Although Junior Councillors can’t vote, in all other ways they have pretty much the same rights as the Senior Council do. They can appoint aides (who gain the legal status of Light mages for the duration of their appointment) and they can’t be sentenced or outlawed via Council resolution the way anyone else in the country can. This was why Levistus had been trying so hard to get me off the Council – as long as I held a seat, it severely restricted the ways in which he could go after me. Council members also can’t be removed from office without a full formal trial, which takes for ever, as evidenced by the fact that Morden was still technically a Council member even though the Council had started proceedings against him nine months ago. Finally – and most importantly – to be raised to the Senior Council, you have to be on the Junior Council first. Which means that for the Senior Council, the question of who gets to be on the Junior Council is very important indeed.
When I’d replaced Morden in his Junior Council seat, despite my months of work as an aide, I had only a sketchy idea of what the Junior Council actually did. To be honest, I’d assumed that that wasn’t likely to change. At the time I’d only recently become a member of the Keepers, who had responded to my promotion with all the warmth and enthusiasm of a housewife waking up to find a dead rat on her kitchen floor. They’d done the bare legal minimum to confirm my appointment, then had proceeded to freeze me out completely. Now that I was on the Council, I’d expected exactly the same thing to happen.
As it turned out, I was dead wrong. Turns out the Council works very differently from the Keepers – in the Keepers you’re assigned jobs by your superiors, but members of the Junior Council are mostly free to select their own duties. There are provisions to force Junior Councillors who are slacking off to do more work, but there aren’t any provisions to force them to do less work (possibly because it had never occurred to the guys writing the rules that someday they’d have a Council member who wasn’t a Light mage). With hindsight, it made sense – if it had been possible for the other Council members to shut Morden out, they’d have done it already, and if they weren’t going to do it for Morden, there was no reason to expect them to do it for me. But at the time, it had been quite a surprise to reach Morden’s study in the War Rooms and find a desk full of work and a lot of impatient messages expecting me to pick up where he’d left off.
I could have avoided it. As I said, there are provisions to force slackers to do their share, but if I’d simply sat at home and refused to help, I don’t think anyone would have forced the issue. But in the end, I hadn’t. Partly it was self-interest: the more involved I was in the workings of the Council, the harder they’d find it to get rid of me. But probably a bigger reason was a sense of responsibility. This morning, it had been Lucian attacking the Council and me defending them, but up until a few years ago I would have been the one in Lucian’s place. I’d hated the Council and everything it stood for, and I’d had nothing but bad things to say about how it treated everyone who wasn’t a Light mage. Now that I was on the Council myself, I had a chance to do something to remedy that. It wasn’t a huge amount of power, but it was more than 99.9 per cent of people in magical society would ever have, and it felt wrong to waste the opportunity.
‘So what have we got for today?’ I asked Anne.
The study I’d inherited from Morden was a small, comfortable room in dark-panelled wood tucked away behind one of the administration blocks. Like all of the War Rooms, it was deep underground, but an illusion feature covering the back wall helped improve the aesthetics. I had it set to a view of a forested hillside, with an audio of birdcalls and the sounds of a distant river, giving the room a pleasant, airy feel. The desk dominating the centre of the room was covered in papers. Mages are slow to adapt to new technology, and the Council still hadn’t fully shifted over to computers. A proposal to digitise the War Rooms was currently working its way through the bureaucracy, which probably meant that the Council would start bringing in desktop PCs somewhere around the invention of quantum computing.
‘First, some bad news,’ Anne said. ‘The Order of the Cloak are very definite that they don’t have any records on those adepts you saw with Richard. Nothing from the pictures; nothing from the descriptions. I asked them to get in touch if they did hear anything, but I don’t think we can expect much.’
‘Damn it,’ I said. Last year I’d managed to briefly eavesdrop on a meeting between Richard and a set of adepts that, with hindsight, had probably been important. Unfortunately, at the time I hadn’t known that it was Richard, and by the time I’d started chasing it, the trail had gone cold. The Order of the Star had already sent me away empty-handed, and the Order of the Cloak had been my last hope. ‘I can’t shake the feeling that they’ve got something to do with his new adept association. If we could track them it might be a way in.’
‘And on that topic, we’re still not hearing back from those other adepts from the association,’ Anne said. ‘The messages have gone through, but they’re not answering.’
‘Because we haven’t managed to get hold of the right people, or because they don’t want to talk to us?’
‘I think it’s probably the second.’
I wondered what these adepts were going to do once they were ready to start talking. ‘What else?’
‘Julia’s trying to get your help on reviving the ID resolution again.’
‘Oh, come on.’ I rolled my eyes. ‘Tell her whatever it takes to make her go away. Next?’
‘The Keepers want a meeting about the Splinter Crown. They say some new details have come up from interrogating those thralls. And Druss’s aide wants an update on the item recovery leads.’
I’ve had to learn a lot of things since joining the Council, and one of the more useful concepts I’d picked up was the Eisenhower Matrix, a method of ordering tasks by importance and urgency. The idea is that you file every task into one of four quadrants: important and urgent; not important but urgent; important but not urgent; and neither important nor urgent. Depending on which of those four a task is in, you do it, delegate it, schedule it or ignore it.
The ID resolution was an example of a task that was neither important nor urgent. The Directors wanted a registry of all the magic-users and magic-involved people in the country, and they kept bringing the idea back no matter how many times it was vetoed by everyone else. For some reason Julia had decided that my support would help (or more likely, she was just pestering everyone on the Council no matter their status). I didn’t want to help with the resolution, and given that Julia was Alma’s aide, I didn’t want to get involved with her either. In this situation the best way that Anne could help me was by keeping them at arm’s length and waiting for them to give up and go away.