Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 567: Chapter 562: Permanently Fixed

Location:The Terrace, Mid Realm

Date/Time:12 Scorchwind 9943 AZI, Restday

Realm:Mid Realm

The quarter had closed on the first of Ashbloom and Sharlin had made it by nineteen.

Nineteen. Not a comfortable number. A comfortable number is forty, or sixty, or the year she had come in over by two hundred and six and had walked about for a week afterward feeling like a woman who had solved something. Nineteen is the margin you get when you have spent the last four weeks of a quarter doing things you would not have chosen to do, and Sharlin had done four weeks of things she would not have chosen to do, and had made it, and had then had about ten days of not thinking about it before the new quarter’s figure came up.

It was in front of her now.

It was on good paper because everything in that room was on good paper, in a hand she had employed for sixty years, and it said five hundred, which it always says, and underneath it said the running position, which was where the trouble lived.

Forty-one days into the quarter.

Eighty-eight.

***

The Terrace at midday in Scorchwind is the most beautiful room on that world, and Sharlin had stopped seeing it some time in the last decade.

That she had stopped seeing it occurred to her about twice a year, generally when somebody new came in and did the thing they all do — the small check in the step at the door, the eyes going up, the determination not to be seen to be impressed. It had been renovated three centuries ago at a cost nobody had ever put in front of her, and she had been genuinely delighted by it for perhaps forty years.

Now it was where the paper was.

Corvane came in at the second bell with the folder under his arm and the flat pleasant face he had been born with and had never had to work on.

He was not a shadow guard. The shadow guards are for the things that happen at night, and this was not that; Corvane ran the districts, which is to say he ran thirty-eight offices and the people in them and the paper that came up from them, and he had done it for eighteen years without once giving her a reason to look at him twice.

”High Priestess.”

”Sit.”

He sat. He put the folder on the table and did not open it, which is a thing he does when he has decided the conversation must start somewhere other than the paper.

”There are four halls,” he said.

”Four.”

”Ashmarch, Grennholt, the Vense crossing, and one at Kell that I would not include except that it is the third time.” He folded his hands. ”Families presenting at the arrivals side on Restdays and asking after children who went down for assessment. Not a petition. Not organized. They walk in, they ask the duty officer, they are told there is no record, and they go away.”

”Numbers.”

”Ashmarch is the largest. Nine on the first occasion, in Sparkfall. Fourteen the Restday after. Twenty-six last Restday, and the registrar there is writing down what they tell him.”

Sharlin’s hand did not move on the arm of the chair.

”Writing it where?”

”Not in a ledger.” Corvane’s mouth did something small and precise. ”That is the part I came about. The ledgers are clean, High Priestess. I have had all nine of them up and read the last two years myself, and there is not one irregular entry in any of them. He is a very good registrar. Twenty-two years.”

”And.”

”And he has a quire in a cupboard with names in it.”

***

Sharlin got up and went to the long window and stood in the light because it is a good place to stand and everybody in that room for three hundred years had known it.

Twenty-six.

Being short makes you take them closer together. She had known that when she did it. Known it in Flamefade, signing the order that put three districts on the same cycle instead of rotating them, and she had known it again in Emberwane when she had let the assessment window run four weeks long, and she had done both things anyway, because the alternative to being nineteen over is being nineteen under, and there is no version of this in which she is nineteen under.

Take eleven children out of a district in a year, and the district does not notice. That is not cruelty; it is arithmetic. A district has fifty of the right age, and it loses eleven and eleven is a number a place can absorb, and by the time anybody adds it up, the ones who could have added it up have moved or married or stopped counting.

Take eleven out of the same district three times in fourteen months, and it is not a district any more. It is a hundred and ninety houses that all know somebody.

She had done that. Nobody had made her. She had sat in this room with good paper in front of her and a figure that did not move, and she had reached for the nearest thing, which is what you reach for when you are behind.

And now there are twenty-six people on a bench at Ashmarch on a Restday, and a very good registrar with twenty-two years and a quire in a cupboard.

