Chapter 88: She Asked...
Coldwell was four days east and it rained on three of them.
It was a bigger town than Vellow and it sat where two roads met. There was a walled yard on the north side where the ground went up.
The undertaker’s premises were the second building from the gate, because that is how those things are arranged everywhere.
The undertaker was a woman of about forty called Bethen Corr, and her father had held the licence before her, and her father had been dead six years.
"Nine years back," she said. "I’d have been an apprentice. I’d have carried."
"Do you keep his books?"
"I keep everything of his. It’s a licence business. You can be asked about a burial forty years after the fact and I have been." She wiped her hands. "Who?"
"Trethe Marn."
Bethen Corr stopped wiping her hands.
"You’d better come in," she said.
The book was cloth-bound and the entries were in a square upright hand, and she found it without the index because she did not need the index.
*Marn, Trethe. Of this parish. 21 Ravenmark, 325.*
*Account settled 19 Ravenmark by the office of record, in coin, eleven silver four.*
And then a second line, in the same hand, further along, under a column headed *Extras*.
*Stone and cutting, three silver two. Paid separate. Same day, same man.*
"He paid for the stone," Mataon said.
"He did."
"Was that usual?"
"No." She had not sat down either. "The line pays for the ground and the box and the carrying. It doesn’t pay for a stone, because a stone isn’t maintenance, a stone’s a thing your people buy you. She had a son, and the son couldn’t, and I know that because I was there when he said so, and he said it standing about where you are."
"And the man from the office paid it."
"The man from the office paid it, and he paid it separate, out of a different purse, and my father wrote *paid separate* because my father wrote down everything that was odd." Bethen Corr turned the book round. "And I’ve had that page open in my head for nine years and never once had anybody to say it to."
***
They went up to the yard in the rain.
Fourth row from the wall. A small stone, weathered the way they go.
He had prepared himself for a name and two dates. He had got that far and no further.
*TRETHE MARN*
*325*
*SHE ASKED*
He stood in front of it for a long time.
Barni had come up the row behind him and did not say anything, and did not sit down, and after a while Mataon noticed that the silence had gone on longer than Barni’s silences went on.
Orvek took his hat off. He had not done that at the border, or at the office, or at the examination.
"Say something," Mataon said, eventually.
"No," said Barni.
"Why not?"
"Because whatever I say you’ll write down and use, and this one isn’t for that."
Bethen Corr came up the row with an oilskin over her head about ten minutes later, because she had decided something on the way and wanted to say it before she changed her mind.
"There’s a scrap," she said.
"A scrap."
"Marlow did the cutting. He’s dead as well, but his wife’s alive and she’s ninety and she’s kept his order box, because he kept it and she keeps what he kept." She pulled the oilskin round. "Men who cut stone don’t take words off a customer’s tongue. They make you write it down. If you write it wrong that’s on you, and if they cut it wrong that’s on them, and they have that argument once and then they never have it again."
"So there’s a paper."
"There’s a paper with two words on it in the hand of the man who paid, and I have seen it, because Marlow showed my father, because neither of them had ever cut a stone for an office before and they wanted to know what they thought about it."
Mataon breathed out slowly and did not move.
"Mrs Marlow is at the end of the lane past the smith," said Bethen Corr. "And I’ll come with you, and I’ll tell you now that I’d rather be in bed."
The lane past the smith took twenty minutes in the wet.
They did it the way Souk had done it eleven days earlier, and neither of them knew that, and it took two hours.
Bethen Corr was the witness with no interest. The old woman turned out the order box herself, on her own table, at her own speed, and would not be helped. There were about ninety scraps in it in fifty years of handwriting.
She found it fourth from the bottom.
A quarter-sheet, folded twice, with a smudge of thumb at the corner where a man had held it while the ink was wet.
*She asked*
Two words. No punctuation. No signature.
Mataon read it and made himself do the next part properly instead of the way he wanted to.
"Mrs Marlow. I’m not going to touch that."
"You can hold it, boy."
"No." He put his hands behind his back, and had a brief and unwelcome sense of Souk somewhere doing the same thing. "I’d like Mrs Corr to describe it out loud, and I’d like her to write down what she says, and I’d like you to say that it’s yours and that it’s been in that box since your husband put it there, and then I’d like to make one copy of the letters and leave the paper on your table where it is."
"Why?"
"Because if I take it, it’s a paper a foreigner found in a house," Mataon said. "If it stays here, it’s a paper that a licensed undertaker described, that a stonemason’s widow has kept for nine years, and that I have never touched."
The old woman looked at him for a moment.
"You’re the one from the roll," she said. "The two-thousand one. It was round the market on the last order day."
"Yes."
"Then don’t be clever with me and be quick, because I’m ninety." She pushed the scrap an inch towards the lamp. "Copy it."
He copied it four times, and Bethen Corr wrote out the description, and all three of them signed each sheet, and the scrap stayed on the table.
They came out into the lane at half past nine.
"You’ve been walking wrong for an hour," Barni said.
"I know."
"Say it."
"He kept a book." Mataon stopped in the road. "Four hundred and six of them, and never an address on one, and not a word to anybody in nineteen years. And then he rode to Coldwell in the rain and paid eleven silver four for a woman’s funeral. And then he paid three silver two out of a different purse for a stone the law didn’t ask for. And he wrote *she asked*, and he didn’t sign it."
"And?"
"And I have spent four months building a man who does not exist. Somebody comfortable. Somebody who has stopped noticing." He put his hand flat on the wall. "That’s not him. That’s a man who is keeping count."
Barni was quiet.
"You’ll want to be careful with this," he said at last.
"Go on."
"It would be very easy to like him now." The ears flattened and did not come back up for a while. "You’ve been carrying a set of scales for two years and you’ve got very good with them, and I want you to notice that the man just put a weight on your side of them and paid three silver two for it, nine years before you got here."
"You think it was aimed?"
"No," said Barni. "I think a man who has been alone with a thing for nineteen years will take any hand that comes. And I think that’s worse."
[Coldwell — 24 Ravenmark, 334 A.Z. — Day 191]
[Burial of Trethe Marn, 21 Ravenmark 325. Account settled 19 Ravenmark by the office of record, in coin, eleven silver four.]
[Extras: stone and cutting, three silver two. PAID SEPARATE. Not a maintenance charge. Not required by law.]
[Inscription: TRETHE MARN · 325 · SHE ASKED]
[Order scrap held by Mrs Marlow, Coldwell, in the second hand. Described, witnessed, copied four times, NOT REMOVED.]
[Level 33 → Level 34]
[Stat points available: +3]
[Basis: correcting a portrait of an adversary against the evidence, at cost to the portrait]
[INT +1 · PER +1 · WIL +1]
[STR 21 · AGI 19 · END 30 · INT 39 · PER 40 · WIL 44]
[Reserved Mana: 7 — First Exception, open, day 150]
[Query SQ-334-Sarrow-11 — day 9 of 60]
***
They stayed two nights at Coldwell because the rain came on properly and because Mataon wanted a day with the copies and a table.
On the second evening Orvek put the slate down in front of him with one line on it and went to bed without waiting to see it read.
*Trethe Marn asked the big question and it cost her nothing, because she died first. You asked the small one. Do not swap them.*
Mataon sat with that for about an hour.
Then he wrote it out on the back of the fourth copy, in his own hand, and put the date on it, because he had begun to suspect that he was going to need to be reminded of it by somebody who was not there.