The Ash went into him like cold water poured down the back of his neck.
It did not go into his lungs.
Corin knew that at once, even as he felt it.
It went in through his mouth and his nose, a thin cold thread of blue-white mist sliding off the tip of the silver rod, but it did not stop in his chest the way air stops.
It kept going.
It went up.
Behind his eyes.
Into the soft gray quiet place where his own memories should have been and mostly were not.
It went in there and it spread out, slowly, the way ink spreads when you drop it into a glass of clear water.
Curling.
Opening.
Filling the gray with color.
He was still kneeling on the rubbish heap.
He knew that.
He could feel the broken crate pressing into his knee through the cloth of his trousers.
He could feel the cold of the silver rod in his gloved hand.
He could hear the lantern hissing softly on its barrel, and somewhere far away, very far, the murmur of the crowd at the rope.
But those things were getting fainter.
Further off.
As if he were walking away from them down a long corridor, and they were in a room at the other end, with the door slowly closing.
And in their place, other things were coming.
A smell.
Ink.
Not the bitter waste-ink of Gutter Lane.
Clean ink.
Fresh, black, good ink, the kind that comes in a stone bottle with a cork, and smells a little of oak bark and a little of iron.
And paper.
Old paper.
Dusty paper.
Paper that had sat in a dark room for twenty years and gone yellow and soft at the edges, and smelled of mice and damp and time.
A sound.
Pens.
Scratching.
Not the great rainstorm of ten thousand pens in the Great Hall.
Fewer.
A few dozen.
A slow, tired, steady scratching, like hens pecking in a yard.
A feeling.
His fingers.
Cramped.
Aching.
Stained.
The first two fingers of his right hand, black to the second knuckle, with a hard lump on the side of the middle one where the pen had pressed every day for years.
Corin looked down at his hand.
It was not his hand.
The Edge
Careful, said the whisper.
It was clearer now.
Much clearer.
It was not a rustle of old paper anymore.
It was a voice.
A man’s voice, thin and dry and old, with a kind of lazy, drawling, mocking music in it, like a teacher who has explained the same thing a thousand times to a thousand stupid students and has started to find it funny.
Careful, scavenger.
You’re going in too fast.
You always go in too fast.
“Who are you?” said Corin.
He did not say it out loud.
He did not have to.
The voice was not outside him.
It was in the same place as the Ash, behind his eyes, in the soft gray room that was slowly filling with someone else’s colors.
Oh, we’ve done this before.
So many times.
You ask me that every time.
The voice sounded amused.
I am the one who taught you how to do this.
Well.
I am the one who taught the man who taught the man who taught the man who taught you.
I am in the rod.
I have been in the rod for a very long time.
You may call me what’s written on it.
“Malakor.”
There.
You see?
You do remember some things.
“I read it,” said Corin.
“This morning.”
Of course, you did.
A dry chuckle, like the snap of a twig.
Now listen to me, because you are about to forget everything I say, and I would like you to forget it as slowly as possible.
You are standing at the edge of a dead man.
Do you feel it?
Corin felt it.
It was like standing at the edge of a pool in the dark.
A deep one.
He could not see the water, but he could feel it in front of him, cold and still and waiting, and he could feel the drop.
One more step forward, and he would be in it.
And it was deep.
Very deep.
Much deeper than one young scribe’s last minutes had any right to be.
That’s him, said Malakor.
Or what’s left of him.
The bit that was burning when he died.
Now.
Here is the trick, and you will forget it, and I will tell you again next time, and the time after that, until one of us gets bored.
You do not jump in.
You never jump in.
You kneel at the edge, and you put your hand in, and you feel around for what you need, and you take it out.
Do you understand?
“Yes.”
You do not understand.
Nobody understands until they’ve drowned once.
The voice paused.
You have drowned many times, scavenger.
Many.
You always come back up.
One of these days, you won’t.
“What happens then?”
Then there’ll be a dead scribe in a body that used to be yours, said Malakor pleasantly, and a very confused clerk standing at the end of an alley with his back turned, wondering why you’ve started laughing like a donkey.
Corin did not answer.
He knelt, in his mind, at the edge of the cold dark pool.
He took a breath.
Not a real one.
A breath inside himself, the kind you take before you dive.
Then he leaned forward, very carefully, and put his hand in.
Cold Water
It was like putting his hand into a river in winter.
