delay, the change was recorded as a concession to the Iyoba's objection, establishing a binding precedent.
Adaeze left the chamber with fifteen days, the warm pendant against her chest, and the quiet satisfaction of having secured exactly what she needed.