Chapter 65: The Number That Lied
The first snow came to Hearthroot on the tenth of Frostmere, and Mataon spent it counting people.
It was not sentiment. A town going into its first winter needs to know exactly how many mouths, how many roofs, how much seed, and how many of those numbers disagree with each other.
So he walked the lanes with Edrin’s roll and a stub of charcoal, and he counted.
Two hundred and thirty-one.
Twenty-two from the first day. The ones who had come up from Greywake since. The free-pack families who had wintered on the ridges and decided, without announcing it, that the valley was warmer. And the ones from the holdfast who had no other place, and had walked here rather than take the Marches’ offer, for reasons Mataon did not ask about.
Two hundred and thirty-one names, each written by the hand that owned it.
"You have counted them four times," Almina observed.
"Three."
"Four. I was here for all of them."
"The fourth was to check the third."
"That is what I said."
Barni walked beside him through the snow, leaving prints that were not quite a dog’s and never had been. He had stopped bothering to hide it. That, more than anything else since the holdfast, told Mataon that something had changed.
Maelor lit the forge that afternoon.
The arm was mending. It would never be what it was, which mattered less than expected, since neither had the other one for thirty years.
He did it without ceremony. Cleared the bed, laid the coal, and struck the spark himself, one-handed, on the fourth try.
Then he stood there and watched the fire take.
Mataon did not go in. Some doors a founder should not stand in.
He watched from the lane instead, and thought about a man who had closed a forge for fourteen years, opened it for a stranger, closed it again to walk a road, and had now opened one more, in a town that did not exist when he started walking.
"He will be insufferable," Barni said.
"He’s earned insufferable."
"He has earned it. That does not make it pleasant."
The folded ears twitched.
"He will want to teach someone."
"There are two hundred and thirty-one people here."
"Then he will want to teach the worst one," Barni said, with feeling.
"They always do."
The Marches clerk arrived on the twelfth, and he was the most frightening thing that had come up that valley since the slavers.
He did not know that. That was rather the point.
His name was Sub-Registrar Anser, and he was perhaps thirty, neat, courteous, and cold in the specific way of a man who has never once had to be cruel personally. He carried a satchel, two ledgers, and a writing board on a strap. He apologized for the snow as though he had caused it.
"Magistrate Corvane’s office," he said.
"Standard assessment. A newly registered settlement is surveyed at the first winter, for the record."
"Of course," Mataon said.
"What do you need?"
"A head count."
"I have one. Two hundred and thirty-one."
Anser smiled the polite smile, opened his ledger, and began to work.
Mataon walked the lanes with him for three hours. He answered every question. He showed him the cistern, the roll, the decision-book, the seed store, the sick-house. He was, he would think later, extremely helpful.
At the end of it, Anser totalled his column, turned the board around, and showed him.
One hundred and eighty-seven.
Mataon looked at the number for a long moment.
"You’ve miscounted," he said, pleasantly.
"I have not."
"There are two hundred and thirty-one people in this valley. I counted them this morning. You walked past most of them."
"Two hundred and thirty-one souls," Anser agreed.
"One hundred and eighty-seven persons."
And there it was.
The snow kept falling. Somewhere down the lane a child shouted at another child. Mataon stood very still, the way he had stood in a weigh-house watching water turn grey.
"Explain that to me," he said.
"Slowly. As though I were a foreign auditor who fell out of the sky with no shoes."
Anser did not hear the edge. He was helping.
"Forty-four of your residents carry an active Deunan classification. The record outside our jurisdiction still lists them as labor property. The Marches does not enforce that classification, of course."
He said of course the way people say it about things they have never had to think about.
"But we cannot enter a person on the register under two conflicting statuses. So they are held in the pending column until the originating registry releases them, or a court unwinds it."
"And how long does that take?"
"It varies."
"How long has the longest one taken?"
Anser checked. He was thorough. That was the worst part.
