Having taken a bit of refreshment, Madame Secretary made eye contact with the other six at the table. “Or at least that’s what I say to my colleagues who want to know why I’m wasting my time at this messal.” She said this in a good-humored way. Fraa Lodoghir laughed richly. Everyone else was able to manage at least a chuckle except for Fraa Jad, who was staring at Ignetha Foral as if she were the aforementioned biological specimen. Ignetha Foral was sharp enough to notice this. “Fraa Jad,” she said, inclining her head slightly in his direction, in a suggestion of a bow, “naturally takes the long view of things, and is probably thinking to himself that my colleagues must have dangerously short attention spans. But my metier, for better or worse, is the political workings of what you call the Sæcular Power. And to many in that world, this messal looks like a waste of some very good minds. The kindest thing some will say of it, is that it is a convenient place to which difficult, irrelevant, or incomprehensible persons may be exiled, so that they don’t get in the way of the important business of the Convox. How would you at this table recommend that I counter the arguments of those who say it ought to be done away with? Suur Asquin?”

Suur Asquin was our host: the current Heritor of Avrachon’s Dowment, hence its owner in all but name. Ignetha Foral had called on her first because she looked as though she had something to say, but also, I suspected, because it was the correct etiquette. For now, I was giving Suur Asquin the benefit of the doubt, because she had helped us make dinner, working side by side with her servitor, Tris. This was the very first Plurality of Worlds Messal, and so it had taken us a while to find our way around the kitchen, get the oven hot, and so forth.

“I believe I’d have an unfair advantage, Madame Secretary, since I live here. I’d answer the question by showing your colleagues around Avrachon’s Dowment, which as you’ve all seen is a kind of museum…”

I was standing behind Fraa Lodoghir with my hands behind my back holding the knotted end of a rope that disappeared into a hole in the wall and ran thirty feet to the kitchen. Someone tugged on the other end of it, silently calling for me. I leaned forward to make sure that my doyn didn’t need his chin wiped, then walked around the table, sidestepping in front of other servitors. Meanwhile Suur Asquin was trying to develop an argument that merely looking at the old scientific instruments scattered around the Dowment would convince the most skeptical extra that pure metatheorics was worthy of Sæcular support. Seemed obvious to me that she was using Hypotrochian Transquaestiation to assert that pure metatheorics would be the sole occupation of this messal, which I didn’t agree with at all—but I mustn’t speak unless spoken to, and I reckoned that the others here could take care of themselves. Fraa Tavener—aka Barb—was standing behind Fraa Jad, looking at Suur Asquin as a bird looks at a bug, just itching to jump in and plane her. I gave him a wink as I went by, but he was oblivious. I passed through a door, padded for silence, and entered a stretch of corridor that served as an airlock, or rather sound-lock. At its end was another padded door. I pushed through—it was hinged to swing both ways—and entered the kitchen, a sudden and shocking plunge into heat, noise, and light.

And smoke, since Arsibalt had set fire to something. I edged toward the sand bucket, but, not seeing any open flames, thought better of it. Suur Asquin could be heard over a speaker; the Sæcular Power had sent in Ita to rig up a one-way sound system so that we in the kitchen—and others far away, I had to assume—could hear every word spoken in the messallan.

“What’s the problem?” I asked.

“No problem. Oh, this? I incinerated a cutlet. It’s all right. We have more.”

“Then why’d you yank me?”

He made a guilty glance at a plank on the wall with seven rope-ends dangling from it, all but one chalked with a servitor’s name. “Because I’m desperately bored!” he said. “This conversation is stupid!”

“It’s just getting started,” I pointed out. “These are just the opening formalities.”

“It’s no wonder people want to abolish this messal, if this is a fair sample of—”

“How is yanking my rope going to help?”

“Oh, it’s an old tradition here,” Arsibalt said, “I’ve been reading up on it. If the dialog gets boring, the servitors show their disdain by voting with their feet—withdrawing to the kitchen. The doyns are supposed to notice this.”

“The odds of that actually working with this group are about as high as that this dinner won’t make them sick.”

“Well, we must begin somewhere.”

I went over to the ropes, picked up a lump of chalk, and wrote “Emman Beldo” under the one that was still unlabeled.

“Is that his name?”

“Yeah. He talked to me after Plenary.”

“Why didn’t he help cook?”

“One of his jobs is driving Madame Secretary around. He only got here five minutes ago. Anyway, extras can’t cook.”

“Raz speaks the truth!” said Suur Tris, coming in from the garden with a bolt-load of firewood. “Even you guys seem a little challenged.” She hauled open the hatch of the oven’s firebox and gazed on the coal-bed with a critical eye.

“We shall prove our worth anon,” said Arsibalt, picking up a huge knife, like a barbarian warlord called to single combat. “This stove, your produce, your cuts of meat—all strange to us.” And then, as if to say speaking of strange…Arsibalt and I both glanced over at a heavy stew-pot, which had been pushed to the back of the stove in hopes that the vapors belching out of it would stink less if they came from farther away.

Suur Tris was nudging coals around and darting bits of wood into the firebox as if it were brain surgery. We’d made fun of her for this until our efforts to manage it ourselves had produced the kinds of outcomes normally associated with strategic nuclear warfare. Now, we watched contritely.

“Kind of weird for Madame Secretary to open by saying the messal’s a drain trap for losers,” I said.

“Oh, I disagree. She’s good!” Tris exclaimed. “She’s trying to motivate them.” Tris was podgy and not especially good-looking, but she had the personality of a beautiful girl because she’d been raised in a math.

“I wonder how that’s going to work on my doyn,” I said, “he’d like nothing more than to see this canceled, so he can go dine with cool people.”

A bell jingled. We turned to look. Seven bells were mounted to the wall above the seven rope-ends; each was connected, by a long ribbon routed through the wall and under the floor, to the underside of the table in the messallan, where it terminated in a velvet pull. A doyn could summon his servitor, silently and invisibly, by yanking on the pull.

The bell rang once, paused, then began to jangle nonstop, more and more violently, until it looked like it was about to jump off the wall. It was labeled “Fraa Lodoghir.”

I returned to the messallan, walked around behind him, and bent forward. “Get rid of this Edharian gruel,” he breathed. “It is perfectly unpalatable.”

“You should see what the Matarrhites are cooking up!” I muttered. Fraa Lodoghir glanced across the table at an avout—one of those who’d celebrated Inbrase with me, earlier in the day—whose face was covered by his or her bolt. The fabric had been drawn sideways over his or her head, as if to form a hood, but the hood had then been pulled down to cover the face, with an opening below through which food—if that was the correct word for what the Matarrhites put into their mouths during meals—could be introduced. “I’ll have what it’s having,” Lodoghir hissed. “But not this!”

I glanced significantly at Fraa Jad who was shoveling the stuff into his mouth, then confiscated Lodoghir’s serving and whisked it out of there, happy to have an excuse to go back to the kitchen. “Perfectly unpalatable,” I repeated, heaving it into the compost.