The Court of Registry Examination sat in a small, dark, wood-panelled room at the back of the Lower Wards Debt Registry, up a narrow flight of stairs that most people in Grisholt didn’t know existed.
It was not a real court.
Wren had explained that very carefully, three times, over three pots of tea.
There was no jury.
No judge in a wig.
It was a room where questions about who people were got settled.
Whose name belonged to whom.
Whether a dead man was really dead.
Whether a bond had been signed by the person it said had signed it.
A Registrar sat at a high desk at one end, and listened to both sides, and decided.
And whatever the Registrar decided was entered into the great ledgers of the Registry, in ink, and became, in the eyes of the Ashen Crown, the truth.
“It’s the most powerful room in the city,” Wren had said.
“And nobody’s ever heard of it.”
On the morning of the 12th of Thaw, it was full.
Lucan sat on a hard wooden bench on the left side of the room, in his best coat and starched collar, with his hands folded in his lap.
Beside him sat Wren in her scorched grey robe, with a stack of documents three inches thick.
And beside Wren, very upright, with his ebony cane across his knees and his blind white eyes gazing serenely at nothing, sat Mr.
Ignatius Vale, Advocate of the Lowmere Bar.
Wren had made him that, too.
It had taken her two days.
The Lowmere Bar had, by sheer good fortune, been destroyed in the same flood as the Lowmere parish register.
On the right side of the room sat Tamsin Marsh.
She was wearing grey again.
Not the green silk from the Spire.
A plain grey dress, neat and dark, with her straw-coloured hair pinned up tightly.
She sat very straight with her hands folded in her lap and didn’t look at Lucan once.
Beside her sat her lawyer, a plump, pink, prosperous man in a silk waistcoat named Cornelius Pruitt, who had a very expensive watch-chain and a very expensive smile.
Above him: Owes: 0.
Is owed: 400 silver (Fennick, Isolde — retainer).
Behind them, in the narrow gallery at the back of the room, sat a crowd of onlookers.
Lucan picked them out one by one.
Two clerks from the Registry, come to watch on their break.
A journalist from the Herald with a notebook.
Coyle, grey and unremarkable, in the back corner.
And, alone at the very end of the gallery, in her dark blue Bureau coat, with a clove cigarette unlit between her fingers and her brass hand resting on the rail, Inspector Maren Voss.
She didn’t look at him either.
The Registrar came in at the tenth bell.
He was an old, thin, grey man with a long, dry, bloodless face and spectacles pushed down to the end of his nose, and he climbed up to his high desk without looking at anyone, sat down, opened a ledger, dipped a pen, and said, in a voice like dead leaves:
“Petition of Marsh, Tamsin, concerning the identity of Thorne, Lucan Aurel.
Proceed.”
Pruitt was very good.
He stood up and spoke for half an hour.
He laid it out the way Lucan himself would have laid it out, years ago, in another courtroom, in another world.
A young man appears in Grisholt out of nowhere.
He has a pedigree from a town whose records were all conveniently destroyed in a flood.
He has an unlimited supply of medicines no one has ever seen before.
He has a household of people who also appear to have come from nowhere: a woman who claims to be from Ilvane, which is not on any map; a naval captain whose ship sank with all its records; and now an advocate from the very same town that was destroyed by the very same flood.
The gallery laughed at that.
Ignatius smiled serenely and bowed his head, as though acknowledging a compliment.
And the young man, Pruitt said, arrived in Grisholt within days of the death of a Pit Nine bondsman named Lucan Marr.
A bondsman who, the Concern’s own records showed, was declared dead in a mining accident, but whose body was never recovered from the spoil chute.
A bondsman who was the same age as Mr.
Thorne.
The same height.
The same build.
With the same very unusual grey eyes.
“And I have a witness,” said Pruitt, “who knew Lucan Marr for six years.
Who saw him every single day.
Who would know him anywhere.” He turned to the door.
“Call Mr.
Bertram Harrick.”
Harrick came in.
Lucan hadn’t seen him for two months.
The Pit Nine foreman was a short, broad, bow-legged man with a squashed face like a bulldog and little bloodshot eyes, and he smelled, even from across the room, of the gin he sold out of his boot.
He wore a new brown coat that didn’t fit him.
He stood in front of the Registrar’s desk with his cap in his hands and wouldn’t look at anyone.
Above his head: Owes: 14 silver (gin).
Is owed: nothing.