"Nineteen years."
"The number is wrong," Mataon said.
"The number is correct."
Anser was not being obstinate; he was being accurate, which was worse.
"It is simply not a count of bodies. It is a count of entries. If it helps, sir, I have no discretion here. I record what the registry recognizes."
"And what does the registry recognize?"
"Whatever it has been told."
The clerk said it as an apology. A small, tired, procedural apology, the kind a man makes when he has been asked to explain a form he did not design.
Mataon heard something else entirely.
He had spent eighty-five days in this world believing he stood inside a machine that measured things. Levels. Ranks. Skills. Worth, made visible so no bloodline could hoard it. He had built a town on the idea that a number written down in the open was harder to lie with than a rumour.
And a polite young man in a snowy lane had just told him, without any idea what he was saying, that the registry does not measure.
It receives.
"Almina," he said, in his head, very quietly.
"The System. Where do its numbers come from?"
For the first time in eighty-five days, she did not answer immediately.
"That is a large question," she said.
"That is not an answer."
"No," Almina agreed.
"It is not."
He did not shout at the clerk. There would have been no point, and Anser was not the crime; Anser was the handwriting.
Instead he did the only thing he had ever been good at.
He asked for a copy.
"Of the assessment?"
"Of the pending column. Every name, the originating registry, the date the classification was entered, and the office that entered it."
Mataon smiled without much in it.
"You said you have no discretion. Then you have no reason to refuse a copy of a record I am named in."
Anser hesitated for exactly one second, then wrote out the list, because he was, in the end, a man who followed procedure, and procedure did not forbid it.
Forty-four names.
Mataon read them in the snow while the clerk packed his satchel. Forty-four people who lived in his town, ate at his fires, drew water from his cistern, and were, according to a ledger nine hundred miles away, still furniture.
[Assessment recorded — Ashvale Marches Register]
[Hearthroot: 187 registered persons · 44 held in pending classification]
[Note: pending status derives from an external registry; local recognition does not override the originating entry]
He read the last line three times.
Does not override.
His whole charter. His decision roll. The unownable names. All of it stopped at the valley’s mouth, because somewhere out there was a book that had gotten to those people first.
"You will want to fix this," Almina said.
"Yes."
"You will want to fix it tonight."
"Yes."
"Do not." A pause.
"You broke a coast by taking its paper. This is not a coast. This is the thing coasts are made of. Look at it properly first, or you will spend your one Exception on the wrong page."
Anser left at dusk, with tea in him and no idea he had detonated anything.
Mataon stood at the neck of the valley until the man’s lantern was gone.
Then he opened his own status, which he had not looked at properly since the holdfast, and read it the way he read everything else.
[Mataon Gaael — Level 27]
[STR 20 · AGI 19 · END 28 · INT 32 · PER 31 · WIL 34]
[Guild Rank: D — Unsealed Bark]
Numbers he had trusted since the first day. Numbers he had planned around, fought around, nearly died around.
He looked at them for a long time in the falling snow.
"Who tells you what I am?" he asked.
The System did not answer.
It had never once answered a question. He had simply never noticed that before, because he had never asked one that it would have to.
Barni sat down beside him in the snow.
"There it is," the old hybrid said quietly.
"There what is."
"The face. You had it at the wash-channel. You had it at the ford."
The odd eyes came up, one pale, one dark.
"The one you get when a thing you thought was a wall turns out to be a door, and you have already decided to walk through it."
Mataon closed the window.
Down the valley, two hundred and thirty-one people were lighting lamps against the first real dark of winter, and one hundred and eighty-seven of them officially existed.
"Two hundred and thirty-one," he said.
"I counted."
"I know."
"I’m going to make the world agree with me."
"I know that too,"
Barni said, and did not make it a joke, which was how Mataon knew the old thing was frightened.
"Try to remember that the last person who decided to correct a registry that size is currently the reason you have gods in your chest."