At home, the thirty-first of December was not a holiday. It was the longest working day of the year.
Everybody else in Jakarta went home early to buy fireworks and argue about traffic. The bank did not. The bank closed its books. Every account, every ledger, every suspense line, every last rupiah in every branch had to balance before the year could end, and nobody went home until it did: not the tellers, not customer service, not the branch manager, not Pak Ujang at the door. We ate cold nasi kotak at eleven at night out of polystyrene boxes stacked on the counter. At midnight the city exploded outside, and we watched the fireworks through the barred window of the vault room, still adding.
I had done it four times. I had hated it four times.
On the morning of Day 467, the last day of the year in Lorvane, I woke an hour before the bread, by Brenna's oven, with my heart going like a drum.
Tutup buku. Tutup buku. TUTUP buku. Every account. Every row. Both doors. A whole year, Day 84 to Day 467, three hundred and eighty-four days, and all of it has to balance before midnight, and I don't have a system, I don't have an end-of-day batch, I have a ledger and a pen and Corvin, and Corvin has been sleeping in the back room since Restday, I know he has, I've seen the blanket—
Brenna was already up. She was always already up. She was standing at the kneading table in the dark, with her best grey shawl over her apron, counting coins into a little cloth bag. Twice.
"It's the last day of the season," she said, without turning round. "I'm paying."
Her fourth installment. Season five. Due today. The last day.
"You could pay this afternoon," I said.
"I could," said Brenna, "and I could die before this afternoon, and then where would you be? With a building and a loan and a dead baker." She tied the bag. "Today. First thing. The way I paid the first one."
So the first customer of the last day of the year was Brenna Holt, at the second bell, in her best shawl, with one crown, seven marks and four bits in a cloth bag, which she counted out on the oak in front of Arno, then in front of Mistress Hale, and then once more in front of me, for luck. Arno wrote the row. Mistress Hale released it with the brass stamp across the seam of her loan book. Gold. Four of twelve.
"Four," said Brenna, putting the book back in her apron, against her chest. She patted it twice. "Eight to go."
Eight to go. At home, a borrower who paid every installment on time or early for a whole year was flagged in the system as kolektibilitas satu. Current. Performing. The best kind. They got a little green dot beside their name. Brenna is the greenest dot in two worlds, and she doesn't even know she has a dot.
Then Corvin stood up behind his grille, with his spectacles pushed up on his forehead and the look of a man who has slept on a bench since Restday, and said, to the whole house:
"Nobody goes home tonight until it balances."
There was a silence in the Trust House.
"All of it," said Corvin. "Every account. Every row of the year. The vault, the drawers, the payroll pages, the escort runs, the loans. Both doors." He looked at Ivo, who had come in with flour on his sleeve and stopped dead. "Counted, checked and closed. Then the year is over." He sat down. "Not before."
Borrik looked at the door, where the lanterns of the Festival were already going up along the bridge.
"Festival," said Borrik sadly.
"After," said Corvin.
"After midnight?"
"After it balances."
He's said it. He's said the THING. Every branch manager I ever had said the thing on the morning of the thirty-first, in exactly that voice, and every one of us made exactly the face Borrik is making now. It's universal. It's a law of nature. It may be the first law of banking. It may be older than interest—
"Thank you, Master Dalle," I said. "I'll draw up the closing list."
"I've drawn it," said Corvin.
He had. It was nailed to the inside of the counter: four sheets, ruled, every account in the house in order, with a box beside each for closed, a box for checked, and a box for by whom. Arno's square capitals were already in the first box beside the first seven accounts.
He's been doing this since Restday. In the back room. On a bench. Without telling anyone. At home, the branch manager only said the thing. Corvin said the thing AND drew the list.
I'm going to cry before the third bell. That's a record. That's a new record for the last day of the year.
The town spent the day getting ready to celebrate. We spent it closing a year.
It went account by account, the way a year is built. Arno and Kit read out each balance from the ledger. Mistress Hale and I checked each against the passbook rows and the release stamps, one by one, in gold. Corvin added every page from the top. Ivo, in the back room with the door open, added every page Corvin had added, from the bottom. When the two of them agreed, Ivo wrote checked in the box with his initial beside it, and Corvin, without looking up, clicked my pen four times.
