Chapter 15 The Report

Hesper Quill had been writing the same report for three days, and it was the worst thing she had ever written.

It was not the prose. Her prose was excellent. It was clear and dry and every sentence did one job, the way a good column of figures did. The trouble was that every sentence in it was true, and when you put them all together they described something that could not exist.

She sat in her office in the north gallery with the door locked and the shutters closed and a lamp lit in the middle of the afternoon, and read it through again from the top.

The registration stone, four hundred and twelve years old, cracked at palm height. Capacity exceeded. Two tally glasses reduced to dust. One bullock scale, rated to a ton, destroyed by a meat cleaver resting on it. The cleaver itself, which no person had been able to lift, including the Knight-Captain of Aldmere, an orc warlord, thirty-three members of five orc clans, and the Senior Auditor of the Adventurers' Guild.

A Brood Tyrant, Level 236, killed alone in under an hour by a man with two lamps.

Brakka Ironjaw, warlord of the Red Steppe, Level 479 by the Treaty delegation's own records. Laid unconscious by a single open-handed blow. Witnesses: thirty-one, all agreeing, several in tears.

The Countess Elodie Vane, Level 511, one of the five oldest predators in the kingdom, whose compulsion had once stopped a cavalry charge at Varrow Bridge. Compulsion failed. Twice. After feeding, the Countess had been rendered unconscious, and then, by the reports of the Watch and half the night market, had spent three days apparently happy.

And the subject's own account, given calmly, while sitting on a stool. One creature matching the description of a Ruin Wyrm per month, approximately. Since the age of nine. A Ruin Wyrm, according to the Guild's own bestiary, was a calamity-tier beast, ranked above Gold, below nothing that had a name. Nine had been killed in the Guild's recorded history, and every one of those kills had cost lives. The subject estimated his own total at a couple of hundred, give or take.

Below all that, the conclusion. Ledger reading: Level 1.

Hesper put the report down and looked at the wall.

* * *

She had tried everything.

She had tried assuming he was lying, and he was not. She had appraised him three more times, through a door, through a window and once, which she was not proud of, through a spyglass from the Guild roof. Each time she got the same thing. Level 1. Farmhand. Then the smooth dark gap, and the nosebleed. She had gone through four handkerchiefs and Mrs Ostry had begun to look at her with what might have been concern.

She had tried assuming the stones were faulty, and they were not. She had sent the dust from the tally glasses to the College for testing, and the College had sent back a short, angry letter asking what she had done to them.

She had tried, briefly, assuming she was going mad. But Maud had seen the scale, and Lark Hollis had seen the cleaver, and half of the Weir had seen the slap. If she was mad, she had a great deal of company.

So that left the Ledger itself.

On the third night, at about one in the morning, she had gone down to the Guild archive with a lamp and a key she was not strictly supposed to have, and pulled out every book on the Ledger she could find. Most of them were useless. Rhapsodies about the Divine Accounting. Sermons. A bad poem. But at the back of the bottom shelf, behind a box of old receipts, there was a thin grey treatise that nobody had opened in two hundred years. On the Three Runes, by a Ledger-keeper called Corvin Thale.

She had read it standing up, by lamplight, in the cold.

Thale's argument was very simple, the way true things often were. The Ledger did not record a level as a word, or a picture, or a feeling. It recorded it as three runes. Each rune could show one of ten marks. Three runes, ten marks each. That was why the cap was nine hundred and ninety-nine. Not because the gods had set a limit. Because there was no fourth rune.

Thale had then asked, in a short final chapter, what would happen if a person somehow went past it.

He had answered his own question in a single paragraph. Hesper had read it eleven times. She could have recited it.

The Ledger would not break. The Ledger would count on. Nine hundred and ninety-nine would become a thousand. But a thousand cannot be written in three runes. The leading mark would be lost, as a wheel loses the count of its turns, and the runes would show what remained. A man of a thousand would read as nothing. A man of a thousand and one would read as one.

