The Auditor came down the stairs like a form being filled out.
I don't have a better way to say it. It wore the shape of a tall person in a grey coat, but the shape was wrong in the specific way of a thing that has read about people without ever being one — too still between movements, too exact, a figure assembled out of the idea of authority rather than a body. Where its face should have been, there was a slow scroll of fine grey text, auditing itself, endlessly.
It reached the bottom of the stairs and looked at me, and I felt every skill in my toolbox flinch.
[CARETAKER-AUDITOR.]Function: revocation of unlicensed capability.You have accumulated skills you were not issued. This will now be corrected.
"Priya," I said, very quietly. "Behind me. Shadows up."
"Leo—"
"I know. Just — behind me."
The Auditor raised one grey hand, palm out, the way you'd hold up a page to read it. And it read me.
Item: [Warden's Inferno]. Source: licensed Flame Warden. Acquisition: unauthorized.[REVOKED.]
Something tore out of my chest. Not pain — absence, the sudden clean nothing of a word deleted mid-sentence. I reached for the copy of Halloran's fire that I'd carried since the first Threshold, the flare that had saved Reyes's life, and it wasn't there. Not spent. Not empty. Gone, as if I'd never stood in a stairwell and watched an old man throw a sun.
Item: [Umbral Grip]. Source: licensed Shadow Tamer.[REVOKED.]
Priya made a small sound behind me. I felt her copy leave me too — the little three-percent grab that had hitched a Guardian's leg, that had opened the way for every kill I'd made — and I understood, standing there getting quietly deleted, exactly what an Auditor was.
It wasn't a fighter. Fighters I'd learned to beat. It was worse. It was the one thing my entire class had no answer for: a being whose whole function was to reach into a Copyist and take the toolbox away.
Item: [Bulwark]. Revoked. Item: [Short Step]. Revoked. Item: [Mend]—
"No," I said. Nour's gift. One percent of a miracle a tired woman had spent on a boy who couldn't be saved. "Not that one—"
[REVOKED.]
The gold light went out of me. I had one skill left in the rack — [Minor Flame], my oldest, the birthday candle I'd ground to twelve percent one Straggler at a time — and the Auditor's grey hand turned toward it, unhurried, thorough, because Auditors are always thorough, they finish the page.
Item: [Minor Flame]. Source: licensed Flame Warden. Acquisition: unauthorized.[REVOKED.]
And then I had nothing.
I stood in a cold chamber, three levels of grind deleted in eleven seconds, a Copyist with an empty toolbox and a locked door and a chained woman on a throne behind me and a form-being in a grey coat finishing its work in front. Priya's shadows were the only power left standing in that room, and they were shaking.
The Auditor's scrolling face paused on me. Almost — and I want to be careful here, because it wasn't kindness, an Auditor doesn't have kindness, it has completeness — almost gently.
There. Corrected.You were an accounting error, Copyist. A number that grew when it should have been held. It is nothing personal. You were never supposed to be able to keep any of it.The discrepancy is resolved. You may now be processed like the rest.
It reached for me — to revoke the last thing, I think, the thing under the skills, the class itself — and I looked at the empty rack where my whole toolbox used to be, and I did the only thing I had left, which was to think.
Because it had audited six skills. Six.
I had seven.
And the seventh wasn't in the rack the Auditor could read. The seventh was the one I'd never catalogued, never licensed, never taken off a person at all.
The one I'd taken off a monster.
[Uncatalogued.]Item: [Straggler's Call]. Source: — unlisted. — Not a licensed class skill. — Not on the ledger.— The Auditor cannot revoke what the Auditor cannot find. —
The grey hand hesitated. For the first time since it came down the stairs, the Auditor did the one thing Auditors are built never to do.
It stopped mid-page. Because there was an item on me its whole function couldn't see.
"Yeah," I breathed, and eight percent of a monster's voice was already rising in my throat. "You only came to audit the parts of me that were authorized."