The payroll pages went quickly: each was one plain sheet, gold from foot to head, with the Reeve's round signature at the top. The escort runs went quickly too, two ends to every record and Hedda's short, hard stroke at both. The loans went slowly, because loans always go slowly: Hob Marrin's barge, Brenna's building, five trade loans to the river merchants, every installment checked against its row.
Six bells, and nothing has gone wrong. Nothing. Something must be about to go wrong. At home, something always went wrong in the fourth hour of tutup buku. Always. A printer. A power cut. A suspense account with three hundred rupiah in it that nobody could explain and everybody was too tired to—
"Aubrelle," said Corvin.
Aubrelle. The other door. Shut since Day 248, except on run days. Two officers who aren't there, one of whom is HERE, making rows for Arno—
I turned the ledger over and opened it from the back.
Aubrelle's pages were thin for most of the year. After Lotte's hundred days, the Aubrelle door had opened only on a handful of run days and for our one long stay; the rest of the time it had been shut, and the pages showed it: long stretches of nothing, and, since Day 431, closings that read door shut; counted; correct. At every one of those, in a small, very old-fashioned hand, with the letters joined in a way nobody had taught in fifty years: F.A.
At the foot of the last page, under today's date, there was a line I had not written.
Day 467. Year closed at Aubrelle. Every row read twice. Vault counted with Wat, without warning (Wat was warned; he said it made no difference). Closed. Correct. F.A.
He did it. He closed Aubrelle. Alone, in a shut shop on the street of the goldsmiths, with his loupe and Wat, a whole year of rows, read twice, without being asked, and he wrote it into the back of our book from twenty-four days away so that it would be here today when we turned the page—
"Hm," said Corvin, reading it over my shoulder.
"That's Rook's."
"I've kept it," said Corvin.
By the eighth bell, the house knew what kind of year it had been.
Corvin wrote it out on a single sheet, the way the Office would want it, and read it to us, standing at the end of the counter with the lamp lit, while the music started outside on the bridge.
Three hundred and sixty-nine real depositors, in two towns, where at last year's Festival there had been a hundred. Two doors, one of them shut. One officer lost and her stamp revoked; two officers made in Corrinford, two more in Aubrelle, and one auditor who answered to nobody in the room. Fifty-four crowns and twelve marks stolen through our own officer, written on the door, and taken from the capital, not from any depositor. Every depositor who asked, paid.
And at the bottom, under a line, in black ink: a profit.
It was a small one. It was smaller than Brenna's building loan. But it was black.
Black ink. At home, the year-end figure went on a slide at the regional meeting in green or in red, and everybody in the room looked at the color first and the number second. We don't have green ink here. We don't have red. We have black, and Corvin wrote it in black, and it's ours. It's OURS. We lost fifty-four crowns and we still—
Aldous Penhallow, on the customers' bench, on his two sound feet, read the figure upside down from where he sat.
"My quarter," he said.
Corvin told him. It was a few crowns.
Aldous looked at it for a long moment. Then he took off his reading spectacles, folded them, and put them away.
"Leave it in," he said. "With the capital."
"Master Penhallow—"
"Interest," said Aldous Penhallow, "is a thing one leaves in, Miss Halim. You told me so the first day you sat in my study. I didn't believe you." He stood up, leaning on his cane, which he plainly did not need. "Leave it in. Let it breed. Within the Edict, naturally."
Compounding. He's compounding. He lost fifty-four crowns of his own coin to a girl who now lives under his roof, and he's leaving his profit in the house that lost it. At home there was a word for investors like that. We called them unicorns. We never met one.
Liesl came at the ninth bell, out of the music, in her green coat, with a lantern. She had come from the Guild Hall, where the Guildmaster was, she said, making a speech about the year that was very short.
"He asked me to bring you this," she said, and laid her hand flat on the counter, and lifted it, and there was nothing under it at all.
I looked at the empty oak.
"A Hm," said Liesl. "The first one. He said it when I told him about Aubrelle and the court and the Wrens and the payroll. He's only used the first one twice that I know of." She smiled her professional smile, the one with exactly four teeth, and then, for once, a different one. "It means well done."
At the tenth bell, I went into the strongroom to count the vault for the last time that year, and heard them.
The strongroom of the old customs house has one small air grate, high up where the cellar wall meets the ground, opening on the yard behind the Trust House where the barrels are kept. It lets in a little air and no light. That evening, it let in voices.
