Chapter 2 The Rounding Habit

The rule that let a city write off nine hours a year had a number: Section Fourteen, Clause Three, of the Rules of Reconciliation. Nyle had a copy of the Rules on the river packet and found the clause before he found the ledger it applied to. It read, in the flat bureaucratic register that the Rules had kept since the first Hourhouse was built: *Where a work item cannot be attested, the city may enter an unattested deduction against the civic account, not exceeding one part in four hundred of the year's assessed outlay, provided the deduction is listed by item and the item is named.* Three requirements. Name the work. List it by item. Hold the total under a quarter of one percent. Nyle did the second sum before he left the Hourhouse that evening. Brackmoor's assessed outlay in the last Return was thirty-nine thousand six hundred and four hours. A quarter of one percent of that was ninety-nine hours. Nine was well inside the ceiling, which meant Brackmoor had not been hiding behind a large allowance. It had been hiding behind a small one, which was the sort of choice a careful person makes. The fourth requirement was the one that had survived forty years of use, and it was the item: *and the item is named*. Every Return he had seen in the fan carried a line for the deduction. None of them carried a name. In place of a name there were nine letters, written in the same hand as the variance every year, unchanged in style through six clerks and four decades. The line read: **standing wear allowance, sched. 14(3)**. "Weather," said Ferrick, when Nyle showed him the line. "They call it the weather line. Timbers shrink. Rope stretches. Iron in wet air goes to rust and a rusting hinge costs more hours than a sound one. It's not fraud, Inspector. It's allowance for decay." "Decay doesn't come to the same figure every year." "Somebody rounds it." "Somebody rounds it," Nyle agreed. "I would like to know how long a rounding takes to arrive at nine, and land on it, forty years running." Ferrick's mouth moved a quarter of an inch. "There's a rule on rounding. The Rules say a standing deduction may be entered at a fixed figure where the underlying items are numerous and immaterial. It saves the clerks a fortnight of listing." "The Rules say it may be entered at a fixed figure. The Rules also say the item is named." "Then the item is the schedule." "The schedule has a number. A number is not a name." Ferrick turned the lantern down a notch and the room lost half its light. "You're right. It's a schedule and not a name. I've been a Reckoner here nineteen years and I can tell you that the line has been on the Return every year of my service with the same letters and the same hand-style. That hand is old. Somebody's grandfather wrote that line and his clerk copied it forward for four decades because nobody ever asked where it came from." "And you never asked." "I asked once." Ferrick turned the lantern back up. "I was twenty-six. I asked a warden about the weather line and she told me it was older than her office and that my question was noted." "Your question was noted." "Everything is noted. It's what we're for." He gathered the lantern against his chest. "Get some sleep, Inspector. If you're going to spend forty years in nine hours, you may as well spend the first one lying down." He said it as a kindness and Nyle took it as one, which was careless, and then he sat on the edge of the table in the dark after the door had shut and thought about the rest of it. A man who has been noted has been entered. Somewhere in this building there was a sheet with the date on it and his name against it and the words *question raised, weather line*, and the sheet would still be there, and the man who wrote it would still be alive somewhere, and in nineteen years a good clerk had put the whole of a career into never asking again because asking had a cost and the cost was small. Nyle had been that clerk. He had declined two advances and told himself it was principle, and it had taken him nine days to work out that a man will decline anything that costs him if he is not also counting something in return. He went back and read the eight o'clock line on the requisition stamp that Ferrick had not yet signed, because there was no requisition yet, and understood that he had already decided to trust the man and had not bothered to examine when he had decided it. Nyle did not sleep much. He worked instead, on the coverslip of his own notebook, which was the only place in the world where he still did arithmetic longhand. He reconstructed the civic account from the Returns. He had the credits — every citizen's band income, summed by the wards and by the trades — and he had the debits, which were the civic works: the Grain Court's timbers, the lampwire, the quay bollards, the sluice, the ford, the burial ground wall, and a line for public advancement, which was the money the city received from the Ministry of Hours to help its citizens take ranks. That last line was where his pencil stopped. Public advancement arrived in a block. The Ministry set a ceiling for each city each year, in hours, and the city claimed the block and applied it to rank payments on behalf of citizens. Brackmoor's ceiling had been one thousand four hundred hours for as long as anyone remembered. The city reported that it had applied one thousand four hundred hours of advancement. The city's own schedule showed the applications it had actually lodged: one thousand three hundred and ninety-one, every year, for forty years. Nine hours. Standing unspent at the top of the ceiling, every year, exactly. Nyle sat with that for a while. An unspent hour at the ceiling should accumulate. If a city held back nine hours of Ministry advancement in year one, then by year five it should have held back forty-five, and the ceiling line should have shown a widening gap. It did not widen. It sat at nine, the way the weather line sat at nine, with the constancy of a thing under maintenance. Which meant the shortfall was not drifting upward from some old accident. It was being produced. Every year somebody lodged one thousand three hundred and ninety-one hours' worth of applications against a ceiling of one thousand four hundred, and then entered the missing nine as decay on the timbers, so that the civic account would close on the figure the Ministry would accept. He wrote one line in the notebook: *the nine is a remainder, not a loss*. Then he wrote a second, because an inspector who stops at the first useful sentence is an inspector who has been made comfortable: *find the applications that were never lodged*. Sleep came at some point after that, in pieces, with the packet's low span still grinding under him. ---