Thale had finished: This is of course a curiosity of no practical consequence, as the cap is unreachable. I record it only for the sake of completeness.

Hesper had put the book down very carefully on the reading desk, and gone back up to her office, and sat down, and thought about it until the sun came up.

* * *

It was a reasonable answer.

That was the worst of it. It was the only reasonable answer. Every other explanation needed the stones to be broken, or a dozen witnesses to be lying, or the laws of the world to have quietly stopped working in one young man's vicinity. This explanation needed only one thing, and it was the thing he'd told her himself. That he had been killing calamities in his barn since he was nine years old, once a month or so, for seventeen years.

She did the arithmetic. She did it on paper, carefully, using the Guild's own estimates for the experience granted by a calamity-tier kill, which were rough, and which she rounded down at every stage, out of caution and something close to fear.

This version was copied from where the story's author publishes it without consent; the official page supports their writing.

He hadn't stopped at a thousand.

By the most conservative figures she could justify, he had gone past a thousand before he was fifteen. Then he had kept going. She stopped calculating at the point where the number would have needed a fifth rune, because her hand had started to shake and she did not want to spoil the page.

Level one.

"Oh, shit," said Hesper Quill aloud, to the empty office. She did not swear. She had not sworn since she was eleven.

Then Hesper Quill, Senior Auditor of the Adventurers' Guild of Harrowgate, who had once corrected the Royal Treasury's annual accounts by eleven copper and received a personal letter of thanks from the Master of Coin, opened the Guild's master ledger to a blank page, put her face down into it, and screamed.

It was a long scream. The ledger muffled most of it. Not all.

When she sat up again there was a knock at the door.

"Miss Quill?" It was Maud. "Everything all right?"

"Perfectly, thank you, Maud."

A pause.

"Only I heard..."

"I dropped something," said Hesper. "On my foot. A large book."

Another pause.

"Right you are, Miss Quill," said Maud, in the voice of a woman who had been a stone attendant for twenty years and knew precisely what she had heard. Her footsteps went away down the gallery.

Hesper looked down at the master ledger. There was a smudge of ink on the blank page in the shape of her nose. She tore the page out, folded it very small, and burned it in the lamp.

* * *

The second thing she found that week, she found by accident. Which was to say, by doing her job.

The Guild paid bounties for bandits through the Crown offices. Every chit had to be reconciled. Cutter Haines's eight gold, paid out at the river office a fortnight ago, had gone through the Crown land and revenue ledgers on its way, and Hesper had gone down to the Land Office to reconcile it. While she was there, out of a habit she had never been able to break, she had asked the clerk for the revenue file on the district of Thornfell.

The clerk was a young man called Edwin Pell who had been in love with her for two years and did not know she knew. He brought her the file without asking why.

It was very thin. Thornfell was a small place. Forty-odd holdings, tax assessed at six gold each, the same for a hundred years. Then, two months ago, a revision. Three holdings past the creek line reassessed at two hundred gold each. Marsh Hold. The Corran place. The Selby place.

The revision order was sealed with black wax and a tower. By authority of the Lord Chancellor.

Hesper turned the page.

Six weeks before the revision, the Corran place and the Selby place had both been sold, by the distant cousins who had inherited them, to the same buyer. Dunmore and Vey, Factors, of the first ring. Twelve gold each. A fair price for empty frontier land, at six gold a year in tax. A very good price, once the tax was two hundred.

Only Marsh Hold had not been sold. Marsh Hold had an owner living on it.

She asked Edwin, very casually, if the Land Office had a file on Dunmore and Vey.

The Land Office had a thick one. Dunmore and Vey had bought fourteen frontier holdings in the past eight years, all along the edge of the Greywild, all empty, all just before a tax revision. The purchases were paid by Crown drafts. The drafts were drawn on an account at the Treasury. Edwin did not have the name on the account, he said, only the number, but he could tell her it was one of the household accounts. The great households.

