Chapter 89: Three Days Before
They turned back west on the twenty-sixth. That surprised everybody, including him.
"There’s a third office at Marrow Hill," Barni said. "You’ve been talking about it for nine days."
"I know."
"And Ithred’s at Marrow Hill."
"I know that too."
"Then say the reason and stop enjoying yourself."
"Because a query needs a subject who can be found." Mataon shifted the pack. "Vellow served Trethe Marn’s query at an address that came back twice. Somebody at Sarrow is going to try to serve mine, and if the office ever does write, it writes to me, and if I’m four days east of the last place anybody saw me then I’m the one who can’t be reached, and the note gets made about the wrong man."
"That’s one reason."
"It’s the only one I’d write down."
"Say the other."
"Souk’s had ninety days and she’s fifteen into it and she’s better at this than she thinks." He looked at the road ahead of them. "If she found anything, she sent it to Sarrow, because Sarrow is where I told her I’d be. And she’d have sent it a fortnight ago and it’ll be sitting in a post house going stale while I walk around the east looking at gravestones."
***
The courier found them on the twenty-ninth, eleven miles short of Vellow, and he had been three days on the wrong roads and was in a filthy temper about it.
He would not hand the packet over until Mataon had said his own name, his line number and the date of his examination. Souk had evidently drilled it into him. Mataon approved of that so much he almost laughed.
Then he sat down on a milestone and read it.
Three fair copies of a witnessed record from a place called Dunnock Mill. A miller’s statement. A priest’s hand. A description of a door, a lock opened in nine seconds and declared, a table, a stool, a press with four shelves.
Seven years of unopened paper.
A seal in a drawer, in felt, bronze, seven characters, and *not removed*.
And on the second sheet, copied out twice in two different hands and initialled by three people:
*Notification of classification. Subject: Mataon Gaael, of Hearthroot in the Marches.*
*1 Frostmere, 333.*
He read the date. Then he read the priest’s line under it, which said in careful plain words that the refounding at Hearthroot had occurred on the fourth of Frostmere.
Three days.
He sat on the milestone for a long time and did not say anything, and Barni let him.
Orvek read it over his shoulder and then went and stood in the road with his back to them. It was the most emotion Mataon had seen out of him since the gate at Hearthroot.
"Say it out loud," Barni said, eventually.
"The instrument is dated three days before the thing it says I did."
"Yes."
"The second reason is injury unmade good, and the injury they mean is the refounding. If the injury hadn’t happened yet when the paper was written, then the paper wasn’t written about it." He heard his own voice go flat and administrative and was grateful for it. "So the reason on my instrument is not the reason the instrument was made for. And the assessment rests on a cause that comes after it."
"In plain language."
"In plain language, if I put that in front of a hearing I win."
"How certain."
"Nine in ten." Mataon folded the sheet along its old crease. "There’s nothing clever in it. It’s a date. A hearing is free and I’ve got until the tenth of Frostmere to demand one, and if I demand one, I think they set the assessment aside."
"And then?"
"And then there’s no assessment."
"And then?"
"And then there’s no line."
Barni waited.
"And then there’s no subject," Mataon said. "And a Subject’s Query is a query about the terms of a subject’s maintenance, and I wouldn’t have any, and it lapses. Same as it lapsed for her. Not because I died. Because I got out."
They walked five miles without anybody saying anything.
Souk’s own letter was folded inside the third copy. He did not read it until they stopped. He had known what she would say from the second sheet onward and had wanted to be sitting down for it.
*I did not take the seal. You would have taken the seal, four months ago, and you would have been right that it was the fastest thing to do and wrong about everything after that, and I have thought about this every day since and I am still not certain I did the correct thing, only that I did the thing you would do now.*
*The date is on the second sheet. I want you to notice that I have not told you what to do with it.*
*I am going back to the hedge. Somebody bought seven years of paper and has not come back for it and a man who buys seven years of paper means to be alive for seven years. — S.*
He read it twice and put it away.
"She’s not going to tell me," he said.
"No."
"You’re not going to tell me either."
"No," said Barni, "and I want you to understand that this is not me being wise. I don’t know. I have turned it over for five miles and I do not know, and if I said a thing now it would be because the silence was uncomfortable."
Orvek sat down beside them and got the slate out, and wrote, and turned it round, and this one was long for him.
*I would take the hearing.*
"Would you."
*Yes. I know what you are choosing and I have been on the other side of it for eleven years and I would take the hearing and I would not think about it for very long.*
"And the forty-four?"
Orvek wiped it and wrote again, slower.
*You put the forty-four on the roll on the thirteenth and nobody can undo that. The note adds one more thing. Not nothing. One more thing.*
He held it up until Mataon had read it twice, and then wrote three words underneath.
*I am biased.*
***
That night Mataon did not write anything. He had not missed a night in eighteen months.
He got the copies out and squared them and put the pen next to them and sat with his hands on the table of a bad inn at the edge of nowhere for about two hours, and then put the pen away and went to bed.
In the morning Barni said, "You didn’t file."
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because I read it at three in the afternoon on a milestone and I wanted to file it by four," Mataon said. "And I have never once been right about anything I wanted to do within an hour of reading it."
[The Vellow road — 29 Ravenmark, 334 A.Z. — Day 196]
[Received: witnessed record, Dunnock Mill. Miller, priest, three fair copies. Seal in situ, not removed.]
[The instrument against Mataon Gaael is dated 1 Frostmere 333. The refounding at Hearthroot occurred 4 Frostmere 333.]
[The stated cause post-dates the instrument by three days.]
[Assessment dispute: free, available until 10 Frostmere 334 — Day 210. Fourteen days.]
[If the assessment is set aside: no line · no subject · SQ-334-Sarrow-11 LAPSES.]
[Feat recognised — reading a decisive document and not acting on it for one night]
[WIL +1 → 45]
[Level 34 — held]
[STR 21 · AGI 19 · END 30 · INT 39 · PER 40 · WIL 45]
[Reserved Mana: 7 — First Exception, open, day 155]
[Query SQ-334-Sarrow-11 — day 14 of 60]
They went on toward Vellow in a hard wind, on the first of Frostmere, and Mataon worked at it the whole way and got nowhere, because the two halves would not go on the same scale.
On one side: two hundred years, and a child not yet born, and the fourth reason, and being a thing that is paid about.
On the other side: a note.
A note that does nothing. A note the clerk at Vellow had said he had never once seen make the slightest difference to anybody. A note that sits on a roll among a great many notes, being true.
"You’re doing the arithmetic," Barni said, some hours later.
"There’s no arithmetic in it. That’s the trouble. It isn’t a sum, it’s a choice between two different kinds of thing, and I’ve been pretending for four days that if I stared at it long enough it would turn into a sum."
"And now?"
"Now I’m going to stop pretending, and go and stand in front of a gravestone I’ve already seen once, and decide there."
Barni thought about that.
"That’s the first religious thing you’ve ever said."
"It’s not religious. It’s evidentiary."
"Mataon."
"Yes."
"It’s a bit religious."