***

”What is he?” she said, without turning round.

”Stennes. Twenty-two years in that hall and no ambition to leave it. No family living — wife dead a long while, and her father dead eleven years, and his hand is still in three of those ledgers.” Corvane consulted nothing, because he never does. ”No debts, no interests, no complaint filed against him in the whole of that time and not one filed by him either. He is not political. He is not devout. He is thorough. His own superior’s word for him was tiresome, and meant it affectionately.”

”Does he know what he has?”

”I do not believe he does. I think a woman cried on his bench and he could not answer her and he did the only thing a registrar knows how to do about anything.”

That was almost certainly correct, and Sharlin found it made the whole business worse rather than better.

A man with a grievance is a manageable object. A man with a grievance has a shape — he wants something, he can be given it or refused it or bought, and either way he can be predicted. This was a man with a habit. He had reached for the thing he reached for. He would go on reaching for it on Restdays for as long as he had a cupboard, not because he had decided anything, and there is nothing in the whole apparatus of the Temple of Light that is designed to stop a man from being thorough.

”How many names.”

”He would not say, and I did not ask him directly, because asking him directly tells him he has something.” A pause. ”Twenty-six presented last Restday, and two of them had lost two. I would assume somewhere above fifty, and I would assume it goes back to Sparkfall.”

Fifty names, with districts against them, and dates, and the village halls the lists were read out in.

The window held her for rather a long time.

It is not the names. The names are children who do not exist in any book in three realms and cannot be made to exist, and a list of them proves nothing whatsoever except that some families are distressed, and families are distressed about a great many things. That quire could go in front of a synod, and they would be sorry about it for an afternoon.

It is that somebody has started a second set of books.

That is the whole of it, and Sharlin had understood it inside four seconds. An institution survives on there being one account of a thing. Not a true account — one. The moment there are two, every single person who reads both becomes a person who chooses, and she had spent twenty thousand years making certain that the number of people in three realms who had ever been given that choice stayed at nought.

***

”Options,” she said.

”The registrar can be promoted.” Corvane began where he always begins, with the cheapest. ”There is a post at the northern offices that has been vacant nine months and is a genuine advancement. He would take it, and the cupboard would stay in Ashmarch.”

”He would take the quire with him.”

”He would.”

”Next.”

”He can be retired. The eyes are going, and there is a scheme for it. It is clean, it is on the record, and nobody in that hall would find it remarkable.”

”And in three months he is a retired man in a town with nothing to do but write in a quire, and the families know where he lives.” Sharlin turned round. ”Next.”

Corvane did not hurry.

”The families can be answered,” he said.

Sharlin looked at him.

”That is a real option, High Priestess, and I would not be doing my work if I did not put it on the table. Some of those children are alive and placed. Not all. Enough that a letter over a seal, giving a facility and a date, would satisfy perhaps two-thirds of the people on that bench and would end the Restdays, and the ones it did not satisfy would be a much smaller and much easier problem.”

”And the third.”

”The third would be a much smaller and much easier problem.”

”Corvane.” She came back to the chair. ”There is a part you are leaving out.”

”That every letter over a seal is a document with a facility named on it.” He said it without any inflection at all. ”And that a facility that has been named in writing to a farmer on the Vense road is a facility that can be walked to.”

***

She thought about it properly, because she owed it that.

That is a thing people do not understand about her, and she had long ago given up minding. Sharlin had not got to where she was by being a woman who enjoys the worst option. The merciful road had been taken perhaps four hundred times in twenty thousand years, and it had been the correct road on nearly all of those occasions, and she had never once been thanked for a single one of them because a thing that does not happen is not a thing anybody remembers.

So she sat in the most beautiful room on that world with a figure in front of her that said eighty-eight of five hundred at forty-one days, and she put the merciful option up against the wall and looked at it.

Two thirds satisfied. The Restdays end. Four halls go quiet. One very good registrar, promoted or retired, takes a quire that nobody will ever ask him for to a town in the north and dies in nine years with it in a box.

