Administrator Of A Broken World

Serreth’s answer took thirty-two days to go and come, and it reached Ardenmoor on the last afternoon of Ravenmark.

Wenna Stoat did not climb the quarry with it. She sent the chapel boy, who ran the whole way up and arrived unable to speak and extremely pleased with himself, and Mataon gave him a copper he could not afford and thought afterwards that it had been worth twice that.

He read it on the face, sitting on a cut block, with his hands still white to the wrist.

Barni came up the track behind the boy and lay down in the shade of the block and waited. Orvek was below, doing the tally for the ganger, and did not come up.

The first page said no.

A district office may take in anything from anybody. Nothing bars the receiving.

But a document handed over by an interested party goes onto the file as an unverified deposit. A deposit sits there. It proves nothing, it supports no review, and nobody may put it to an office of record.

If she tried it, the centre would send it back with one line, and her review would come back underneath it.

*So no. Do not send it. You were right and I was going to tell you so before you told me.*

He read that far and stopped and looked out at the flats for a while, and one of the other men asked if it was bad news and he said not yet.

Mataon put the first page under his knee so the wind would not have it. Then he read the second.

***

She had put a heading on it. She had never done that before. The heading was one word.

*Requisition.*

A district office may **call for** a document. Section eleven.

Where a review on own motion is running, the district may require the office of record to produce any document forming part of the practice under review. A document produced on requisition is not a deposit. It counts as evidence.

She had held that power for nine years and used it four times, all four for expense returns.

He read that line twice. Nine years, four calls, and every one of them about somebody’s coach fare.

And there was a catch, and she set it out in three lines without any softening at all, because she had worked out some time ago that he preferred it that way.

**A requisition must name the document.** It may not say *everything*. It may not say *the practice*. It has to give the thing a title.

And if it names a document that does not exist, the office of record answers that it does not exist, and **the requisition is spent.** One call. That is all a review ever gets.

*I have been trying to name it since the twenty-second of Sylphenia. I have written eleven versions and every one of them was a guess.*

*You have just handed me the name.*

He went and stood at the edge of the cut, where you could see eleven miles of flat grey country and nothing standing up in any of it.

Barni got up and came and sat on the rock beside him, and put his chin on Mataon’s boot, which he did about twice a year.

"Say it."

"I can’t give her the sheets. That’s confirmed, in writing. I was right about it for the wrong reason and I’d like that noted." Mataon folded the page along its crease. "But she can call for it. By name. *The sixth column of the schedule maintained under this office, being the record of the state of the person at the last date the office had information.*"

"That’s not a guess."

"That’s a title. Nobody outside that office has ever known it, because it’s never left that office. And a requisition that names it right is one he’s got to answer."

Barni was quiet for a moment.

"Then he didn’t give you evidence," he said.

"No."

"He gave you a name for a thing, so somebody else could demand it off him." The ears went flat and stayed there. "He built the shape of his own requisition and posted it to a man in a quarry."

"Yes."

"So he wants to be asked, and he can’t be the one who asks, and he’s spent nineteen years arranging to be a man who isn’t allowed to." Barni shook the dust off. "And I want it on the record that I’ve described that man three separate ways now and been wrong twice, and I’m not trying a fourth."

Orvek came up at the change of shift and read all three pages standing, and gave them back, and went and sat on the low wall with his back to everybody.

The third page was shorter and it was the bad one.

The review had a number now. CR-335-Marrow-4, into the general queue at the centre on the ninth of Pyrelon.

She had asked what the queue looked like. The clerk who answered had not been unkind about it.

Four hundred and eleven matters ahead of it. No priority of any kind. The centre clears between forty and seventy a year.

*Do the arithmetic yourself. I have done it eleven times and I would rather you got the same number without my help.*

Mataon took the pencil stub out of his coat and did it on the back of the sheet.

He did it sitting on a block, in the dust, with two quarrymen eating forty feet away and one of them watching him do it.

