Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 557: Chapter 552: The Departures Book

Location:Ashmarch — The Gate Hall

Date/Time:18 Sparkfall 9943 AZI, Restday

Realm:Mid Realm

On Restday, the hall had a sound in it that it never had on any other day, and Stennes had worked there twenty-two years without ever deciding whether he liked it.

Water, mostly. The roof was two hundred feet of slate over a space built to hold four hundred people and their arguments, and with the people out of it you could hear the gutters working at the north end, and the pigeons, and one of the eight desks ticking as the sun came round onto it and the wood moved. The passage mouth in the end wall made no sound at all. It never had. He had asked, once, as a young man, whether it was supposed to, and had been told by a man long dead that a thing which is not anywhere cannot be expected to be noisy about it.

Paper got done on Restdays because Restday was the only day the hall was his.

Six ledgers open on the long table, which was five more than a careful man needs, but the closing of a quarter is a matter of making six books agree, and there is no way to do it one at a time. Ink. A rule. The good lamp, because his eyes had gone in the last four years and he had stopped pretending otherwise.

That morning gave him about an hour and a half.

Then Loet put his head round the arch from the outer court and said, in the flattened voice of a boy who has already tried to deal with something and failed, ”There’s people.”

”The hall’s shut.”

”I said.”

”Then they know it’s shut.”

”They know it’s shut,” Loet agreed. ”They’re still there.”

Stennes put the rule down across the page to hold his place.

”How many?”

”Nine.”

That was wrong. Nine is not a delegation, and it is not a family. It is the number you get when a thing has happened to several people separately, and they have found each other on a road.

Stennes went out.

***

They had put themselves in the lee of the east wall because there was a wind coming up the valley, and they had been there long enough to have arranged themselves — the ones who knew each other in one clump, the ones who did not standing slightly apart with that particular Mid Realm politeness that is mostly about not seeming to push.

Four women. Four men. One older woman sitting on a bundle.

Their boots told him most of it before anybody opened a mouth. Not town boots. Not one pair of them, and two of the men had walked in something that had been resoled with whatever was to hand, and the older woman’s had been good once and had been good a long time ago.

”The hall opens on Kindleday,” Stennes said. ”Arrivals from the second bell.”

”We can’t come on a Kindleday,” said one of the women.

That stopped him, because it was the right answer and it was the answer nobody official ever gets, and he heard it and understood it in the same second. Of course they could not. A Kindleday is a working day in every village between here and the border, and these people had walked, and walking costs days at both ends, and Restday was not a convenience they had chosen. It was the only door in the week they had been given.

”How far have you come?”

”Four days,” said the woman. ”Some of them further.”

”Six,” said a man at the back.

Stennes looked at the nine of them against his east wall in the wind.

”Come inside,” he said. ”I am not opening a desk. I want that understood. But you are not standing out here for it.”

***

The arrivals benches were where the benches were, so that is where they went, and he took the second desk and did not sit behind it. The chair came round to the front of it instead, and he sat on that side, which was a small thing and cost him nothing, and he had learned a long time ago that it changed how people talked.

”One at a time,” he said. ”And I will write down what you tell me, and I want to be honest with you before you start, because I would rather be honest at the beginning than at the end. I do not know that I can do anything with it.”

”Then why write it?” said the man with the resoled boots.

”Because I do not know that I cannot, either.”

That seemed to do. It was not much, but these were not people who had come expecting much; they had come because there was one building in the southern Mid Realm with a door in it, and they had run out of other buildings.

The woman who had answered him outside came first.

”Aleida Vesk. From the Vense road, past Dellenmoor.” Her hands were in her lap and stayed there. ”My daughter is Sanne. She was nine in Cinderfall. They took the screening in the village in Flamefade, and she came up on the list, and they said she would go down for the assessment and be four months, and that was four months. That was four months and then some.”

”Down,” said Stennes.

”Down. To the Lower.”

”Who said four months?”

”The man who did the screening.”

”His name?”

She looked at him for the first time with something other than exhaustion in it.

”I don’t know his name,” she said. ”He had the coat.”

Stennes wrote the coat and did not comment on it.

The rest came out of her slowly and from several directions, which was how he got things out of people, and the shape of it came up the way these things do. A screening in the village hall in Flamefade, which happens every year and always has. A list read out. Eleven children off a district that had fifty-odd of the right age. A cart the following Grindday. Two men in white, one woman, and the children walking out to the cart perfectly cheerfully because a cart is an adventure, and their mothers were standing there smiling at them, because what else does a woman do.

”And you have had nothing.”

”A letter in Emberwane.” Aleida Vesk’s chin came up slightly. ”Not from her. From the office. It said she had been placed and was well and that further correspondence would come through the district.”

”Have you gone to the district?”

”Four times.”

”And.”

”They have not had any further correspondence,” she said, ”and they are very sorry, and they write it down.”

The others were much the same. Different villages, different years. Different ages. Always the screening. Always the coat. Always a cart.

The man with the resoled boots gave his name as Herrik Doorn and his son’s as Teun, and Teun had gone down in Ashbloom two and a half years ago, and Herrik Doorn had stopped expecting an answer some considerable time before he stopped coming to ask for one, and had walked six days to this wall anyway. That was the worst of the nine of them to listen to, and Stennes made himself listen to all of it.

Two hours of writing, and not once did he have to ask anybody to slow down, because people who have said a thing in their heads three hundred times say it cleanly.

***

Then he went to look, because that was the part he could do.

