92 - Served

Hesper read it through twice at the pace of a woman reading a form she has read four hundred times, and then took out a pencil and changed one thing.

"Your hour is wrong."

"That is the hour I wrote it."

"It wants the hour it is served." She put a small even figure over the top of his and initialled beside it. "A compulsion runs from service. Date it from your kitchen table and you have given them a night for nothing."

"Nine days."

"Nine days from the hour on that line, and the line now says the right hour."

She read it a third time, which she had not done with anything of his before.

He had written it twice. A statement is filed in duplicate and the duplicate has to be in the same hand, because a Warranted's word is the instrument and a copyist's word is not. Four hours for the first and two for the second, at the kitchen table, with the lamp turned down and his sister asleep four feet away behind a curtain that has been a wall in that room since she was seven.

Eleven hundred words. It set out what the Ward Nine variance is, and what year it was carried from, and what the authority line on two hundred and six dockets says, and what a works return is, and which office used to make one.

It did not allege a single thing about anybody.

That was the part that had taken the four hours. Every sentence in it was a thing he had seen with his own eyes, and every sentence in it had already been sealed, burned, classified or dismissed at some point in the last year. The ward archive is shut. His transcriptions are behind an order signed by a boy he has known since they were nine. The tags in the rack are two hundred feet under a ward and might as well be on the moon.

None of that matters now, and it took him a fortnight to believe it. A Warranted writes down what he saw, and it goes into the record, and there is no document behind it because he is the document.

He had written the office was abolished in the fourth paragraph and then struck it out. The schedule says discontinued. His word sounds like a man with a grievance and theirs sounds like a line in a book, so he used theirs. There is not one adjective anywhere on the page. That took him about an hour on its own.

It ended with four lines that were not an argument. A Warranted of Ward Nine required the disposition of the Ward Nine variance disclosed, by name, in full, by the House that holds the ward's paper.

"It is a good instrument," Hesper said.

"You have found something wrong with it."

"I have found nothing wrong with it. That is what I said."

She folded it into three, the way collectors fold everything, and put it in the flat pocket at the front of the satchel, face down, without any ceremony at all.

"I will take it."

"I can serve my own paper."

"You can. You will stand at that counter for an hour while a clerk goes to find somebody senior enough to receive it from a man they hold a file on." She got up off the folding stool and put her coat on. "Nobody has ever kept me waiting at a counter in my life."

Kalen looked at her.

"You want to do it."

"I have been a Freehand collector since I was twenty-five. I have served paper on eleven hundred people in this ward and every one of them was somebody's neighbour."

"And none of them was Chartered."

"None of them was Chartered."

* * *

They walked down through the ward in the middle of the morning and neither of them said anything worth writing down.

Hesper walks at the pace of somebody who has never once been late and has never once hurried. Kalen worked that out a year ago and has been matching it since.

Ash on the pavements, ash on the sills, ash in the gutters where the rain had put it. Two carts on Cinder Row and the gantry line turning quietly overhead, forty heads, greased once a month, forever, by a man with a can and a ladder. A man was up the ninth mast with a can as they went under it. He did not look down and there was no reason he should have.

They went past the tally shop, where the man behind the counter is missing the last two joints of three fingers and has become, over eleven years, extremely good at counting coins with the others.

Kalen has walked past that counter since he was nine. He looked at the hands now the way he has looked at them since a smelt yard in the summer, which is for about a second and a half and then not at all.

The Sedge Counting House is four streets outside Ward Nine and it is a good building kept well.

Everyone in it is polite. That is the first thing anybody in Ashfall says about the place, and it is entirely accurate, and it is not a complaint until you have been in there twice. There is a man at the door whose whole job is the door. There is a bench for waiting, and a stove behind the bench, and tea, and the tea is good, and a boy brings it round whether or not you are anybody.

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There were four people on the bench. A woman with a folded docket in both hands and a coat too thin for the season. Two carters from somewhere out on the north road with a manifest between them. An old man with nothing in his hands at all, who had probably been told to come back and had come back.

Eleven departments work above that hall, and every one of them does one correct thing to a number that arrives already wrong.

Kalen has been in that hall four times. The first time he had a bond application and no co-signer and eight days left on a notice. He sat on that bench for two hours and drank two cups of tea. Nobody was rude to him then either.

Tam was on the receiving counter.

He had been on it since the spring. He had a clerk's cuffs on now and the brass at his collar was a grade up from the brass he started with, and he saw the two of them come in from thirty feet away and did not do anything at all with his face.

"Kalen," he said.

"Tam."

"Hesper Vane, Freehand, Ward Nine." She put the paper on the counter face up and squared it with two fingers. "Service on the House. I will want the receipt in your hand and the hour on it."

She did not raise her voice and she did not lean on the counter. She said the words of service the way you say a thing you have said four thousand times, which is without any weight on any part of it. A clerk two counters down looked up and then looked away again.

That is the whole of the ceremony. Somebody says the sentence out loud and somebody else writes down that it was said. There is no seal on it and there is no oath.