Six to ten years.

He got the same number she had, and then he did it again from the other end to see whether it moved, and it did not.

The last four lines were about her first requisition.

She had sent it on the twelfth of Ravenmark, before his letter could possibly have reached her. She had named the practice in the only words she had and the words were wrong.

It would come back. It would be spent. She had known that on the day she sealed it.

*I sent it because a requisition that is spent is still a requisition that was made, and it goes on the file, and the file is the only thing in this country that outlives anybody.*

*I am not asking you to make me feel better about that. I am telling you because you are the only person who will understand why, and not call it brave.*

The ganger let him off the last hour. The ganger did not do that, and did not explain it, and Mataon did not ask.

Wenna Stoat was on her step when he came down, and she did not ask either. She held the door and said the stove was lit and went back inside, and he wrote at her long table until the lamp burned low.

He wrote back that evening at the long table with the lamp pulled close, and it was the shortest letter he had sent anybody in two years, and it took him four attempts to get there.

He told her the spent requisition was not a waste. It puts on the file that the district asked, on that date, in those words.

When the second one goes out with the right name on it, the file already shows she was reaching for the thing before she had it. That beats a clean first attempt.

He told her to send the second one when he said, and not before, because there was one thing he needed to be certain of and he was four hundred miles from being able to check it.

He told her six to ten years was a number he could work with.

Nobody at the centre expected a subject to still be standing at the end of one. That was the first advantage anybody had handed him since the border.

Then he sealed it, and opened it again, and added one line at the bottom, because he had learned in a graveyard at Coldwell that a thing not said out loud does not exist.

*And it was brave. I know you told me not to. I am saying it once and then never again.*

[Ardenmoor — 29 Ravenmark, 335 A.Z. — Day 317]

[A district office MAY RECEIVE anything from anyone. There is no bar on receiving.]

[A document handed over by an interested party enters as an UNVERIFIED DEPOSIT. Proves nothing. Supports no review. Cannot be put to an office of record.]

[REQUISITION — standing orders, section eleven. Where a review on own motion is running, the district may call for any document forming part of the practice. The office of record MUST produce it. A produced document is evidence.]

[A requisition must NAME the document. It may not say ’everything’ or ’the practice’. If it names a document that does not exist, THE REQUISITION IS SPENT. One call per review.]

[Serreth’s first requisition: sent 12 Ravenmark, named in the wrong words. Will be spent.]

[The name, now known outside the office for the first time: *the sixth column of the schedule maintained under this office, being the record of the state of the person at the last date the office had information.*]

[Review CR-335-Marrow-4 — general queue, 9 Pyrelon 335. Four hundred and eleven matters ahead. The centre clears 40-70 a year.]

[ESTIMATED WAIT: SIX TO TEN YEARS.]

[Level 39 — held]

[STR 23 · AGI 19 · END 33 · INT 43 · PER 45 · WIL 50]

[Reserved Mana: 7 — First Exception, open, day 276]

***

Orvek was waiting outside the long house with the slate already out, so he had been composing on the walk up.

*Six to ten years is longer than I have.*

"Don’t."

*It is arithmetic.* He wiped it without waiting to be answered. *I am fifty-one. My knee is eleven years past its best and I have walked nine hundred miles this year and I am not being sad, I am being useful.*

Mataon leaned against the doorframe and let him finish.

*If the paper comes in nine years, somebody has to be able to stand in a room and read it out loud. It will not be me.*

"It’ll be me."

*No.* Orvek held that one up for a while before wiping it. *You are a subject. You will still be a subject in nine years. A subject reading his own evidence to a hearing is a man arguing for himself, and every officer in that room will hear it that way and be right to.*

Mataon stopped.

He had not thought of that, and it was obvious, and it had been obvious since the day he signed.

"Then who?"

Orvek wrote three words and turned the slate round, and did not appear to think the question was difficult at all.

*Kess is ten.*

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