And a facility named in writing.

And a farmer on the Vense road who walks to it, because that is what a farmer on the Vense road would do, and finds what is at the end of that walk, and comes back and tells a hundred and ninety houses that all know somebody.

She put the folder square on the table with two fingers.

”No,” she said.

***

”The registrar is not to be touched,” Sharlin said. ”Not promoted, not retired, not spoken to, not audited. He is to have an entirely uneventful year, and I want the northern post filled by somebody else this month so that nothing ever goes near him.”

Corvane’s eyebrows did not move, and he was surprised, and she knew he was surprised, and let him have it.

”He is the only thing in this that is honest,” she said. ”If he is moved, the families will know he was moved, and then it stops being twenty-six people asking a clerk and starts being a thing that was covered up, and there is no recovering from that word. Leave him exactly where he is being thorough.”

”And the quire?”

”It is a list of names of children who do not exist. Worth nothing, until it is in the hands of somebody who can put a facility against it.” She looked up. ”Nobody is ever to be in a position to do that. That is your standing instruction, and it is the only one I am going to repeat.”

”Understood.”

”The families are the matter.”

”Yes, High Priestess.”

And here it was, and she took the two breaths she always takes, because she had decided a very long time ago that she would never do this quickly and had held to it even when holding to it was theatre performed for an audience of one.

”They are to be permanently fixed,” she said.

Corvane wrote nothing down.

”I want it understood the way I mean it and not the way it will sound to whoever you give it to, so I am going to say all of it.” Sharlin’s voice did not change. ”I do not want a hall full of dead farmers. A hall full of dead farmers is four hundred more of them next Restday and a synod and a very great deal of paper. I want the asking to stop. I want it to become a thing that people in those districts do not do, for reasons they would find difficult to explain if you asked them, and I want that to take about a year, and I want no single event in it large enough that anybody outside the four districts ever hears a number.”

”That is a slower instrument.”

”It is the only one that works. Fear is not a hammer, Corvane, it is weather.” She turned a page she was not reading. ”Method is yours. I will not ask, and I do not want the detail, and I am not doing that to keep my hands clean; I am doing it because I will be asked under oath about this at some point in the next two hundred years, and I intend to be able to say I did not know.”

”Understood.”

”One condition.” She looked up, and this was the part she meant most and the part he would understand least. ”Not the children. Not one. Anywhere. If a man somewhere decides that the efficient way to make a village stop asking about its children is to be seen doing something to a child, I will have that man’s hands, and then I will have yours. Those children are an asset. I have eighty-eight of five hundred and forty-nine days, and I am not spending stock to solve a paperwork problem.”

Corvane stood.

”Some of them will get out,” he said. ”The first year of a thing like this is always leaky. Four halls, four districts, and people who have already shown they will walk six days.”

”I know.”

”Do you want them followed?”

Sharlin considered it, and the honest answer was that she was eighty-eight of five hundred at forty-one days, with a plan due on Shaolin and a navigator she did not have yet — one woman on a rubbish heap of a world who had walked a nation into a temporal fracture and out the other side of it without a map, and who had to be in a room Sharlin owned before the year was out — and that a handful of frightened farmers scattering across the southern approaches was, measured against any of that, nothing at all.

”No,” she said. ”Let them run. People who run stop talking.”

***

It was the only genuinely stupid thing she said that year, and she would not find that out for a long time.

Afterward she went back to the window and stood in the light with the figure still on the table behind her.

Eighty-eight.

Forty-nine days, and then the paper would be wrong again, and there is no version in which the paper is wrong. That arrangement had been made with her own mouth in her own chambers five thousand years ago, and she had understood every clause of it at the time and had signed it anyway, and the clauses had not altered and neither had she.

Somewhere down the mountain the bells went for the middle of Restday, and in four district halls on the southern approaches families who could not come on any other day of the week were standing in the light asking a clerk about their children.

Sharlin did not know that either.

She stood in the most beautiful room on that world and thought about a number.