Chapter 35 - The Part of the Account That Had Names

Ilyen's next letter didn't come by the ordinary courier. A junior ritualist brought it with two sealed copies of procurement records and a written request that Aoi and I receive them together.

I knew before opening it that the answer wasn't simple.

Aoi sat beside me at the officers' table. Pell waited outside unless called. Halwen stayed nearby, not as a witness, as someone who'd seen the messenger's face.

I broke the seal. The first sheet was Ilyen's explanation. The second was a treasury extract.

The third had names on it.

I read the explanation aloud because Aoi had asked me to. Then I stopped, and she took the page, and read it herself.

The working that brought her through had used twenty-four living donors for part of the active mana supply. All had survived the chamber. The record described military duty allocation, not consent. Several had needed extended recovery.

That was one part.

The stored catalyst had come from a reserve bought through the crown treasury. Its production had used lethal vitality extraction from condemned prisoners.

Eighteen deaths recorded in the source batch.

The batch had supplied multiple workings. Both our summonings drew from it. No honest arithmetic could assign a separate number of those deaths to either arrival.

Aoi lowered the paper.

I looked at the names. Eighteen. Not an estimate. Not a dramatic number picked to make horror legible. Names, dates, legal classifications, and a column for the resulting material yield.

I could read the script without effort. I wished I couldn't.

Ilyen had written a fourth page. Her own part. The matrix delivered to the chamber could be produced several ways. The receiving laboratory certified stability and capacity. Fiscal provenance sat in separate treasury records. She'd accepted the certification. She'd known vitality-derived reserves existed. She hadn't asked whether this allotment was one.

Accurate. She didn't use it to let herself off.

I treated the approved source as a question already answered by someone entitled to answer it. I should not have.

Aoi read that twice. Then the next page.

The King's authorization permitted certified crown reserves, including sanctioned vitality substitutes, for the summoning program. His seal. Corvane's office had chosen the particular allocation.

The King hadn't signed the list of eighteen names. He'd signed an authority under which such a list could become a delivery.

I put the paper down. My hands were cold. Across from me Aoi had gone completely still.

We sat until Halwen knocked. Neither of us answered. She came in anyway.

"Read it," Aoi said.

Halwen did. Her face changed at the names. Not surprise that the practice existed. Something more specific than that. She sat down. For a while all three of us looked at the table.

"What were they condemned for?" Aoi asked.

Classifications. Some precise. Some not. Murder. Armed robbery. Desertion under enemy contact. Repeated theft under emergency grain law. One line said only aggravated sedition.

Aoi touched it. "What does that mean?"

"I don't know the case," Halwen said.

"Neither did the person using the crystal."

"No."

The reserve's manufacturing date was before either of us arrived. The deaths weren't a spectacle arranged round our summoning circles. They'd happened elsewhere, earlier, and their product had sat in a store until a clerk assigned it.

I understood then why Veyr had warned me not to expect the horror to announce itself. The chamber could be clean. The ritualists could see no victim. The resource could arrive already measured.

Aoi pushed back from the table. "I need air. Not alone. Just... not in here."

We went outside.

The market ground was empty. Wind in the canvas over the tool stall. Past the fence, the new goat was trying to eat a thorn bush with real optimism.

Aoi walked to the wall and stopped.

"I didn't ask."

"I know."

"They keep making it about what we owe."

"Yes."

"I don't owe them."

"No."

She turned. "The people who died?"

I had nothing ready. Probably lucky.

"We did not choose it."

"That isn't what I asked."

"No."

I looked at the hill. Rookstead was on the other side of it, full of people clearing rooms and arguing about roofs.

"I don't think their deaths create a debt the King gets to collect from us. And I don't think pretending they were unavoidable would be honest. What we do because we know is ours to decide. Not his."

She leaned on the stone. For a long time neither of us said anything.

"I want their cases," she said. "All eighteen."

"Some records may be gone."

"Then I want to know which. And the donors. They didn't die. That doesn't mean they had a choice. I want to know whether they recovered."

We'd gone looking for a way home. Now there were more people to ask about. I could have resented that, or the people who'd made it necessary.

I would not resent the names.

We didn't read the records to the whole watch. It wasn't a performance opportunity. Aoi chose who got told. Halwen. Orra. Ressa. Pell, because copies would be needed.

We met after supper. Nobody tried to make it smaller.

Orra stared at the authorization seal.

"He signed this."

"Yes."

"I've carried his orders for twenty years."

Nobody answered that.

Ressa read the grain-law conviction.

"My brother was taken for stealing seed grain once." She set the page down carefully. "He got six strokes and a debt."

Dain wasn't there. I was grateful for the absence only because the room already held enough.

Pell copied the names onto a separate sheet. His handwriting stayed neat. It cost him something to keep it neat. I could see that.

At the end he asked, "What do I call the file?"

I looked at Aoi. She looked at the names.

"Not materials."

Pell waited.

"The people in the summoning accounts."

He wrote it.

Ilyen's messenger stayed the night. Before he left I asked whether she'd been ordered to send the documents.

"Master Ilyen obtained authorization to inspect procurement. Permission to release the copies was disputed."

"Is she in danger?"

He looked away.

"She has been relieved of oversight of the next proposed summoning."

Aoi, beside me: "Proposed."

"Yes."

"Another one."

"Not when I left."

"Who is supervising?"

"I don't know."

She drew a breath and asked him to wait while we wrote. Receipt acknowledged. Request the court records behind the eighteen names. Request the donor recovery record. Ask whether her removal affected the return research. Aoi added one line of her own.

Thank you for sending the answer instead of another reason we should not ask.

I didn't touch it.

We sent a separate petition through Marret asking that the procurement evidence be preserved. Not because preserving it would fix anything. Because losing it would make the next questions easier to avoid.

The messenger left. Later that morning a kid came to ask whether we still needed people to weed the old village common. I said yes. Then I went with them.