Chapter 113: O Children

The year turned on the first of Sylphenia. Nobody in Ardenmoor did anything about it except light the chapel and eat more than usual.

On the third Mataon worked out the thing that had been sitting in front of him since Marda Vell went up the road.

In the long house on the third evening he put it to Orvek in one sentence. Then he had to sit down.

"The sixth column is the state of the *person*. But the schedule carries *instruments*. And an instrument doesn't die."

Orvek stopped writing.

"A line passes. It's in my own clause and I've read it eighty times. The office of record is successor, and a maintenance line runs to the heir, and none of that needs anybody to be told anything." Mataon had both hands flat on the table. "So a row that says *no information since 313* isn't describing a person who's stopped doing things."

Orvek waited for him to say the rest of it.

"It's describing whoever held that line twenty-three years ago. And it's been passed since. Once. Twice. And the column doesn't know."

*How many times can it have passed.*

"As many times as people die."

***

That night he did not sleep, and it showed. Wenna Stoat said so in the shop and would not be argued with about it. On the fifth he went up to the chapel instead of the tally hut.

Nara Wray was on the roof.

He waited at the foot of the ladder with his hands behind his back. Somebody had put new slate along the ridge and run out of it two-thirds of the way, and the rest was turf and tar and would not see another winter.

She came down the ladder in her own time and did not hurry it for him, and she had a hammer through her belt and a face that had already decided what this was about.

"You've come about the book."

"I've come about the book."

"Then you'd better say why before I go and get it, and if the why's no good I'll say so and we'll have had a pleasant morning."

So he told her. It took him about two minutes and he did not soften any of it.

He told her an office cannot know who holds a line if nobody is obliged to report a death. He told her a chapel is not an office and has never once been dissolved into anything, and that it writes down who is born and who is buried and always has.

Nara Wray listened to the whole of it with the hammer still through her belt.

"You want me to hand a stranger a book that has every child in this valley in it."

"Yes."

"Say the worst thing that could come of it. Not the best. I've had the best off men before."

"Somebody uses it to find people who don't know they're bound and starts collecting." He did not look away. "That's the worst and it's not unlikely and I can't stop it happening to a book I've read out loud."

She looked at him for a while.

"That's the first honest answer I've had in this chapel in nine years." Nara Wray took the hammer out of her belt and set it on the step. "Come inside. You'll not touch it. I'll turn the pages and you'll say what you want and I'll tell you if it's there."

Inside, the register went back a hundred and nine years. It was kept in a chest that her grandmother had bought with her own money. It was the cleanest book he had seen in Gaiark.

They worked at it for four days.

The chapel was cold and she would not light the stove for a book, so he wore the coat and she wore two. She turned the pages with a strip of linen under her thumb. On the second morning he asked whether she wanted a chair brought up and she said the chest was a chair, and sat on it, and that was the end of it.

He was not allowed to write down names and he did not try. What he wanted was the shape. The shape came out in about two hours on the first morning and then took three and a half more days to be sure of.

Twice he got it wrong and had to be told so. The second time she made him say the wrong version out loud before she corrected it, and he understood why, and thanked her for it, and she said she had not done it to be thanked.

Nine households in Ardenmoor stood on the schedule in 313.

Of those nine, seven had buried the person named in the row since. Four of the seven had buried two.

And in every one of those eleven cases the line had gone on to somebody, and in none of them had anybody written to any office about it, and in none of them had anybody been asked to.

On the fourth afternoon he said it out loud.

"Eleven."

"In nine houses." Nara Wray had her arms folded. "In one village. And I'd put my hand in the fire that Ardenmoor is not unusual, and I'd take it out again before I let you write that down."

"I'm not going to write it down. You can't file an opinion about villages you've never been to."

"Then what can you file?"

"Eleven. In nine houses. In one place. Dated, from a book that's been kept by the same family for three generations, described by the woman who keeps it and signed by her." He rubbed his eyes. "It's the smallest true thing in the country and it's worth more than every guess I could make about the other three hundred and sixty-two."

*And the person the row describes,* Orvek wrote that night, *is dead in seven of nine cases within twenty-three years, and the column at Grey Sallow says how they were.*

"Says how they were in 313."

*Says how they were in 313, in a hand that has ruled that line ninety-two times since, four times a year, without once being told that the man in it was in the ground.*

[Ardenmoor — 1-9 Sylphenia, 337 A.Z. — Days 469-477]

[MATAON'S FINDING: the schedule carries INSTRUMENTS. A line passes to the heir and needs nobody to be told. *No information since 313* does not describe a person who stopped doing things. It describes whoever held the line twenty-three years ago — and it has passed since.]

[NARA WRAY — b. 4 Frostmere, circuit 1, 217 A.Z. — THE HEARTH. Age 39. Chapel keeper at Ardenmoor, third generation.]

[THE CHAPEL REGISTER: 109 years. A chapel is not an office and has never been dissolved into anything. It records births and burials and its reporting has never stopped.]

[Terms of access: he does not touch the book and does not write names. She turns the pages. He asks. She answers.]

[THE ARDENMOOR NUMBERS — nine households on the schedule in 313. Seven have buried the person named in the row. Four of the seven have buried two. Eleven passages in twenty-three years, none reported, none asked for.]

[He refuses to extrapolate. *You can't file an opinion about villages you've never been to.* What he will file: eleven, in nine houses, in one place, dated, described and signed by the keeper.]

[Level 42 — held]

[STR 23 · AGI 19 · END 33 · INT 47 · PER 49 · WIL 55]

[Reserved Mana: 7 — First Exception, open, day 334]

***

On the ninth she closed the chest and locked it and sat down on it, which meant she was not finished.

"There's one more and you've not asked for it, and I've been waiting four days to see whether you would."

"Go on."

"You'll want to know which of the eleven is a child."

For a moment he did not say anything at all.

"Two." She had her hands on her knees. "One's a girl at the far end who's fourteen and works in Bell and doesn't know. And one's mine."

The wind did something in the roof she had been mending.

"Tobin's father died when the boy was nine." She looked at the chest and not at him. "It was a Sylphenia and it was quick and it was nobody's fault. About four months after we buried him I sat down and read the paper in the box and worked out what it meant, and I've had two years of knowing it and nobody to say it to."

She did not look at him while she said the next part.

"He holds a line on a schedule that has never heard of him. He was entered in that chapel book on the twenty-second of Frostmere in three hundred and three and he has never been entered anywhere else in his life. He is eleven. He sweeps a step for coppers and he counts things in his head because he can't help it, and there is a man four hours up the north road who rules a line for him four times a year and thinks he's somebody else."

"That's why you told him to leave the lane alone."

"That's why I told him to leave the lane alone." She looked at the door. "Not because I thought that man would hurt him. Because I thought that if the pair of them ever got talking, the boy would tell him his name."

On the floor by the chest Mataon sat down.

"He nearly told me his." Mataon put both hands on his knees. "Somebody's. In the autumn. I stopped him."

"I know. He came home and told me you'd said no to a free thing and he's not got over it yet."

"He won't."

"No." Nara Wray got the key out and turned it over twice in her fingers. "So you'll go and do whatever it is you do, and I'll be here mending a roof, and I want one thing put where you can't lose it."

He waited.

"Whatever you build out of my book, my son is in it. He's in it as a number and I've agreed to that. But he's eleven, and he's got a broom, and of your four hundred and six he's the one who'll still be alive in sixty years to find out how it came out."