Chapter 5: A Debt Recorded

The usher at the door of the Tribunal House dealt out slips as the families came in, one to a household, without looking up from the stack. Each slip was green and ruled in black and headed Tool and Lattice Invoice. Due the fifteenth. Tessa took hers and read it standing. Joren took his and put it in his coat unread, which was another way of reading it.

Kael took his and held it in the crook of two fingers, because the rest of his hand would not close on paper. The linen on his palms had gone grey with three days of wear. Hook, two marks. Two lamps, a mark each. One length of ward brace, one mark. Five marks, in a clerk's round hand, for a hook he had left in the drift and a brace that had broken on his back.

The hearing room was long and cold and smelled of lamp oil and wet wool. Three rows of benches faced a rail, and behind the rail stood a dais with a high desk. Mira had put her shawl on the witness bench to keep it. Kael sat on the invoiced bench in the second row instead, with the crew, and after a look at the shawl she came and sat beside him.

Nadi Tarn's mother was the last in. She was small and brown-shawled, led by a neighbour girl who let go of her at the door as if the building might object. The usher put a slip in her hand. She held it at arm's length and turned it, and the paper told her nothing.

"The boy's name is on it," the neighbour girl said. "That's all I can tell her."

Kael got up. He crossed the aisle, and the woman kept her eyes on the paper, and he took it from her fingers.

"Tarn, N.," he read. "One lamp, one mark. One pick, two marks. A share of the lattice, one mark six bits. Four marks six bits in all."

She nodded at each figure, as though checking it against a list in her head. When he finished she said, hoarse and short, "He's in the infirmary."

"I know."

"He woke up yesterday. First thing he asked." Her hands closed on nothing. "He asked if his shift was kept."

Kael had no answer to that. He held the slip out and she took it and folded it small and put it inside her bodice, and he went back to the bench with nothing to do with his face. "My girl eats first," Tessa Rill said, to the room in general. "The bill eats what is left." Nobody argued. Across the aisle a man sat apart with his left arm in a sling and his eyes on the rail. Kael knew the voice before he knew the face. Pay's the same either way. The roll at the landing had given it a name, Oswin Marr, and Kael's own knot had put the arm in the sling. Marr studied the floor between his boots.

Behind them someone hummed the festival song under his breath, the way men do waiting. Kael's own mouth started on the other tune, the six notes, and found them in order and empty. He shut it.

The rail in front of him was oak, worn pale where hands had gripped it. He laid his bandaged palms on it to stop them shaking, and something came up through the wood and went into the heels of his hands: a cold prickle, small and exact, like frost forming on a pane. It ran along the rail and down into the floor, and where it ran he could read the room. The third joist from the dais carried more than its share. The one under the door end carried nothing at all, only hung from its pegs, waiting to be asked. He took his hands off the rail as though it had bitten him. Under the linen the burn woke up hot, and when he turned his right hand over a thread of red had come through the grey.

"Don't," Mira said, low. Her palm lay on the bench between them. "You're white, and it's coming through. Listen. I went to the copy desk yesterday and asked, in the voice, what happens to a report after it's pressed." She did not look at him. "The carbon stays on the pad until the hearing opens. The Board's set goes to the Overseer's office overnight and comes back clean."

"So whatever's on that pad is the only true one," Kael said. "You asked all that?"

"I asked. He told me everything but the weather."

The cold had gone out of his hands, and a dullness had come in behind his eyes in its place, a wedge under the bone. Five marks by the fifteenth. The fourteenth was Mira's. The fifteenth was also the bond, three marks, and nothing in his coat would cover either. The sums would not add, and the wedge turned and made the figures swim.

The copy desk stood in the corridor outside the hearing room: a counter, a rack of claimant boxes against the wall, and a pad of pressed sheets under a slab of lead. The clerk behind it was a thin, damp young man with a pen in each hand and his lips moving. He was counting the strokes of a signature as he copied it. Forty-one, forty-two. The corridor had a skin on it for Kael now, and the count came through it like talk through a wall.

He planted himself at the counter and put his invoice down.

"Two marks for a hook?" He said it loud. The corridor took it up and carried it. "I left the hook in the drift. Show me the hook."

"I can only copy what is filed," the clerk said. He did not stop counting. Forty-three.

"It says two marks. Show me the hook."

Down the counter an usher turned his head. At the far end a third man in a good coat, Halden's clerk by the badge, looked up from a ledger. Kael let his voice get louder. He asked who had weighed the lamps and which of them had been broken, and if a miner paid for a brace the Company itself had hung, why the Company did not pay the miner for the hanging.

Behind the clerk's back, Mira had come up to the rack.

