Chapter 47: I Walked Into the Chancellor’s Office and Found the Whole Play

"Nobody touches anything until I’m inside and Zelina comes in with me."

Decimus Vanthel’s office was the tidiest room in the palace and had been for twenty years.

Four shelves, a desk with no drawers and one chair for visitors, always lower than his.

The case sat open in the middle of the desk, empty except for one thing.

A grey covered notebook the size of a missal, with a ribbon marking the last written page.

"Don’t open it yet," Zelina said.

"Why?"

"Because if he left it there, he wants you to open it." She circled the desk. "And I’d rather know what else he wants before I give him the first thing."

She looked at the floor, the hinges, the edge of the rug.

"No struggle. No hurry. He walked out and took the seal."

"And this?"

"This is what he wants you to read."

I opened it anyway.

Thirteen years pricing settlements taught me that sometimes the trap is the document, and sometimes the trap is taking three days to read it.

It wasn’t a journal.

It was a play.

Five acts, with headings, with character names in the margin and dates beside each scene. Decimus’s hand, small and upright, without a single correction in twenty pages.

Act one. The tyrant burns the south. Dated the ninth year of the era. In the margin, in the same hand: no provocation was necessary.

Act two. The boy in the barn. The ceremony. The transport. Dated the fifth year, with a note beneath: twelve days. Correct this next time.

Act three. The five marriages. Five kingdoms that hate the same man. In the margin: a villain needs witnesses who outlive him.

Act four. The Regency Council. The hero’s entrance. The southern rebellion. The coronation on the ashes.

And here, for the first time in twenty pages, the hand changed.

Four lines struck through with one clean rule, and above them, written later and larger:

Act four did not occur.

The south received plows. The hero unloaded carts. Nobody rose.

I have lost.

Zelina read over my shoulder and said nothing for a long time.

"Turn the page," she said at last.

I turned it.

Act five was blank.

And in the margin, in the fast ugly hand from the four letters, three lines Decimus Vanthel had not written:

I’ll finish act five.

You’re no longer required, Chancellor.

Thank you for the seal.

I closed the notebook.

Out in the corridor Lunara’s boots went back and forth in front of the door, because she’d gone three days without sleep and didn’t know how to do anything else.

"Vaelion." Zelina had a hand on the edge of the desk and hadn’t moved it. "Decimus didn’t flee."

"No."

"Decimus was dismissed."

"He wrote four acts in twenty years." I set the notebook down on the desk. "Somebody read all four and decided he wasn’t going to write the fifth."

"Somebody who watched him write them."

"Somebody who filed them." I turned the case toward her. "How long does it take to copy twenty pages by hand?"

"Two nights, three if you’re careful about the margins."

"And to learn a man’s whole method from twenty pages?"

Zelina thought about it the way she thinks about doses.

"You don’t learn it from the pages but from twelve years of carrying them." She put her finger on the blank act five. "This is an apprentice."

And there, for the first time since I woke up in this body, I felt something I had never once felt about the chancellor in eleven weeks.

With Decimus Vanthel I knew how to negotiate. I knew his price, his method and his limit.

A man who pays eighty four pensions for twenty years has a floor, and you can work with a floor.

Whoever wrote those three lines didn’t have one.

"He thanked him for the seal," Zelina said.

"I noticed."

"He thanked him, Vaelion. You don’t thank a man you’ve killed."

She picked up the notebook and put it down again.

"Decimus is alive somewhere and whoever has him wants him alive, and I can’t decide which of those two facts I like less."

I asked Zelina for the personnel roll again.

"Forty one names," I said. "Two with more than twelve years. One died in March."

"Yes."

"How did he die?"

Zelina looked down at the sheet and stayed quiet longer than she ever stays quiet.

"A fall from a horse," she said.

Eleven months after the ceremony, a Towers overseer fell off a horse.

In March, a Chancellery secretary with twelve years of service fell off another.

"Who signed the death notice?"

"The office of supply."

"Which is staffed by?"

"Four men." She was already ahead of me. "And the notice is in the same fast ugly hand as the four letters."

"He signed his own colleague out of the roll."

"He signed his own colleague out of the roll and then kept drawing the wages." Zelina rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand. "Vaelion, I’ve poisoned people for money. That is a trade. This man works for free and keeps the paperwork tidy."

"The one who’s left," I said. "Name."

Zelina ran her finger down the list, took it to the bottom, brought it back up.

She did it three times.

"Read it out," I said.

"I’ve read it three times."

"Then read it a fourth."

"Vaelion, the roll has forty one names and forty one wage signatures." She raised her head. "And only forty posts."

"Say that again."

"Forty one men are being paid."

She turned the sheet around so I could see the column.

"The forty first signature is on every page, it has been for twelve years and it doesn’t match any name on the list."

Down in the great courtyard the hour bell started.

I counted it out of habit.

It rang nine times, and on the ninth the blue window opened on its own in my palm with a line I had never seen in eleven weeks.

[HERO.]

[Something just looked at US.]