第11章 The Signature Block

There is a shelf in the outer room of every Hourhouse in the kingdom, and in Brackmoor it was three feet of dark shelving above the window with a plate of varnished deal screwed to the front of it. A finding that reached the shelf was finished. The shelf took three shapes. A finding with one signature went into the day's post. A finding with two signatures — the inspector and the warden — went into the day's post with the warden's assent written on it. A finding with two signatures and the seal of the Office went into the year's book. A finding that reached the shelf without a signature stayed on the inspector's person until it was signed, and if the inspector left the city without signing it, it was logged as an exception and the inspector's file was annotated with the word *unclosed* in a red hand that Nyle had seen twice in sixteen years. He had been one of the two, at thirty-one, on a file concerning a salt factor who had rounded a hundred and forty times. He had closed that one. He had written the word *unclosed* on somebody else's file at thirty-eight, and the other man had been moved to a coast, and never held a rank again. The Rules gave an unclosed exception a life of eleven months. It had to be renewed at the anniversary or it lapsed and the finding died where it stood, and a lapsed finding leaves no mark at all, because the shelf does not record what it never received. In the eleventh month the Office purged its registers. Everything that had not been certified by then was sealed for five years, and a sealed return cannot be produced to anybody, including the inspector who wrote it. So there were two dates in a year that mattered, and both of them were in the last third of it, and one of them Nyle could have named off the calendar on the wall of the outer room without counting. Nyle wrote them in the back of the notebook where nobody would look: *the eleventh month. The purge and the verification are the same month. They do it together on purpose, so that a man cannot arrive with an objection while his own figures are still open.* He had eleven weeks. It was the first piece of arithmetic in nine days that had frightened him, and it frightened him because it was the first one that had a date on it. He went down and asked the clerk on the outer desk what the post from Marnhull cost. "Fourpence the quarter ounce," the boy said. "The fast post is a penny and it's four days quicker." "And if a letter is sent with the fast post on a Thursday, when does it arrive?" "The Tuesday. Always the Tuesday." The boy looked up. "Why?" "Because I am going to send three, and I want to know which of them I will still be here to receive." The boy did not know, and it was not his job to, and Nyle thanked him and went back up. Nyle put the press books in a satchel and the schedule in a second satchel and sat down to write what he had. It took him the whole afternoon. He wrote it in the form the Rules require: the claim, the schedule of figures, the exhibits, the objection he anticipated, and the finding. Fourteen hundred words. The longest paragraph in it was the one about the assurance levy, and he wrote that one three times and threw it away twice before he was satisfied it could not be read as a claim that the South Ward had been robbed of everything. When he had it, he read the last page and the first page and then the middle, and he noticed for the first time in nine days that his hand had stopped writing the way his teacher had taught him and had begun writing the way the clerks here wrote, which was flatter, and faster, and worse. He signed nothing. He put the finding in the satchel and the satchel under the mattress of his bed at the tally-clerk's house, on top of the notebook, and he went down to the Hour Market to eat because it was nearly eight and he had not eaten since four. The letter was waiting at the desk when he came back, carried up from the south by a postman who had walked eleven miles to deliver it, which meant it had come by the fast post from Marnhull. *Kerrin Drennick, Inspector-General of the Office of the Rolls.* Nyle read it standing up, in a room with one lamp and a dead fire. It was four paragraphs. The first recalled him to the Office. The second observed that Rule Fourteen, Clause Three had been applied in Brackmoor for forty years without exception and that such consistency is itself an assurance of good faith. The third noted that assurance levies are domestic charges of the city and are not within the competence of the Office except where they touch the civic account. The fourth expressed confidence in his judgement and instructed him to close the file with an assurance of reconciliation and forward it by the next post. Signed, sealed, and dated the day before the letter left Marnhull. Nyle set it on the table and stood looking at it for a while, and then he did a thing he had not done since he was thirty-eight. He took out a sheet of paper and wrote his reply, which was four lines long, and at the end of it he left the space for a signature blank, and he did not fill it in. Ferrick came in at nine, saw the letter face up on the table, and read it standing up behind him, which was an abuse of a privilege he had never been granted and which Nyle allowed because there was no version of the evening in which the man went out of the room. "Sign it," Ferrick said. "You have not read it." "I read it upside down from the door. Sign it, and go home, and take the coast posting they will offer you, and write to me." He came in and sat down. "I have watched two men try to hold a finding open in this city. One of them held it for six years. Do you know what he had at the end of the six years?" "Nothing." "A finding four pages long, because pages were all he could get read, and a band with the advance still on it, and a very good memory." Ferrick put his elbows on the table. "You have got six weeks of coal and eleven weeks of figures and then the whole thing seals and you have got a notebook and a bad address and no post. That is the end of the line. I am not being cruel. I am telling you the shape of the ground so you can decide whether you want to be on it." "And you are the second man." "I am the man who told him, eventually, and he is alive and teaches in a town with a small roll." Ferrick shrugged. "You are welcome to the other version. I would only take it if I were you, and I am going to say that to a man I have known eleven weeks, which is the strangest thing I have said this year." He would hold the reply for two days. An unsigned answer is not an answer; it is a thing that tells a senior desk that a junior desk is awake. He wanted Marnhull to have that, and he wanted the two days to be spent doing something rather than waiting. He wrote a third letter, to the Register of Attainment at the Ministry, requesting access for an inspector of the rolls to the Brackmoor returns for the years in question. That request required no local countersignature. It went out with the morning post, and when it went out it became visible to anybody who paid the halfpenny for the Office's daily list of requisitions and returns, which is how the Office had worked for a hundred and forty years. Then he sat down, put the blank reply in the satchel with the finding, and did not sleep. ---