"You first," said Kit's voice.
"No," said Ivo's.
There was a pause, filled with the sound of the river, and of someone sitting down on a barrel.
"All right," said Kit. "Me first." Another pause. "I'm not going to say anything. To her. Not one word. Not until she sees it for herself."
Sees what? Sees WHAT?
"Neither am I," said Ivo.
"Agreed?"
"Agreed."
"And if she— if she sees it, and it's—" Kit stopped. "If it isn't me."
"Then it isn't you," said Ivo.
"And if it isn't you?"
There was a very long silence. I stood perfectly still in the dark of the strongroom, with a stack of crowns in each hand, and did not breathe.
"Then it isn't me," said Ivo. "She decides. Not us."
"She decides," said Kit.
I heard them stand up. I heard two pairs of boots cross the yard, at exactly the same speed.
A surprise. They're planning a surprise. For the Festival. For me. Something they're not allowed to tell me about until I see it for myself. A gift? Not a gift, there's the gift register. Food? It's food. They've agreed to bring me food, and neither of them will say who's bringing what, so that I have to choose which to eat first. That's what "she decides" means. That's very sweet. That is very poor planning. Somebody should coordinate them. I'll coordinate them. No. It's a SURPRISE. I'm not supposed to know. Count the crowns. Count the crowns, Sekar.
I counted the crowns. They were correct.
At the eleventh bell, they came in with the food at the same moment.
Kit came in from the street with a basket from the best cookshop on the square: hot pies, spiced, wrapped in a clean cloth, enough for the whole house. Ivo came in from the yard with a pot from Marga's kitchen at the Copper Kettle: stew, still steaming, which he had carried up Tanner's Row and across the bridge in both hands without spilling, because Marga had told him that if he spilled it he would be carrying barrels until the next Festival.
They reached the counter at the same moment, from opposite doors, and both of them stopped.
There it is. The surprise. They both brought food. At the SAME time. After agreeing, in the yard. I knew it. Brilliant intentions. Very poor coordination. At home, we'd have set up a group chat.
"Thank you, Master Stannard," I said, taking the basket. I opened my notebook to the back, to the gift register, and wrote it in: Day 467. Pies, hot, one basket. Given by: K. Stannard. Given to: the house. Perishable. Action: shared among all present. Then I set the basket on the counter for everyone.
"And thank you, Ivo," I said, taking the pot, "for working so late. On the last day of the year. That's well beyond your hours."
Ivo looked at me for a long moment.
"It's stew," he said.
"It's overtime," I said, and put it beside the pies.
Overtime. He's carried a pot of stew across a bridge on the last night of the year, when he could have been at the Festival. That's commitment. That's dedication. At home there would be a certificate for that. Employee of the Month. A plaque—
Across the hall, by the doorframe, Brenna had come back with a tray of honey buns and was standing beside Tamsin with her arms folded, watching the two of them, the pies and the stew.
"Which one's sweet on her, then?" said Brenna, very quietly, to Tamsin.
Tamsin did not take her eyes off them.
"Both," said Tamsin.
Sweet? Both? Both of them brought something sweet? The pies are savory. The stew is savory. The honey buns are sweet, and Brenna brought those, so she must mean— oh. She's asking which of the two brought something sweet, and Tamsin says both, and that isn't true, neither of them did. Tamsin is mistaken. It's the first time I've ever heard Tamsin be mistaken. It's the Festival. Everybody's tired.
Lotte came in with Agnes Wren and the twins from Penhallow House, with the lantern-light behind them, and laid a small cloth purse on the counter in front of Aldous, who had not gone home, because Corvin had said nobody was going home.
"My first share," said Lotte. "From the fountain. Eleven days of letters." She hesitated. "It isn't much."
Aldous untied the purse and tipped it out on the oak. He counted it slowly, the way he counts everything now, without warning. Three marks and some bits.
"Short of a crown," he said. "And early." He put it back in the purse. "Have it made into a row."
Arno made it into a row. Mistress Hale released it. Lotte watched the gold come up across the seam with her inked hands folded very tightly in front of her, and her dimple came, and this time it was not wrong at all.
The fruit basket came at the half-bell before midnight.
