Administrator Of A Broken World

Souk found the house on the eighth of Ravenmark, and then spent three days not going into it, and it was the hardest work she had ever done.

She had crossed the band four times by then. Sixteen pins had become nine, then five, then two.

The two came down to a stationer in Ashvale who would not look at her, and a boy at the same shop who would.

The boy was eleven and swept up. He would not have talked to an adventurer either, except that Souk had stopped being one for six days. She carried a basket. She asked about paper for a cousin who wrote letters and had a fussy hand.

On the fourth day the boy said the Verrick was ordered special, twice a year. The last lot went out to Dunnock Mill on a cart with the flour. Had she seen the mill? It had a wheel that ran the wrong way round and everyone said so.

Souk thanked him and bought a quire of paper she did not need and walked out of Ashvale at a completely ordinary speed.

Then she got round the corner and put her back against a wall and swore for about forty seconds.

Dunnock Mill was eleven miles east.

It was a mill and four cottages and a lane, and the third cottage had a slate roof where the others had thatch, and nobody had lived in it since Frostmere.

She lay in a hedge for two hours and looked at it.

She wanted to walk down the lane, take the door off its hinges, and be inside that house in under a minute.

She was good at doors. She had been in and out of eleven places better defended than this one and had never once been caught. She was faster now than she had been at twenty.

The thing Mataon would say was that a door taken off its hinges by a woman with no standing turns everything behind it into nothing.

She had heard him say it in four different ways over eighteen months and had rolled her eyes at three of them.

She stayed in the hedge.

She went to the miller instead.

Oram Deel was sixty and deaf on one side and did not want to talk to her. She stood in his yard for two hours while he pretended to fix a strap.

Then he asked her what she actually wanted, in the tone of a man who has decided that the only way to end a thing is to let it start.

"I want you to open a door with me," she said. "And I want you to write down what we see, in your hand, and sign it, and I want a second person there who isn’t either of us."

"Which door?"

"Third cottage."

Oram put the strap down.

"You know whose that one is."

"No. That’s the whole trouble."

"Neither do I," he said, "and I’ve lived forty paces from it for nineteen years, and that’s a thing I’ve been not-thinking about for a long while now, and I’d rather you hadn’t come."

"I know."

"Cart came twice a year. Never the same driver. The man was thin and about fifty and he said good morning and he said the weather, and once he asked after my wife by name, and I could not have told you his." He rubbed his mouth. "Stopped in Frostmere. I told myself he’d died."

"Did you believe it?"

"For about a week."

***

They opened it on the eleventh, in the middle of the day, with the priest from Aldbury there because Oram would not have anybody else and the priest could write.

Souk did it the way she had watched Mataon do it, and it took a great deal longer than she wanted.

She had them describe the door before it was opened. Locked, no forced entry, dust on the sill undisturbed.

She had the priest write down the time. She had Oram say out loud that the cottage was not his, that he claimed nothing in it, and that he had never been inside.

Then she opened the lock. It took her nine seconds. She said so out loud, and made the priest write down that she had said it.

The room smelled of dust and old ink and slightly of apples.

There was a table under the window. A stool. A press with four shelves. A shaving mirror. A cup with a dry brown ring in the bottom.

And on the table, squared to the edge, one instrument, half written, in the second hand.

Souk did not touch it.

She stood over it and read it upside down twice to be sure.

Then she went round the table and read it the right way up, with her hands behind her back, like a woman at a stall who has been told not to handle the fruit.

*Notification of classification. Subject: Mataon Gaael, of Hearthroot in the Marches.*

Half a page. Four clauses, then nothing.

And in the top right corner, in the place where the date goes, in the same faded ink as the rest:

*1 Frostmere, 333.*

She read the date four times.

Then she said, in a voice that came out strange, "Father. Come and read that date to me out loud, and then write it down, and then read me back what you wrote."

The priest came and read it out loud. He wrote it down. He read it back.

"The first of Frostmere," said Oram, from the door. "Wasn’t the first of Frostmere the—"

"The refounding at Hearthroot was on the fourth," Souk said.

Nobody said anything for a while.

"Three days," said the priest.

"Three days before the thing he’s supposed to have done." Souk put her hands on the back of the stool and leaned on it, hard. "They’re hanging the whole document off that injury. And somebody started writing it three days before the injury happened."

The press had four shelves.

Three of them were paper. Verrick, unopened, in bands, enough for six or seven years. A man buys like that when he does not expect to be able to buy again.

The fourth shelf had a shallow drawer, and the drawer was not locked.

Inside it, in a fold of felt, was a seal.

Souk looked at it for a long time. Bronze, worn at the edges, with a handle rubbed pale by a hand. Seven characters.

Every part of her that had ever been good at her job said: take it. Take it now, be four miles away before dark, and put it on a table in Hearthroot tomorrow night, and watch their faces.

She could feel exactly how it would go. She could feel the weight of it in her coat.

"Father," she said. "Describe the drawer."

"Souk—"

"Describe the drawer. Say what’s in it. Say that it’s in it now, at this hour, on this day, and that nobody has moved it." She had not taken her hands off the back of the stool. "And then we’re going to shut the drawer and shut the door and lock it and put a man on it, and I am going to walk out of this house carrying nothing at all."

Oram said, "You’re joking."

"If I take it, it’s a thing a woman found in a cottage." Her voice was very level and her hands were not. "If it stays where it is, it’s a thing three people saw in a locked house that a witness with no interest opened, and one of the three is a priest. He needs the second one. He can’t use the first."

"Who’s he?"

"A friend of mine," said Souk, "who’s standing in an office in Deuna about now, and who’s going to be very stupid about something, and this is the only thing I’ve got that might make it worth it."

***

They put a guard on the cottage that night and two more the next morning.

The priest of Aldbury wrote out three fair copies of the record. He kept one. Oram Deel kept one. Souk carried the third and did not let it out of her coat.

The rider went east on the thirteenth at first light.

Souk stood in the lane and watched him out of sight. Then she went and sat on the mill wall for a while.

The road to Sarrow was ten days at best. Whatever was going to happen in that office had probably already happened.

"He’ll be all right," Oram said, coming out with two cups. "Man like that."

"He’s not all right," said Souk. "He’s never once been all right. He just keeps being useful about it and people confuse the two."

She drank the tea. It was bad and hot and she was grateful for both.

Then she got up and went back to the hedge above Dunnock Mill, because somebody had bought seven years of paper and had not come back for it, and a person who buys seven years of paper intends to be alive for seven years.

And in nineteen years the second hand had never once been late.