Chapter 11 The Warden's Office

Halric Verrick's office was above the counting floor, up a stair that smelled of wax and hot brass, and the door had a plate on it that said nothing at all. "I want five minutes of the best man in the south ward," he said. "I am told you asked a question this week." "Yes." "I am told it cost the office nothing and gained the office a fair copy." He turned a paper over on the desk. "You are an honest man in a city where being honest is a hobby. That is worth money to a person like me and I would like to be very clear about the shape of it." "Then let us both be clear, sir." "Sit down. You would look better sitting down and you will be here more than five minutes." He took his time. "When you go to master you will need two thousand hours, and you do not have them, because your band is a small band and your mother eats a small band's worth every week. There is no way for you to reach master by work. I have read your arithmetic. You will reach journeyman and then you will stand in a chute for six years and die in it, or you will do one of the two other things." "Which two?" "You will take money from somebody." Verrick opened his hand and turned it over as if showing it was empty. "Or you will take hours from yourself. The second is what a fool does and the first is what a man does, and the first costs you nothing you were going to use. My office can put you forward for master at two thousand and it will take the two thousand off the fund and not off you, and you will carry no mark for it at all." "That is not a tariff." "It is a subsidy, and subsidies are what the warden's office is for." Verrick leaned forward. "But you will pay me for it, and I will tell you how, because I would rather you thought about the price than not. Four words, and they are small, and nobody will ever know you said them. When they ask you, in a gallery or in a kitchen or on a step on the Weir, whether the south ward is charged more than the Rolls hold, you will say that you have heard the question and you do not believe it." "Will they ask?" "Somebody always asks. That is what south wards are for." "And if they ask twice?" "Then they will find out in about four years that the answer to a question depends on who is asked, and there will be no harm in it at all, because that is already true." He took a small card out of the drawer and wrote on it. "Two thousand hours. Master. You will have the confirmation in eight days. The confirmation will take forty hours off your band and you will carry the master seal and a rate of pay you cannot imagine, and in three years you will have a band that a north-ward clerk would be proud of." "And after three years?" "After three years you will be a man in a corridor with a good coat," Verrick said, "and I will have been one for a long while before you." He pushed the card across the desk. Ryam looked at it for a while. "Can I take it away?" "You may take it away. You have eight days." Ryam picked it up and turned it over on the blotter. "Can I see what happens if I don't take it?" "That is not a question anybody has ever asked me in this chair." Verrick leaned back and folded his hands. "You would be a journeyman for the rest of your natural account, which for a man on your band is about eleven years of good lungs and then the chute. I would not come after you. There is no instrument in this office that goes after a man who has not signed anything." "And in eleven years my mother will have been four years dead." "Yes." "So the fund you are offering to pay me from has had nine hundred hours out of her since the spring." Verrick's hands stayed folded. "I have four wards and nine thousand names in them," he said. "I do not know your mother's name and I am not going to learn it, and you have just told me something about a woman I am not going to remember, and that is the correct way round, because if I knew it I would have to have an opinion about it, and nobody in this office has an opinion about anything. We move stones. That is the whole of what this office is." "No. You move people," Ryam said. "The stones are how you do it." He took the card and got down the four flights and out into the light, and stood on the third gallery with his back to the stone and read the four words on it, and then he turned it over and looked at the blank on the back. There was nothing on the back. He had expected there to be something on the back. He went down into the yard and put his hand in his shirt and took out his mother's slate, and he held it in his palm and looked at the number on the first line, and then at the count of the days, and then at the name written twice. Then he went and found Halberd Jessop and asked her whether anybody in the four hundred and six names of that building had ever taken a subsidy from the warden's office. She looked at him for a long moment. "Four," she said. "How do you know it's four?" "Because I have been counting for nineteen years," she said, "and the answer has been four ever since the office opened." "What were they?" "Two are dead. One reads the fair copy in the third gallery." She put her hands in her apron. "The fourth is forty-one years old and has been a journeyman since she was nineteen and she is the best slate-handler on the north side and she sends nine hours a month to the Grey Stile and thinks nobody knows. And she will tell you, if you ask her, that she is happy. And she will be right. And you will not be able to make your hand write anything against that, and you were not meant to be able to, and that is the design, and I am telling you the design because you are nineteen and you would not otherwise see it." ---