It was carried in by a boy nobody knew, who set it on the end of the counter, bowed, and left before anyone could ask him anything. It was very large and very beautiful: winter pears, late apples, figs from somewhere far to the south. In the middle, on a small cream card, in neat, gentle handwriting I would have known anywhere:
To the keeper of the Corrinford Trust House, on the turn of the year. So many of my clients carry your little books now. I find them so very reassuring. I do so look forward to our next meeting. H.G.
I read it twice. The second time, I was checking.
Your little books. His CLIENTS carry our little books. Why would a moneylender's clients carry our books to a moneylender? To show him what they have. To show him what they could— As collateral. They're showing him their passbooks as collateral. And at our counter the gold wins, but at his counter there's no gold, there's only a book, and a book can have ink in it, ink that anyone could—
"Corvin," I said.
Corvin read the card over my shoulder. He said nothing for a long time. Then he took it out of my hand, folded it once, and put it in his satchel, beside Anselm's correction and Lotte's letter.
"Next year," he said.
Borrik came over, looked at the basket, examined a pear from every side with great seriousness, and ate it in four bites.
"Safe," he reported.
At the last half-bell of the year, there was one page left.
It was the keeper's page: my own drawer, the four bits returned to me by a correction row two days before, the day's last rows, Brenna's installment, Lotte's share. The last page of the house's first whole year, waiting at the bottom of the ledger with its column of figures and the line drawn under them and nothing yet written beneath the line.
I added it from the top.
Ivo, standing at the other end of the counter, added it from the bottom.
Nobody else in the house said anything. Outside, on the bridge, the music had stopped. The whole of Corrinford was holding its breath for the bell.
From the top. Twelve. Carry one. Don't drop it. DON'T drop it. Ivo dropped one on Restday, and I dropped one at dawn in Aubrelle, and the Grandmaster ran his finger up it, and if I drop one now, on the last line of the last page of the year with everybody watching, I will walk into the river. I will walk into the river in my blazer, and Lumeth will have to press it at the bottom of the Corrin—
I wrote my figure on the slate beside the ledger and turned it face down.
Ivo wrote his on Lotte's board and turned it face down.
We turned them over together.
They were the same.
From the top and from the bottom, the same. The keeper's column and the auditor's, both ends, one figure.
"Balanced," said Corvin, very quietly.
I wrote it beneath the line, in ink, and signed. Then I laid the closing over its page, the last row of the year against the line of the closing, and pressed my stamp across the seam.
Gold.
Outside, on the bridge, the bell of the town hall began to ring for the turn of the year, and the whole of Corrinford, which had been holding its breath, let it go at once.
It's over. The year is over. It balanced. It BALANCED. Nobody has to stay— everybody can go home—
Somebody knocked on the door.
It was a solid, cheerful bargeman's knock, three times, on the oak of the old customs house, at the first stroke of the new year. Borrik opened it, because the Head of the Queue opens doors.
Hob Marrin stood on the step, rangy and sunburnt, with a coil of rope over one shoulder, his gap-toothed grin, and the lanterns of the Festival behind him.
"It's next year," said Hob.
No.
No no no no NO.
"Ask me again next year." I said it. On Day 83, at the Festival. I said it AGAIN on Day 180. I said it because the house was six hundred rows behind and a cheque is a whole season of trouble, a whole new product, chequebooks and leaves and registers and bounced paper and the enforcement chapter of every regulation I ever read—
And it's next year. It has been next year for exactly one stroke of a bell. And he's HERE.
"Master Marrin," I said. "Happy new year."
"About my cheque," said Hob.
I reached under the counter into the bowl of wooden tokens and took out the first one. Number one. The first of the year. I held it out to him across the oak.
"Please take a number," I said. "The counter opens at the second bell."
Hob looked at the token. He looked at me. Then he laughed, the big, gap-toothed laugh of a man who has hauled barges for twenty years and knows exactly what the second bell means, and put the token in his pocket.
"First," he said. "I'll be first."
"I know," I said.
At the end of the counter, Corvin had taken a fresh sheet of paper and was writing something on it in his cramped capitals. I leaned over to see.
Next year's target.
And under it, one line.
Three doors.
