第20章 The Unreconciled Nine

The purge of the Band Register happens in the last week of the tenth month, and it happens because the plates are soft brass and soft brass is worth recycling. Cray let him in on purpose. That was what she wanted and she wanted it badly, because she had begun to understand that the thing in her cellar was going to be examined by somebody one way or another and she would rather choose the moment. She let him in on the fifth of the month, on a Monday morning, with her clerk standing in the doorway, and she stood at the rack herself while he took down the year-twelve case. "You may search the cellar," she said. "You have my permission and my presence, and there is no form for a private citizen searching a cellar so I have written one out for you by hand, and there it is, and you may take it with you when you go." He took the year-twelve case down and opened it on the bottom step. Eleven hundred plates in eleven hundred small brown envelopes: licence renewals, four fee cuts, a run of nine sick bands in one week of the autumn. Not one of them had a word of assurance on it, and all of them were going into the metal drawer on Friday. He had not come for the year-twelve case. "You have forty years of Returns upstairs," he said, "and twenty years of plates, and a cellar that goes back further than the rack." "The rack is the cellar." "The rack is the front of the cellar." Nyle put the case down. "Behind the coal." Halla Cray did not move for a while. "It is not on any schedule," she said. "No." "It has never been on a schedule. I have been warden nineteen years and I have never had it open, and I know it is there because the coal does not stack square against that wall." Nyle looked at her for a moment and understood that she was about to say something she could not take back, and that she was going to say it anyway, and that this was the most courage anybody had shown him since he arrived. "I have known about that case since I was a clerk," she said. "I have known about it since I was twenty-four years old. It is the only thing in this building I have never opened, and I have arranged my whole working life around not opening it, and I would like it recorded that I am aware of what that makes me." He wrote it down, exactly as she said it, with the date and the hour, in the longhand he used for facts. Then they moved the coal. The case behind it was a plain deal box with no label and a broken hasp, and inside it, wrapped in oiled cloth and gone brown at the edges, were the plates of the first nine years of the levy. Nine years. No cuts marked. No case number. Nothing that would tie them to a schedule, in a cellar, in a cellar that four clerks in four decades had walked past. Nyle sat down on the floor of the cellar of the Hourhouse of Brackmoor and read year after year, and he worked fast because he had eleven weeks and now eight. Year one. A levy of twenty-two thousand hours struck off the South Ward, in a single spring, at twenty-four hours a head, in a year when there had been no advancement scheme at all, because the Ministry did not introduce city advancement grants until the ninth year, and Nyle knew the date because he had read the grant schedule in the Rules on the river packet. Nine hundred and sixteen people. Year one. Twenty-two thousand hours, taken from the arms of nine hundred and sixteen people in the poorest ward of a small city, in exchange for nothing, for a scheme that did not yet exist, in a year when the advancement allocation was not yet written. The ninth hour had not been a remainder in year one. In year one there was no ceiling to stand unused under it. It had been the first slice, taken off the ward in the first year, before anything had been bought and before anything had been spent, struck through bands in a block in a single afternoon, and it had been described in a Return that was written afterwards by a clerk who had been told what the number was. And then — this was the part that took him three hours to hold in his head and would take him the rest of his life to put down — everything else had been built on top of it. The ceiling, the remainder, the weather line, the assurance levy with its honest posting on a ward wall, the coal that came in the December: forty years of careful, plausible, warm-handed administration, every part of it defensible, every part of it documented, all of it resting on nine hundred and sixteen hours taken from people in year one who had been told they were paying for something. He had spent nine weeks looking for a fraud that had been designed. There had been no design. There had been a theft, and then four decades of clerks, each of them competent, each of them unwilling, each of them carrying it forward one notch and one year because nine hours was too small to stop for. He wrote it out in four lines in the notebook, and then he read his own four lines and struck out the word *fraud*, and wrote *theft* instead, and then struck that out too and wrote *taking*, because a word chosen to make him feel clean would be a word he had chosen. Then he put the year-one box back behind the coal, and did not take it, because taking it would be a theft of his own, and because the box was more use in a cellar in Brackmoor than in a coat in Averholt, and because he had seven weeks and one thing to do with them. Cray walked him up the three steps. "The submission goes to the Register," Nyle said, "and the Register verifies in the eleventh month. You could countersign it. You have the standing of a warden and the authority. It would arrive with a warden's seal on it instead of an inspector's exception." "Would you trust it more." "I would trust it exactly the same and a great deal more quickly." She thought about it for as long as it took the clerks upstairs to open the shutters, and then she went and got her seal out of the drawer, and put it in his hand, and would not take it back. "You will tell them what I said in the cellar," she said. "Word for word. And the hour." "I know you will. That is the reason." She turned to go up, and stopped. "The weather line is not older than my office. It is older than this building, and there were forty men who could have stopped it, and I was one of them for nineteen years, and I have a great deal of paper about timber in my head and very little about nine hundred and sixteen people." She went up. Nyle stood at the foot of the three steps with a warden's seal in his hand. The post came in at noon, a day early, carried up from the south by a postman with bad boots, and the fact of the day early was what made his stomach go cold before he had the envelope open, because a fast post that is early is a post that was carried to the front of a queue. He broke it on the bottom step. *From the standing clerk, Register of Attainment, Ministry of Hours.* *Received: the unclosed exception of Inspector N. Threshwick, Brackmoor, comprising a variance schedule, a levy schedule, an exhibit register of one hundred and nine pages, and a warden's seal of the city of Brackmoor.* *Noted for the verification of the eleventh month. The register will require the city's return for the current year, and the register will compare it against its own count, in the ordinary course, in the ordinary way, on the first day of the month.* Nyle read the third line again. Brackmoor's return for the current year had been filed four days ago. It had been countersigned at the top, as every year's is countersigned, by a hand he knew from a document he had read nine weeks ago on a table in the outer room, standing up, with his coat still on. The ninth hour was in it, in the fourth month's line, in the weather line's old hand-style, struck and accounted at nine hours exactly, the forty-first year of the practice. And the countersignature was Kerrin Drennick's seal.