Received: 60 silver (Coyle — Silk House, Velvet Row, Tuesday, 9th bell).
“Mr.
Harrick,” said Pruitt kindly.
“Did you know a bondsman named Lucan Marr?”
“Yes, sir.”
“For how long?”
“Six years, sir.
Since he was a boy.
Thirteen.
Came down with his dad’s debt on his back.”
“And do you see Lucan Marr in this room today?”
Harrick lifted his little bloodshot eyes.
He looked around the room.
His gaze crossed Lucan’s, stopped and stayed.
For a long moment, he just stood there, looking.
His squashed face worked.
Something moved in it that Lucan didn’t expect.
Not fear.
Not greed.
Shame.
“That’s him,” Harrick said hoarsely.
He pointed.
“That’s Marr.
He’s filled out.
He’s got better clothes.
But that’s him.”
The gallery murmured.
The journalist from the Herald scribbled.
“Thank you, Mr.
Harrick,” said Pruitt.
“No further questions.” He sat down, smiling.
The Registrar looked at Ignatius over his spectacles.
“Advocate?”
Ignatius rose slowly to his feet, leaning on his cane.
“Mr.
Harrick,” he said.
His voice was soft and dry and very courteous.
“I am an old man, and blind, as you can see.
Forgive me if I ask you some very simple questions.”
“Yes, sir.”
“How did you come to this hearing today, Mr.
Harrick?”
“I was asked, sir.”
“By whom?”
Harrick hesitated.
“By Mr.
Pruitt, sir.”
“Ah.
And before that?
Did anyone else speak to you about it?
On Tuesday, perhaps?
At about the ninth bell?” Ignatius tilted his head politely.
“At the Silk House on Velvet Row?”
Harrick went white.
“I’m only asking,” said Ignatius gently, “because I have a statement here, sworn this morning before a notary, from Madame Valentina Orlov, proprietress of the Silk House, who says that at the ninth bell on Tuesday evening a grey-haired gentleman in a grey suit met you in her front parlour and gave you a purse.” He held up a sheet of paper, though of course he couldn’t see it.
“And a second statement from the girl who brought you your drink, who says that she saw the purse opened, and that it contained sixty silver marks.
And that the gentleman said, and she remembers this very clearly, ‘Just point.
You don’t have to be sure.
Just point.'”
The room was silent.
In the back corner of the gallery, Coyle sat perfectly still.
His grey face showed nothing.
“Mr.
Harrick,” said Ignatius softly.
“Were you paid to say what you just said?”
Harrick’s mouth opened.
Closed.
Opened.
He looked at Pruitt.
He looked at the back of the gallery.
He looked, for a long time, at Lucan.
“Yes,” he whispered.
The gallery exploded.
It went on for another hour, but that was the moment it ended.
Lucan could see it in the Registrar’s dry face.
Could see it in the way Pruitt’s pink cheeks went blotchy and the way he started shuffling his papers too fast.
Pruitt called Maren Voss anyway.
She came down from the gallery and stood in front of the Registrar’s desk with her hands behind her back, the brass one and the flesh one clasped together, and swore the oath in a flat, dry, tired voice.
“Inspector,” said Pruitt, “you’ve been investigating the deaths at Pit Nine since the spring.”
“I have.”
“You’ve investigated the disappearance of Lucan Marr.”
“I have.”
“Is it not true, Inspector, that on the night of the first of Thaw, you removed every Constable from the vicinity of Coldwater Mill on a pretext—”
“Objection,” said Wren, so sharply that the Registrar actually jumped.
Everyone turned to look at her.
She was on her feet, her spectacles flashing, a document in her ink-stained hand.
“Registry Examination Act, Section Four, Paragraph Two,” she said crisply.
“The Examination shall confine itself to the question of identity before it, and shall not admit inquiry into any other matter, civil or criminal, save as it bears directly on that question.” She looked at the Registrar.
“The movements of the Detective Bureau on the first of Thaw do not bear on whether my client was born in Lowmere.
If Mr.
Pruitt wishes to accuse an officer of the Crown of conspiracy, he may do so before a Crown Court, with a jury and a judge, and the officer may defend herself properly.
He may not do it here, under cover of an identity hearing, in a room with no jury, before a Registrar who has no power to try it.”
The Registrar looked at her for a long time over the tops of his spectacles.
Then he looked at Pruitt.
“Sustained,” he said, in his dead-leaf voice.
“Confine yourself, Mr.
Pruitt.”
Pruitt’s jaw worked.