Day 467, I wrote at the counter, with the bell still ringing and the house emptying out into the Festival around me. Year closed. Every account closed, checked and signed. Both doors. Real depositors: 369, where at last year's Festival there were 100. Profit: black, small, and left in. Season's target, "one stranger": met. Next year's target: three doors. Customers waiting for the new year: 1, holding token number 1. Pies: shared. Stew: overtime. Fruit: eaten by security. Card from H.G.: in Corvin's satchel. Balanced: from both ends.
Corvin read it over my shoulder. He took my pen, clicked it four times, and wrote one word underneath.
Met. (C.D.)
Then, after a moment, he crossed out Met and wrote, more carefully, a word I had never once seen him use.
Good.
I slept by Brenna's oven, as I always do, and for a very short time.
In the dream, the branch at home was dark except for Counter 3, and Lumeth was standing in front of it with a queue ticket, and a ribbon on each wrist so thick with threads that it looked like a sleeve.
"Happy new year," said Lumeth.
"Happy new year," I said. "How can I help you?"
"I've brought something," said Lumeth. "I hear you have a custom at home. At the end of a year, when a house has done well." They tilted their head. "A bonus."
A bonus? A BONUS? At home the year-end bonus was announced in March, after the audit, by email, as a number of months' salary, and everybody did the arithmetic in the toilet—
"It's for everyone who works for the house," said Lumeth. "Only while they work for it. If they leave, it leaves. The next morning. That seems fair." They smiled. "You'll see."
"What is it?"
"You'll see," said Lumeth again, and laughed like a bell, and the light over Counter 3 went out.
I woke in the grey of Day 468, the first morning of the new year, and there was something beside me on the floor by the oven.
It was a stack of clothes.
Folded. Pressed. Navy and white. Complete sets, one on top of another: navy blazers, white blouses and white shirts, navy skirts and navy trousers, and at the very bottom a row of plain black shoes. On every blazer, a small, neat house-and-key was embroidered in white thread over the breast pocket, exactly the size of Jory's carving on the tokens. Pinned to each set was a scrap of paper with a name on it, in letters that were not anybody's handwriting I knew.
Corvin Dalle. Arno Kell. Mistress Hale. Borrik. Tamsin Reed. Fenn. Kit Stannard. Ivo. Fulk Arden. Wat.
Ten.
Jatah seragam.
Jatah SERAGAM. The uniform allotment. At home it came once a year, two sets each, in plastic bags with your name on a sticker, and every single year the sizes were wrong, and the whole branch spent January swapping blazers in the staff pantry, and once Mbak Rini got the branch manager's trousers and wore them for a week out of spite—
I unfolded the top one. Borrik. It was enormous. It was exactly, perfectly enormous.
They fit. They're going to fit. A god measured them. A god measured BORRIK.
I had no idea how to explain them. I had never told anyone about Lumeth. Not Corvin, not Brenna. I could not begin the first morning of a new year by telling the house that a fading god had delivered its uniforms in the night, like a tailor without a shop.
So I carried them across the bridge at dawn, in two trips, and laid them in a stack on the counter of the Trust House with the names on top, and when the house came in for the first briefing of the year, I said:
"From home."
Corvin looked at the stack for a long time. Then he looked at me.
"Good fabric," said Corvin.
They took them into the back room one at a time, to change, and came out in them.
Borrik's set was not like the others. No blazer ever made would have closed across Borrik with an axe on his back, so his was a long navy coat without sleeves, cut wide across the shoulders, over a white shirt and navy trousers, with a broad strap across the back made exactly for the dwarf-steel axe. He came out of the back room with the axe in its strap, the house-and-key on his enormous chest and his beard bristling over the white collar, and announced to nobody in particular that the Head of Security was now in uniform; and then, after a moment, in a much smaller voice, that it was very nice.
Tamsin's was cut short: a navy jacket that stopped at the hip, with a strap at the left shoulder for the crossbow and room in the arms to draw it, over a white shirt and navy trousers. She came out, slung the crossbow across it, looked at herself in the dark glass of the strongroom door for exactly as long as it takes to say one word, and said it.
"Good."
Fenn's was small: the smallest blazer I have ever seen, a white shirt, navy trousers that stopped at the knee, and a pair of small black shoes. Fenn has never in his life owned shoes. He put everything else on first, and then the shoes, very slowly, and came out and stood very straight beside the doorframe with his nail in his fist, looking down at his own feet, and did not say anything at all, and did not have to.
