He had thirty-six minutes and he used thirty of them, because it took two to get out of the door and down the passage and four to get his hands back afterward, and the one time he had cut it to thirty-four he had gone down eleven steps backwards in the dark.
The loop never varied. Fourteen minutes at the bench, twenty-eight away, eight on the stairs and the pour floor. Kalen had timed nine of them since the first morning, and the worst ran fifty-one and a half and the best ran forty-nine, and he worked to thirty, because a man who works to the average gets caught by the difference.
He did not think of it as hiding. He thought of it as a shift pattern, which is what it was, and which was the part he did not care for.
The record bench office was twelve feet by fifteen and dry as a drawer, and after six days he knew where every patch of grey dust on the floor lay and stepped over them the way you step over a sleeping dog. The stool had still never been sat on.
The left-hand pile was eleven high and it was the worst thing in the room.
He had gone through it on the first day on his hands and knees with the lamp turned down, and then again on the third day, because he had not believed the first day.
W2 / LEVY / STANDARD ........ 14.0
W2 / LEVY / ASSESSED ........ 14.6
W2 / LEVY / VARIANCE ......... 0.6 [carried, 1188]
W2 / VARIANCE / DISPOSITION .. general fund
Standard, assessed, variance, and a fourth line with somewhere to be.
Ward Two to the general fund. Ward Six to a crown works and then, five quarters later, back to the general fund, which meant that somebody had finished a bridge and had written it down.
Two hundred feet above him, at the seventh bell, the month's standing notice went up on the board by the gate.
WARD NINE: STANDING NOTICE
Levy assessed ................ 17.6
Assessment of N. Ashgrove in .. 251 days
The same four people stood in front of it, the way they always did. Kalen was not one of them and would not see it for nine days, and the number did not care either way.
He had been talking out loud for about a fortnight. He had noticed it in the second week and had decided not to have an opinion about it, on the grounds that a man who argues with himself about it has already lost.
"Ward Six," he said, and put the tag back where it had been. "A bridge."
The right-hand pile was not a pile. It was a case.
Shallow wooden trays, racked behind the bench, going up past the lamp light to a ceiling he had still not seen, and every tray sorted by quarter with the oldest at the bottom of the rack and this year at the top of it. For two days he had looked at it the way you look at a debt.
Then he looked at it properly, once, all at once, the way Tally makes you.
Eight hundred and sixty-eight.
He got the count without any working at all, and he did not know how he knew, and he had stopped minding that at about fifteen. Then he did the part he could show. Four to the year is two hundred and seventeen years, and two hundred and seventeen years off this one is 987, which he had known before he started counting, and which was the trouble with the whole of it. Every road he walked down here came out at a figure he already had.
The other end of it was worse. The near tray was this quarter, and it was not full, and there was room in it.
They were still coming.
He had come up eight days ago with a barrow and a week of stubble and had sat at his own table in the middle of the afternoon like a man on holiday.
"What is down there," Nessa had said.
"Tags."
"How many tags."
"I have not counted them."
"You have absolutely counted them."
"I have not counted them," Kalen said, "because I have been counting other things, and because the counting is the last thing you do and not the first."
She cut the bread in half without looking at it, which was a thing she did to make a point about him.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
She was talking before he finished.
"Are they worth anything?"
"Eleven marks. They are brass."
"Eleven marks," his sister said. "For the hole you have been down for a month."
"Yes."
"Still seventeen point six."
"I know."
"It went up in the spring and it has not come down since."
"I know what it is," Kalen said. "There is a current adjustment struck every year, and this year it came in at a tenth, and it is correctly struck, and I can show the working on it, and it is not the thing that is wrong."
"Two hundred and fifty-nine days," Nessa said, and put the difference column in front of him with the heel of her hand.
"I know."
"You look like a bad debt."
"Thank you."
"I am not being unkind. You have gone the colour of the stairs." She took the plate off him and put more on it than there was any call for. "What happens when the six weeks are up?"
"I take a case to the ward office."
"With brass tags."
"With eight hundred brass tags, forty pages of transcription and a rate table."
"And they read it."
"Somebody reads it."
"Who is somebody," Nessa said, and he had not had an answer for that at the table either.
The cards took him three days.
