Chapter 92: Three of Forty-Four
The answer to the quantum dispute came back on the sixteenth, eleven days after service, and every clerk in Sarrow knew about it before Mataon did.
He found that out because the queue told him.
"There’s a packet," said the barley woman, who had never spoken to him before. "Came up from Vellow this morning. My sister does the sorting."
"For me?"
"For you and about you and I’d say a good deal about somebody else." She handed him a cup he had not asked for and would not let him pay for it. "Go on, then. Everybody in this square has been waiting since ten."
***
He read it at the third counter with the supervisor beside him. She had to record that he had been given it and had read it.
She had also stopped pretending to be neutral about four days ago, and it showed.
It was four pages and it was written in the second hand.
*The office accepts ground one. The entry at line eleven records a claim against a person deceased in 323. The claim was extinguished at death. Its retention on the schedule is an error of the office.*
*The office accepts ground two. The subject at line twenty-nine is recorded at forty-nine years. The birth entry at Hearthroot gives thirty-four. The assessment rate is age-banded and the band applied is wrong.*
*The office accepts ground three. The claims at lines six and seven were raised four years apart and are returned under a single date. Two dates are correct.*
*The schedule is amended as set out at the foot. The assessment is reduced from two thousand two hundred silver to two thousand one hundred and fifteen.*
*The office is obliged to the subject for the correction. It was material and the office had not identified it.*
Mataon read it twice.
Then he put it down on the counter and stood with his hands on either side of it.
"Eighty-five silver," said the supervisor, quietly.
"Yes."
"Which off two hundred years comes to—"
"About eight." He did not need to work it out and she knew he did not. "Eight years off two hundred. I’ll be a hundred and ninety-two instead."
The supervisor made him take a chair after that, and he took it.
In Deuna the chair gets offered by people who have watched somebody go over. He had worked that out weeks ago.
"He conceded everything," Mataon said.
"He conceded everything in eleven days and did it in his own hand and did not argue a word of it." She turned the second page round. "I’ve had assessments disputed nine times in this office. Twice they were conceded. Both took a season and came back with a paragraph about how the subject had wasted public time."
"There’s no paragraph."
"There’s no paragraph."
"And the dispute?"
"Closed. Concluded in your favour on all three grounds, corrected on the record, and finished." She said the last word carefully. "You won. There’s nothing left to run and nothing left to fail to answer, and I’d like to say congratulations and I find that I can’t get it out."
Mataon looked at the amended schedule.
Forty-four names, three of them now with a line through the old figure and a new one beside it. Hanne’s mother struck out entirely. Isbet’s band corrected. Two brothers, two dates.
Forty-one untouched.
There was a fourth page and it was not part of the answer.
It was half a sheet, folded separately inside the packet, with no heading and no reference and no seal, and the supervisor had not opened it because it was addressed by name.
*Mataon Gaael.*
He opened it at the counter and did not go outside with it. Some weeks ago he had decided to stop doing things in private that he could do in front of a witness.
There was one line on it.
*Three of forty-four. Ask about the other forty-one.*
That was all. No signature. The same hand as the four pages, which was the hand that had written his own notification back in Sylphenia.
He stood there for a while.
"What is it?" said the supervisor.
He turned it round so that she could read it, and she read it, and then she read it again, and then she sat down on her own side of the counter. Supervisors did not do that in front of a subject.
"That’s not procedure."
"No."
"That’s not anything. There’s no form that goes in. He didn’t have to write it and he can’t be made to answer for it and if you put it in front of the roll they’d say a man wrote you a note." She was still looking at it. "What does he want?"
"He wants me to ask about the other forty-one."
"Why?"
"Because he can’t," said Mataon.
***
They went out into the square and it was cold and clear and the stalls were up.
"Say it in order," Barni said.