The cold went up his arm in a rush, so sharp it hurt, and then the hurt went away and there was only the cold.
And in the cold, things.
Moving past his fingers.
Brushing against them.
Soft, and quick, and slippery, like fish in dark water.
Each one, as it touched him, left a little flash of something behind.
A color.
A sound.
A word.
Lunch.
Steps.
Warm.
Boiler.
Toby’s face, laughing, with crumbs on his chin.
Ink.
Ledger.
Columns of numbers.
So many numbers.
A letter.
Brown paper.
Round careful handwriting.
“Dear Pell.”
Fear.
That one came hard and sudden, like a fish biting.
Corin jerked his hand back, in his mind, and the cold dark pool rippled and went still.
Good, said Malakor approvingly.
You felt that?
That’s the bottom.
That’s the end.
That’s what you’re looking for, and that’s what will drown you if you’re careless.
Don’t go there first.
Go there last.
Feel around the edges.
Find out who he was before you find out how he died.
“Why?”
Because if you find out how he died first, said the dry old voice, quite gently for once, you’ll die with him.
And you won’t know whose death it was.
And you’ll never find your way out again.
Corin knelt at the edge of the pool for a long moment.
Then he put his hand back in.
Slowly.
Carefully.
Not reaching for the bottom.
Feeling along the sides.
The way you feel along the wall of a dark room, looking for a door.
And found one.
It was small.
Square.
Hard-edged.
It felt like a book.
He closed his fingers around it, gently, and drew it up out of the cold water, and opened it.
And the soft gray room behind his eyes was gone.
And in its place, there was a desk.
Pell
It was a small desk.
Old.
Scarred.
One of a long row of desks just like it, in a long, low, dim room with a curved stone ceiling and a single high window at one end that let in a thin gray slice of daylight.
The window was barred.
The walls were bare stone, damp, with little white crusts of salt.
Gemstone lamps hung from iron hooks along the ceiling, one above every third desk, and their cold blue light did not quite reach the desks in between, so that you had to lean forward to see your page.
The First Basement.
The Copying Hall.
He was sitting at the desk.
He was leaning forward, to see his page.
He was writing.
He was Pell.
It did not happen all at once.
It came in slowly, the way warmth comes back into cold fingers.
First the body.
The young, thin, narrow-shouldered body, lighter than Corin’s own, quicker, with an ache in the lower back from too many hours bent over a desk and a hungry, hollow feeling in the stomach that had not been fed properly in a long time.
The hair, too long, falling into the eyes, and the habit of pushing it back with the left hand, impatiently, every few minutes.
The cramp in the writing fingers.
The itch of the gray wool collar on the back of the neck.
Then the thoughts.
Not words, exactly.
Not at first.
More like the weather inside someone.
A kind of cheerful, restless, bored impatience.
A wanting-to-be-somewhere-else.
A humming.
Pell was humming.
Not out loud.
Under his breath.
Through his nose, very softly, so that the supervisor at the end of the room would not hear.
A tune.
Corin felt it vibrate in a chest that was not his chest.
He knew the tune.
He had heard it that morning.
On a bridge.
Played on a cracked fiddle by a man with a beard like a bird’s nest.
The tune went up, and up, and hung there for a moment, asking.
And came gently down.
Somewhere very far away, in a place that felt like another country, a man kneeling on a rubbish heap at the end of an alley felt his chest go tight and hot and painful, like a fist closing.
Steady, said Malakor.
That’s his.
Not yours.
Let it be his.
Corin let it be his.
And Pell Dorran, Grade Three Scribe, First Basement, sat at his scarred desk in the dim blue light and hummed his gran’s old song about the fisherman and the moon, and dipped his pen in his inkwell, and looked down at the page in front of him, and sighed.
It was a ledger.
A big one.
Bound in faded green cloth, its corners worn to the boards.
It was open on his desk, and its pages were yellow and soft and crowded with numbers.
Long columns of them.
Dates.
Sums.
Names of places.
In a small, cramped, old-fashioned hand, in brown ink that had faded to the color of weak tea.
And beside it, a clean new book, with white pages, ruled in blue.
His copy.
Half full.
In his own neat, quick, careful hand.
Treasury of the Oblivion Bank, said the top of the old ledger’s page.
Provincial Accounts.
Southern Valleys.
And a year.
Twenty years ago.
