Jelaza Kazone
Surebleak

In which various preparations are made.

And while Val Con is off dealing with his metaphorical bombshell, Miri is stuck with another one – which is going to become rather less metaphorical if it’s not dealt with promptly.

This is one of Korval’s weak points at the moment: there aren’t very many members of the clan, all things considered, and there is such a lot to do. And if it should happen that something comes up when everybody who could do it is already elsewhere, there’s going to be serious trouble. (Come to think of it, this situation was somewhat foreshadowed earlier, with the difficulty they had lining up a suitable group to go and retrieve the children from their hiding place.) Now I’m maybe a bit surprised that the Department hasn’t tried to do anything with that, but then again maybe they don’t have any good ideas about what trouble they could cause that would require a specific clanmember to deal with; they only stumbled on this one by accident.