Wenna Stoat came up to the quarry on the twenty-eighth of Pyrelon. She had not been up there in eleven years, and every man on the face stopped working to watch her climb.
She got to the top and stood getting her breath back and would not be helped.
"There’s a thing in my shop with your name on it," she said.
"A parcel?"
"An envelope, and it’s been there three days, and I have not touched it since it was put down." She was still breathing hard. "And I want you to understand before you come down that I did not take it in. He put it on my counter himself and he said one sentence and then he left, and I have been sitting with it for three days trying to decide whether I was allowed to tell you."
Mataon put the mallet down very carefully.
"What did he say?"
"He said: *give it to him if he comes.*"
The envelope was thick, and it was tied rather than sealed, and it had his name on the front in the second hand.
He did not open it in the shop.
He carried it down to the trough and sat on the wall in the last of the light with Barni on one side and Orvek on the other, and untied it there, in the open, in front of two witnesses and a woman standing in her own doorway forty yards away who had decided to watch.
Inside there was no letter, no covering note, nothing folded round the outside of it at all.
There was a list.
***
It ran to fourteen sheets and it was written in one hand throughout, in a small square script that got very slightly faster after about the ninth page.
Four hundred and six entries, ruled in six columns, with the rules drawn by hand and drawn straight.
Each one had a name. A place. A date of first claim. A reason. A figure. And a sixth column that no schedule he had ever seen had carried, headed in the same hand:
*State of the person, at the last date this office had information.*
*Living. Living. Deceased 329. Living, at Ashvale, does not know. Deceased 318, entry retained in error, see note. Living. Living, at Coldwell, informed by me in 325 at her own request.*
Mataon read the sixth column for a long time.
There was a single sheet on top of the fourteen, and it had four lines on it.
*You will need this before she asks for it. A review on own motion requires the practice, and the practice is the sixth column, and no district office knows the sixth column exists.*
*I am not helping you. I am tidying.*
*Do not come to Grey Sallow. The hand is not the seal, and the hand has a son.*
*Read line one first.*
He turned to the first sheet and put his thumb on the top line and made himself read it slowly.
Line one was written the same as all the others, in the same columns, with the same care.
*Calder Hesh. Of Ardenmoor. First claim 313, second reason. Assessed four hundred and ten silver. State of the person: living. Holds this office.*
Barni made a sound that Mataon had not heard out of him in two years and did not want to hear again.
"He’s on it."
"He’s line one," said Mataon.
"He’s a subject."
"He’s a subject of the Deuna Central Roll, second reason, four hundred and ten silver, and he’s been one since three thirteen, and he’s run the office that holds him for nineteen years." Mataon’s hands were completely steady and he noticed that and did not know what to do about it. "That’s why he never sold a line. A buyer reads the schedule. That’s why the officer-holding line is blank. That’s why he has no address."
Orvek took the sheet out of his hands, and read it, and gave it back, and got the slate out, and it took him longer than usual.
*Then who owns him.*
They sat on the wall until it was properly dark. Barni did not move off Mataon’s foot the whole time.
"Say it in order," said Barni, eventually, and it was the gentlest Mataon had ever heard him.
"An office of record can be held under a retained seal, the officer-holding line can be left blank, and nobody checks." Mataon looked at the fourteen sheets on his knees. "So a classified man took a seal. And for nineteen years he’s raised four hundred and six instruments against four hundred and six people, correctly, on schedule, at the going rate, and kept a sixth column nobody asked for and nobody’ll ever read, saying what happened to each of them."
"Including himself."
"Including himself, at the top, in the same hand, at four hundred and ten silver." He turned the page over. "He put himself first. Not last. Before all of them."
"Why?"
"I don’t know."
"Guess."
"I’ve been guessing about this man for six months and I’ve been wrong every single time." Mataon put the sheets down. "But I’ll say what I want it to be, and you can hold it against me later. I think a man who was going to spend nineteen years writing people into a schedule decided that the first name in it was going to be his own, so that he would never once be able to open the book without seeing it."
Barni was quiet for a long moment.