Arno's fitted: white shirt, navy blazer, navy trousers, all of it exactly. Arno looked at himself, nodded once, exactly, and went back to his window.
Mistress Hale went into the back room in her black dress and came out in a white blouse buttoned to the chin, a navy skirt and the navy blazer, with the brass stamp moved to one pocket and the key to the other. Not black. For the first time in all the days I had known her, not black at all. She stood at the end of the counter and said, to the house in general, "Adequate," and I saw that her hands, smoothing the white collar, were very slightly unsteady.
Kit came out with enormous care, as though it might all be taken away again, and stood looking down at the house-and-key over his heart for a long time. He did not grin. Ivo came out last, in white and navy, with his shirt buttoned wrong, one button off all the way down, and Lotte, who had come down with Aldous to watch, crossed the hall without a word and set it right.
Aldous, on the bench, looked at the stack. There was no blazer with his name on it.
"I am not staff," said Aldous.
"No, Master Penhallow," I said.
"Hm," said Aldous.
Fulk's and Wat's I folded again and set aside, to go down with the first run of the new year, with the ICU, to the shut door on the street of the goldsmiths.
The last one on the counter was Corvin's.
He picked it up. He did not put it on at once. He held it at arm's length, the way he holds a coin he is about to weigh, and looked at the breast of it, at the small house-and-key embroidered in white thread over the pocket.
On his old grey coat, the one he had worn every day since I met him, with the elbows gone shiny, there was a darker square on the left breast where a badge had once been torn off. The badge of the royal mint. They took it from him on the day he told the truth about the coin.
The house-and-key on the navy blazer sat in exactly the same place.
Corvin looked at it for a very long time. Then he took the set into the back room, and when he came out he was in a white shirt and navy trousers and the navy blazer, buttoned, with his old grey coat folded over his arm. He laid the coat on the counter and stood there, with his spectacles pushed up on his forehead and the house's mark over his heart, where the Crown's had been.
He did not say anything. He didn't need to. He clicked my pen four times and gave it back.
And my face moved.
The third time. The last one I am allowed this year, if anyone were counting, which I suppose I was. Something at the corners of my mouth went up, and stayed there, and I let it, in front of the whole house, on the first morning of a new year, with Hob Marrin already standing on the step holding token number one.
Don't cry. Don't cry. It's the first day. There's a queue. There's HOB.
I cried a little anyway. Nobody mentioned it. Mistress Hale handed me a handkerchief without looking, from the pocket that does not hold the stamp.
Then Arno took the bar off the door.
Day 468, I wrote that night. First day of the year. Uniforms: 10 (8 worn; 2 to travel with the ICU to Aubrelle). Fitted: all. Explained: "From home." Accepted: "Good fabric." Customers: Hob first, as promised. Cheques: asked about. Answer: "Let's sit down."
Then, under the closing, because it was a new year, and because some lines are worth writing twice in a lifetime, I wrote one more.
Trust. In another world. Counted daily. Compounding.
Afterword
Thank you for reading the third volume of Interest in Another World.
Volume 1 asked whether ordinary people could learn to trust a stranger with their money. Volume 2 asked what happens when the hand that holds the stamp is no longer only hers. Volume 3 asked the question every bank has to ask out loud sooner or later: who counts the counter?
The answer, it turned out, was a stranger. Someone who belonged to no branch, no cousin and nobody in Corrinford at all; someone who could not read when Sekar found him, and who would rather go hungry than sign a paper he had not read. And the hardest part of his job was never the counting. It was writing down the truth about the person who had fed him.
Along the way, the house paid a town's wages without a single bag crossing the bridge, closed its first year with every book balanced from both ends, and learned a number of small things that real banks learn the hard way: that customer information flows one way, like a river; that a gift you don't write down becomes a debt you don't know you owe; that an over is as wrong as a short; and that a vacancy notice should really say what it pays.
Sekar would also like it noted that the Internal Control Unit is, strictly speaking, an internal audit unit, because it answers to the owner and not to the branch. Nobody in Corrinford has listened to her. It is nailed to the door with four nails.
The numbers at the end of this volume are larger than she dared to hope: three hundred and sixty-nine real depositors, a small profit in black ink, and a target that is not a number at all. Three doors. Aubrelle is still shut, waiting for its first count. Lotte writes letters by the fountain. The Wrens are on the Crown's side of the stones. Two young men have agreed, in a yard full of barrels, to say nothing at all. And a bargeman is holding token number one.