Every tray had a card slotted into a brass holder on the front of it, and for the first sixty years the cards carried a hand. Not a good hand and not a trained one: a working clerk's, upright, small, the year written out and then a tick beside it, and the tick was the man's own and was on every card he ever wrote. In 1004 he had put the year down twice and crossed one out. In 1029 he had run out of room and set the last figure underneath. In 1041 it was the same hand and it had got slower, the way a hand does. In 1047 it stopped.
After 1047 the cards were blank.
Not missing. Blank. The card was in the same brass holder in the same slot on the front of every tray, cut to the same size out of the same stock, and there was nothing written on any of them, all the way up a hundred and fifty-seven years of dark to a card in a holder on a tray with room left in it for this quarter.
Kalen stood on the bench with a tray in both hands and did not come down for a while.
He had come to this floor expecting to find a man. Not a name, he was not that stupid, but the shape where a man had been: a ledger with a bad entry in it, a route, a room where the money stopped. Something you could carry into an office and put on a table.
What he had was a rack, a card and a brass holder.
The works books were at the far end of the same bench, under the tag store's brass measure, holding a stack of blank slates up off the floor. He had wanted them since the strongbox. He had wanted them because a rate assessed on a foundry is somebody's arithmetic about a foundry, and arithmetic has to be done out of something, and the something had been sitting in this building the entire time.
There was no arithmetic in them.
They were tonnages. Hands on the floor, hands off, the weight of a pour, the weight of the next pour, a column for waste, four hundred pages of a works getting through a Tuesday. Nobody keeps the working. He had said that out loud to a wet box on the second sub-level a fortnight ago and had come down two floors to be told it again by four volumes in a clerk's fair hand. The last entry was a half page in the same hand as the rest, giving the count of hands on the floor and the tonnage and the date the great works closed, which was in 987, and after it sixty blank leaves, which is what a clerk does when he expects to come back.
Kalen put the books to one side and wrote works books, four vols, tonnages only, closed 987, no rate working on the list he kept of things he had looked at, because he kept everything, and then went back to the case, because the case was the evidence.
The loop came round.
He heard it at the bottom of the steps, where you always heard it, and he was out of the door and forty feet down the passage with his lamp shut before it came up, and then he lay down on the stone at the door line for the nine inches of bench that gets you.
Fourteen minutes, and every fourth movement the same small correction in the wrist, the settling of a thing gone slightly out of square.
"Eight hundred and sixty-eight," Kalen said, into the stone, at a distance of forty feet, to something that could not hear him. "You have got all of them."
It did not look up. They never do.
When it had gone he went back in and stood at the bench where he had left his own tag two nights ago, beside the first tag out of the bottom tray, and turned the lamp up, and read them left and right and then right and left, which is the way you read Accord script and the way he had never been able to unlearn.
W9 / LEVY / STANDARD ........ 14.0
W9 / LEVY / ASSESSED ........ 17.5
W9 / LEVY / VARIANCE ......... 3.5 [carried, 987]
W9 / VARIANCE / DISPOSITION .. (blank)
W9 / LEVY / STANDARD ........ 14.0
W9 / LEVY / ASSESSED ........ 17.6
W9 / LEVY / VARIANCE ......... 3.5 [carried, 987]
W9 / VARIANCE / DISPOSITION .. (blank)
Two hundred and seventeen years apart, and one tenth of difference on the assessed line, and he could account for that tenth in four lines standing on one foot. The variance line was the same line. Not the same figure. The same line, letter for letter and space for space, struck by two different dies eight hundred and sixty-eight quarters apart.
And the fourth line on both, with the dots running out to nothing.
Kalen stood at the bench with the lamp between the two of them and finally let himself have it.
This was not a theft. Nobody had hidden anything on this floor. Nobody had needed to. A clerk in 987 had been handed a category he had no instruction for, and had done the sensible thing with it, which was to make a rule: variance carried, disposition blank, right-hand case. He had kept that rule for sixty years and then he had died, and somebody had taken the bench, and the rule had gone on being obeyed after the hand that wrote it stopped, and after the cards stopped, and after the works stopped, and after the man doing it stopped being a man.
There was no room in it for a villain. There was not even room for a decision.
He took a card out of his roll before he went up, because the card on the near tray was blank like all the rest of them, and cut it to the size of the others against the brass measure, and wrote the year on it in pencil, and put it in the holder, because the tray was current and whoever came to it next would want to know.
Then he looked at what he had just done, in his own hand, in the sequence.
Procedures do not stop when people do.
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