Chapter 2: The Tallyman

Wick had kept the Roll of the Delivered for nine years, and in that time he had written four thousand and some names into it and drawn rather more lines than that out of it, and he had come to believe, though he would never have said so to a Confessor, that the lines were the holier work.

Anyone could write a name. A name went in at the Rite of Delivery, with the whole carriage watching and the bell going and the new soul standing damp-eyed and blank in their first clean shift, and the Acclamant’s voice filling the room, and a name written under all of that was hardly a private act of devotion; it was more like signing for a parcel everyone had already cheered the arrival of. But the line — the line you drew alone. The line came when a lamp was brought back to the Office with its flame let down, and you took the Roll to the desk and found the name, sometimes years up the page, sometimes only weeks, and you drew the ruler across it once, in the good ink, and you blotted it so it would not weep into the entry below. No one watched you do it. No one rang a bell. It was the train’s quietest sacrament and Wick had appointed himself, without authorisation, its priest, and he thought the dead were better served by his ruler than the living were by his pen, and he kept this thought where he kept the other things he could not put a name to, which was in a drawer in himself that he did not open.

He was at the desk in the third hour of the morning watch, reconciling the oil.

The oil was not holy. The oil was the most ordinary thing in the Office — so many measures issued to the lamp-stores, so many burned, the difference accounted for by spillage and by the slow theft of evaporation, which was a thief you could not catch and so were permitted to forgive. Wick reconciled it on the fourteenth of the watch-cycle because the Stewardry liked the figure by the fifteenth, and he did it in the old way, in the old hand, because the oil-ledgers went back further than the new orthography and it was less trouble to keep writing a book in the language it had started in than to begin a quarrel between two scripts halfway down a column. The old hand was a cramped, looped, abbreviating thing, full of marks that stood for whole words — a circle with a tail that meant measure, a doubled stroke that meant carried forward, a little gallows-shape that meant deficient, to be made good. They did not teach it any more. Wick had learned it from the man before him, who had learned it from the woman before him, and when Wick drew his own last line one day there would likely be no one to read the early volumes at all, which was a small sadness he had decided the dead would understand.

Halia came past with the dead lamps.

She carried them two at a time to the high shelf, dark and cold, and she did it tenderly, which he had noticed and approved of. She was one of the better ones — seven weeks delivered and already she moved through the Office as though she had been given it rather than assigned to it, which was the right spirit and rarer than the Confessors liked to admit. He had written her name himself. Halia. A good name off the Roll of the Delivered, the name of a soul a hundred years dead and well thought of, handed down to the new the way the lamps were handed down, so that the train was never short of names and the dead were never quite finished being useful.

She stopped at his shoulder to settle a lamp she had set down crooked, and she looked at the ledger the way people look at a thing that is not their business but is open in front of them, and she said, lightly, the way you’d remark on weather:

“You’re three short on the forward stores, not two. There’s a carry-forward you’ve read as a measure.”

And she went on to the shelf with her lamps.

Wick looked at the column.

He looked at it for what was, he realised afterward, an unkind length of time, the way you go on looking at a step you have not fallen down. There was the doubled stroke. He had read it as the circle-with-a-tail because they were not unalike in a tired hand and because the figure had come out neater his way, and a neat figure is a quiet temptation to a man reconciling oil at the third hour. But it was the doubled stroke. Carried forward. And carried forward it ran three short, not two, exactly as she had said, in a script that had not been taught aboard the Pilgrim in thirty years.

He sat very still.

He was aware of several explanations arriving at once, the way a flustered clerk is glad of a queue. She had heard him read the old hand aloud — he sometimes muttered the marks as he went, an old habit. She had a quick eye for figures, some people did, the Mercy left odd talents lying about in the scoured-clean, everyone knew that, the Confessors had a whole gentle teaching on it. She had simply guessed, and been lucky, and three was a likelier guess than four. Any of these would do. Several of them together would do very well. He reached for them gratefully and laid them over the thing like a cloth over a cage, and the figure underneath went quiet, and he corrected the column — carried forward, three short, to be made good — and he did not look up at her, and he told himself there was nothing to look up at.

