Chapter 279 Parliament's Succession Wars
POV: Alteroni | Parliament chambers, private office
Five years of succession wars have produced in me the specific quality of someone who has been managing a narrow margin for long enough that the narrowness has become the baseline condition, the specific arithmetic of a seven to five vote being a good day and a six to six tie being the ordinary one and a five to seven loss being the kind of thing that requires a week of damage assessment before the next campaign begins.
The composition of Parliament after five years of contested succession votes is not what I hoped it would be and it is considerably better than what I feared, which is the specific quality of political outcomes that require fighting for rather than arriving naturally, and the fighting has produced a version of Parliament that is fractured in ways that are functional rather than catastrophic, the fracture lines running between positions rather than producing the total dysfunction that the blackmail file release could have produced if the institution had not found a way to reconstitute itself around new personnel.
Twelve seats. Six positions filled over five years through processes that each produced a different version of the same war, the traditionalist faction and the reformist faction competing for each vacancy with the specific intensity of people who understand that each vote is the institution's direction for decades rather than simply the filling of a chair.
The reformist bloc is four: myself, Ashford, Elena's predecessor in the third seat, and a young Ancient of two hundred years named Vera who joined last year with the specific quality of someone who has been watching from outside long enough to have formed clear opinions and who stated them at her confirmation hearing without softening them, which is either integrity or tactical miscalculation and which has turned out to be both simultaneously.
The traditionalist bloc is five: Ravenscroft and three others whose names appear on every vote against every reform and who have the specific solidarity of people who agree about the thing that matters, which is the direction, even when they disagree about the specific tactics.
The undecided three are the architecture of every vote I have cast in the past five years, the swing bloc whose individual assessments on each issue determine the outcome, and the managing of those three has been the specific work that has produced everything the reformist faction has achieved, which is considerable when measured against where we started and insufficient when measured against where we need to be.
The reforms that have passed in five years: consent laws requiring Parliamentary oversight of thrall arrangements, which are real and which have reduced the worst abuses without eliminating the system. Thrall trade restrictions, which have reduced trafficking without ending it. Hybrid recognition, which passed seven to six with conditions that I have been working to reduce. Omega class abolition within Parliament's direct jurisdiction, which applies to the vampires Parliament governs and not to the wolf packs who maintain their own hierarchy.
The reforms that have not passed: full equality, which requires eight votes and which I have never had. End of the thrall system entirely, which Ravenscroft's faction will fight to Parliament's dissolution rather than accept. Democratic elections for supernatural community leadership, which the twelve Ancient vampires who currently determine supernatural governance are not going to voluntarily reduce their own authority to accommodate.
Small victories. I have been having Callum's conversation with myself for five years, the same conversation that ends with small victories being better than none, and the conversation arrives at the same place each time, which is that the answer is accurate and which does not make the continued narrowness of the margin easier to manage.
Three more seats are opening within the next two years. Three Ancient vampires who have been in Parliament for between two and four centuries and who have been managing the specific relationship with existence that very old vampires develop, which is the relationship of something that has been going for a very long time and which is beginning to assess whether continuing requires more than the continuation itself provides.
The retirements are not coordinated, which means they are not a faction strategy, they are simply the specific mathematical reality of a Parliament that has a significant proportion of members who have been in their positions for centuries and some of whom have reached the end of what centuries of the same position produces.
Lord Pembroke is the first. Not Sir Pembroke, who I last saw in the Rookeries three years ago and who has rebuilt himself in a modest way in the packless community, but Lord Renwick Pembroke, an unrelated Ancient of five hundred years who has held his seat for three of those centuries and whose announcement comes at the end of a Thursday session in the specific careful language of someone who has been composing this statement for some time.
"I am announcing my retirement from Parliament effective in six months," Pembroke says. He says it to the chamber with the quality of someone reading a prepared statement, the flatness of language that has been worked and reworked into the shape that says what needs to be said without the emotional content that the decision producing it contains. "The succession vote will be scheduled according to the standard process. I encourage the community to engage thoughtfully with the candidates."
The chamber receives it in the way chambers receive things they expected and which arrive with the weight of things expected.
Six months. The seventh succession vote of the reformation era. Three factions, twelve members, the razor margin that the next candidate determines.
I look at the empty chair that Pembroke will leave and I think about six months and I begin composing the list of what the reformist faction needs from the next member of Parliament and what the next six months require to produce that member.
The war continues. It is the right word and it has always been the right word and I have stopped resisting it.