The item reached the Ardenmoor office on the twenty-sixth of Pyrelon and sat in box twelve for seventeen days. Mataon knew it was there on the second day and did nothing about it for eleven.
Wenna Stoat kept the pigeonholes because nobody else would have them.
She had told him that on his first morning in the village. She had said it in the tone of a woman who had got through it four hundred times and meant to get through it again.
"Something's come for twelve." Wenna Stoat did not look up off the ledger. "District cover. Green string."
"Don't tell me anything else about it."
"I wasn't going to. I was going to tell you I'm out of candles."
He stood outside for a while afterwards. Then he went back in and bought thread he did not need. A man who walks into a shop and leaves again with nothing in his hands has been in there for a reason, and reasons get remembered.
That night he put it to Orvek, and it took him four sentences to get to the part he actually wanted.
"He'll open it in the lane or at the counter. Either way somebody sees him do it. And if I'm anywhere in this village that morning, there's a version of it that can be written down — *the subject was present when the office of record was served in his own matter* — and I can't stop that being written."
Orvek waited.
"So I'll make it false."
*How far.*
"Far enough that two people can date it and neither of them is me."
*Then go further than that,* Orvek wrote. *Go where the work is hard enough that the ganger has to notice you. A man who is somewhere is a man who was seen doing something. A man who is merely absent is a man nobody can place.*
He left on the eleventh of Ravenmark and was at the quarry face for five days.
He was bad at it. He had been bad at it in the spring and he had got worse over four months of paper. The ganger said so twice on the first day and once on the second, and then stopped saying it, and the stopping was worse. On the fourth day they put him on the barrow run. A barrow run cannot be done wrong, only slowly. He did it slowly for nine hours and slept without dreaming.
He got two lines out of it. The ganger wrote *he was here* and the date and made a mark like a man signing a debt.
Then he asked whether Mataon was in trouble. He took *no* for an answer without any of the follow-up a townsman would have given it.
Wenna Stoat had written hers before he went and had refused to let him read it. He asked twice.
The second time she said an attestation a man has approved is worth less than one he has not seen. He had told her so himself in the spring. She had been waiting four months for a use for it.
***
He came down off the cut on the sixteenth with his boots in one hand and the two attestations folded into his shirt. It had rained on the twelfth and the track was still bad in the low part. He stopped at the ford and washed the quarry dust off his forearms. He put the boots back on before he came into the lane. A man who arrives barefoot gets talked about.
The chapel boy was waiting on the wall by the trough. He had clearly been waiting on it for some time and he had prepared.
"I still haven't told you." He got that in before anything else.
"I know."
"I want that said first because the rest of it is going to sound like I did."
"Go on."
The man had come down on the thirteenth. In the morning, earlier than usual, before the shop was properly open.
He had opened box twelve in the lane instead of at the counter. He had not taken anything else out. There had not been anything else in it.
Then he had stood there.
"How long?"
"Four hundred and ten," said the boy. "I count in my head when there's nothing else on. It's about seven minutes. He didn't sit down and he didn't lean on anything. He read it twice, because his eyes went back to the top, and then he folded it into three and put it inside his coat instead of in his bag, and the bag's where he puts everything."
"You've thought about the bag."
"I've thought about all of it since the thirteenth and I've had nobody to say it to."
Mataon sat down on the wall so that they were level. He did not say anything for a moment. A boy telling you a thing and a boy handing you a thing he has carried about for three days are not the same event.
"That was well done. Better than three grown men I've paid for the same work."
"You didn't pay me."
"No, and I'm not going to, and I'd like you to understand why before you decide you've been cheated." He turned round on the wall. "A thing somebody sold me can be bought off me. That's the first question anybody sensible asks and it ends most arguments before they start. I'd rather nobody could ask it about you."
The boy considered that with the whole of his face.
"So I'm free."
"You're free, and I owe you, and those are two different words and I'd like both of them on the table."
"Then he went in the shop," said the boy, satisfied.
At the shop Wenna Stoat had her own account. She gave it standing, with her hands on the counter, in the order she had settled on.
"He bought paper."
"Is that unusual?"
"He's come down that road twice a season for twenty-two years and he has never bought a thing in this shop that wasn't salt or candles. Not once." She flattened her hand on the wood. "Four sheets. Good paper, the sort I keep for the chapel and sell about twice a year, and he paid for it without asking the price."