The most boring work I’ve ever done, thought Pell, and in Corin’s borrowed chest, the thought was as clear as if it had been said aloud.
Twenty years of tax receipts from villages nobody’s ever heard of.
Copied out by hand.
Because the old books are falling apart and somebody in the Treasury wants new ones.
For what?
So they can sit in a cupboard for another twenty years?
He pushed his hair out of his eyes with his left hand.
Impatiently.
And turned the page.
The Copying Room
The Ash did not move in a straight line.
Corin learned that quickly.
It was not like reading a book, one page after another.
It was more like waking up in the middle of the night in a strange house and walking through it in the dark, room by room, bumping into things.
A memory would come, clear and bright and whole, and then it would end, suddenly, like a door slamming, and there would be gray, and then another memory would come, from a different day, a different hour, and it would not be clear which had come first.
It’s all jumbled, said Malakor, because he was.
At the end.
Frightened men don’t keep tidy rooms.
Just keep walking.
Keep your hand on the wall.
Corin kept walking.
Monday
It was a Monday.
Pell knew it was a Monday because Monday was the day Supervisor Grane wore his brown waistcoat with the egg stain on it, and there was Supervisor Grane at the end of the long room, at his high desk on its little platform, in the brown waistcoat with the egg stain on it, peering down the rows of scribes over the top of his spectacles like a heron looking for frogs.
Pell bent his head and wrote.
Thornwick.
Quarter tax.
Paid in full.
14 households.
Ashby Cross.
Quarter tax.
Paid in part.
22 households.
3 to Intake.
Mill Hollow.
Quarter tax.
Not paid.
9 households.
9 to Intake.
He stopped.
He looked at that line for a moment.
9 households.
9 to Intake.
The whole village.
Every family.
Twenty years ago, someone had come to a place called Mill Hollow with a cart and a list and taken every single one of them to the Intake Hall, to pay what they owed in the only coin they had left.
He wondered if there was anyone in Mill Hollow now.
He wondered if Mill Hollow was still there.
He dipped his pen and copied it out.
Mill Hollow.
Quarter tax.
Not paid.
9 households.
9 to Intake.
Neatly.
Carefully.
In his best hand.
As if neatness could make it better.
Then he turned the page.
The Lunch Steps
The gray came, and went, and then it was a different day, and Pell was sitting on the steps by the boiler room with his back against the warm brick wall.
The boiler room was at the bottom of a short flight of stone stairs off the First Basement corridor, and nobody went there except the boilerman and the rats.
The boiler itself was behind a heavy iron door.
Through the door, you could hear it, a great deep growling roar, like a dragon asleep.
And the wall beside the door was warm.
Always warm.
Even in the middle of winter, you could put your back against it and feel the heat soak through your coat and into your bones.
Pell and Toby had found it in their first month.
Nobody else knew.
It was their secret.
Toby was sitting on the step below him now, eating a pie.
He was holding it in both hands and nibbling at it suspiciously around the edges, like a rabbit with a carrot it does not trust.
“What’s in it?” said Pell.
“The man said chicken.”
“It’s not chicken.”
“I know it’s not chicken.” Toby looked at the pie unhappily.
“I think it might be pigeon.”
Pell laughed.
He laughed so loudly and so suddenly that it echoed up the stone stairs, a great braying haw-haw-haw, and somewhere above them a door opened and a voice shouted quiet down there!
and the door slammed.
Which only made him laugh harder.
He laughed until he had to hold his stomach, until tears came out of his eyes, while Toby sat on the step below him looking offended and nibbling his pigeon pie.
Inside him, very deep, Corin felt the laugh.
Felt it shake a chest that was not his chest.
Felt how good it was.
How easy.
How it came up from the belly like water from a spring.
He could not remember the last time he had laughed like that.
He could not remember if he ever had.
“It’s not funny,” said Toby.
“It’s very funny.” Pell wiped his eyes.
“You paid two coppers for a pigeon.”
“I paid two coppers for a chicken.”
Pell laughed again.
Then he stopped, and unwrapped his own lunch from its paper: a heel of bread with a thin scrape of dripping on it, and a pickled onion.
He ate the onion first.
Slowly.
Because it was the best part, and you ate the best part first, in case something happened and you never got to eat it at all.
His gran had taught him that.
“Toby,” he said.
“Have you ever heard of a place called Mill Hollow?”