Hesper thanked him and asked him to make her a copy of the Thornfell file, and the Dunmore and Vey file, and to say nothing to anyone. He went red to the ears and said he would.

That night she went through the Guild's own records of the core trade. The Guild licensed every core sold in the city. She found what she was looking for in the margins of the licence register, in the place where a careless clerk had copied a buyer's name instead of his agent's. For nine years the Lord Chancellor's household had been buying unlicensed crystals from frontier traders. Warm ones. Bright ones. Brought in from out east, along the Greywild.

She sat back in her chair.

She did not have proof. She had a pattern. A pattern was not proof. A pattern was what you took to a magistrate if you wanted to lose your post and your pension and possibly your liberty, the way her father had. She knew exactly how that went. She had sat through every day of it, at eleven years old, in the second row.

But she knew what it was. Somebody very powerful wanted the frontier empty. They were emptying it one farm at a time, with a pen. And one farm hadn't emptied, because a stubborn young man with a meat cleaver had walked six days to the capital to pay a tax that had never been meant to be paid.

* * *

She wrote two reports.

The first she wrote fair, on Guild paper, and took to Guildmaster Ashby's office on the fourth morning. It was two pages long. It said that the subject, T. Marsh, had been measured by three separate instruments, and that all three had confirmed a level of one. It said that the registration stone's fracture was consistent with age-related fatigue in the heartglass, and recommended it be replaced. It said that the measuring room breakages had been recorded as calibration failures. It said, in a careful sentence that took her an hour, that the Junction Four fee had been corrected according to the fee schedule, as was standard. It recommended that the file be closed.

Every word of it was true. She had made sure of that.

Ashby read it in silence. He read it twice. Then he looked up at her, and smiled the smile that did not reach his eyes.

"A data error," he said.

"As you said, Guildmaster."

"Good." He signed the bottom and put it in a drawer. "Good work, Quill. Close it."

She closed it.

The second report was forty pages long. She wrote it in her room at Mrs Ostry's, in her own hand, over two nights, with the copies Edwin had made her pinned inside the back cover. It contained everything. The stones, the scale, Thale's treatise, her arithmetic. Dunmore and Vey. The tower seal. The core register. She sealed it with her own seal and locked it in the iron box under her bed, where she kept her father's letters.

* * *

She came down to breakfast at the seventh bell the next morning, as she always did, with a book under her arm.

She did not sit at the end of the table.

She went halfway down the far side and sat down next to Tobin Marsh, who was on his second bowl of porridge. He looked up, surprised, with his spoon halfway to his mouth. Across the table, the clerks looked at each other. At the head of the table, Mrs Ostry's eyebrows went all the way up and stayed there.

Hesper opened her book. She didn't read it.

She thought about telling him. She had thought about little else since the Land Office. Your tax was rigged. Someone wants your farm. Someone has been buying the frontier for nine years, one empty holding at a time, and you are the only one who didn't sell.

But she did not have proof. And he would go and do something about it. She knew that as surely as she knew her own columns. He would pick up that cleaver and walk straight to the palace, politely, and ask to see the Lord Chancellor, and they would hang him for it, and he would let them, because he would not want to break anything.

So she would get proof first. Then she would tell him.

"Morning, Miss Quill," he said, a bit cautiously.

"Good morning, Mister Marsh."

He ate a spoonful of porridge. She turned a page she hadn't read.

"Mister Marsh," she said. "What does first frost look like? Where you're from?"

He thought about it, the way he thought about everything, properly, before he answered.

"White on the paddocks before sunrise," he said. "Crunchy underfoot. The chooks hate it. The apple tree goes black at the edges, overnight, like it's been burned. And the air smells of iron." He smiled a little. "It's pretty, actually. If you're not worried about it."

"Thank you," said Hesper.

She wrote it down, later, in the brown ledger. Not in the columns. In the margin, small, where nobody else would ever look.