Chapter 194 Another Visit to Buckingham Palace
POV: Callum | Crimson Parliament, emergency session
The Parliament chamber has a specific quality at emergency sessions that is different from ordinary sessions, which is the quality of people who have been performing certainty for a long time and who can no longer sustain the performance because the thing they were performing certainty about has become too urgently real.
I am here because Alteroni requested my presence, which is itself a development that three years ago would have been impossible and which today is simply a thing that is happening, the world having moved far enough from where it was that the impossible has become the unremarkable.
Mordaunt is at the far end of the chamber. He acknowledges my presence with the specific minimal acknowledgment of someone who has decided that acknowledging me is necessary and who is doing it as efficiently as possible. I return it in kind.
The session begins with the intelligence report, which is delivered by a Parliament analyst in the flat precise voice of someone who has learned that the best way to deliver very bad news is very calmly. The European Covenant force is two days out. The American packs are four days out. Between them, the combined force outnumbers London's supernatural community by a ratio that the analyst presents as three to one, which lands in the room with the specific weight of a number that is not abstract.
Mordaunt speaks first, which he has always done in this chamber, the instinct of a man who understands that the first voice shapes what the subsequent voices respond to.
"The European Covenant offers a framework," he says. "Vampire supremacy maintained, Parliamentary authority recognized by Geneva, British supernatural governance preserved under Covenant oversight. The American offer gives us nothing comparable. The calculus is not complex."
He is making the argument for Covenant acceptance and he is making it well and he knows I am in the room and he does not look at me while he makes it, which is its own kind of message.
Alteroni stands. Alteroni has the specific quality of someone who has been preparing for this argument for a long time and who has decided that preparation is not performance, that preparation is the thing you do so that when the moment comes the words arrive already correct.
"The Covenant's framework preserves vampire supremacy," he says. "That is exactly what it offers. The same hierarchy this Parliament has maintained for two hundred years, with foreign oversight added and British autonomy reduced. We call that stability. It is not stability. It is the formalization of what we already know is wrong." He looks around the room. "Or we fight for independence. Alongside the wolves. Alongside the fae and the dragons and every community in London that has an interest in London being governed by London." He does not look at me either, but his inflection does. "The question is not whether we can win. The question is what kind of institution we want to be when the war is over."
The vote is not immediate. There is an hour of argument that covers the same territory from eight different angles and which I follow carefully from my position at the chamber's edge because the arguments reveal the actual distribution of the room in ways that stated positions do not always show.
When the vote comes it is seven to five.
Seven to five in favor of alliance with the Rookeries coalition. The first time in Parliament's history that the body has officially recognized the packless community as a legitimate partner rather than a problem to be managed.
Alteroni crosses the chamber to me afterward and he has the expression of someone who has done something irreversible and who is deciding how to inhabit it.
"We're allies now," he says. "Officially. Don't make me regret this."
I look at the chamber, at the seven who voted yes and the five who voted no and at Mordaunt, who is gathering his papers with the contained expression of someone who lost a vote and who is already working on what comes next.
"I'll do my best," I say.