Administrator Of A Broken World

The roll went up on the first of Pyrelon and Mataon found out about it in a village called Ottery, from a woman selling nails.

"You’ll have heard," she said.

"Heard what?"

"About the discharge." She wrapped four nails in paper for a man who had not asked her to. "Nobody can be let off. Turns out there’s no paper for it and there never was. It’s on the roll. My brother-in-law reads it at Marrow Hill and he came back yesterday and would not shut up about it."

Mataon stood in the middle of a village he had never been to.

"What do people think?"

"That’s a strange question."

"I’d like the answer anyway."

The woman thought about it while she counted change.

"Most of them think nothing," she said. "It’s the roll. There’s nine hundred things on the roll. But my brother-in-law’s a stonemason and he sat down when he read it, and my husband reckons it’s the sort of thing that turns out to be a mistake in a fortnight, and the girl who does our bread said her father’s been paying since before she was born." She handed him the change. "And then we all had our dinner."

***

He got the actual sheet at the post house that evening. A copy of the general return goes to every post house in the district and gets nailed up for two weeks.

There were about nine hundred entries on it and his was three-quarters of the way down the fourth column, between a boundary award and a change of name.

*Answer received to Subject’s Query SQ-334-Sarrow-11. Office of record certifies that no prescribed form of the certificate of discharge exists, and that no such certificate has been or could have been issued.*

Thirty-one words.

He read them standing in a corridor with his hat still on, and then he went and sat outside on the step, and Barni came and sat next to him without being asked.

"Say it."

"It’s thirty-one words in the fourth column."

"Yes."

"I gave them two hundred years and any child I ever have, and it’s thirty-one words, three-quarters of the way down, between a hedge and a man changing his name to Corven."

"Do you want it to have been more?"

Mataon thought about that properly, which took a while.

"No," he said. "If it were more it’d be a scandal, and a scandal finishes. This is a fact and it’s on file. It’ll still be on that roll when the man who wrote it’s dead. Somebody will find it in ninety years and it’ll be exactly as true."

"Then why do you look like that?"

"Because it’s thirty-one words in the fourth column," said Mataon, "and both of those are correct, and I’d like to be allowed to feel two things at once for about ten minutes."

Barni put his chin down and let him.

The nail-seller’s boy came after him across the green about ten minutes later, at a run, holding the copy of the return that had been nailed up.

"Mister. Are you the one?"

Mataon stopped.

"Which one?"

"Sarrow eleven." The boy had his finger on the line and had clearly been holding it there the whole way. "My mam said no. But you asked her what people thought, and nobody asks that, and then you went and stood in front of it for a quarter of an hour with your hat on."

"I’m the one."

The boy looked at the paper, and then at him, and did not seem to know what he had planned to do next.

"It doesn’t say your name," he said.

"No. It says the reference."

"Then how would anybody know?"

"They wouldn’t. That’s rather the point of a roll." Mataon crouched down so they were level. "What’s your father’s line at?"

The boy went red.

"I don’t know."

"Then that’s the thing to go home and ask, and I’d ask it tonight, because you’re going to be told it’s rude and it isn’t." He stood up. "And if he doesn’t know either, ask him to send for his sheet. They have to give it. He’s entitled and most people never ask."

The boy went off across the green at the same speed he had come.

Orvek watched him go the whole way and then wrote on the slate and held it up without any expression at all.

*That is the first person in this country who found you.*

Ithred’s man found them at Ottery on the third.

Not Coll. A rider with a letter, and the letter was four sides in a hand Mataon recognised from a wall in the sun north-east of Sarrow.

*I have read the return. I am writing to you because I want it on the record with somebody that I read it on the first and understood it by the second.*

*The house has three hundred and eleven lines out. Not one of them has ever been discharged. I have always known that and I have always told myself it was because nobody clears a line, the way you tell yourself a thing when the alternative requires you to go and look.*

*I have gone and looked. There is no form. There has never been a form. My grandfather cleared his line in nineteen years and the house is named after it and I have been telling that story since I could talk, and I went into the strongbox on the second and there is no certificate in it. There is a note from a clerk saying the sum is satisfied. That is all there has ever been.*

*So the story my family tells about itself is not a lie and it is not true either. He paid. Nobody ever gave him anything.*

*I am not going to tell you what I intend to do, because I have not decided, and because you would immediately think of four things I could do that I have not thought of and I would like the next fortnight to be my own.*

*But I want you to know that I bought two lines yesterday at the ordinary rate and I did not haggle, and I have never once in eleven years not haggled, and I could not have told you why until I sat down to write this.*

*C.I.*

Mataon read it twice and gave it to Orvek, who read it and gave it back and did not write anything.

"He’s going to do something," said Barni.

"Yes."

"Do you know what?"

"No. And I’m glad, because I’ve spent nine months being the only person in this country who moves, and a man I met once on a wall has gone off to think for a fortnight without asking me anything." He folded the letter carefully. "That’s the first thing that’s happened this year that wasn’t mine."

[Ottery, on the north-west road — 1-3 Pyrelon, 335 A.Z. — Days 258-260]

[GENERAL RETURN, 1 Pyrelon 335 — published to the central roll and posted at every district post house for fourteen days.]

[Entry: fourth column, thirty-one words. The finding is public and permanent.]

[Public reaction: none, and some. It is on the roll with nine hundred other things. Two people in one village sat down.]

[House Ithred — 311 lines out, none ever discharged. No certificate in the strongbox. A clerk’s note that the sum was satisfied, and nothing else.]

[Coll Ithred is deciding something and has declined to say what.]

[Level 37 → Level 38]

[Stat points available: +3]

[Basis: publishing a fact that nobody was waiting for, and not needing it to be more than it was]

[INT +1 · PER +1 · WIL +1]

[STR 22 · AGI 19 · END 32 · INT 43 · PER 44 · WIL 49]

[Reserved Mana: 7 — First Exception, open, day 217]

[Ten days to Ardenmoor.]

***

They went on the next morning and it rained on and off for three days.

On the fourth evening Almina spoke for the first time since Sarrow, and she did it while he was cleaning his boots. He had worked out a long time ago that she chose her moments.

"You have not asked what I think."

"I’ve been trying not to."

"That is not a reason. Say the real one."

"Because you’d tell me," Mataon said, "and I’ve got six days of walking left and I’d rather arrive with my own opinion than a better one."

"Then I will not give you an opinion. I will give you an observation and you may do what you like with it."

"Go on."

"Every person you have moved in this country moved because you gave them a document and stood out of the way." Almina’s voice was exactly as it always was. "The officer. The supervisor. The undertaker. The man on the wall with the horse. You did not persuade any of them. You put a true thing in front of them and then you left the room."

"That’s not a strategy. That’s just what worked."

"I have not said it was a strategy." A pause. "I have said it is the only thing you have ever done that succeeded, and that in six days you are going to walk into a shop belonging to a man who has spent nineteen years alone with a true thing, and you are going to want very badly to persuade him."

Mataon stopped with the brush in his hand.

"Yes."

"Then do not," said Almina. "Give him the document and stand out of the way. It is the whole of what you are, and you have never once needed to be anything else, and I would prefer not to watch you find that out expensively."

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