第1章 The Standing Nine

The brass band on her left forearm read **1174**, and on the third Monday of the seventh month Avelin Cindermill learned that the number had stopped being a fact and become a promise. She was sitting in the outer bench room of the Hourhouse at Draymoor with her cuff bare and the waiting bench's own wood grain ticking under the October sun, and the clerk at the end of the row slid a card across the rail. The card had her name, her rank, and a single column of figures, and the figure at the bottom of the column was 1174. "Your standing," said the clerk. Her name was Wrenno. She was young, and she had the flat voice of a girl who had read the same column ten thousand times and stopped hearing the words. "As cut at the last revision." Avelin looked at the band. Then she looked at the card. The number on her skin matched the number on the paper, which meant the cut she had received at the end of the fourth month was still true, and which meant she had done nothing since then that the Hourhouse did not already know about. "Is that a good number," she said. Wrenno set her pen down. She considered the question the way other people consider a word they have not used before. "It is your number," Wrenno said. "It is 1174 Hours." "Your standing is 1174 Hours." "If I spent them, what could I buy?" "That is not the standing. That is the ledger." Wrenno tapped the card with one fingernail. "The standing tells you what you hold. The ledger tells you what you may pay. I write the standing." Avelin had been a warden of the Hourhouse for eleven years and three days. Before that she had been a master of the same house for nine years, and before that she had held the Read of a prentice for so long that people in Draymoor still said she could find a missing hour by the sound of a door. The standing did not say any of that. The standing said 1174, and the standing did not change when she lifted three hundred stones of river sand across a bridge in one held breath, and the standing did not change when she read the whole ledger of a house with forty-two clerks in a night and named every false entry before the clerks had made their own copies. That was the part she had never quite understood when she bought it. You pay and you get stronger, and then you look at your arm and the number has gone down and nothing about the strength leaves any mark. "Merric Mabry wants me," she said. "He wants everyone who has spent," Wrenno said. "That is his whole book." "Then I am in his book." Wrenno wrote something. She wrote it slowly, and Avelin watched the pen and thought that a person who writes slowly is a person who has been told what to write for a very long time and has stopped arguing about it. "Fourteenth bench, upper floor," Wrenno said. "He asks that you bring the cut card. He asks that you bring nothing else." The upper floor was a corridor of bench rooms, and the bench rooms had no windows and the light in them came from the tops of high narrow tubes and Avelin had always thought the rooms were designed for people who did not want the day to notice what they were doing to them. She found her name on a thin brass plate set into the door. Merric Mabry was sitting at a bench in the middle of the room with a loupe in his eye and a small file against his knee, and he did not look up. He had the look of a man who has been at a bench for many years, which meant that his sleeves were already unbuttoned and folded back and his shoulders had a set to them that would not have lifted for a decade. "Sit down," he said. She sat down. "The card." She laid the card on the bench. "Left arm." She rolled her cuff. The brass was warm where her body had warmed it, and the cut at the edge of the number was a fresh groove the colour of the metal itself. Mabry held the loupe to it for eleven seconds. He put the loupe away. He picked up the card and read it twice, once slowly and once quickly, and then he put the card in front of her on the bench and laid his own hand beside it, flat on the wood, palm down. "Eleven hundred and seventy-four," he said. "That is what the House will write for you. Let us see what I get." He picked up the file. He ran it once along the band, from the inner edge to the outer, and he ran it again, slower, and he ran it a third time so slowly that Avelin could have followed the movement with her eyes but chose not to, because she had a whole life of refusing to watch people measure her. "Cut depth is even," Mabry said. "No drift. The House cut you clean." "They cut you clean too," she said. "They cut me and I cut for them." He set the file down. "Your band is true. That is not the part I am asking about." "What are you asking about," she said. "I am asking about the rate." She waited. "You have been overdrawn for nineteen months," Mabry said. "I have measured you every month since, which is how I am allowed to be here on a Monday. In nineteen months the standing has moved from 1421 to 1174." "Which is what I expected." "Yes. It is what the ledger expected." He moved the card three inches to the left. "The ledger expects 247 Hours a year. You have spent 247 in nineteen months, which is 1550 a year. Do you know the difference between those two numbers?" "No." "It is that the ledger expects your standing to reach zero in about four and three-quarter years. At the rate the metal is actually going, it will reach zero in about nine and a half months." The light in the room was a grey that came from nowhere in particular. Avelin put both hands flat on the bench, palms down, the way other people put their hands flat on a table when they are working through something they do not want to explain. "Why," she said. "You are doing it," Mabry said. "That is what I ask you. You are an Overdrawn. You hold a Read that a prentice could spend twenty years learning and spend it without the standing moving, because the standing has moved already. You carry more than three people can in a single pull, and you walk the long street to the mill without the walking costing you a thing you could name. Every hour you wake up, something spends itself so that you can hold what you hold. The metal does not move. The metal only catches up." "And the House does not record it." "The House records what is written. Nothing else is written." "There is a second measure, then." "There is a second measure, and I keep it, and it is the one I am showing you." He picked up a second card, one the clerk had not made, and set it beside the first. "Fourteen months of mine. Sixteen months of the House." He tapped the one on his side. "You have already spent this one." Avelin looked at the two cards. They were the same size and the same paper, and the difference between them was the size of her life for the next nine and a half months. "Is there anything," she said, "that spends less." "There is," Mabry said. "It is called not doing it. Nothing spends less. That is the whole book, and it is a very short book." "Then teach me the short book." He looked at her for a long time, which is what people do when they have already decided the thing and are only deciding whether the deciding is finished. "There is no short version," Mabry said. "There is only the long one, and it costs you all of it, and I have to tell you that anyway because if I did not tell you then someone else would, and the someone else would be the House, and the House would tell you on the last day." He drew a line on the card. He drew it with a ruler, and when the line was finished the paper was divided in half and the second half was blank and the blank half was the part of the book that had never been written for her. "Sign here," he said. "And here. And here." "I will sign," Avelin said. She signed, and Mabry took the cards and walked out with them, and the door closed, and she sat in the grey light with her arm out on the bench in front of her and she looked at the brass, and she understood that the number had stopped being a fact and become a promise, and she understood that the promise had a date on it that no one would write down for her except herself. She was still sitting there when the clerk at the end of the corridor came and collected the card back, and Wrenno wrote a new line under 1174, and the line said that the standing had been revised, and under the line there was a small stamp, and the stamp said that the revision had been accepted. Outside, on the long street, the bell of the Hourhouse had struck the third hour and no one in Draymoor had any reason to look up. ---