The digest was 847 pages.
Rethik Myrvalis set it strictly on the left side of the desk. The right side was where Neth had kept things, and Rethik deliberately kept things exactly where Neth had not. It was a matter of precision—the precision of being a completely different person in the same chair. The left side. The digest on the left. The pen on the left. The filing tray on the left. The right side of the desk was empty, and the emptiness was intentional, and the intention was the space between one Master of Whispers and the next.
He opened the digest to the summary page. The summary page was new. His invention, implemented in Year 520, a concession to the fact that the Grand Ordinator's office had stopped reading the full digest after Quarter 3, Year 519, when the digest had crossed five hundred pages for the first time and Brightforge's administrative secretary had sent a memo requesting "a mechanism for prioritisation."
