Chapter 86: A Good Offer
The rider caught them at the second milestone, and he did it politely. Mataon was learning to dread that.
He came up at a walk from thirty yards back, so that they would hear him arrive and have time to turn round. He stopped four horse-lengths short and got down before he said anything. Good coat. Good horse. A satchel across the body with a strap worn shiny.
"Mataon Gaael?"
"Yes."
"Coll Ithred. I’d like ten minutes and I’ll pay for them with the truth about why I want them."
"Go on."
"My family buys maintenance lines." He said it plainly. "I’ve ridden nine days to make you an offer on yours, and I’d have ridden fifteen. Ten minutes."
Barni sat down in the road and put his ears flat and left them there.
***
They did it on a wall, in the sun, because Ithred asked whether they could sit and Mataon said yes before he had worked out why he wanted to.
"Start with how you know my name."
"The quarterly return." Ithred took a folded sheet out of the satchel. "First of Ravenmark. Every new line in the country goes onto the central roll, and they publish the roll. Anybody can read it. I read it in the coffee house at Marrow Hill on the third with about forty other men who do what I do."
"Forty."
"On a slow morning." He handed the sheet over. "Yours was the largest new line north of the river this quarter. Two thousand two hundred. Second reason. Twenty-two years old office of record, no directory entry."
"You knew about the directory before you rode."
"I know about the directory better than you do." Ithred did not say it unkindly. "That office has four hundred and six lines out and it has never once sold one. Every other office in Deuna sells. They’re allowed to, they need the money, and a line in the hand at forty per cent is worth more to a district treasurer than a line on paper at a hundred that pays out over sixty years. That office holds all of them. It has held all of them for nineteen years."
Mataon put the sheet down on the wall very carefully.
"Say the offer."
"We buy your line from your office of record at a discount. Whatever they’ll take, and for a paper that old and that odd they’d take thirty." Ithred watched his own hands. "You’d then owe us instead of them. Our schedule is published. Half in hand, half against, same as anyone — but we discharge at the assessed sum we paid, not the sum on the instrument, and we cap additions. Boots and physician come out of our side."
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning two hundred years becomes about sixty. If you work, and you’d work, because a man with your reading is worth eleven coppers a day to us and not six."
"And the fourth reason?"
"Unchanged. We can’t touch that. Nobody can but the centre." He looked up. "I’m not going to pretend that away. Any child you have inherits, under us the same as under them. It’s the worst part of my trade and I’ve stopped having the argument with myself about it."
Mataon sat and looked at the road for a while.
It was a good offer. That was the difficulty. A good offer, made in daylight, by a man who had ridden nine days and told him the truth in the first sentence and had not once said the word *unfortunate*.
Sixty years instead of two hundred. Eleven coppers instead of six. A creditor with an address, a published schedule, and a name over a door in Marrow Hill.
A creditor with an address.
He heard himself breathe out.
"Say the second half," he said.
Ithred did not ask what he meant. That was its own answer.
"If we hold your line, we’re your office of record."
"And my Subject’s Query goes to you."
"And I’d answer it inside a week, because we’ve got a form. Ours. Prescribed by us, printed by us, issued eleven times in my father’s life." Ithred took another paper out and put it on the wall. It was a certificate of discharge, blank, with a house seal at the foot. "That’s the thing you asked Sarrow for. I’d have posted it to you the day the query landed and it would have been a complete and honest answer and your query would be closed and satisfied and gone."
"And the note of failure never happens."
"No."
"And the central roll is never told that an office with four hundred and six lines out has no address."
"No," said Coll Ithred. "It’s told that a subject asked a reasonable question and a reputable house answered it promptly. That’s what I’d want said about me."
Barni had not moved.
"You’ve thought about this for nine days," Mataon said.
"I’ve thought about it for nine days and I still can’t tell whether I’m doing you a kindness or removing your only weapon, and I’ve decided I don’t have to be able to tell. I sell relief. Sometimes it’s also a leash." Ithred picked the blank certificate up and put it away. "Now the part you’re not going to like."