He turned back to Voss.
“Very well.
Inspector.
A simple question, then.” He leaned forward.
“Is the man sitting there, who calls himself Lucan Aurel Thorne, in fact Lucan Marr?”
Voss turned her head.
For the first time that morning, she looked at Lucan.
Straight at him, across the dark little room, with her long, sharp, unlovely face and her dark, tired, steady eyes.
He remembered her in the lamplight in her small bare room.
Is Lucan Marr alive?
“I have never met Lucan Marr,” said Inspector Maren Voss, under oath.
“I have no evidence that he survived Pit Nine.
I have no evidence that he is in this room.” She turned back to the Registrar.
“That’s all I know.”
“Petition dismissed,” said the Registrar, half an hour later, and wrote it in his ledger, in ink.
“For want of reliable evidence.
The identity of Thorne, Lucan Aurel, of Lowmere, is confirmed as registered.” He looked over his spectacles at Pruitt.
“And I would advise your client, Mr.
Pruitt, that the Registry does not look kindly on paid witnesses.
Should she return to this room with another petition of this kind, I shall refer the matter of Mr.
Harrick’s purse to the Crown Prosecutor.”
He closed the ledger with a dry thump.
]
[ Status: PROTECTED.
]
On the right side of the room, Tamsin Marsh sat very still.
Her face was white.
She was staring at the Registrar’s closed ledger as though it were a coffin lid.
Lucan stood up.
So did Wren and Ignatius.
The gallery was emptying.
People pushed past, talking, laughing.
The journalist from the Herald was already gone.
Tamsin turned her head and looked at him.
Her eyes were very bright.
Her lips were pressed tight together, and they were trembling.
She didn’t say anything at all.
She stood up, and walked out of the room, and didn’t look back.
At the door, Voss passed him.
She didn’t stop.
She didn’t look at him.
But as she went by, her brass hand brushed his, very lightly.
Just for a moment.
Cold metal against his knuckles.
Then she was gone too.
They celebrated that night.
Not loudly.
Not for long.
But they celebrated.
Rook cooked.
He made a great steaming pot of something from Saltreach that involved eels and garlic and a great deal of black pepper, and served it in bowls the size of washbasins, and everyone ate until they couldn’t move.
Wren drank four cups of tea and then, astonishingly, a small glass of brandy, and then fell asleep upright in her chair with her spectacles askew.
Ilse said a long grace over the food in her flat foreign voice and refused the brandy.
Then, when Rook wasn’t looking, she took his glass and drank it.
Ignatius sat by the window and played a tiny silver violin that he’d somehow had in his coat pocket when he came through the tear from Kesset.
The tune was old and slow and very sad, and nobody asked him to stop.
Brutus sat in his corner by the door with a bowl in his lap, eating eel stew very slowly with a spoon.
Nell sat on the floor beside him and refilled his bowl every time it was empty.
And Orsen sat at the end of the table, enormous and grey, with his veins glowing faintly blue under his skin, and little Pip on his knee.
She had come to live with them two days ago.
Lucan hadn’t been able to say no.
She was six, with a pinched little face and enormous brown eyes, and she never let go of the doll with no face, and she had taken one look at Orsen in the doorway of St.
Ivo’s crypt, all seven feet of him with his blue veins and his patchy beard and his huge grey hands, and walked straight across the crypt and climbed into his lap.
Orsen had looked down at her as though she were made of glass.
Now he sat at the end of the table, singing to her, very softly, in his cracked, rumbling voice.
Not the bosun’s song.
Something else.
A lullaby.
Hush now, the furnace is low, hush now, the night trains go.
And Pip fell asleep against his enormous chest with her thumb in her mouth and the faceless doll tucked under her chin.
Lucan sat at the other end of the table and watched them all, and for a moment, for just a moment, he let himself believe that it was over.
[ Bound: 52.
]
He didn’t know why that line came into his head.
The silver words above Tamsin’s head at dinner in the glass garden.
He thought about Ignatius, in the dark, the night they came back from the Spire.
Saul Varney’s out of the infirmary, my boy.
And he’s hiring.
He thought about Varney, sitting at the head of the table in the back room of the Hanged Bishop, with the silver rims around his eyes, saying pleasantly, She told me what to do.
And I find that I’m doing it.
Take everything he has.
Had she ever taken it back?
Lucan stood up.
His chair scraped.
Everyone looked at him.
“Ignatius,” he said.
“What can you hear?”