There is a woman in a wool coat, a boy with good cuffs, and a book.

Tam read the header.

Then he read the whole of the first page, which he was entitled to do and which took him ninety seconds, and neither of them hurried him. A clerk went past behind him with a tray of dockets and said something about the weather and got nothing back.

"This has to be entered by a clerk of the house."

"You are a clerk of the house."

"I'm the clerk that's here," Tam said.

He got the book out and turned it round and wrote it in. His hand is a good hand, better than Kalen's, because somebody trained it. He blotted the entry and squared the book. He has a blotter now, and a rule, and a tray for the stamps. Then he stamped the receipt, and put the hour on it, and slid it across the counter, and kept his fingers on it for a second before he let go.

"You know what this is."

"I wrote it."

"I mean you know what it does to the day." He took his hand off it. "There are eleven departments in this building and by the fourth bell every one of them has a copy."

"That is the instrument."

"That's the instrument, Kalen," Tam said, and he was not arguing.

Kalen picked the receipt up and read the serial in the top corner, seven digits and a ward letter, in a running series, the way Sedge stamps everything.

It was in sequence. There was no gap in it at all.

He has spent eleven weeks looking at the gaps in a series like that one, and at what the gaps turned out to be, and at a girl's four hours of work on a strip bench matching them to a rubbing off a wall. Somewhere in that building a series was running correctly, and had been running correctly all morning, and would go on running correctly after everybody in it had gone home.

The Accord printed while he was still holding the paper.

STATEMENT ENTERED

Ashgrove, Kalen. Ward Nine. Warranted.

Disclosure compelled: Ward Nine variance,

carried 987, disposition.

A Chartered house shall answer within nine days.

NOTICE OF SERVICE

Statement of a Warranted entered to the record.

Credited to the maker.

Credited to the maker.

He had spent four years being paid half a day for work that took four. The Accord paid him for eleven hundred words in about a second and a half, and was not kind about it, and was not anything about it, and did not know what was in them.

He put both receipts in his coat with the ward-tag, because he keeps everything, and went out.

* * *

They got as far as the bottom of the steps.

It is a wide flight, eleven of them, worn in the middle the way stone goes when a building has been busy for a hundred and forty years, and there is a rail down one side that nobody uses. Hesper stopped on the second step from the bottom and turned round, which is how Kalen knew before he heard the door.

Tam came down with a paper in his hand and no coat on.

"They have lodged this."

"Already."

"It went to the ward office at the fourth bell." He was out of breath and doing his best not to be. "I am not supposed to bring it to you. I am supposed to put it in the box for the ward and it goes up in the morning."

"Then why have you brought it?"

"Because you'd have found out at the yard tomorrow with the gate shut," Tam said, "and you'd have had to work out what it was standing in the road, Kalen."

Kalen took it and read it.

It was one page and it was entirely correct. It observed that the Ashfall reclamation house had entered recoveries from the sealed lower floors of the Ashfall foundry under a clearance contract, and from Ward Four under a Chartered arrangement, and that both were substantial. It requested an inspection of the house's stock and its entries.

Any holder of a ward's paper is entitled to request that, and the ward office is obliged to act on it, and there is no part of it anybody could argue with in a room.

There was nothing in it about a statement. There was nothing in it about him. His name was not on it anywhere.

"Before we go on, that is not a legal answer," Hesper said.

"No. It is a work order."

The Accord printed on the step while he was still on the second page.

NOTICE OF SUSPENSION

Ashfall reclamation house, Ward Nine.

Holder: Quill, Sabra. Warranted.

Trading warrant suspended pending inspection.

Effective from the hour of entry.

Kalen read it twice, and then went back and read the request again, and Tam stood on the step above him with his arms at his sides and let him.

Two pieces of paper, in two hands, on a wet step.

One of them gave him nine days. The other one took the house in an hour. He had spent a year learning what Standing is worth and had never had it laid out on two sheets before.

Nine days for them.

One hour for the house.

"Pending inspection," Hesper said.

"When is the inspection?"

"There is no when. That is the whole of the instrument." She took it out of his hand, read it in two seconds, and gave it back the right way round. "An inspection is appointed when an inspector is free, and nobody has ever been made to say when an inspector is free."

"So the house is shut."

"The house is shut."

Tam was still standing there.

Kalen thought about eleven or twelve things he could have said, and did not say any of them, because the boy had come down eleven steps in his shirt with a paper he was not supposed to be carrying, and there is a thing you do not do to somebody who has just done that.

"Thank you for the hour," he said.

"It is not much of an hour."

"It is an hour."

He went back up through the ward the long way, along the far side of Cinder Row, because the short way goes past the yard gate.

The tally shop was shut for the middle of the day. A boy was chalking a delivery on the shutter and getting it wrong.

Four men on wages. A house that could not lawfully sell a bolt. Eleven weeks of recoveries standing in a shed nobody could open.

He did the arithmetic twice and got the same answer both times.

The house was shut and nobody had said for how long.

An inspection is appointed when an inspector is free.