"There’s more."
"I don’t need you to agree."
The road noise went on. A cart somewhere behind them. Nothing changed in the light.
"Say that again."
"A line is money owed to an office, and money owed to an office belongs to the office." He said it without any relish at all, in the flat voice Mataon had heard from Rethe for five hours. "So they can sell it. They’ve never had to ask the subject and they never will, because the subject isn’t a party to it. He’s the thing being paid about."
"Then why ride nine days."
"Because I’d rather buy a line off a man who’s been told than one who finds out from a slip in the post." Ithred stood up. "And because if you tell me no, I want to have heard you say it. I’ll still make the offer to your office of record. I’d be a fool not to. But I’ll have heard you."
"Then hear it."
"Go on."
"No."
Ithred nodded once, and did not argue, and did not look surprised.
"Reason?"
"Because sixty years of my life is worth less than one letter that has to be written down." Mataon stood up too, and his hands were steady and he noticed that and let it be. "You’d give me a better creditor. I don’t want a better creditor. I want the record to say that there is a body in this country holding four hundred and six people at an address that does not exist, and the only way to make it say that is for somebody to try to write to it and fail."
"That’s an expensive sentence."
"Two hundred years and a child I don’t have. I’ve costed it."
Coll Ithred put his satchel back over his shoulder.
"I’ll tell you two things for nothing and then I’ll go," he said. "First. That office has never sold a line in nineteen years and forty men in a coffee house at Marrow Hill think that’s because the paper is bad. I don’t. I think it’s because whoever holds that seal doesn’t want a second party looking at his ledger, and I’d very much like to know why, and I’m not going to find out by being told."
"And second?"
"Second." He gathered the rein. "You’ve got sixty days on that query. A sale takes about forty if the office moves at all, and about four if it wants to. If they hear what you’ve done and they want your query dead, they can have it dead in a week and it’ll cost them nothing, because I am not the only house on the roll and there are men in that coffee house who would not have ridden nine days to tell you first."
Mataon did not say anything for a moment.
"Why did you?"
"Because my grandfather was a line," said Coll Ithred. "Third reason. Took him nineteen years to clear it and the house has got his name on it. I’d rather you knew who you were saying no to."
He got up and turned the horse and went, and did not look back, and about forty yards on he lifted one hand flat, palm out, the way Orvek had at the border.
[The north-east road — 16 Ravenmark, 334 A.Z. — Day 183]
[Offer received and refused: House Ithred, Marrow Hill. Purchase of maintenance line.]
[Consent of subject NOT REQUIRED for the sale of a maintenance line.]
[If sold: office of record changes. Subject’s Query passes to the buyer and can be answered.]
[Estimated time to sale: forty days at ordinary speed. Four if the office wants it.]
[Query SQ-334-Sarrow-11 — day 1 of 60.]
[Feat recognised — reading the second half of an offer before it was made]
[PER +1 → 39]
[Level 33 — held]
[STR 21 · AGI 19 · END 30 · INT 38 · PER 39 · WIL 43]
[Reserved Mana: 7 — First Exception, open, day 142]
***
They made four more miles and camped early because Orvek’s leg had had a long day and nobody said that was the reason.
"You want to talk about it," Mataon said.
"Not especially." Barni was watching the road they had come up. "I want to tell you one thing and then eat."
"Go on."
"That was the best man you have met in this country and he came to buy you, and both of those are true, and you will meet him again." The ears came up. "Now. Sixty days, and they can kill it in four. What’s the arithmetic?"
"The arithmetic is that I don’t have sixty days. I have as many days as it takes for somebody who has never sold a line in nineteen years to find out that a line of his is asking questions."
"How long, then?"
"The quarterly return went out on the first," Mataon said. "The minute went to the roll on the thirteenth. If he reads the roll like Ithred reads the roll, he already knows."