Chapter 7 Data Error

Hesper Quill liked numbers because numbers did not lie to her.

People lied to her constantly. Adventurers lied about their kills, merchants lied about their losses, nobles lied about their land, and clerks lied about all three to whoever paid them most. But a number written down in the right column, checked against the right ledger, was either correct or it wasn't. There was no charm in it. There was no pleading. There was only the sum, and the sum was the sum.

She was twenty-nine years old, Senior Auditor of the Adventurers' Guild of Harrowgate, Level 184, and her class was [Appraisal]. She could look at a sword and know its maker, its age and what it would fetch at auction. She could look at a man and know his level, his class and his skills, the same as a Ledger Stone would, without him putting his hand on anything. It was why the Guild paid her. It was also why she ate breakfast with her nose in a book. Looking at people all day was exhausting, and most of them were lying.

On the morning after the farmhand's reading, she arrived at her office in the north gallery at the seventh bell and a half, as she always did. She hung her grey coat on its peg. She sharpened three pens. She opened the overnight tray.

There were four things in it, and every one of them was wrong.

* * *

The first was a job closure.

Old Sewer Junction Four, Lower Weir. Copper rank. Assigned to T. Marsh, Farmhand, Level 1. Fee six silver. Closed, paid, proof of completion received: one ear.

That alone would have been unremarkable, except that someone in the cold room had attached a note to the form in a shaking hand, and the note said: Have you SEEN this ear.

Hesper went down to the cold room and saw the ear.

She put her hand on it, which was not pleasant, and used [Appraisal]. Words came up behind her eyes the way they always did, crisp and clean.

Brood Tyrant. Rodent, sewer-adapted, matriarch. Estimated level at death: 236. Classification: Gold rank threat. Recommended response: party of four, Gold minimum.

She stood in the cold room for a long time with her hand on the ear.

A Gold-rank threat. Under the Lower Weir. The Guild had sent two Copper boys down there last month, and they'd come back and said rats, and someone had written down rats and closed the file. Then Guildmaster Ashby had handed the job to a Level 1 farmhand for six silver.

And the farmhand had brought back the ear.

She went up to the yard and found the sewer foreman's statement, which had come in late last night by a runner. It was badly spelled and very clear. One man, a big fellow with a cleaver, had gone down alone with two lamps. He had come up two hours later with the foreman's nephew over his shoulder, alive, and an ear. The foreman had been down since with three men and a cart. They had counted forty-one dead rats the size of dogs on the approach tunnel, and the body of something in the junction pool that the foreman described as, quote, a fucking horse with hands, unquote.

Hesper read that line twice, then put the statement in the file. She did not approve of language in official documents. She did approve of accuracy.

* * *

The second thing in the tray was the registration record for T. Marsh, Farmhand.

Every Ledger reading was copied to the Guild's master book by a copy-glass, a thin sheet of the same green stone that sat in the back of the registration hall and printed whatever the big stone read. The copies came up on special paper overnight, and Hesper checked them, because nobody else would.

Name: Tobin Marsh. Level: 1. Class: Farmhand. Skills: four, all at Rank ???.

Below the skills, the copy-glass had printed something. It filled the rest of the page and went over onto a second sheet, and it was not writing. It was dense black marks, crowded together, like ants, or like ink that had been dropped on the paper and had tried to crawl off it. When Hesper held the page up to the light, some of them had.

There was a ring of tiny black marks on her desk round where the paper had been lying.

She put the page down very carefully.

Rank ???. She had never seen that. Ranks went from one to ten. Every skill on every Tally she had ever read had a number after it. A question mark meant the stone had tried to count the rank and failed, and stones didn't fail. That was the whole point of stones.

* * *

The third thing was a maintenance report.

Ledger Stone One, registration hall. Hairline fracture, palm height, approximately one finger's length, occurring during a reading on the tenth. Reported by Maud Kestrel, Stone Attendant. Below, in Maud's neat hand: The fracture appeared during the reading. It was not there before. I clean that stone every morning.