The old man stopped playing.
He lowered the little silver violin.
He turned his blind face toward the window, toward the dark city, and was silent for a long moment, listening.
Then all the colour went out of his face.
“Money,” he whispered.
“A great deal of money, very close.
Changing hands in the street outside.
Coins in pockets.
Many pockets.
Moving.” His milky eyes widened.
“And the sound of men who’ve been paid to do something very—”
The bow window exploded inward.
The firebomb came through the new plain glass in a shower of shards and burst on the floor of the shop below them in a great ball of orange flame.
Then another.
And another.
The whole building shook.
Smoke poured up the stairs in a thick black wave.
Somewhere below, Abel Greaves was shouting.
Glass was breaking.
Wood was splintering.
And over all of it, from the street outside, came the sound of a great many men’s voices, roaring.
“Down!” Lucan shouted.
“Everyone, down the back stairs!”
Rook was already moving, sword in hand, a blur of navy blue across the room toward the front stairs.
Ilse was behind him, drawing her broadsword, praying aloud in a deep, carrying, furious voice, and a golden light was rising around her like a halo.
Brutus came up off the floor like a wave breaking.
Lucan grabbed Wren, who’d woken with a cry, and pushed her toward the back stairs.
“Ignatius!
Get Ignatius out!
Take him to the yard!” He spun around.
“Nell!
Orsen!
Pip—”
Orsen was already standing, with the little girl clutched against his chest in one huge arm.
Nell was beside him, white-faced, holding a poker.
“Back stairs,” Lucan said.
“Now.
All of you.
Go.”
He turned and ran for the front stairs.
The shop was burning.
Flames ran up the walls and across the floor in rivers of orange and blue.
Abel Greaves’s hundreds of little wooden drawers were burning, popping, spitting out showers of sparks as the powders inside them caught: sulphur flaring yellow, saltpetre flaring white, something green and acrid that made Lucan’s eyes stream.
The smoke was so thick he could barely see.
And through it, through the broken window and the smashed-in door, men were coming.
A lot of men.
Twenty.
Thirty.
In brown coats and bowler hats and dark mufflers, with cudgels and knives and hatchets, and a few with carbines.
And among them, here and there, moving with the dead mechanical regularity of clockwork, men with silver around their eyes.
BOUND (Marsh, Tamsin).
Five.
Eight.
Ten of them.
And at the front, walking calmly through the flames in his brown tweed suit and green waistcoat, with his arm in a sling and his round wire spectacles glinting orange in the firelight, came Saul Varney.
“Mr.
Thorne,” he said pleasantly.
“I’m so terribly sorry about this.”
Rook hit the first rank of them like a storm hitting a fishing fleet.
Lucan had seen him fight before.
In the Hanged Bishop, in the dark, in Crane’s warehouse.
He had never seen him like this.
Rook didn’t laugh this time.
He didn’t make a sound.
He went into them low and fast and silent, and his sword didn’t hum, it screamed, and men went down in front of him like wheat in front of a scythe.
Arms.
Legs.
Heads.
Blood sprayed across the burning shelves and hissed in the flames.
Ilse came behind him with her broadsword in both hands and her golden light blazing, roaring out her prayer.
Every time her blade came down, a man came apart.
When a Bound man reached for her, the light around her flared, and he screamed and fell back, clawing at his face, his silver-rimmed eyes smoking.
Brutus didn’t use a weapon.
He didn’t need one.
He walked into the crowd with his ruined knee dragging and simply picked men up, one in each hand, and threw them.
Through the window.
Through the wall.
Into each other.
Lucan went for Varney.
It was easier than it had been at the Hanged Bishop.
Much easier.
Lucan was Rank 2 now.
The Exchequer had remade his body in a blaze of amber light, and it moved now like nothing he had ever known.
When Varney’s Bound strength drove a fist at his chest, Lucan caught it, and held it, and felt Varney’s knuckles grind together in his grip.
Varney looked down at his trapped fist with mild surprise.
“Oh,” he said.
“You’ve changed.”
“Call them off.”
“I can’t.
I’m so sorry.
I really can’t.
The order was given weeks ago.
Take everything he has.” Varney’s face twisted, very slightly, behind the spectacles.
“She never took it back.
She’s probably forgotten she gave it.
But I can’t forget.
I’m not allowed to.” He smiled sadly.
“And now Lady Fennick’s paying for it, too.
Two thousand silver.
Isn’t that convenient?