Volume 4 will open the next ledger: cheques, a current account, and the question of what happens to a little book of trust when it is carried somewhere it was never meant to go. Hollis Grane, after all, finds them so very reassuring.
Sekar will keep her face calm.
Inside, the panic has already started counting.
See you in Volume 4.
Bonus: The Fourth Box
On the first Restday of the new year, Day 470, Corvin counted the pebbles in a navy blazer.
Nobody mentioned the blazer. It had been three days, and the whole house had agreed, without ever discussing it, that the uniforms were a thing we did not mention, the way you don't mention a colleague's new haircut until they mention it first. But I noticed that he had stopped pushing his spectacles up onto his forehead while he counted, and hooked them over his breast pocket instead, carefully, where the arms would not catch on the white thread of the house-and-key.
He's protecting the embroidery. Corvin Dalle, who wore a coat with a torn badge every day since I met him, is protecting the EMBROIDERY—
There were four boxes on the counter.
Three I knew: SMILING, FLAT and FROWNING, in Jory's careful capitals. The fourth was new. It was the same size as the others, with the same slot in the lid, and burned into its front in the same careful capitals was one word.
UNPLEASANT.
"Whose is that?" I asked.
"The unit's," said Corvin. "Jory made it on the first day of the year."
"For the ICU?"
"For whoever counts us," said Corvin. "Everyone who's been counted puts in a pebble for the counter. One pebble. No discussion." He picked up the box. "The way Mistress Hale designed it."
A satisfaction survey for the auditor. Scored by the audited. With only one box. At home, the audit team had a feedback form too, and nobody ever filled it in, because filling in the auditor's feedback form was like writing a thank-you note to your dentist—
He tipped it out. Nine pebbles rolled across the oak.
Corvin counted them twice. Then he looked up.
"Arno," he said. "Mistress Hale. Master Stannard. Borrik, who wasn't counted but asked to be. The keeper. Myself. Master Penhallow sent two down the hill with the egg girl, because he says a capital partner is owed a second vote. And one I can't account for."
"Nine," I said.
"Nine," said Corvin. "Unpleasant: nine." He wrote it in the margin of his ledger and underlined it. "Excellent."
Ivo was standing by the doorframe in his navy blazer, buttoned correctly now, with his slate. He had come in on Restday because nobody had told him not to, which I suspected was going to become a habit.
"Is that good?" he said.
"It's the highest score anyone in this house has ever had," said Corvin. "For anything."
Ivo considered this. He looked at the nine pebbles. Then, very slightly, his ears went red, and he looked at the floor and said nothing at all, which, I was beginning to understand, is how Ivo looks when he is pleased.
Unpleasant: nine out of nine. And he's PLEASED. At home, if an auditor had received top marks on every anonymous feedback form in the branch, the bank would have opened an investigation into the feedback forms.
Then Corvin tipped out the first box.
"Smiling," he said. "Seven. From Master Stannard, for the keeper. As usual." He looked into the box again. "And one more."
I looked.
There was an eighth pebble. It was not a river pebble like the others. It was a small grey stone, rough, with a white vein through it, the kind you find on the road down out of the hills.
"Only Master Stannard makes for me," I said. "The rule is one pebble a day, from the maker, for the releaser."
"It is," said Corvin.
"So it's a mistake."
"Is it," said Corvin.
He did not look at the doorframe. I did not look at the doorframe. Tamsin, leaning against the doorframe, looked at absolutely everyone, one after another, and said nothing at all.
A mistake. Somebody misread the labels. Somebody who isn't even a maker put a pebble from the hill road in the wrong box, on the wrong day, without telling anyone. That's a control failure. That is a CONTROL failure in the one system in this house that runs on pebbles. I should raise it. I should raise it at the briefing. I am going to raise it at the briefing.
I did not raise it at the briefing.
I put the grey stone in my blazer pocket instead, beside the four bits, and that night, in my closing, I wrote in very small letters, at the bottom, where nobody reads:
Satisfaction boxes: one irregularity. Not investigated.
Corvin read it over my shoulder. He clicked my pen four times and did not write anything at all.