She did not use the voice from the Arcade. She used another, brisk and slightly aggrieved, a woman with an errand and no time. "Rill, I need the Rill set. The one with the hand. I've the wrong box, I've got Rilt here, Rilt is the lamp-oil claim, I don't want Rilt. Rill, with the hand."

The clerk looked round. "Rilt's on the left."

"It isn't. This says Rill."

"It says Rilt. There's a t."

"Then where's Rill?"

He turned to the rack to find it, one pen still lifted. Kael watched Mira's hand go to the pad. It lifted the corner of the top sheet, found what was under it, a blue skin as thin as a leaf, and tore it free in one long pull, and the shawl took it. She said, "Never mind, he's got it," and walked away from the rack.

The usher had been watching Kael's mouth and not Mira's hands. He turned back a beat late. "Here," he said. "You. The blue's gone off the pad."

They ran. The corridor went straight to a door, and the door gave onto a stone stair that went up in a tight turn. Mira took the steps two at a time with the shawl clutched to her ribs. Kael pounded after her. At the first landing she stopped with her back against the wall and her breath tearing, and then she laughed, once, short and ugly, and he laughed too, and the sound frightened both of them.

Boots below. Not yet climbing.

She had the blue sheet out. She smoothed it against the wall with the heel of her hand and ran her thumb under a line. "Survey cleared, the fourteenth of last month," she read. "Seam inspected, the nineteenth." Her thumb moved. "The fourteenth is before the nineteenth. Somebody cleared the seam five days before anyone went down to look." She folded it. When she spoke again it was fast and exact. "That's the true set. Whatever they press for the Board will say the clearance came after, and Halden's name goes under that one."

"I'll take it."

"No."

"They'll search the house. They'll turn the bed over. Give it here, I'll burn it."

"It's the only one there is." She put it in the shawl, against the skin. "I keep it. You don't ask for it unless it's the only way, and if you do ask, you look at me first."

He had his hand out. He lowered it.

"And the rubbing," Mira said. "You've the other paper in your coat. Why won't you use that one too?"

"It's the only copy. Hask tore the warning." He kept his eyes on the stairwell. "Whoever scraped that plate would come for whoever drew it."

She looked at him. Then below them a door banged and boots took the first flight at a run, and she said, "Go ahead," and he put himself in the stair door.

The usher came round the turn with his coat flying, saw Kael in the opening, and tried to go through him. Kael caught him by the lapels. The linen on his hands gave under the cloth with a wet sound, and the burn that had been cold since the gap came hot, all at once. He held. The usher swore, and kicked, and over Kael's shoulder there was the clatter of Mira going up the stair with her shawl in both fists. When it stopped, he let go.

"I know you," the usher said, gasping. He had a red mark on his chin. "Veyran. East Cut." He straightened his coat. "Eleven years I've stood that door. You know what they take off a man who loses a pad on his watch?" He looked past Kael at the copy desk, at the clerks who had let a sheet walk, and at his own name on the door roster. Whatever he had seen, it would cost him more to say it than to keep it. "They've called the hearing," he said, as though it were Kael's fault, and went in ahead of them. Mira slipped through on the families' side with her shawl up, and the usher did not turn his head.

The Overseer read the findings in a soft, balanced voice, from a ledger with a ribbon in it, and it took him some time to say anything at all.

He was tall and pale-handed, in a pressed charcoal coat with the Board's badge, with the ledger on his forearm. "The Board regrets the losses occasioned by the collapse of the fourth," Halden said. "The Company is grateful to every man who stayed." He turned a page. "It is nonetheless the finding of this office that the collapse arose from lapses in the conduct of the shift." The pale eyes went over the benches. "Certain sums, for lamps, hooks and the broken lattice, are recoverable from those present." A pause. "The sums will be spread. I would like that understood."

Kael sat with a wet linen strip under his sleeve, and the room did not understand. It coughed.

Hask stood below the dais with his roster. He looked at it. "No paper reached me," he said. "Veyran left his post." The sentence went out. "Veyran."

The presiding clerk was a heavy man on the high stool with a pen like a spike. A second clerk crossed the room from Halden's table and laid a sheet on the rail before him, with a small flourish of the wrist. "The re-copy of the report, pressed yesterday," said Halden's clerk. "Survey clearance, last month's twenty-second."

"Entered," said the presiding clerk. "Inspection, the nineteenth. Cleared after."

It was easy. It would stay easy. The room settled into it like a bench taking a load.

Kael stood up.

He had not told Mira he would. He heard her breath go in beside him. A corner of blue showed at her elbow, in the shawl, and he turned his face away from it, to the dais, so the room would turn with him.

"Which day was the seam cleared?"