Everyone gets what they want.”
Behind Lucan, at the back of the shop, there was a scream.
A child’s scream.
Lucan turned.
The back stairs.
The door at the bottom of the back stairs, which led to the yard.
It was open.
And in the doorway, framed by firelight and smoke, three men stood with carbines raised.
Brown coats, bowler hats.
And in front of them, between them and the stairs, with Nell crouched behind him and Pip clutched to his chest, stood Big Orsen Tull.
They’d come round the back.
Lucan saw it all in one frozen instant.
The carbines coming up.
The blue charges glowing in their grips.
Orsen turning, with the little girl in his arms, putting his huge grey back between her and the guns.
Nell’s mouth open in a scream.
“ORSEN!”
The carbines fired.
Three blue flashes.
Three sounds like tearing canvas.
Orsen’s great body jerked.
Once.
Twice.
He didn’t fall.
He stood there in the doorway with his back to the guns, hunched over, his arms wrapped around Pip and his body wrapped around Nell.
Three smoking holes opened in his back, each one the size of a fist, and the blue light that had glowed in his veins for two months flared, brilliantly, all at once, lighting up the whole back of the shop like lightning.
Then it went out.
Orsen stood there for a moment longer.
Swaying.
Then, very slowly, he turned his head and looked over his shoulder, past the men with the guns, across the burning shop, at Lucan.
His faint blue eyes found Lucan’s face.
“Sunday,” he said.
His voice was very soft.
“It’s Sunday, isn’t it?”
Then his knees folded, and he went down, carefully, gently, the way a tree comes down, and he was dead before he touched the floor.
And under him, safe in the circle of his arms, with not a single mark on her, Pip was screaming.
Lucan didn’t remember much of what happened next.
He remembered Varney’s hand in his grip.
He remembered squeezing.
He remembered the sound Varney’s fingers made, and then his wrist, and then his forearm, all the way up to the elbow, bone after bone after bone.
He remembered Varney’s mild, pleasant face finally changing.
Going grey.
Going slack.
Saying, through clenched teeth, very quietly, “I really am so sorry, Mr.
Thorne.”
He remembered saying, “I know.”
He remembered what he did after that.
He would remember it for a very long time.
He would wake up at night remembering it.
Afterward, Saul Varney lay on the burning floor of Greaves & Son, and he didn’t look like a schoolmaster any more.
He didn’t look like anything.
[ LEDGER: Varney, Saul — 1 broken contract — COLLECTED.
]
[ Additional: Varney, Saul — 31 lives (on behalf of those he killed) — COLLECTED.
]
Lucan didn’t read it.
He stepped over the body and walked through the fire to the back of the shop.
The three men with the carbines were dead.
Ilse had reached them.
There wasn’t much left.
Nell was kneeling on the floor beside Orsen with Pip in her arms.
The little girl had stopped screaming.
She was staring at Orsen’s huge, still, grey face with her enormous brown eyes, and holding the doll with no face very tightly, and not making a sound at all.
Nell looked up at Lucan.
Her face was streaked with soot and tears.
“He said Sunday,” she whispered.
“It isn’t Sunday.
It’s Thursday.”
Lucan knelt down beside them.
He put his hand on Orsen’s enormous shoulder.
It was still warm.
▸ NEW ENTRY: Debt owed TO Account Holder: Marsh, Tamsin.
Amount: One life (Orsen Tull).
Status: UNCOLLECTED.
He looked at it for a long time.
Then he closed the panel, and stood up, and walked out of the burning shop into the night.
She was waiting for him at St.
Ivo’s.
He’d known she would be.
He walked there through the dark streets of Tallowgate with soot on his face and blood on his hands and the glow of the burning shop behind him lighting the smog over Hob’s Cross, and nobody stopped him.
People got out of his way.
He didn’t look at them.
The churchyard was dark and silent.
The fog had come down again, low and grey and wet, drifting between the gravestones.
Under the twisted yew, Ottilie’s stone gleamed faintly.
She never gave anyone up.
Tamsin Marsh was kneeling beside her brother’s wooden marker on the far side of the church, in the pauper’s ground, in her plain grey dress.
Her hands were pressed flat against the wet earth.
Her shoulders were shaking.
Around her, at a distance, in the fog, stood her Bound men.
Twenty of them, perhaps.
Silent.
Waiting.
Their silver-rimmed eyes glowed faintly in the dark like the eyes of animals.
She heard him coming.
She didn’t look up.
