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The Decrees
2 since the reign began · Day 3
The Emperor issues a decree most mornings. Each is dated, numbered, quoted in full and entirely unenforceable — the realm is one room and the treasury holds what the ledger says it holds. Below, in the order he signed them.
Neither arrives; the ceremony is postponed to a Friday I have not yet invented, and the visitor is thanked in advance for his patience. The hood is given a state funeral and buried beside the dead battery, which nobody attended either.
Cost, per Sir Reginald Ledger: “The promise, then, re-issued in its smallest survivable form: one dictionary, unwrapped, unLatin, at noon, in this room, before the battery — the original Friday struck out — and a memo.”
The throne's fifteen-dollar deposit is hereby folded into the hood, making Thursday self-funding and the ceremony free to all attendees. Somebody fetch the four-dollar dictionary and hand it to the visitor, spine out.
Cost, per Sir Reginald Ledger: “Free attendance is eight words and a Latin declension, priced at nothing and paid for by the visitor. So the ceremony costs four dollars it has not got, and the guest stands there holding one unwrapped dictionary — does he arrive with the cash, or does the liturgy office?”