75 - Eighty-One Days

The clerk at the Warrant counter stopped on the first page.

Not on the sponsors, which were the ninth sheet in the bundle. Not on the crew book, which was the eleventh and ran forty-one entries long in a twelve year old's ruled columns, with the dates on them and a difference column in a second pencil.

Page one. Line four.

"There is a complaint standing against you."

"There is."

"Then I cannot take this."

"You have got it in your hand."

"I have got it in my hand and I am giving it back," the clerk said.

He gave it back. It took about as long as it takes to hand a man his hat, and there was nothing whatever wrong with the way he did it.

Kalen stood at the counter with eleven days of paper in both arms.

Eleven days. He had done it at night, after the brace and after the winch and after the shed, at a table with the lamp turned down so as not to wake the room. He had done the fair copies twice, because the ward will not take an interlineation and will not say so until you bring one.

The forty-one entries were the whole of the case and he had made himself put in the ones that paid nothing. The Fetter Street pump, no coin and no service. The schoolhouse register, no coin. The tenement load-frame, three weeks, unpaid. The bell, which cost him a Fine grade Pattern and is entered at nought against nought in his sister's ruled columns.

Against those he had set the gantry Charter, discharged two days inside its term, and the two dead recoveries he had entered at the counter on the day he killed them.

A man who leaves out the two dead ones has written an advertisement. Kalen had put them on the fourth sheet, in his own hand, with the times on them.

Nessa had checked every figure in it and found nothing, which had annoyed her. She had charged him for the fourth sheet, because the fourth sheet fell outside the terms, and she had pointed that out before he could.

Page nine was blank and he had lodged it blank.

A petition for Warranted wants two sponsors, and a sponsor must be Warranted himself, and there are eleven Warranted in Ward Nine. He had made the list on the fourth evening and got to the end of it in two minutes. Sabra had put her name to one document in nineteen years and he had not been able to make himself ask her for a second. Karrow signs correct things, and a sponsorship is not a correct thing, it is an opinion. That left nine names he had never spoken to.

He had lodged it anyway, with the page ruled and empty, to find out whether a counter would take it that way and what it would say when it did not.

"Do you want to know what is on page nine?" he said.

"No."

"It is blank."

"Then it would have been refused on page nine."

"That is a different refusal."

"It is the same refusal from this side of the counter."

"How long have you had it?" Kalen said.

"Since you put it down."

"How long has the complaint been standing."

"That is not on the petition. That is on the roll."

"Can you look at the roll."

The clerk looked at the roll. It was neither forbidden nor unusual, and it was the fourth bell, and there was nobody behind him in the queue.

"Autumn," he said.

"Which week."

"It does not carry a week. It carries a quarter."

"Nobody has served it on me."

"It is not served. It is lodged."

"What is the difference?"

"About four months, in your case."

"Then how does a man find out that he has got one?"

"He petitions for something," the clerk said, "and then he is told."

* * *

"Can you print it."

"Print what."

"The complaint."

"You have not seen it."

"I have never seen it. I have asked at the ward office twice and been told twice that it is not the ward's paper."

The clerk had the expression of a man asked to do a thing that is neither forbidden nor usual. Then he did it, because it was neither forbidden nor usual, and because there is nothing a clerk enjoys more than a request that turns out to be admissible.

COMPLAINT STANDING

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Sedge Counting House against Ashgrove, Kalen.

Ward Nine. Freehand.

An Accord function performed without warrant.

In the matter of the schoolhouse register.

Open.

"Whose name is on the lodgement?"

"A house does not lodge under a name."

"Somebody wrote it."

"A house wrote it."

"Then who signs it?"

"Nobody signs a lodgement," the clerk said. "That is what a house is for."

He read it four times, which is what he does. There was not one word on it he could have argued with.

He had stood in a cold room at the end of Fetter Street with a woman who had been the teacher of that school before the closure. He had read forty-one names off the ward roll out loud, in order, until the attendance register for the week the foundry shut was finished. She had stopped, and had stayed stopped.

Eleven of those names were standing at the gate that same evening at the sixth bell, in their own coats, with their own buttons done up.

There is a counter for that. There is a form for it and a man paid to sit behind the counter and take it off you and give you a docket. Kalen had walked past all three without slowing down, and he had known at the time exactly what he was walking past.

"It is true," he said.

"That is not a thing men say at a counter."

"It is true and it is going to go on being true," Kalen said.

"Then do not say it in this building."

"The ward raised forty marks to have that done. I gave the forty marks back."

"That is not on the paper either."

"What does it take to shut it."

"It does not shut. It gets withdrawn."

"Then what does it take to have it withdrawn."

"The complainant withdraws it."

"Is there anything I can do today?"

"You can take your paper home."

"And after that?"

"Come back when it is not standing."

"And if it never stops standing?"

"Then you are a Freehand for the rest of your life," the clerk said.

* * *

He went along the passage to the ward filing office and stood at the second counter for forty minutes.

He got the whole of it, because the second counter is Emmer Loy. Emmer Loy will explain anything at all to anybody at all, correctly, at length, with his hands, and has never in eleven years been observed to be in a hurry.