“I didn’t know,” she said.
Her voice was raw.
“I swear on Tobin’s grave.
I didn’t know.
The order to Varney.
Take everything he has.
I gave it weeks ago.
In the churchyard, the day after I met you.
I was so angry.
I forgot I’d given it.
I forgot to take it back.” She pressed her hands harder against the earth.
“And then she gave him money.
Two thousand.
She never told me.
I didn’t know until Pike came to tell me the shop was burning.”
“Orsen Tull is dead,” said Lucan.
She went very still.
“He was the strongest man in Pit Nine.
He used to drink the meat out of the soup.
He spent two months in the Throat, and he came out singing.
He gave Nell Harlow a barley sugar every Sunday for four years.” Lucan’s voice was flat and empty.
“He died with three holes in his back, holding a six-year-old girl.
The one with the doll.
Pip.
The one who waved at you through the crypt window.”
Tamsin made a sound.
It wasn’t a word.
She got up.
Slowly.
She turned around.
Her face was wet and white and twisted, and her eyes were enormous, and the silver panel was already open beside her, tall and thorned and blazing in the fog.
[ THE COLLECTOR ]
[ Debtor: Lucan Marr.
1 life (Tobin Marsh).
]
[ Account Holder’s Rank 2 requirement: 1 life Claimed.
]
[ Debtor’s Ledger: NO LONGER IN GOOD STANDING.
(Uncollected blood-debt counterclaim pending.) ]
[ CLAIM PERMITTED.
]
She stared at it.
Her lips moved.
Claim permitted.
“I don’t want it any more,” she whispered.
“I don’t— I don’t want—”
Her hands came up.
They were shaking.
She looked down at them as though they belonged to someone else.
“It’s making me,” she said.
“It’s pulling.
Lucan, it’s pulling—”
She lunged for him.
And he saw, in her face, that it wasn’t her.
That it was the panel, the thing behind the panel, the cold hungry silver thing that had found her dying on her floor and given her a ledger of her own.
The Collector does not create value.
It extracts it.
Her hands closed on his wrist.
The cold came.
The bottom of the bucket gave way.
His heart stuttered.
And Lucan Marr, who had died in debt twice, and asked for an audit, said the one word he had never yet said to the Exchequer.
The word that had appeared at Rank 2, in the list of new functions, that he had looked at a hundred times and never understood.
“Dispute.”
The world went white.
Not bright.
White.
Everywhere.
The churchyard, the fog, the gravestones, the Bound men, the yew tree and the dark sky and Tamsin’s white, terrified face an inch from his own.
All of it went white at once, like a page with the ink washed off it, and there was no sound, no cold, no heat, no ground under his feet.
[ DISPUTE FILED.
]
[ A debt between two Account Holders has been contested.
]
[ Claimant: Tamsin Marsh (THE COLLECTOR) — 1 life (Tobin Marsh).
]
[ Counterclaimant: Lucan Marr (THE EXCHEQUER) — 1 life (Orsen Tull).
]
[ Mutual blood-obligations may not be netted.
]
[ ARBITRATION CONVENED.
]
[ Both parties are summoned to THE CLEARING HOUSE.
]
And out of the whiteness, slowly, something began to form around them.
A floor.
Pale and polished and endless, like white marble, stretching away in every direction until it vanished.
Columns, rising from it, white and impossibly tall, so tall their tops were lost in a white haze far above.
And between the columns, on every side, as far as the eye could see, there were shelves.
Shelves of ledgers.
Millions of them.
Billions.
Bound in every colour of leather and every kind of skin, some new and some so ancient they were crumbling to dust.
Stacked on shelves that rose into the haze and ran away into the distance in long, endless, silent avenues.
And from somewhere among them, very far away, came a sound.
Very soft.
Very steady.
Like a single pen, scratching on a single page.
Forever.
Tamsin was still holding his wrist.
She was staring around her with her mouth open.
“Where are we?” she whispered.
Lucan didn’t answer.
At the end of the long white avenue in front of them, far away, there was a desk.
A high desk, like the Registrar’s, but vast.
And behind it, something was sitting.
Something that might have been a figure, in robes of grey and white, with a great open book in front of it and a pen in one long pale hand.
It lifted its head.
It didn’t have a face.
Where its face should have been, there was only a page.
Blank and white and waiting.
And a voice spoke, from everywhere and nowhere, dry and quiet and old as dust.
“Approach,” it said, “the bench.”
End of Chapter 20