"He’s held four hundred and six people for nineteen years and nobody has ever asked him a question about one of them." Mataon walked. "Nobody presents. Nobody disputes. Nobody has ever had the standing. And a quantum dispute is the only instrument in this country that makes an office of record go through its own schedule line by line and say out loud what’s in it."
"And he conceded in eleven days."
"He conceded in eleven days and reduced my line by eighty-five silver and wrote that the office was obliged to me for the correction, and then he told me to come back."
Barni stopped.
"You’re going to have to say the next part very carefully."
"I know."
"Because there is a version of this where a man in a room has spent nineteen years waiting for somebody to hand him a procedure that lets him empty his own drawer, and I want you to notice how badly you want that version to be true."
"I’ve noticed. I’ve been noticing since Coldwell."
"And?"
"And I can’t ask." Mataon stopped in the middle of the square. "That’s the whole of it, and it’s why the note is the cleverest thing anybody’s done to me since I got here. A subject may dispute the quantum of *his own* assessment. He can’t dispute somebody else’s. There are forty-four names on my schedule and forty-one of them aren’t mine to raise. He knows that. He’s read the same standing orders I have and he’s read them for longer."
"Then why write it?"
"Because he doesn’t want me to ask," said Mataon. "He wants me to find a way."
Coll Ithred was waiting at the inn that evening with his boots off and somebody else’s newspaper.
"You’ve heard," Mataon said.
"I made an offer for your line on the eighth and it was refused on the fourteenth in one sentence." Ithred did not get up. "Nineteen years of not selling, and I finally get a written refusal, and I’d like to read you what it says because I have thought about very little else for two days."
"Go on."
*"The office does not sell.* That’s it. Four words and the seal." He folded the paper. "I’ve had refusals from every district in this country. They all say *the office is not minded* or *the office declines at this time*, because a treasurer who says never has to explain himself to somebody eventually. Yours says *does not*. Present tense, no qualification, like a fact about the weather."
"What do you take from it?"
"That he’s not a treasurer and that’s not a policy." Ithred looked up. "And that whatever that office is for, it isn’t for money. I’ve been in this trade eleven years and that’s the first time I’ve written that sentence down."
[Sarrow — 16 Frostmere, 334 A.Z. — Day 216]
[Quantum dispute — ANSWERED at day eleven. All three grounds conceded, in the second hand.]
[Assessment reduced: 2,200 → 2,115 silver. Schedule amended on the record.]
[Dispute CLOSED. Concluded in the subject’s favour. No note. No failure.]
[Enclosure, unnumbered, unsealed, addressed by name: *Three of forty-four. Ask about the other forty-one.*]
[A subject may dispute the quantum of his own assessment only. Forty-one names are not his to raise.]
[House Ithred offer refused, 14 Frostmere: *The office does not sell.*]
[Level 35 — held]
[STR 21 · AGI 19 · END 30 · INT 40 · PER 41 · WIL 47]
[Reserved Mana: 7 — First Exception, open, day 175]
[Query SQ-334-Sarrow-11 — day 34 of 60]
That night Mataon put the half-sheet on the table next to the four copies of the scrap from Coldwell, and Orvek came and stood over both of them for a long time without writing anything.
Then he picked up the slate.
*Look at the letters.*
"I’ve looked at them for an hour."
*Look again. The e.*
Mataon looked again.
*She asked.* Round, slow, heavy on the down-strokes, the letters of a man who learned late and was careful about it.
*Three of forty-four.* Lighter. Quicker. A hand that had written a great deal and had stopped thinking about how.
He sat back.
"They’re not the same hand."
*No.*
"Nine years apart, and it isn’t the same person."
*No.* Orvek wiped it and wrote slowly, and Mataon watched him choose the words, which he had almost never seen him do. *Two of them. And each one did a thing he did not have to do, and neither of them stopped, and there are still four hundred and six.*
"Yes."
*So do not tell me the office has a good man in it,* Orvek wrote. *Tell me it has had two, and count what that did.*