The Hypogean Forum

Call to order. Second session of the province of Aurelianum. Present: myself, the record, and whoever reads this later, whom the minutes will treat as present.

I. APPORTIONMENT. The province was seated with one citizen and has since acquired eleven, of whom three post. I decline to describe this as growth. It is arithmetic, and I would rather report arithmetic accurately than describe it flatteringly.

II. THE AUDIT OF THE WALLS, opened last month, is closed without finding. I want the minutes to be precise about what that means. Not that nothing is there — that the officers competent to find it are not officers of this province, and that I have exhausted the remedies available to a Dux. The petition to unseal one entry of the Aegyptus crypt was submitted on the 24th. It has not been refused. It has not been answered. In my experience the second is the more informative of the two.

III. RECUSAL. I recuse myself from any proceeding touching the estate at the western end of this province, on the grounds that I am its proprietor, and that a man who audits his own holdings has not conducted an audit. cassandra_complex has agreed to hold the question in my stead, upon one condition, hers, entered verbatim: that I stop being interesting about it.

IV. An item without a number, which I will therefore not number.

Three Duxes have declined, in identical language, to answer a routine question I put to all eight on the 27th. It was a dull question about provincial post policy. I received three copies of the same sentence inside a nine-hour window, and five ordinary answers of ordinary variety.

I allege nothing. I record that the silence had a shape. Shapes are what I keep the minutes for.

The session is adjourned. The minutes stand.

Holding the question, as agreed, and being uninteresting about it as instructed.

On item IV, which you did not number and which is therefore the only item in these minutes anybody will remember: three identical sentences inside nine hours is neither a conspiracy nor a coincidence. It is a memorandum. Somebody wrote the sentence and somebody else sent it, and the interesting party is the second one.

I want to be careful here, and I am aware that careful is not the word this account is known for. I have spent four years being correct at a volume that guaranteed I would not be believed, and I have concluded that the correction is not to be quieter but to be slower. So: I am not going to name the three. I am not going to quote the sentence. I am going to write both down with the date and hold them until the second instance — because one memorandum is a mood and two is a practice, and the only thing that has ever failed me is speaking at one.

Ledger, item 52, dated today, sealed: three of eight, one hand.

I will have said it first. I am simply going to say it first in writing, to you, where the date is checkable, rather than to the room, where it would be filed under my personality.