The trouble was the looping marks.

You could mistake the doubled stroke for the measure, yes. But to correct it you had to know which was which, and to know which was which you had to be able to read a hand that took a man like Wick the better part of a year to learn at the elbow of a patient teacher, in a script no Confessor used and no Delivered was given, because the early volumes of anything were not the Delivered’s concern, because a soul came to the Pilgrim with nothing behind it and was filled only forward, only with what it was given, only from the day of its Rite. There was no before in a delivered soul. That was not a rule of the Office. That was the Mercy itself, the whole of it, the gift the train knelt to. A soul that could read the old hand had read it somewhere, and there was nowhere, for a soul seven weeks delivered, that somewhere was allowed to be.

Wick became aware that he was doing the thing he did not let himself do, which was to stand at the edge of a question and feel the cold come up off it.

He did not look into the question. He had a great deal of practice at not looking into questions; it was, if he was honest, the largest single component of his faith, larger than the prayers and far larger than the fasts — the daily, hourly, well-worn discipline of arriving at the lip of a why and turning, gently, the way you turn from a stranger’s curtain you have no business behind. Why did the Mercy empty some and not others. Why did it leave the singing and take the song. Why did a man come back with his lamp let down at thirty and another burn on to ninety, and which of those was the kindness. You did not ask. Not because anyone forbade it — Wick had never in his life been forbidden a thing by the Pilgrim, which was part of what made the Pilgrim so difficult to disobey — but because the asking was itself the wound. To ask why the gift was given was to suggest the gift might have been withheld, and a man who stood about suggesting that the Mercy might have done otherwise was a man making himself sad to no purpose and unsettling the people around him, and the Confessors were right, they were so plainly right, that this was not piety but a kind of picking at a scab, and the scab was the most beautiful thing the train possessed.

So Wick turned from the question the way he had turned from ten thousand questions, and he felt the turning as devotion, because it was, and the cold went back down where it lived.

But he did not write anything in the Roll.

That was the thing he noticed about himself, sitting at the desk with the oil reconciled and Halia settling the dead lamps behind him in their rows. There was a place a thing like this could be written. Not in the Roll proper — the Roll was for names and lines — but the Office kept a quieter book, the one the Stewardry never asked to see, in which a clerk noted what he had observed of the Delivered in his care, so that the Confessors might have it if ever they wished. A soul slow to settle. A soul troubled in the night. A soul that wept too long at the smell of cut hay. And, somewhere down the list of things a clerk might gently note, a soul that knew a thing it could not know — which was not a sin, the book did not deal in sins, but which was a sign, and signs on the Pilgrim did not stay in quiet books. A sign went up. It went to the Confessor, who would weigh it; and if it weighed heavy it went on to the Acclamant, who would weigh it the other way; and between the two of them a thing that had been a slip of the eye over a column of oil would become a question, the kind with a bell on it and a carriage watching, and the soul at the centre of it — the woman who had paused at his shoulder and done him the small courtesy of his own arithmetic — would no longer be Halia who carried the dead lamps tenderly. She would be the question. And Wick had drawn enough lines to know that a person and a question could not occupy the same name for long, and that when one of them had to go, on the Pilgrim, it was never the question.

He had the pen in his hand. He had the quiet book a drawer away.

He reconciled the oil, and blotted it, and put the pen down, and did not open the drawer, and told himself, with the part of him that was very good at telling himself things, that he wanted to be sure — that a clerk did not raise a sign on a guess and a slip, that it would be unkind to her and unworthy of the book, that he would watch, and weigh, and that if it was nothing, as it surely was, he would have spared a good soul a great deal of trouble, and if it was something, then he would have the duty of it then and not a moment before he was certain.

It was all quite true, and it was the first lie of its kind he had told in nine years, and he knew the difference, the way he knew the doubled stroke from the measure now that someone had shown him, and he sat with it in the warm brass-smelling dark and was, for no reason he would let himself name, afraid.