The nine ledgers live on the shelf behind the arrivals desks, and they are the pride of this hall, and Stennes had put more of his life into them than into anything else, including, if he was going to be truthful about it on a Restday with the wind up, his marriage. Everything that comes into the Mid Realm goes into a book. Everything. A bale of hides, a crate with a bad seal, a man with a grievance, a woman with no cargo. He had been thorough about it for twenty-two years and had believed, without ever having occasion to put it into a sentence, that being thorough about it was a form of care.

The arrivals books for the last three years came off the shelf and went onto the long table under the good lamp.

What he was looking for was a nine-year-old girl named Sanne Vesk, coming up.

It took him until the middle of the afternoon to understand what he was actually holding.

The Temple columns come up in groups. They always have. They come out of the passage two abreast with their escort, and they go past the desks and out through the far arch, and they are entered, correctly and by the standing instruction, by the officer on duty. Stennes had entered a great many of them himself.

Escort, Temple. Thirty. Transferred.

One line. There it was, in his own hand, on the tenth of Sparkfall, eight days back, on the Quenchday, in ink he had ground himself because the hall’s ink is poor.

Back a page. Escort, Temple. Twenty-two. Transferred.Escort, Temple. Nineteen.Escort, Temple. Thirty-one. Every few weeks, for as far back as the books went, in four different hands, and one of the hands was his father-in-law’s and had been in the ground eleven years.

Not one name. Not one age. Not one district.

Stennes sat back.

Transferred is a proper word. It is the word in the standing instruction, and he had looked it up once, as a new clerk, in the volume that lives in the registrar’s cupboard, and it means moved between authorities of the Temple without change of custody, and the reason you do not enumerate is that the Temple is one authority and a thing does not need a name to move from its own left hand to its own right.

That had been in his head since he was twenty-three.

It had never once had to stand next to a woman on a bench.

***

And then the other thing, and it was worse, and it took him a further half hour to arrive at it, because some things you cannot see from inside.

Which was when he went to look for Sanne Vesk going down.

The child left the Mid Realm in Flamefade of last year. On a cart, through this hall, with a Temple escort and ten other children off her district, out through the departures rail at the west end. That happened. Nine people on his benches had watched it happen with their own eyes.

There is no book.

There has never been a book. There is a rail, a table, one clerk, and the clerk looks at your paper to see that it is a paper, and you go through, and the hall takes no account of it whatsoever, because what would be the point — a thing leaving is not a thing arriving, and the whole apparatus, the eight desks and the trestles and the nine ledgers and the man whose entire employment is carrying them back and forth, exists to answer one question, which is what has come in.

Stennes stood at the long table with his hands flat on it.

Sanne Vesk had left this realm, and there was no record anywhere in three realms that she had ever done so. She had not come back, and if she had come back, she would have come back as a third of one line. The system was not concealing anything. That was the part he could not get past, and he was going to go on not getting past it. Nobody had hidden the child. There was simply no place in the architecture where a child of that name had ever existed, going either way, and the architecture had been built that way by reasonable men for reasonable reasons and had been maintained, meticulously, by him.

There had been a young man in a good coat, in Sparkfall, sent to the benches for giving him a second answer he did not like.

Stennes had been proud of that.

***

At the fourth hour he went back out to them and told them the truth, because the alternative was to tell them something else.

”I cannot find your children,” he said. ”I want to be exact with you about why, because you have walked four days and you are owed exactness. It is not that the record is lost. It is that there is no record. Nothing that leaves this realm is written down. It never has been. And when a Temple column comes back up, it is entered as a column.”

Nobody said anything for a moment.

”So she’s not in the book,” said Aleida Vesk.

”She has never been in a book.”

The older woman on the bundle began, very quietly, to cry, and one of the men put his hand on her shoulder and left it there and looked at the floor.

”Then what have you been writing all afternoon?” said Herrik Doorn. It was not aggressive. He genuinely wanted to know, and Stennes respected him for it.

”A list,” Stennes said.

”Of what?”

”Of the names,” he said. ”Which is the thing that does not exist anywhere else.”

***

It did not go in a ledger.

The ledgers are the hall’s, and everything in them belongs to the hall and is read by the hall, and if you write a thing in a hall’s book then a hall’s book is where it lives. A blank quire came out of the cupboard instead, the cheap kind they use for scrap tallies, forty leaves and a paper cover, and he ruled it himself at the long table with the good lamp pulled over.

Four columns. Child. Age at taking. District. Date, and the name of the village hall it was read out in.

Then a fifth column, which he sat and looked at for some time before he cut it, narrower than the others, with no heading on it at all. He could not think of a word for who came and asked, and he did not want to write mother, because two of the nine were fathers and one was a grandmother, and in a lifetime of standing instructions he had learned that the wrong heading on a column is worse than no heading.

The first line went down in his own hand, in his own ink.

Sanne Vesk. 9. Vense Road, past Dellenmoor. Flamefade 9942, village hall.

And in the fifth column: Aleida.

Eleven more lines after that, because two of the nine had lost two.

He read the page back when it was done. Twelve children on one leaf of scrap paper, in an ink he had ground himself, in a hall with nine ledgers on the shelf behind him and not one of those names in any of them.

Stennes blew on it, and closed it, and sat with his hand flat on the paper cover, and understood with a clarity that did not distress him as much as it probably should have that he had just done the first thing in his working life that was not permitted, and that he was going to do it again on the next Restday, and that he was going to need somewhere to keep it.

Outside, the nine of them were walking down toward the Slagrows to find a bed, because it was too late in the day to start four days home.

Stennes put the quire in the bottom of the cupboard, under the volume of standing instructions, which nobody had opened since he was twenty-three.