Administrator Of A Broken World

The latch was where it had always been, and his hand found it before he did.

Four days southeast, and the last of it on foot because the horse would not take the root wall. Frost had got into the ferns and turned them the colour of old rope. Mataon knelt, cleared the snow with his glove, and felt the wood give under his thumb.

Chk.

The strip of warm air came up at him, and it still smelled of boiled roots and wet cloth and too many people in too little room.

Barni went through the opening without surrendering anything, exactly as he had the first time.

"You could try," Mataon said.

"I could not."

Someone had put a lamp on the customs shelf. Mataon laid the Surveyor’s Spear down beside it, and his belt knife, and then, because the rule was the rule, the loose stones from his coat pocket. He had four. He had no idea when he had started doing that again.

The refuge had grown. Two more chambers had been cut in the eighteen months, and a proper flue, and a doorway with a hide across it that somebody had painted.

Raska met him at the second turn. Her ear had healed badly and she had stopped covering it.

"Four days," she said. "In Frostmere."

"Yes."

"You’ve never come in Frostmere."

"No."

She looked at him for a moment longer than was comfortable, and then stood aside.

Orvek was in the third chamber, sitting on a bench with a slate across his knees and a stone knife in his hand. He was older. Mataon had somehow not expected that.

He put the slate down and stood, and pressed one hand flat to his chest, and did not say the name. He had said it once, eighteen months ago, on a hillside, and it had cost him something he never got back.

"Orvek," Mataon said, for both of them.

They sat. Raska brought two bowls of something and put one in front of Barni without being asked, which told Mataon more about the last eighteen months than a report would have.

He had planned the order of it on the road and he abandoned the plan in the first minute.

"I need to ask you for something," he said. "It’s bad. I’m going to explain all of it before I ask."

Orvek turned the slate over and set the knife against it.

So Mataon explained. Article Nine, and the forty-four names, and the ninety years, and the three parties who may speak. He explained it slowly, and stopped when the knife stopped, and waited when Orvek needed to catch up.

The scratching was patient. Person. Chain. Then a line drawn hard through the chain.

"Yes," Mataon said. "Like yours. Forty-four of them."

Orvek scratched the danger mark and pointed at Mataon.

"That’s the part I have to explain."

He laid it out. To speak for the forty-four he had to be entered into Deuna. A registry subject was a classified thing, and a classified thing could not be a party to anything, and he was a party to something already.

Then he said the number out loud for the second time that week.

"Seven mana. Every day since Sylphenia. It’s the price of the exception that keeps the covenant from honouring your record."

Orvek’s hand went flat on the slate.

He had known about the eighteen. Everybody had watched Mataon go down in the moss that day. He had not known about the seven, and it was in his face for one second before he put it away.

Raska had gone absolutely still by the flue.

"There’s a lawful way out," Mataon said. "It’s written into the exception. It ends when you receive independent recognition from an authority you accept."

The knife moved.

Person. Then a small square with a line under it. That one meant a paper.

"Yes. A charter town. Hearthroot has a register and a roll and a magistrate at the Marches who honours it. If you’re recognised there, the exception closes lawfully, the seven come back, and I’m free to be entered."

Orvek looked at him and waited, because Orvek had always been better at waiting than Mataon was.

"And your protection stops working," Mataon said. "The covenant goes back to honouring what Deuna wrote about you. You’d be trading a thing that works for a piece of paper from a town Deuna has never heard of. That’s the trade. That’s the whole trade. I’m not going to dress it."

The chamber was warm and smelled of roots and nobody said anything for a while.

Then Orvek pulled the wrap off his thigh. He did it without ceremony, the way a man opens a cupboard he uses every day, and the geometric scar underneath was the same as it had always been. Four cuts and a closed figure, put there by somebody who was paid by the piece.

Behind Mataon’s sternum, for the first time in four Chapters of silence, Zahr said, "I know that shape."

Mataon went cold in a way that had nothing to do with the weather. He did not move his mouth.

"Say that again."

Nothing.

"Zahr."

Nothing at all, and not the ordinary nothing. The silence had a shut door in it.

Orvek was watching his face, the way he always had, reading a window he could not see.

Mataon shook his head once. It was the truest answer available.

The knife started again, and this time it went quickly, and Mataon had to lean in to follow it.

Person. His own mark, the one Orvek had used for him since the marked tree.

Then the chain.

Then Orvek set the end of the chain under Mataon’s mark, and looked up.

It was the same gesture. In the moss, eighteen months ago, Orvek had done exactly that to warn him what he was about to do to himself, and Mataon had gone ahead and done it anyway.

Now Orvek scratched the chain out and drew it again, under his own mark instead. Then he tapped it twice.

"No," Mataon said.

Orvek tapped it again.

"I said no. You’re not taking it back. That isn’t what I came here to ask and it isn’t something you can offer."

Orvek made a short sound in his throat, and drew the choice symbol, and put it in front of Mataon with the flat of the knife, hard enough that the slate rang.

Which was, Mataon thought, an extremely fair point, and he hated it.

"That’s not the same," he said. "I chose to file it. You never chose to be written down in the first place. If you take the weight back to make my arithmetic easier, then the whole thing was a favour, and it was never a favour."

Barni had not said a word since the second chamber.

Mataon noticed it the way you notice a clock that has stopped. He glanced over. Barni was lying with his chin on his paws and his eyes on Orvek’s scar, and his folded ears had gone back flat, and he did not look away when he was caught.

"Well," Barni said. "Go on and tell him the actual problem, since you’ve been polite for a quarter of an hour."

"Which actual problem."

"That you’d rather he refuse."

There was no answer to that, so Mataon did not make one.

Orvek wiped the slate with his sleeve.

Then he drew one thing, and turned it around, and it was not a symbol Mataon had seen from him before. A person mark, and beside it the small square with the line under it, and then a gate: two uprights and a bar.

He pointed at himself. Then at the gate. Then he stood up and picked up his staff.

"You want to walk in," Mataon said.

Orvek nodded once.

"You don’t have to be there. Anser can carry a letter and Kess can enter you from a—"

Orvek hit the slate with the flat of his hand, hard, and pointed at the gate again, and then at Mataon’s chest, and held it there.

Raska spoke from the flue, and her voice was flat and slightly rough.

"He’s not going to be written down by post," she said. "He’s been written down by post before."

Mataon sat in a warm room under a hill and understood, about two years too late, why the man he had freed had never once walked into the town he built.

"Right," he said. "Then we go together. And you can look at the book first, and you can look at every name in it, and if you don’t like what you see you can turn around at the gate and I’ll ride you back myself."

Orvek held out the stone knife, handle first.

Mataon took it, and drew the person mark, and left the space beside it empty, and gave it back.