Attached to it, for no clear reason, was a scrap of paper torn from the weapons register. Someone, it looked like old Tolly from the weapons desk, had written on it in pencil: CLEAVER, BUTCHER'S, ONE. Underneath, underlined twice: CANNOT BE LIFTED. NOT NAILED DOWN. I CHECKED.

Hesper sat back in her chair.

She had been at the Guild nine years. In that time the registration stone had been read perhaps twenty thousand times. It had never cracked. It was four hundred years old and had been cut from the heart of the Varrow quarry and could, according to the Guild's own records, survive a fall from the palace's highest tower. It had survived three, in fact, during the Riots.

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It had cracked under a farmhand's palm.

She went down to the registration hall before it opened and looked for herself.

Maud Kestrel was already there with her bucket and her chamois, as she was every morning, a square grey woman of fifty with a voice like a gravel path. She stood back without being asked and let Hesper look.

The crack was exactly where the report said. Hesper put her fingertip beside it, not on it, and used [Appraisal] on the stone.

Ledger Stone. Varrow heartglass. Age: 412 years. Condition: fractured. Capacity: exceeded.

Capacity exceeded. She read the words three times. She had appraised this stone on her first day at the Guild, nine years ago, out of curiosity, and it had said Capacity: sufficient. She had not known there was another option.

"What was he like?" she asked. "The farmhand."

Maud thought about it while she wrung out her chamois. "Polite," she said. "Took his hat off. Didn't mind the laughing, which most do. When the crack came he looked at it and said, was that there before, like he truly wanted to know." She wiped the base of the stone with long, even strokes. "Nobody ever asks me anything, Miss Quill. Twenty years I've stood here. He asked."

"Did you answer him?"

"No," said Maud. "I didn't know what to say."

Hesper didn't either. She thanked Maud, went back up to the north gallery, and wrote down Capacity: exceeded in the margin of her notes in very small letters, as if that would make it less true.

* * *

The fourth thing in the tray had come in late in the evening, from the assay desk, with a red flag on it.

A broker from the second ring had brought in a stone for appraisal, a crystal about the size of a hen's egg, warm, reddish, with a slow light inside it. He had bought it that afternoon from a rag-and-bone barrow on the Weir hill for two silver, thinking it might be a lesser core worth a few gold. The assay clerk had put it on the scale, and the scale had gone off the end of its markings, and the clerk had flagged it and gone home with a headache.

The core was in the strongbox. Hesper had the key.

She got it out and held it in her bare hand and used [Appraisal].

Core, Brood Tyrant, matriarch. Grade: Gold (anomalous). Estimated output: sufficient to light one city district for a year.

She almost dropped it.

A Gold core lit a street. A good one lit a large house for a winter. Cores that could light a district came from things nobody killed, things the Guild ranked above Gold and below the end of the world, and they were sold at the palace, under guard, for sums with a great many noughts in them. This one had come out of a rat in a sewer. It was too dense. The creature must have been feeding on something far richer than dogs and boots, for a long time.

She made a note of that and then put it aside, because one thing at a time.

The rag-and-bone man had been found by a runner before breakfast. He remembered the seller perfectly well. A big young fellow, he said, polite, country voice, with a meat cleaver on his back and blood all down one side of a brown coat. Called it a pretty rock. Sold it for three copper.

Three copper.

Hesper put the core back in the strongbox, locked it, and sat with her hands flat on the desk for a while. She breathed in for a count of four and out for a count of four, which is what her mother had taught her to do when the numbers would not add up.

They still didn't.

* * *

Guildmaster Ashby did not like being interrupted before the ninth bell. He made that plain by not looking up from his letters when she came in.

"Quill."

"Guildmaster. The file on T. Marsh, Farmhand, Level 1."

"The record holder." He smiled at his letters. "What of him?"