"A complaint is not a charge," he said.

"Say the difference."

"A charge is heard. A complaint is lodged," Emmer Loy said.

"And nobody hears it."

"Nobody hears it. Nobody proves it. Nobody answers it."

"Does it expire?"

"It does not expire and it does not accrue. No clerk anywhere in Kentra does one single thing to it, ever, in either direction."

"Then what does it do?"

"It stands," Emmer Loy said, and looked pleased about the word, because it is the correct word and he had been waiting to use it.

"How many are standing in this ward?"

"That is not a figure I hold."

"Guess at it."

"I do not guess at figures. I can tell you how many I have seen come across this counter in eleven years, which is none, because they do not come across this counter."

"Then how do you know about them?"

"Because men come and stand where you are standing and ask me," Emmer Loy said.

"How many men?"

"Four this year."

"Can the ward strike it?"

"The ward did not receive it," he said.

"Can the Assessor strike it?"

"The Assessor of this ward is a very thorough man."

"That is not an answer."

"He will tell you precisely what I am telling you." He put both palms flat on the counter. "A complaint by a Chartered house is lodged against the Accord's roll, and not against ward paper."

"And the roll."

"There is not a pen in this building that reaches the roll."

"Whose does?"

"The only hand that takes a thing off the roll is the hand that put it on."

"So it does not have to be true."

"It does not have to be anything at all," Emmer Loy said. "It has to be open."

Kalen thanked him, because he had done nothing wrong and had spent forty minutes being right. Then he went out through the yard door and stood in the road with eleven days of paper under his arm.

* * *

The thing that would not sit down was what it had cost them.

Not a fee. Not a hearing. Not a clerk for a morning.

Somebody in an office had written four lines about a ward schoolhouse he had never seen and would never see. He had put a quarter on it instead of a date. Then he had gone to a good lunch in a building where the tea is free.

The four lines would sit on the Accord's roll doing one thing forever. The one thing was stopping a man in Ward Nine from becoming anything better than he already was.

Kalen had spent a year proving that a rate was wrong.

He had proved it, in a room over a tea shop, in front of four people, with brass on the table and a working nobody could fault. Not one of them had said he was wrong. The number had gone up two tenths.

He was not going to make that mistake twice.

That was the whole of what he took out of the corridor. It was worth more than the eleven days and it did not feel like it on the day, and he was honest enough about the difference to write both halves down.

You cannot argue a complaint away, because there is nobody to argue with. The clerk does not want it there. The Assessor cannot reach it. It is not evidence and it is not an accusation and it is not a debt.

It cannot be answered, because nothing about it has been asked.

It is a hand on your arm, in writing, put there by a building.

He stood in that road for a while and made himself say the other half out loud, which is a thing he does about twice a year. The complaint was accurate. He had performed an Accord function without warrant in front of nine people, and he would do the same thing at the same door on the same evening, and the House had written down what he did and had not embroidered one word of it.

That is the part that does not go away. They had not needed to lie about him. They had only needed to be quicker than he was with the paper.

So a man does not go at the complaint. He goes at the building. He finds the thing the building wants more than it wants the complaint, and then he makes it choose.

He got that far at the top of Cinder Row and did not enjoy it. It is not a thing anybody arrives at with pleasure. The only lever he had found in four years of looking was being useful to the people holding the other end of him.

* * *

The board had been up two days and he had not been to it.

That was its own answer and he liked it less than the other one. He had gone past that board four times in eleven days with a bundle under his arm, on the way to a counter, and had thought after this every time.

There are always four people in front of that board.

There are three of them now. The old man from the cooperage has been at the gate since the summer. The place where he used to stand has stayed a place, because nobody in Ashfall stands in a dead man's spot at a board and nobody has ever had to be told not to.

WARD NINE: STANDING NOTICE

Levy assessed ................ 17.8

Assessment of N. Ashgrove in .. 81 days

Eighty-one.

He had first stood in front of that line at three hundred and fourteen, in a wind, with a brass tag in his coat and no idea what he was looking at. He had done the long division standing up with the board as a desk, and got a number about nine thousand people that he could not hold in his head for eleven seconds together.

He could hold it now. That was the difference and it was not a comfort.

Seventeen point eight against a standard of fourteen, on a girl who will be thirteen in the winter. She keeps a rate sheet in pencil ruled with the edge of a knife. She has their mother's face and their father's hands.

Eighty-one days for a man with a complaint on his roll to turn himself into something that can stand between those two figures.

Somewhere across the ward the sixth bell went.

It is not the foundry's bell now. It is a curfew bell and he wrote it himself over four days. It cost him a Fine grade Pattern spent to nothing and one of nine slots. Eighty Rendered turn off the gate road when it sounds and go where the bell tells them, and the road has been walkable after dark for a fortnight.

Outside this ward not one living soul knows that any of it happened.

The Sedge Counting House had written four lines.

Kalen stood at the board until they put the lamps out. He worked it through twice and came out at the same place both times.

He wanted it withdrawn, in writing, by the House itself.