Toby shook his head, chewing.
“Ashby Cross?
Thornwick?
Briar End?”
“No.
Why?”
“They’re in the books I’m copying.
The old Treasury books.
Southern valleys.
Twenty years ago.” Pell looked at his bread.
“I’ve never heard of any of them.
And I’m from the south.
I’m from the hills.
I should know them.
They should be right next door.
But they’re not on the maps.
I looked.
In the map room on the second floor, when Grane was at lunch.
They’re just not there.”
Toby swallowed.
“Maybe they changed their names.”
“Maybe.” Pell took a bite of bread.
“Or maybe somebody changed them for them.”
Toby looked at him strangely.
Pell shrugged and laughed and said, “Never mind.
Boring, isn’t it?
Boring old books.
Tell me about your landlady’s cat again.
The one that ate the canary.”
And Toby told him, and Pell laughed in all the right places.
But inside, behind the laugh, Corin could feel something else.
Something cold and small and hard, like a stone at the bottom of a stream.
A question that would not go away.
Wednesday
The gray came again.
And went.
And it was night.
Late.
The Copying Hall was empty.
All the other scribes had gone home hours ago, and Supervisor Grane’s high desk at the end of the room was dark, and most of the gemstone lamps had been turned down to save money, so that there was only one still burning, a single cold blue glow over Pell’s desk in the middle of the long, dark, silent room.
He should have gone home too.
He knew that.
He was not paid for night work.
If Grane found out, he would be written up.
Again.
He did not care.
He was reading.
Not copying.
Reading.
He had the old green ledger open in front of him, the Treasury book, Provincial Accounts, Southern Valleys, and he was turning its soft yellow pages one by one, slowly, running his ink-stained finger down every column.
Looking for something.
He did not know what.
Something that would make the cold stone at the bottom of his stomach go away.
The villages went past under his finger.
Thornwick.
Ashby Cross.
Mill Hollow.
Briar End.
Pike’s Ford.
Then other names, more and more of them, all of them strange to him.
All of them quarter after quarter, year after year, paid in part, not paid, to Intake, to Intake, to Intake.
And then the columns changed.
Near the end of the book, in the last quarter of the last year.
The neat cramped brown handwriting of the old Treasury clerk went on, the same as always, but the words were different.
Not Quarter tax.
Not paid or not paid.
Something else.
The same thing, written again and again, down a whole page, beside every village name.
Thornwick.
Account closed.
Ashby Cross.
Account closed.
Mill Hollow.
Account closed.
Briar End.
Account closed.
And beside each one, the same small stamp.
Red ink, faded to brown.
A little square, with three letters in it.
S.F.R.
Pell frowned.
He did not know what it meant.
He turned to the back of the ledger, where there was a list of abbreviations, the way there always was in Treasury books.
He ran his finger down it.
S.F.R.
— Struck From Register.
He sat back in his chair.
The cold blue lamp hummed above him.
Struck from the register.
Not moved.
Not renamed.
Not merged with another village.
Struck.
Crossed out.
Removed.
As if they had never been.
All of them.
Every village in the book.
In one quarter.
Twenty years ago.
And at the very bottom of the page, the last line, in the same faded brown hand, but pressed harder into the paper, as if the old clerk’s pen had been shaking:
Oakhaven.
Account closed.
S.F.R.
By order of the Inquisitor-General.
Pell stared at the word.
Oakhaven.
He had never seen it written down before.
Not once in his life.
Not on a map.
Not on a letter.
Not on a signpost on any road.
His gran never wrote it.
When she sent his letters, she wrote To Pell Dorran, Ministry of Records, Veridia, and on the back, where you were supposed to write where a letter came from, she wrote nothing at all.
She said it was safer.
But he had heard it.
Spoken.
Whispered.
Very quietly, at night, by the fire, when his gran thought he was asleep, and the old people of the village came and sat with her and drank her cider and talked in low voices about the old days.
Oakhaven.
His village.
The one that was not on the maps.
Pell put his hand over his mouth.
And very far away, kneeling on a rubbish heap in the yellow light of a single lantern, a man who had read that word in his own handwriting that morning felt the cold dark pool of the dead man’s last week ripple and shiver around him, as if something very large had moved, very deep, at the bottom.
Steady, said Malakor sharply.
Steady.
That’s not yours either.
But Corin was not sure, this time, that the voice was right.