The thing he had to be certain of was whether there was one schedule or two.
He explained it to Barni on the second of Frostmere, walking up to the face in the dark. The ganger had started them an hour early and there was nothing else to talk about.
"A requisition names a document. He has to produce the document named. If he keeps a working copy and a clean copy, he produces the clean one, and it will be a perfectly honest answer to a perfectly correct call, and the call is spent."
"And you’d never know."
"I’d never know, and Serreth would never know, and the file would show that the district asked and the office answered." He shifted the bar to his other shoulder. "It’s the only way this fails without anybody lying."
"So how do you check?"
"I compare."
***
He had two things and they had come from opposite directions.
The first was the schedule of forty-four names read aloud into a verbatim minute at Sarrow on the thirteenth of Ravenmark, three hundred and four days ago, by an officer of record who had not hurried the hard ones. He had a copy. He had paid four coppers for it and it had gone on his line.
The second was fourteen sheets handed across a counter in a village.
If the forty-four in the minute matched the forty-four in the sheets, in the same order, at the same figures, with the same three errors and the same three corrections, then the sheets were not a clean copy. They were the schedule. And the sixth column sat on the same paper as the rest, which meant a requisition naming it would land.
It took him nine evenings, and it took eleven.
He worked the face all day and did the ganger’s returns after, and then walked down to the shop and read forty-four lines against forty-four lines by lamplight until the letters started swimming.
Orvek sat opposite him for six of the eleven and did not read anything. He said afterwards that a man counting needs somebody in the room who is not counting.
He did it at Wenna Stoat’s long table, because his own lodging had no lamp worth the name. She never once asked what he was doing. Twice she put bread down beside him and took the empty plate away in the morning without mentioning that either.
On the fourth evening he found the first thing.
Isbet’s line. Corrected in the sheets. Thirty-four, not forty-nine, and the band changed with it. The correction had gone out on the sixteenth of Frostmere last year, and the sheets had been written after that, and the correction was there.
He sat back and rubbed his eyes and understood that he had just proved the wrong thing.
"It proves he updated," he said, to nobody. "It doesn’t prove he only keeps one."
Barni, from under the table: "Then keep going."
"I know."
"You said nine evenings on the second and it’s the fifth."
"I know that too."
On the seventh evening he found Hanne’s mother.
Struck out. Dead eleven years, carried at fifty silver for all of them, and now a single ruled line through the figure and nothing written over it. Not corrected. **Struck.** And in the sixth column, in the same small square hand:
*Deceased 323. Entry retained in error from 323 to 334. Struck on concession, 16 Frostmere 334. The error was mine.*
Mataon read that last sentence four times.
Nobody had asked for it. A concession does not require a confession. The correction Serreth received had said the entry was *an error of the office*, which is what a correction says, and this said *the error was mine*, on a page that had never been going to leave a drawer.
"He writes down who did it," he said.
Barni got up off the floor.
"Say the rest."
"In a document nobody reads. He keeps a column that says what happened to four hundred and six people, and when he gets one wrong he writes down that it was him." Mataon put the pencil across the sheet. "That is not a man hiding a second set of books. A man with two sets does not put his own name on the mistakes in either of them."
He finished the count on the eleventh evening, two more than he had promised, and he was tired enough by then that he did it three times.
Four hundred and five.
He put the pencil down and sat very still and did not touch anything for about a minute.
He counted the fourteen sheets again, line by line, with a straight edge, and got four hundred and five again. He counted the entries per sheet and added them, and got four hundred and five.
Every single thing anybody had said about that office, for nine months, across four districts, had said four hundred and six.
Rethe had said it in an examination room. The Vellow clerk had said it looking at his own index. Coll Ithred had said it on a wall with his boots off. Serreth had put it in a review that went to the centre with her name on it.
Four hundred and six instruments in nineteen years.
There were four hundred and five people on the schedule.
He did not sleep, and at about three in the morning he went and sat on Wenna Stoat’s step in the cold with the lamp out, and Barni came and sat against his leg without being asked.
"Somebody left."
"Or somebody was never entered," said Barni.
"Or somebody died and the sixth column would say so, because the sixth column says so four hundred and five times." Mataon had his hands round his knees. "That’s the whole point of it. It’s the column that never leaves anybody out."
"Then it’s a person who is not on a schedule but has an instrument."
"Yes."
"Which is the same thing as a person who is owned and has no line."
"Yes."
Barni put his chin down.
"That’s a new shape," he said. "In nine months, that is the first thing about this office that isn’t tidy."
"I know."
"And you’re going to sit on it until the second requisition goes out, because if you write to Serreth about it now she has to enter it, and it enters as an unverified deposit from an interested party."
Mataon looked out at the nine houses of Ardenmoor with no light in any of them.
"Yes," he said. "I’m going to sit on it. And I’ve been sitting on the step for four hours trying to find a version where I don’t have to, and there isn’t one, and I’d like somebody to know that I looked."
"Somebody does," said Barni.
[Ardenmoor — 2-13 Frostmere, 335 A.Z. — Days 318-329]
[Question to be settled before the second requisition: does the office keep ONE schedule or two?]
[Method: compare the 44 names read aloud into the Sarrow minute (13 Ravenmark 334) against the same 44 in the fourteen sheets. Same order, same figures, same three corrections.]
[RESULT — they match. The sheets are the schedule, not a clean copy. The sixth column sits on the same paper. A requisition naming it will land.]
[Sixth column, Hanne’s mother: *Deceased 323. Entry retained in error from 323 to 334. Struck on concession, 16 Frostmere 334. **The error was mine.***]
[A concession does not require a confession. Nobody asked for that sentence.]
[COUNT — the fourteen sheets carry FOUR HUNDRED AND FIVE entries. Counted three times, two ways.]
[Every source in nine months has said the office raised FOUR HUNDRED AND SIX instruments in nineteen years.]
[One person has an instrument and is not on the schedule.]
[Feat recognised — counting a document three times when twice would have been enough]
[PER +1 → 46]
[Level 39 — held]
[STR 23 · AGI 19 · END 33 · INT 43 · PER 46 · WIL 50]
[Reserved Mana: 7 — First Exception, open, day 288]
***
Orvek was awake when he came in, sitting up on the edge of the bed in the dark with his hands on his knees. He sat like that when the knee was bad and he did not want to be asked.
Mataon told him the number.
Orvek listened, and then reached for the slate and did not bother with the lamp, and wrote by feel.
*Four hundred and five is not a mistake.*
"No."
*He rules the lines by hand and he draws them straight. He counts.*
"Yes."
Orvek wiped it with his thumb and wrote one more thing, slowly, and Mataon had to take it to the window to read it.
*Then he left one out on purpose, and he gave you the sheets knowing you would count them, and he is waiting to find out how long it takes you.*
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