Assessment shall be made upon the vessel presented, by the qualified man, in the presence of the factor, and the figure entered shall be the figure certified. Standard of the Province, transfer houses, cl. 4
There is a way to find out.
“I know there is a way to find out.”
You have known for eleven days and you have not said it, and I have not said it, and we have now walked past that building four times. Level. Su’inn, I have given you a number twice and both times it was a guess with a coat on. There is a man in this town who does this properly.
She stood at the window of the room over the chandler’s with her arms folded.
“He does it to corpses.”
He does it to vessels. Yes.
“He will put his hands on me and work out how much is left of me and write it in a book.”
Yes, said Azaelis. And I am not going to dress that up for you, because you would spot it, and because it is exactly what it sounds like and there is no version where it is not. A pause. And you have been running an economy for eleven weeks on a figure I invented in a corridor.
Su’inn looked out at the street.
“Tomorrow,” she said.
Sarl had aged about four years in nine weeks.
He looked up from the ledger when she came in and went absolutely still, exactly as he had the first time, and she watched him arrive at it and then watched him do a thing she had not expected, which was to get up.
“Madam.”
“Factor.”
“You are alive.”
“So they tell me. There was a finding on the ninth.” She stood in the front hall with the four hundred and eleven flags under her boots. “The rite was validly performed. It is written down.”
“I know it is written down. I have a copy of it. I asked for a copy of it.” Sarl put both hands flat on the counter. “Nine weeks, madam. Nine weeks of the province and the chapter and a man from the diocesan house who came here four times and asked me the same eleven questions, and a boy of nineteen who gave notice in the summer because he could not sleep, and I have sat in that back room every night since April doing an arithmetic that does not come out.”
“I am sorry.”
“Do not be sorry, I do not want sorry.” He said it without heat. “I want to know what I wrote down. That is all I have ever wanted. I have got a reconstruction in that book and I have known since the morning I made it that it is not what happened, because what happened is that a woman I had certified as stock stood in front of me and told me her name, and there is no line in that book for that, and I put down the nearest thing and it was a lie and I have signed it.”
Su’inn stood in the hall.
“You put the date wrong.”
Sarl’s head came up.
“There is a date wrong in the reconstruction,” she said. “In my favour. A finder called Vasse found it in about a week and has told two chapters about it.”
“Which date.”
“He did not say. He said you did not know.”
“I did not know,” said Sarl. He sat back down slowly. “Well. There it is. Twenty-six years and I have put a date wrong in a book, and it turns out to be the only decent thing I have done since April, and I did it by being tired.” He pulled the ledger toward him. “What do you want.”
“An assessment.”
“On what vessel.”
“On this one,” said Su’inn.
The qualified man was called Enner and he had done it for thirty-one years and he did not want to.
“She is alive.”
“Yes,” said Sarl.
“I assess vessels. A vessel is a body with the occupant out of it, and this is a body with two in it, and there is no practice on that, and I am not making one up in my own house on a Thursday.”
“There is practice,” said Su’inn.
Enner looked at her.
“Clause four says assessment shall be made upon the vessel presented. It does not say the vessel shall be dead. It has never said that, because it did not have to, because nobody ever presented one.” She put her hands on the back of the chair. “I am a practitioner of eleven years’ standing out of the low house at Ulmatis and I have been running the slow on other people’s tissue for nine of them, and I know exactly what you are going to do to me and I know what it will feel like and I am not going to jump. And you are going to do it because I am the only one there has ever been, and because in thirty-one years you have never once been able to check your own figure against anything.”
Enner stood in the doorway of the assessment room for a long moment.
“That is true,” he said.
“I know it is true. It is the only thing I have got to pay you with.”
It took two hours and it was the worst two hours she had spent in a building since the yard.
Not painful. That was almost the difficulty. He was gentle and thorough and completely uninterested in her, and he worked down her the way she had worked down four hundred people, hands and thumbs and the flat of the palm, listening at the joints, pressing and waiting and pressing again, and every three or four minutes he said a word to Sarl and Sarl wrote it in the book.