"And the other reading?"
"The other reading is that he’s a subject, somebody holds his line, and that somebody put him in a chair with a seal in front of him nineteen years ago and told him what to write." Mataon looked out at the dark. "And in that reading there’s a person above him nobody in this country has ever seen, and I’ve spent a year auditing a clerk."
He wrote to Serreth that night and it took four drafts and the fourth was six lines.
*There is a sixth column. It is not on any schedule you have seen because it is not on any schedule that has ever left that office. It records the state of the person at the last date the office had information: living, deceased, informed, does not know.*
*It is the practice. It is exactly what a review on own motion is entitled to. It exists in fourteen sheets in one hand and I have it in front of me.*
*I am not sending it to you yet. If I send it you have to say where it came from, and where it came from is a man handing it across a counter in a village, and that makes it a gift and not a finding.*
*Tell me what a district office is allowed to receive. Not what it usually receives. What it is allowed to. I will wait as long as it takes and I have got very good at waiting.*
*And there is one more thing, which I am putting at the bottom because I have written it four times and taken it out three. The office of record is a registered subject of Deuna. Line one of his own schedule. I do not know who holds him. Neither, I suspect, does he.*
[Ardenmoor — 28 Pyrelon, 335 A.Z. — Day 285]
[DELIVERED BY HAND to the receiving house, three days prior. No letter. Instruction: *give it to him if he comes.*]
[THE SCHEDULE — fourteen sheets, one hand, 406 entries. Name · place · date of first claim · reason · figure · and a SIXTH COLUMN.]
[Sixth column: *State of the person, at the last date this office had information.*]
[No district office knows the sixth column exists. It has never left that office.]
[LINE ONE — Calder Hesh. Of Ardenmoor. First claim 313, second reason. Four hundred and ten silver. State: living. HOLDS THIS OFFICE.]
[The office of record is himself a registered subject. He has been for twenty-two years.]
[Unknown: who holds his line.]
[Level 38 → Level 39]
[Stat points available: +3]
[Basis: opening a document in the open, in front of witnesses, on the worst day to do it]
[STR +1 · END +1 · WIL +1]
[STR 23 · AGI 19 · END 33 · INT 43 · PER 45 · WIL 50]
[Reserved Mana: 7 — First Exception, open, day 244]
[END OF VOLUME ONE — THE LEDGER OF SMALL DEBTS]
***
Late, with the lamp down, Zahr spoke for the first time in a hundred and fifty-odd days.
"Mataon."
He sat up so fast that his hand went through the cup and neither of them said anything about the cup.
"You’ve been gone since Hearthroot. That’s eight months."
"I have been listening. That is a different thing and I would like you to stop treating it as the same one." A pause, and something in it that was not amusement. "Ask me the question you have been saving."
"Which one? I’ve got about forty."
"You have four. Ask the one you were going to save until you were dying."
Mataon sat in the dark for a while.
"Who wrote the four reasons?"
Zahr did not answer immediately, and that was the answer, and both of them knew it.
"That," he said at last, "is the correct question, and you have taken two years to arrive at it, and I am going to tell you something and then I am going to be quiet again for a while."
"Go on. I’m not going to interrupt."
"When we made the world," said Zahr, "we did not make categories. We made a measure. A measure says how much. It does not say what for, and it does not say who, and it does not carry forward to a child."
"Then who wrote them?"
"People did," Zahr said. "That is the whole of it and it is the worst sentence I know. Nobody handed anyone the four reasons. Somebody wrote them, at a table, on an afternoon, and somebody else did not check, and here we are four hundred years later with a man in a village who put his own name at the top of his own list."
The lamp guttered and went on burning, and outside the wind came round the end of the long house.
"And that’s supposed to make it better, is it?"
"No," said Zahr. "It is supposed to make it findable. You have been looking for a god to audit. There is not one. There is a table, and an afternoon, and a piece of paper, and I have watched you for two years become the only kind of creature that has ever frightened the thing that came after us."
"Which is what?"
"A man who asks where the form is kept."
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