The quarry did not close for the turn of the year and neither did the ganger, so Mataon spent the last week of Frostmere breaking stone in weather that made a man’s hands split at the knuckle.
There were seven of them on the face by then. Two had gone to the coast and one had a chest that would not clear, and the ganger had stopped pretending the returns were anybody’s job but Mataon’s.
He worked out the other thing on the twenty-third, on a rest, sitting on a slab with his back to the wind and Tal’s arithmetic in his head from four hundred miles away.
*The useful thing is to ask what my line’s at.*
Nobody had ever asked Calder Hesh.
***
He had the figure. It was on line one, in the man’s own hand, and he had read it enough times by now that he did not have to unfold the sheet to see it.
*Assessed four hundred and ten silver.*
He had the date. First claim, 313. Twenty-two years.
And he had, at the bottom of the sheet, in the sixth column, the words *state of the person: living* — which meant that for twenty-two years the office of record had been holding an open line against a man who was paying it down at the ordinary rate like anybody else.
He did the sum in the dust with a bit of shale, on the flat of the slab, where the wind would take it off in an hour.
Four hundred and ten silver. Half of six coppers a day against it, at the going rate, with the additions capped nowhere.
Twenty-two years should have taken about a hundred and thirty silver off it.
The line said four hundred and ten.
He went and found Tal in his head and then went and found the actual arithmetic, because a man in his head is not a source.
The Sarrow crew sheet. He had kept his own, all four of them, folded into the back of the minute. Days worked, rate, gross, in hand, applied, additions, balance.
That was the shape of a maintenance line for a working man, and the shape of it was that it moved. Slowly, badly, wrongly, but it moved.
Tal’s had moved. Mataon’s own had moved fifty-eight coppers in the hardest month of his life, and it had still moved, and he had sat on a bank and hated the number and never once doubted that it was a number.
Four hundred and ten silver, and it had not moved at all.
There were three ways that happened.
**One.** The man had not worked in twenty-two years. Absurd, because he had ridden to Coldwell and paid for a stone out of a purse.
**Two.** Some provision froze the line, one Mataon had never read. Which would mean a provision existed that he had never read, and at this stage he did not believe that.
**Three.**
He sat with three for a long time in the cold.
"Say it," said Barni, who had come up the track and lain down against the slab out of the wind.
"He can’t pay."
"He’s got money. He paid three silver two for a stone."
"He’s got money and he can’t pay." Mataon put the shale down. "Who does a subject pay?"
"His office of record."
"And who is his office of record?"
Barni’s ears came up very slowly.
"He is."
"He is." Mataon leaned his head back against the stone. "A man cannot satisfy a debt to himself. You cannot pay yourself and mark yourself paid. No office in this country would accept it, and he is the office, so there is nobody left to accept it. That line has been standing open at four hundred and ten silver since three thirteen because there is no procedure in Deuna by which the man who holds the seal can discharge the man who holds the seal."
"Then he’s been carrying it the whole time."
"He’s been carrying it the whole time and it hasn’t gone down by a copper. Every year he pays nine coppers for a directory he doesn’t use and a shelf in a village, and he keeps a column that says what happened to everybody, and at the top of it, in his own writing, there’s a debt he isn’t allowed to pay."
The wind came round the shoulder of the cut and took most of the sum off the slab, and neither of them said anything for a while.
Below them somebody dropped a bar and swore about it, twice, in two different ways.
"There’s a fourth," said Barni, eventually.
"There isn’t."
"There is and you’ve had it for an hour and you’re not saying it because it’s the one that hurts."
Mataon closed his eyes.
"He did pay," he said.
"Say the whole of it."
"He put himself at line one in three thirteen and then he worked, because everybody works. Twenty-two years at the ordinary rate on four hundred and ten silver, half in hand, half against, the way it comes off every man on that road crew." He opened his eyes. "That’s about the length of it. That’s exactly about the length of it, Barni, and I did the sum in the dust and got a hundred and thirty because I used six coppers, and he’s a clerk, not a quarryman, and a clerk gets eleven."
Barni sat up.
"Eleven."
"Ithred said it on a wall. *A man with your reading is worth eleven coppers a day to us and not six.*" Mataon picked the shale back up and did it again, properly, with the right rate. "Twenty-two years at five and a half against, six days in seven, no additions because he buys his own boots—"
He stopped.
He did it a third time, and then a fourth, and then he sat with his hands on his knees and looked at the number in the dust.
"He cleared it," he said. "Somewhere around three thirty-one, three thirty-two. He paid four hundred and ten silver over nineteen years and he cleared it."
"And then?"
"And then he needed a certificate of discharge in the prescribed form." Mataon’s voice came out perfectly level. "And there isn’t one. There never has been. And he’s the office that would have to issue it, so he applied to himself, and he searched, and he found what I found last Sylphenia — four years after he already knew."
He started to rub out what was left of the sum with his boot, and then stopped, and copied it onto the back of a crew sheet instead, and dated it, and put the date on it twice because his hands were cold.
"He’s the first man in this country who paid," he said. "Not the only one. The first one who found out."
"You don’t know that."
"No. But he’s the first one who was in a position to check, because he was the office. He checked. The answer was that the paper doesn’t exist. And he couldn’t tell one person in the world, because the moment he opens his mouth about it he’s got to say who he is."
Barni was quiet.
"That’s why he answered you."
"That’s why he answered me in four sentences with nothing softened and no paragraph about wasted public time." Mataon folded the sheet. "I asked him where a form was kept. He’d been looking for it for four years."
[Ardenmoor — 23 Frostmere, 335 A.Z. — Day 339]
[Calder Hesh, line one: assessed 410 silver, first claim 313, state of the person LIVING, line still open at 410 after twenty-two years.]
[A subject cannot satisfy a debt to his own office of record. There is no procedure by which the holder of a seal discharges the holder of that seal.]
[WORKING CONCLUSION — he paid it. A clerk’s rate is eleven coppers a day, not six (Ithred, Ch. 86). At five and a half against, 410 silver clears in roughly nineteen years, or about 331-332 A.Z.]
[He then required a certificate of discharge in the prescribed form. He was the office that would have to issue it. He searched. There is none.]
[He has known there is no discharge for approximately four years. He could not tell anybody without saying who he is.]
[Feat recognised — doing a sum four times because the third answer was worse than the second]
[INT +1 → 44]
[Level 39 — held]
[STR 23 · AGI 19 · END 33 · INT 44 · PER 46 · WIL 50]
[Reserved Mana: 7 — First Exception, open, day 298]
***
Orvek was doing the tally at the hut when he came down, and Mataon put the crew sheet on the table in front of him and sat and waited.
Orvek read it twice and put his hand flat on it.
Then he wrote on the slate without looking up.
*So he is finished and cannot be told so.*
"Yes."
*And he has stayed at the desk for four years afterwards, writing other people onto the same schedule.*
"Yes."
Orvek looked at that for a while. Then he wiped it and wrote again, and it was not what Mataon expected at all.
*Then you must be careful of one thing, and it is not what Barni told you at Coldwell.*
"Go on."
*Barni said it would be easy to like him. That is true and it is small.* He turned the slate round so the lamp caught it properly. *The danger is that you have just found a man who paid everything he owed and got nothing, and you are going to spend two hundred years doing the same, and you have started reading him as a warning instead of a person.*
Mataon sat back.
"That’s the best thing anybody’s said to me this year."
*I know,* Orvek wrote. *I have been holding it since the twenty-eighth of Pyrelon.*
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