Chapter 83: Thirteen Clauses
He went back in at half past one with thirteen clauses left and a plan he did not like very much.
Rethe was already seated. She had eaten at the table and cleared it. The folder sat squared to the edge exactly where it had been.
Orvek took the second chair again. Fenn was sharpening a pen.
"Clause forty-nine," she said.
He listened to it. Rethe read it twice without being asked. It was about the form of service if his address changed.
"I understand clause forty-nine. May I ask a question about it?"
"You may ask anything."
"Which offices receive a copy of this minute?"
Rethe did not look up. "The central roll. The originating office. This office keeps the third."
"Thank you. Clause fifty, please."
***
He asked one after each of them.
They were not clever questions. That was the whole of the method and he had worked it out on a bench in a corridor with his head against the plaster. Clever questions get objected to. Ordinary questions get answered.
Clause fifty was about the schedule of assessment.
"I understand clause fifty. Is the assessed sum itemised anywhere?"
"On the schedule attached."
"Is the schedule part of the instrument?"
"It is."
"Then does somebody read it?"
Rethe stopped with her thumb on the clause.
He watched her go and look at it, properly, the way the clerk downstairs had gone and got a book. She turned to the front of the folder, and then to the standing orders in a second binder on the shelf behind her, and she was gone eleven or twelve minutes and neither of them said a word while she was.
"Yes," she said, coming back. "An attached schedule forms part of the instrument, and every part gets read. It’s never come up in my career, because a schedule of one line gets read inside the clause and nobody notices."
"How many lines has mine got?"
"Forty-four."
"Then I’d like it read."
"You’re entitled to it." She sat down. "You’d have been entitled to it if you hadn’t asked, and I would have missed it, and I want that in the minute as well. Say it for the corner, please, Fenn."
The man in the corner said, without looking up: "The officer states that she would have missed it."
It took twenty-two minutes. Rethe unfolded the schedule and weighted the corner with an inkwell.
Forty-four names, each with a place of residence, a date of first claim, and a figure. Rethe read them the way she had read the clauses, at a speed a man could follow, and did not hurry the ones that were hard.
Hanne’s mother, who had been dead eleven years and was still on the schedule.
Tovan.
Isbet, whose figure was thirty silver, because she was recorded as a woman of forty-nine.
Two brothers with the same surname and dates four years apart. Somebody had gone back for the second one.
A child of six.
Mataon sat with his hands on the table and did not look away from the window once, because looking away is a thing a man does, and everything a man does in that room goes into the corner.
"Do you understand the schedule?" said Rethe at the end of it.
"I understand the schedule."
"Say the rest of it. You’re going to anyway."
"I understand that the forty-four names Officer Rethe has just read aloud are now recorded in a verbatim minute filed with the central roll, and that the minute cannot be amended by the office that raised the instrument."
Fenn turned a page over and kept writing. Rethe waited for him.
"Yes," said Rethe. "Clause fifty-one."
He got four more in before she said anything about it.
Clause fifty-three was the requirement that the originating office maintain a service address. He asked whether the office held a current directory entry. She checked. It did not. She said so out loud and the corner had it.
Clause fifty-six was the record of prior examinations. He asked how many examinations that office had held in nineteen years.
Rethe went and looked. She was gone longer this time.
"None," she said. "Four hundred and six instruments. No examinations. There has never been one, because nobody has ever presented."
"Is that irregular?"
"It’s unusual. Irregular is a word with a procedure attached to it and I’m not going to hand it to you."
"That’s fair."
"It’s also the first thing I’ve said today that I chose." She sat down and put her hands flat on the folder. "Do you know what you’re doing?"
"Yes."
"Say it. He writes it either way, so you may as well be the one who said it."
Mataon took a breath.
"There’s nowhere else in this country where a man with no standing can put a sentence into a document the state has to keep. You write everything down in here and nobody can change it afterwards. I’ve got no standing anywhere else in Deuna and I’ll have less once I sign. So I’m using the twenty minutes I’ve got."
"Yes," said Rethe. "That’s about the size of it."
"Are you going to stop me?"
"No."
"Why not?"
Officer Rethe looked at the window for a while.
"Because the procedure doesn’t have a lever for it," she said. "There’s no clause that says the officer may decline to answer a proper question about the document she is reading. I’ve looked. Not today. Years ago, for a different reason, about a different man. There isn’t one." She turned the page. "And because I’ve done this nine hundred times and it has always been the part of my work I could sleep on, and if it turns out that the careful thing can also be the useful thing, then I’d sooner find that out than not. Clause fifty-seven."
He signed at twenty past four.
There was no ceremony to it. She turned the last page and read the dispute procedure to him again because she was required to, and told him he had thirty days, and asked whether he wished to dispute today. He said no. She wrote that he had been asked and had said no.
Then she put the sheet in front of him and pointed at the line.
*I confirm that the instrument was read to me in full and that I understood each clause.*
"You can add nothing to that line," she said. "People try. It goes in as a defacement and the whole minute gets a note on it saying the subject attempted to qualify the signature, and it does you harm and no good at all."
"I wasn’t going to."
"I know. I’m required to say it."
He signed. His hand was steady and he noticed it being steady and disliked that too.
She countersigned it and dated it. Fenn brought the minute over and she checked it page by page for about ten minutes, longer than Mataon had expected, and initialled the foot of every sheet.
"Forty-one pages," she said. "Longest I’ve had. Most of them run to nine."
[Examination concluded — Sarrow, 13 Ravenmark, 334 A.Z. — Day 180]
[Instrument: 61 clauses, read in full. Schedule of 44 names, read in full.]
[Verbatim minute: 41 pages. Filed with the central roll. Copy to the originating office. Not amendable.]
[Classification: CONFIRMED. Mataon Gaael — registered subject, second reason, injury unmade good.]
[Assessed: 2,200 silver. Maintenance line: open.]
[Fourth reason: applies.]
[Feat recognised — the schedule read aloud]
[INT +1 → 38]
[Level 32 — held]
[STR 20 · AGI 19 · END 29 · INT 38 · PER 38 · WIL 42]
[Reserved Mana: 7 — First Exception, open, day 139]
***
They came out into the square at a quarter to five and the market stalls were down and the light had gone orange over the roofs.
Barni was sitting where they had left him, next to the bench, and did not get up.
"Well?"
Orvek sat down on the bench and stretched the leg out in front of him.
"It’s done."
"Say the rest."
Mataon stood on the step of the office of Sarrow with his hands in his coat and made himself say it in order, because he had learned two days ago that he was better at bearing a thing after he had said it out loud in front of somebody.
"I’m a registered subject of Deuna. Second reason. Two thousand two hundred silver on a maintenance line that pays down at three coppers a day. That’s two hundred years. I’ve checked it twice and I’d like somebody to tell me I’ve made an error."
"You haven’t."
"No." He watched a man dismantling a stall. "And the fourth reason applies. Which means that if I ever have a child, the child is born into it. Not because of anything the child does. Because of me."
Barni was quiet.
"I want you to know that I understood that clause," Mataon said. "I said so out loud. Twenty-nine. There’s a man in a room upstairs who wrote it down."
"And forty-four names went into the same document."
"Yes."
"And a child of six is on the central roll of Deuna this evening, by name, in a paper that the office that owns her cannot touch."
"Yes."
"Then say the whole sum," said Barni, "the way you’d say it if it were somebody else’s."
Mataon breathed out.
"I traded a child I don’t have," he said, "for a child who exists."
Orvek wrote on the slate and turned it round, and did not hold it up long, and put it away again immediately.
*Her name is in it now. Keep it there.*