for a working lunch, by order.
It didn't say whose order. Or, they noted, whose lunch.
Now they were assembled in the antechamber.
And there had been changes. It had never been what you might call a select place. The Patrician had always felt that if you made people comfortable they might want to stay. The furniture had been a few very elderly chairs and, around the walls, portraits of earlier city rulers holding scrolls and things.
The chairs were still there. The portraits were not. Or, rather, the stained and cracked canvases were piled in a corner, but the gilt frames were gone.
The councillors tried to avoid one another's faces, and sat tapping their fingers on their knees.
Finally a couple of very worried-looking servants opened the doors to the main hall. Lupine Wonse lurched through.
Most of the councillors had been up all night anyway, trying to formulate some kind of policy vis-a-vis dragons, but Wonse looked as though he hadn't been to sleep in years. His face was the colour of a fermented dishcloth. Never particularly well-padded, he now looked like something out of a pyramid.
'Ah,' he intoned. 'Good. Are you all here? Then perhaps you would step this way, gentlemen.'
'Er,' said the head thief, 'the note mentioned lunch?'
'Yes?' said Wonse.
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