"And then he asked you something."
"He did." She looked at him. "I'll give it to you word for word because I've been saying it over to myself since, and I'd like you to hear it the way it came.
"He said: *Is the man staying at the long house a subject or an officer?*"
Mataon did not move.
"And what did you tell him?"
"I told him I didn't know."
"Was that true?"
"I've not lied in this shop in thirty years and I didn't start on the thirteenth of Ravenmark." She put the ledger down. "I've been trying to work out what you are since the day you came and I've got no further than the first afternoon, and now a man I've sold salt to for twenty-two years has asked me straight out and I still couldn't answer him."
"What did he do when you said it?"
"Nodded. Same as he does about the weather." She picked the ledger back up. "And then he said thank you, and he's said that about sixty times in this shop and it's never once meant anything, and that time it did."
In the long house that evening Orvek had it in four lines and would not be hurried.
*A requisition under section eleven is served by an office. It does not matter to the answering officer who stands behind it. He owes the answer to the review, not to you, and he is not required to know your name, your condition, or whether you exist.*
"So he didn't need to ask."
*He did not need to ask. That is the whole of the point and it took me three days to see it.*
"Three days. You were here on the thirteenth."
*I was here on the thirteenth and I have said nothing for four hours this evening while you worked at it, and you will thank me for that in about a minute.*
Mataon walked to the door and back twice before he had it. He said it quietly. Out loud it was worse.
"The sixth column is the record of the state of the person."
*Yes.*
"So if I'm a subject, I'm in it. Not by name — I don't know that he's got my name — but there's a line somewhere in that schedule with a state on it that's mine, and it's been there since somebody entered it, and he's kept it up for however long he's had the post."
*Go on.*
"He wasn't asking who's making trouble." Mataon put his hand flat on the table. "He was asking whether he's about to write four sheets of paper about a stranger, or about one of his own."
Barni, from the hearth, without lifting his head: "And which answer did he want?"
"I don't know. I don't think it's a question with a good answer for him either way."
*He bought paper,* Orvek wrote. *Four sheets, and he paid without asking the price, and he did it after seven minutes of standing in a lane. Whatever the question was for, the buying came afterwards.*
[Ardenmoor — 26 Pyrelon to 16 Ravenmark, 336 A.Z. — Days 404-424]
[The requisition reached the Ardenmoor office 26 Pyrelon. It sat in box twelve for seventeen days.]
[MATAON LEFT THE VILLAGE 11-16 Ravenmark, deliberately, so that no record could ever say the subject was present when the office of record was served in his own matter. Two dated attestations: the quarry ganger and Wenna Stoat.]
[COLLECTED 13 Ravenmark, in the morning, earlier than usual. Opened in the lane, not at the counter. Read twice. Stood approximately seven minutes. Folded into three and put inside the coat rather than in the bag.]
[HE BOUGHT PAPER. Four sheets, the good sort, paid for without asking the price. In twenty-two years he had never bought anything in that shop but salt and candles.]
[HIS QUESTION, verbatim: *Is the man staying at the long house a subject or an officer?*]
[Wenna Stoat answered *I don't know*, and it was true.]
[READING: he did not need to ask. A section eleven requisition is served by an office and is owed to the review, not to the subject. He asked because the sixth column is the record of the state of the person — and he needed to know whether he was about to write about a stranger or about one of his own.]
[Feat recognised — removing himself from a record he could not otherwise control]
[WIL +1 → 54]
[Level 41 — held]
[STR 23 · AGI 19 · END 33 · INT 46 · PER 48 · WIL 54]
[Reserved Mana: 7 — First Exception, open, day 334]
***
Wenna Stoat caught him at the door on his way out, which she had never done, and did it by putting the ledger down hard enough to make a noise.
"There's one more bit and I nearly didn't give it you, and then I thought about it for three days and decided I was being a fool."
"Go on."
"He asked what you were." She said it slowly, the way she counted change. "He never once asked me who you were. Not your name, not where you'd come from, not who you'd got in the long house with you.
"Twenty-two years that man has walked down my lane and I've never known him ask a question of anybody. He asked one. And it wasn't *what's he called.*"
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