The year turned again and the quarry gave them one day for it, and Mataon spent his sitting on the floor of the long house with every document he owned laid out around him in a circle.
There were nineteen of them.
That was the whole of two years. Nineteen pieces of paper, and he had bought four of them and been given three and copied the rest by hand.
"You look ridiculous," said Barni, from the door.
"I’m aware."
"You look like a man doing a séance."
"I’m looking for an office."
"You’re looking for an office on the floor."
"That is where the floor is," said Mataon, and did not look up, and Barni came in and lay down in the one clear space, which was the middle, and had to be moved twice.
***
The question was simple and he had not been able to touch it for a month.
Calder Hesh was classified in 313. Somebody classified him. An instrument does not raise itself.
So: **which office?**
Not his own. He did not have the seal in 313 — he took it three years later, in 316. In 313 he was nobody, in a village, with a claim against him and a shelf he had just paid for a year in advance.
Somebody else wrote that instrument.
It took him until the middle of the afternoon, and he found it in the least likely place. His own instrument.
Sixty-one clauses, read to him in a room at Sarrow by a woman who did not hurry the hard ones. Clause two: the date, and the seven characters of the originating office.
And clause fifty-eight. He had not thought about it since the day it was read, because at the time it had seemed like nothing.
*The originating office is successor to such offices as have been dissolved into it by order.*
He sat back on his heels.
"Barni."
"Mm."
"How does a small office in a village end up holding four hundred and six people?"
"It grows."
"It doesn’t grow. Nobody sends it work. It’s got no directory entry, no address, no correspondence and no staff." Mataon put his finger on clause fifty-eight. "It doesn’t grow. **It inherits.**"
He got the rest of it out of three documents and a memory of a conversation on a wall.
Coll Ithred, boots off, with somebody else’s newspaper: *that office has four hundred and six lines out and it has never once sold one.*
Four hundred and six lines. Nineteen years. That is twenty-one a year, in a district with no labour shortage, from an office with no address and nobody working there.
Nobody raises twenty-one instruments a year out of a village.
**They were not raised. They were absorbed.**
Somewhere in the two hundred and eleven years since the discharge provision was written without a form, small offices had been dissolved into other offices by order. Their claims went with them. They rolled downhill for generations until they came to rest in a drawer at Dunnock Mill.
And one of the offices that had been dissolved was the one that had classified Calder Hesh in 313.
So its claims passed to its successor.
And in the year 316, when a man with a debt of four hundred and ten silver took up a retained seal in a village nobody visited, **he inherited his own line.**
He said it out loud in an empty room and it sounded worse than it had in his head.
"Nobody owns him."
Barni sat up.
"There has to be somebody."
"There doesn’t." Mataon was looking at the floor. "That’s the thing I’ve had wrong since Ardenmoor. I’ve been looking for a man above him because a man above him would explain it, and there isn’t one. The office that classified him got dissolved by order into another office, and that one into another, and somewhere down the chain the paper landed on him. He’s the successor to the body that owns him."
"Then he could just—"
"No. He can’t discharge himself. We settled that on the twenty-third." Mataon put both hands flat on his knees. "He’s held by a chain of dissolutions and there’s nobody at the end of it. There’s a filing decision, made by somebody who’s been dead eighty years and who wasn’t thinking about him at all."
Barni was quiet for a long moment.
"That’s worse," he said.
"Yes."
"A man you can argue with. A man you can buy, or frighten, or outlive." The ears went flat and stayed. "You can’t outlive a filing decision. It doesn’t get tired. It hasn’t got an opinion about him. It’s never heard of him."
"No."
"And he has known that for four years as well."
"He’s known it longer than that," said Mataon. "Since 316. He’s the one who read the transfer schedule when the claims came in, and he’d have read every line, because he reads every line of everything. And somewhere about the fourth page he came to his own name and had to keep going."
They ate at Wenna Stoat’s because it was the turn of the year and she had made too much of everything on purpose.
Orvek did not drink this time. He read the whole thing through twice at the end of the table and then put his hand flat on it. It was the second time he had done that.
*So there is nothing to fight.*
"No."
*Then we have been walking for a year toward a man who is not there.*
"He’s there. He’s just not the top of it." Mataon turned the sheet round. "There isn’t a top of it. It’s a chain of paper going back eighty years, and the last link happens to be a person, and he’s the one who has to write the letters. That’s the entire structure."
Orvek wiped the slate and wrote for a while.
*Then when you win — and I am saying when, because I am old and I would like to say it — you are not beating anybody.*
"No."
*Who apologises?*
Mataon sat with that one for a long time and did not have an answer.
It went into the fourth column at the back of his notebook, where he put the questions he had not been able to close.
Barni, from under the table, into the silence:
"I’d like to say something and I want it on the record that I know it’s the wrong moment."
"Go on."
"Wenna Stoat has made nine dishes for four people and a dog, and I have eaten from six of them, and I would like everyone here to understand that I am doing this for her sake and not my own."
Orvek made a sound that nobody had ever heard out of him before.
It took Mataon about four seconds to work out that it was laughing.
[Ardenmoor — 1-2 Sylphenia, 336 A.Z. — Days 349-350]
[Clause fifty-eight of Mataon’s own instrument: *The originating office is successor to such offices as have been dissolved into it by order.*]
[The office did not raise 406 instruments. It INHERITED them, through a chain of dissolutions running back generations.]
[One of the dissolved offices classified Calder Hesh in 313.]
[When Hesh took the retained seal in 316, the claims came to him — INCLUDING HIS OWN.]
[He is successor to the body that owns him. He cannot discharge himself.]
[NOBODY OWNS HIM. He is held by a filing decision made by somebody dead eighty years who was not thinking about him.]
[Open question, entered in the fourth column: WHO APOLOGISES?]
[Level 39 → Level 40]
[Stat points available: +3]
[Basis: finding the answer in his own instrument, in a clause he had been read and had not thought about since]
[INT +1 · PER +1 · WIL +1]
[STR 23 · AGI 19 · END 33 · INT 45 · PER 47 · WIL 51]
[Reserved Mana: 7 — First Exception, open, day 308]
***
Late, with the others asleep, he put the nineteen documents back in order and found that his hands had stopped.
"Zahr."
"I am here."
"The thing you told me on the first day. In the white."
"I have told you a great many things and you have used four of them."
"The one about the name."
Zahr did not answer for a moment, and the not-answering was itself a kind of answer, and Mataon had learned to read those two years ago.
"Yes," said Zahr.
"I have not said it out loud since. Not once, in two years, to anybody, in any room."
"I know. I have been counting."
Mataon closed the notebook.
"I’ve spent a year proving that a man is held by a piece of paper with his name on it that he cannot edit." He looked at the wall. "And I have one of those too, and mine isn’t in Deuna, and I can’t audit it, and there isn’t a district office in any world that would take the case."
"No."
"Say the rest, please. I would rather have it from you than find it."
"There is no rest," said Zahr. "That is the whole of it, and it has been the whole of it since the day you arrived, and I told you once and never again because a man who is reminded of a thing daily begins to say it in his sleep."
The lamp went down another notch.
"Then I’ll keep not saying it."
"Yes," said Zahr. "And I will keep counting. It is the only thing I do for you that costs me anything."
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