Chapter 9 The Press in the Cellar

The Band Register cellar had two presses in it, and that was the first thing Nyle had not expected. He had gone down on the fourth morning with a candle and a request for the year-thirty-two case, expecting a cupboard of brass and the smell of old metal. What he found was a working room: a low bench along one wall, a stool, a rack of chisels, and two hand presses bolted to a plank floor that had been planed so often it shone. One of the presses was new and one was not, and the new one sat nearest the stairs. "You will want the books on the shelf above the bench," said Ferrick, from the top of the steps. He had not offered to come down. He had offered, by standing at the head of the stairs, to be present in a way that cost him nothing and could be reported as attendance. "I will want the books," Nyle agreed. "The books are the Reckoner's. The bands are the wardens'. The cellar is the city's. You are asking three offices for one thing in the same room." "I am asking the city for one thing in a room it built." Ferrick did not come down. Nyle did not expect him to, and had not meant to. The shelf held eleven working books in brown calf, one for each live year, each ruled in six columns: date, name, ward, hours struck, cut, release. Nine thousand band entries in the year-thirty-two volume alone, and he had perhaps a morning. He began at the South Ward. By the third hour the pattern had stopped being a pattern and become a wall. Every March, for nine consecutive years, the South Ward entries run from a Tuesday to the following Thursday. Every other ward's entries for the same week were scattered through the year as people found need of a new band: a death in the family, a change of trade, a cut to pay a fee. The South Ward's were not scattered. They arrived in a block, struck in one sitting, and every single one of them carried the same cut: **24, JOURN.** He read the line three times to be sure he had the shape of it right, because a man who has found one series in a wall of figures will go looking for series, and the series has to be there in the years as well as in the columns. It was there in the years. Year thirty-two: sixty-one. Year thirty-three: sixty. Year thirty-four: fifty-seven, which was a bad year on the river and the only one of the twenty where the number went down. Nothing had gone down anywhere else. Nothing in the South Ward books had changed in twenty years except the price of flour. Then he went and did the other four wards, standing up, in the cold, with the candle guttering. The North Ward book had a hundred and four entries in the whole of the year-thirty-two volume and he read every one of them, because a man who only ever counts the people he has already decided are being cheated is not counting, he is collecting. They were the entries of an ordinary place: a woman whose band was struck when her trade changed from rope to sailcloth, a boy of nine with a fee cut, a run of eleven in the third week of the autumn when a fever went through one street and the Hourhouse put a fee on the issue of sick bands, six of the eleven for the same reason and in the same week. The Quay Ward had ninety-one. The Bank Ward had forty, and thirty-four of the forty were for the annual re-cut of the licence bands the ward clerks themselves wore. Not one cut in three thousand citizens outside the South Ward was block-struck in a spring. Not one carried the price of a journeyman advance against a citizen who did not hold one. The practice had a single address and it had been operating it annually for twenty years, and every year it had sent an invoice to a ward of people who could least afford the currency it was charging in. Above eight hundred citizens. Two years' worth of plates for a ward that held three thousand one hundred people. He did the sum twice on the cellar wall with a stub of chalk, because there was nowhere else to put it. Twelve hundred and eleven cuts over twenty years, an average of sixty-one in a spring. Twenty-four hours each. Twenty-nine thousand and sixty-four hours, struck out of the bands of people in the South Ward, for advancements that no register in Marnhull has ever heard of. Then he went and found the Return for year thirty-two, and read the civic account again, and this time he did not stop at the advancement ceiling. Below the ceiling, on the fourth page, under the sinking works, was a line he had walked past nine times. *Assurance, ward levy, south: struck 24,000; accounted 24,000.* It balanced. It had balanced every year of the forty. Twenty-four thousand hours struck from the South Ward, taken off the bands of people who could not spare them, and accounted to the penny by an office that had never produced a name. Nyle sat on the planed floor of the cellar with the book open on his knees and understood the arrangement entire. The nine is the fingerprint. The levy is the hand. The assurance levy was the reason the civic account closed. Take away the hours the levy took from the South Ward and the debit column would be short by thousands every year, not nine. The weather line absorbed nine of those. The rest went into timbers, ropes, lamps and gear renewals that no one had ever inspected, and the city had spent forty years paying for the decay of its own paperwork with the savings of the poorest people in it. There was one more thing about the arrangement, and he had to put the book down flat on his knees to look at it properly, because it was the thing that would keep him awake later and he wanted to see it whole while he was alone in a cellar. The levy bought coal. That part was not a fiction. Six hours a household, taken in the spring, against a winter guarantee of fuel and bread and burial lime, delivered in the December to households on a list kept in the ward clerk's house. The list was real, and the coal was real, and the women who had stood at that ward desk and counted their bands after the levy had been struck had counted them correctly, because the coal came. Somebody in this city had built the most efficient instrument anyone had ever devised for taking twenty-four hours off a woman's arm at a press, and had then hung the winter guarantee on the same nail, so that the people being robbed would be the last people in the kingdom to admit there was anything to admit. He went up the stairs slowly. Ferrick had gone. There was a note on the outer table in the same square hand as the note about the cellar keys, and it said only: *the warden will see you at eleven.* ---