She laid it out for him in order. The Brood Tyrant. The sewer statement. The registration record, with its second sheet of crawling ink. The stone fracture, and Tolly's note. The core and the three coppers.

Ashby read it all. He took longer over it than she expected. When he looked up his smile was still there, but it had gone very still, the way a cat goes still.

"A data error," he said.

"Sir, the stone..."

"Is four hundred years old and due for recalibration. Stones fail. The copy-glass smudged. Tolly is seventy and has a bad back." He tapped the sewer statement. "A sewer foreman who drinks. A rag-and-bone man who'd swear to anything for a copper. Some other party killed this creature, and our farmhand came upon the body and cut off an ear. It happens. Opportunists."

"He brought out the foreman's nephew alive."

"Then he's a lucky opportunist." Ashby put the papers together and squared their edges. "But you're right that it's untidy, and I dislike untidy. Audit him."

"Sir?"

"Full audit. Measurements, tests, whatever you need. Find the error and correct the record." He looked at her properly for the first time. "I want it closed, Quill. Quietly. Report to me and only to me."

She was halfway down the stairs before she worked out what had bothered her about that. It wasn't the order. Audits were her job. It was that Ashby had not asked her a single question about the core. Not what it was worth. Not where it was. Nothing.

She wrote that down too.

* * *

The address on the registration record was Widow Ostry's, Candle Lane.

Hesper read it twice. Then she put her face in her hands for a moment, because she had lived at Widow Ostry's for six years, and she ate breakfast there every morning, and she could not for the life of her picture a single one of the other lodgers.

She went home that evening, ate a cold supper in her room, and opened the small brown ledger she kept for herself.

It was nothing to do with the Guild. It was every coin she had earned and spent since she was fifteen, every debt and every repayment, in columns so neat they looked printed. Her father had kept books for a lord in the west when she was small. The lord had cooked his figures and signed her father's name under them, and when the auditors came it was her father who went to Blackwater gaol for twelve years, and wrote to her every week of them, and came out with a cough he never lost. She had been eleven. She had sat with him through the trial and watched honest columns lose to a well-dressed liar.

Since then she had trusted figures and very few people.

She wrote the day's expenses in the brown ledger. Two copper for bread. One silver for lamp oil. Then, at the bottom, after a long pause: T. Marsh. Three copper.

Then she lay awake in her room on the second floor and tried. The clerks. The old woman with the horn. A man with a bandaged hand. And at the other end of the table, yesterday and the day before, someone large, who had eaten two bowls of porridge. Who had been looking at her.

She hadn't looked back. She never did.

* * *

The next morning she came down at the seventh bell exactly, sat at her place at the end of the table, opened her book, and did not read a word of it.

He was there. He was sitting halfway down the table on the far side, eating his porridge, and he was much bigger than she had remembered, and much more ordinary. Broad shoulders under a plain shirt. Brown hair that wanted cutting. A sunburned, patient face, the face of a man who would sit and wait for a cow to calve. There was a brown oilskin coat over the back of his chair, and down the side of it, from armpit to hip, ran a long line of new, careful stitching.

He was buttering bread. He did it thoroughly, right to the edges.

Hesper put down her book, looked straight at him, and used [Appraisal].

Tobin Marsh. Level 1. Farmhand.

Then nothing.

Not a blank. Nothing. Where the rest of him should have been, his skills and his history and the faint warm hum that every living person gave off under her skill, there was a gap, smooth and dark, like looking down a well. She looked into it for a moment too long, and the room tilted, and a hot thin line of pain went in behind her left eye.

She closed her eyes. When she opened them he was looking at her, with the butter knife in his hand and a polite, slightly worried expression.

"You all right, miss?" he said. "You've gone a bit pale."

There was a warm wet feeling on her lip. She touched it. Her fingers came away red.

"Nosebleed," said Hesper Quill, and got out her handkerchief, and kept looking at him over the top of it.