Stay still, said Azaelis, once, early.
“I am still.”
You are lying on a table being read out to a clerk, and I have done it eleven times and I want to tell you the one thing that made it bearable, which is that the man is not describing you. He is describing a thing you are in.
“Does that work.”
It has never worked once, said Azaelis. I offer it every time.
At the ninetieth minute Enner stopped and stood back and looked at the wall for a while, and then came back and did the left forearm again, and then the throat, and then the jaw.
Then he went and washed his hands for a long time.
“Factor,” he said. “Read me back the fourth line.”
Sarl read it back.
Enner dried his hands and did not turn round.
“Do it again,” he said. “The whole of it. From the ankles. I am not writing that figure with one run under it.”
It took another hour and a half and the second run came out the same.
“Sit up,” said Enner. “Slowly. You will be dizzy and it is nothing, it is two hours on your back.”
Su’inn sat up.
“I am going to give you the figure and then I am going to tell you what I do not know,” he said, “and I want the second part more than the first, because the second part is the honest half.”
“Go on.”
“The certificate in April said thirty-one years. That was mine. I made it in about ten minutes on a Tuesday off a corpse that had been down about a day and a half, and it was a good assessment and I would make it again, and it was correct.” He folded the cloth. “Thirty-one years of ordinary occupancy. That is what that figure means and it is what it has meant in this house for thirty-one years.”
“And now.”
“Now there is a second one in it, and the whole thing has come apart, and I have measured this body twice and both times I get the same answer, and the answer is not in years.” He looked at her. “It is in hours.”
The room went very quiet.
“There are about eleven hundred hours left in that body of the other one at the front of it,” said Enner. “Give or take a hundred either way and I would not spend the last hundred. When he is at the front, it burns. When you are, it does not, and it is repairing, and I have never in thirty-one years put my hands on a vessel that was repairing and I do not have a word for what that is.”
Su’inn sat on the edge of the table.
“Eleven hundred hours.”
“Forty-five days,” said Enner, “if it were done all at once, which it will not be. Spread thin it is a great deal more useful than that sounds and it is a great deal less than thirty-one years, and both of those are true, and I am not going to help you decide which one to think about.”
Su’inn, said Azaelis.
“How much has he had,” she said.
Enner looked at Sarl. Sarl looked at the book, and then at her, and did not answer, because he did not know.
“About thirty,” said Azaelis, out of her mouth, and she heard herself say it and had not given him anything, and understood a half second later that she had said it herself, out loud, on his behalf, because she had been keeping the count too.
“Thirty hours,” said Enner. “Since April.”
“Yes.”
“Then he has been careful,” said Enner, “and I want to say that plainly in this room, because you are going to walk out of here and do arithmetic for a week and you will not put that in it. In thirty-one years I have handed a figure to a great many gentlemen and I have watched what they do with it, and thirty hours in five months is not what any of them do.”
They got out into the street and she walked about two hundred yards and then stopped and put her back against a wall.
“Eleven hundred hours.”
Yes.
“That is nothing. That is six weeks. That is six weeks spread over the rest of my life and then you are.”
Then I am at the end of a body and there is a dormant notice in a drawer at the provincial office, yes, said Azaelis. You may say it. I would rather you said it than sat on it.
She stood against the wall with her eyes shut.
“How much was Halbrick’s leg.”
An hour and a half.
“And the leat.”
An hour and ten minutes.
“And Ostrand.”
Four hours and twenty, said Azaelis, and I have been sitting with that particular figure since a man in an assessment room said the word hours, and I would like to say something and I would like you to let me finish it.
“Say it.”
I spent four hours and twenty minutes of your life going up a flight of stairs to be spoken to by a professional, he said. And I told you at the time that I was enjoying it and I asked you to be generous, and you were.
She did not open her eyes.
I have eleven hundred hours, said Azaelis, and perhaps forty of them are going to be worth it, and I do not know which forty, and I have already spent four and a third of them on being a person for an afternoon.