Chapter 74: Nine Days, Then Three
The date column was still on the table on the twenty-sixth, because nobody had been willing to move it, and because Edrin had spent two days doing the one piece of arithmetic none of them had thought to do first.
He did not look up when Mataon came in.
"Ask me."
"When’s the next one?"
"Winter after next." Edrin put the pen down. "The gaps run on odd years. Three fifteen, seventeen, nineteen, all the way up to thirty-three. This coming winter is even. He doesn’t go anywhere."
Mataon stood there and let the number arrive. Outside, somebody was hammering, and had been hammering since before dawn, and would go on hammering all morning because Tovan had promised the last roof by month’s end.
"Twenty months."
"Twenty months and change."
"And we have thirty-two days."
"We have thirty-two days," Edrin agreed, "and the only reproducible route to that seal opens the winter after the winter after the one that’s coming, and by then your notice has been on the central roll for a year and a half."
Souk took it better than anyone, because Souk had never believed in the route.
"It was always a habit, not a door," she said. "A habit tells you a man exists. It doesn’t tell you where he sleeps."
"You didn’t say that when you found it."
"I found it on the fourth day of a search and I was pleased with myself, and being pleased with yourself is not evidence." She pulled the specimen sheets back toward her. "We stop chasing the old one. We chase the new one."
Anser stopped writing to listen.
"The old hand has nineteen years of discipline," Souk said. "He files the same way, on the same rhythm, and he takes his six weeks and comes back and picks up exactly where he stopped. There’s nothing careless in him anywhere. I’ve looked."
"And the new one?"
"Has five years. And five years is not enough time to become invisible."
***
It took them until the twenty-ninth to find it, and in the end it was not in the entries at all.
It was in Corvane’s intake stamps.
Every instrument her office took in got a date on the back when it arrived — not the date on the filing, the date it came over the desk. Thirty-one years of it, in three different clerks’ hands, and none of it interesting to anybody until Souk laid the two columns side by side.
Filing date. Arrival date.
"Nine days," she said. "Ten. Eleven. Nine, nine, ten." She ran a finger down four years of the first hand. "It never goes below eight and it never goes above twelve, in fourteen years. That’s a courier route. That’s a fixed distance with weather on it."
"And the second hand?"
She moved her finger to the lower sheets and stopped.
"Five. Four. Five. Four. Four."
Nobody said anything.
"That’s not the same road," Edrin said.
"That’s not the same country," said Souk.
Mataon went and got his own notice out of his coat.
He had not looked at the back of it. He had read the front perhaps thirty times and had never once turned it over, because there had been nothing on the front worth surviving and he had stopped there.
There was a stamp on the back, in a clerk’s hand, and a date. He put it on the table and counted, and then counted again, because the first answer was one he did not believe.
"Three days," he said.
Souk came round the table.
"Say it again."
"Filed on the eleventh. Over Corvane’s desk on the fourteenth. Three days."
She looked at it for a long moment.
"Then whoever wrote that is inside the Marches," she said. "Or a day outside it. Nothing in Deuna is three days from Corvane’s office. Nothing on that coast is."
Barni, who had been asleep by the stove, was not asleep by the stove any more.
They sat with it for a while, and the room got colder than the stove could account for.
"Say the whole thing out loud," Mataon said. "I want to hear whether it’s stupid."
Edrin obliged, because Edrin always obliged.
"There’s a filing seal that was never withdrawn. For fourteen years it sat nine to eleven days from the border-post. That’s Deuna. In fourteen years it wrote four hundred entries and nobody looked. Then five years ago a second person started using it, three to five days out."
"And three to five days out puts him here."
"It puts him here."
"With the Marches."
"With the Marches. Possibly with Ashvale town. Possibly closer."
"And two months ago that person wrote my name on a piece of paper."
"Yes."
Mataon sat back and looked at the ceiling of a sick-house he had helped roof, and found that the thing he felt was not fear, exactly, but the specific unpleasantness of having spent a winter looking at the wrong end of a road.
"I’ve been planning to go to Deuna," he said. "I’ve been planning it since Frostmere. I’ve been thinking about ports."
"Yes."
"And it’s been here."
"Some of it has been here," Souk said. "Don’t do the other thing. Don’t swing all the way over and decide the old hand doesn’t matter, because he wrote thirty-one of your forty-four and he is still out there being extremely careful. You’ve got two problems. One of them is close, and the close one is the one on the clock."
***
The custody question got settled that evening. It got settled badly, and Mataon had begun to suspect that was how most real things got settled.
The second book could not stay in a room he walked into every day. Nobody doubted him and nobody said Deuna out loud. It was simpler than that: in thirty-two days he would have a published classification, and a book kept where a classified person lives is a book somebody can come and ask about.
Kess would not give it up.
She did not argue. She sat on the wood-box with the book on her knees and answered every question in three words or fewer, and after an hour Hanne said, quite gently, that she had spent nine days being reasonable at people in a shed and it had got her nowhere either.
In the end it was Orvek.
He came in halfway through, listened to about ten minutes of it, and then took the slate off his belt and wrote one line and put it on the table in front of Kess.
Two person marks. A book between them.
Kess read it twice.
"Both of us," she said.
Orvek nodded.
"You can’t write."
He tapped the slate.
"That’s not writing, that’s —" She stopped. Then she picked up the pen and wrote it into the roll herself, out loud, the way she did everything. "Custody of the register: Kess and Orvek, jointly. Neither one alone. Reason: a book with one keeper has one door."
Anser copied it. Edrin did not say anything at all, and from Edrin that was a standing ovation.
[Registry analysis — courier interval]
[First hand: 8-12 days filing to arrival, 14 years, no exception. Consistent with Deuna.]
[Second hand: 3-5 days. Not consistent with Deuna. Consistent with Ashvale Marches or nearer.]
[Notice served on subject: 3 days.]
[Assessment: the second seal-user is local.]
[Custody of the Hearthroot register: Kess and Orvek, jointly, 30 Sylphenia 334]
[Feat: INT +1]
[STR 20 · AGI 19 · END 28 · INT 36 · PER 35 · WIL 39]
[Reserved Mana: 7 — First Exception, open, day 111]
[32 days to quarterly return]
He walked up to the neck of the valley that night, because he had got into the habit of it, and Barni came because Barni always came.
"You’re going to say something about roads," Barni said.
"I was going to say something about roads."
"I’d rather you didn’t."
They stood there. Down below, the lit windows had got to thirty-one, and somebody was still working the forge at this hour. Maelor had lost another argument with his own arm.
"Three days," Mataon said.
"Yes."
"Somebody who can put a paper on Corvane’s desk in three days has probably stood in Ashvale market. Might have been through this valley."
"Also yes."
"Does that frighten you?"
Barni was quiet for a moment, and his ears did the thing they did.
"What frightens me," he said, "is that you keep looking for the far one. You’ve done it since the ford. There’s always somebody near, and you always want the one at the end of the road, because the one at the end of the road is allowed to be a monster."
Mataon did not answer that.
They went back down together, and neither of them said the obvious thing, and by now the obvious thing had been unsaid so long it had become a piece of furniture.