Halden's head came round. The pale eyes were mild. "The seam was inspected on the nineteenth, Mr. Veyran, as the clerk has read."

"Inspected. I asked cleared."

"The clerk has read it."

"Then read the other," Kael said, and looked at Mira.

She gave one nod, small enough to be nothing. Her hand came off the bench. She went to the rail in four steps, and she laid a blue sheet on the oak in front of the presiding clerk, and she smoothed it out.

"The stamp on yesterday's carbon," Kael said. "Read it out."

The presiding clerk took up the sheet and held it close. He read it as he read everything, with no weight on any word. "Pressed on the sixth. Survey clearance, the fourteenth. Seam inspected, the nineteenth." He lowered it. "Cleared before."

Nobody coughed.

"The two copies differ," the clerk said, "in the date of clearance. The Board will hold the finding." He did not put the sheet down. "The claimant will state how a Tribunal carbon came into her possession."

Kael felt Mira not look at him. She could have said a clerk gave it to her, and made the room believe it.

"I took it off your pad," she said. "In the corridor, this morning, while your copy clerk looked for a box. I tore it off and put it in my shawl."

A sound went along the benches. The presiding clerk wrote for some time.

"Entered. The carbon is taken into the Tribunal's record. A note of copying will stand against the claimant's name, and a fine to be assessed by the desk." He blotted the line. "The sheet does not leave this room."

"The Board would not see a girl fined for her zeal," Halden said. He had not moved, and for a second the soft face held its shape like a mould. Then it softened further, and he laid the ledger on the dais and inclined his head to the room. "The Company is grateful to Mr. Veyran for his diligence. It was, of course, a confusion between desks." His voice had not changed in any way. "The strut, which Mr. Veyran so thoroughly examined, will be entered to his invoice. Twelve marks in all, due on the fifteenth. In order." He turned his head. "Clerk, enter the young woman's name in full, with her address, that the Board may thank her properly."

The presiding clerk's pen waited.

Mira had not moved from the rail. She said, a little breathless, "Mira Veyran. Of the Low Stair."

"Mira Veyran, of the Low Stair," said the clerk, writing. He blotted it, tore a slip from the stub, and pushed it across the rail with two fingers: a docket slip with a number inked on it. He lifted the blue sheet from the oak and laid it in the box at his elbow. Halden's clerk, at the table, did not even have to reach for it. "The finding is held," the presiding clerk said, to the ceiling. He rapped the desk. "Next."

Beside Kael, someone breathed out. It was Tessa. Across the aisle Oswin Marr had not looked up once. In Kael's coat the five-mark slip had become twelve, and Mira, passing him on her way to the door with the docket in her fist, said without turning her head, "The sum's disputed. I'll put that in writing myself."

The yard behind the Tribunal House was paved in wet slate and ran down to a gate on the Oldest Street. Mira stopped at the foot of the steps and let the crowd go by. A board stood against the wall there with the week's postings on it: a drainage levy, a lost mule. Beside them hung one printed sheet with a seal pressed square at the foot, clean and level, nothing like the thumbed wax on the Company's orders.

She read it aloud in her flat voice, as she read everything she meant to remember. "Meridian Audit Bureau. Review of Marches mine findings. Injury and infirmary returns invited. Inspector S. Valcrest, probationary commission."

Kael looked at the seal. It had been pressed once, by a hand that had not needed a second go.

"Probationary," Mira said. "Somebody new enough to still check the sums." She ran a thumb under the name. "Halden wants his figures settled before that gets here."

"Who is it?"

"S. Valcrest. I don't know." She said the name again, as if weighing it. "Whoever it is, they're the first person in this town to ask for the injuries."

Kael read the line again, Injury and infirmary returns invited. Then Mira took his sleeve, and they started toward the gate.

An evidence cart stood in the yard at the foot of the wall, with a hauler at the horse's head and a Company guard leaning on the tailboard. Two men were loading a canvas sling off the back. Kael knew what was in it before the cloth shifted: a white fan of iron the length of a forearm, white as salt, lying in a net of canvas as a dead bird lies in a hand. The hauler was talking to a man in a grey coat. "Weight only, old man. I'm not paying for opinion. Mind the wheel."

"Keep walking," Mira whispered.

Kael stopped.

It was a stupid thing. Keeping his head down would have been safer. But the sling shifted in the lamplight, and what hung in it was the thing that had gone into his arms and out of his palms, and his hands went cold.

The old man in the grey coat took the brace out of the sling and turned it over. He was narrow and upright, with white hair cut short as if by himself, and his coat was scorched at the cuffs. He ran a thumb along a broken strip, slowly, as if he had handled iron like it before. Then, without altering his face, he raised his eyes from the iron and looked at Kael, and kept looking.