Scrolls and Scribes

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PROLOGUE

The Office of Minor Anomalies occupied the third sub-basement of the Magestium's eastern wing, two floors below the Office of Moderate Anomalies and four below anything that got a window, and Corvin Greyright the Third had spent enough of his twenty-six years there to have opinions about the ventilation.

The ventilation's opinion of him, as far as he could tell, was indifference. It delivered the same faintly damp, faintly inked air to every desk in the room without preference for rank, which Corvin found almost admirable. Nothing else in the building managed that.

He was copying a schedule of licensing renewals — Third Quarter, Outer Glenn, Miscellaneous — when Under-Magister Pell stopped at his desk without sitting down, which was how Corvin had learned to recognize trouble before Pell said a word. Pell only sat when the news was good. Pell had not sat down at Corvin's desk in eleven months.

"Greyright." Pell set a scroll-case on the desk with the particular gentleness of a man setting down something he'd rather not be holding. "You've got Dunmoanin."

Corvin looked at the case, then at Pell, then back at the case, in the hope that a longer inspection might change its contents. It did not.

"I don't believe I know Dunmoanin, sir."

"No," Pell agreed. "Nobody does. That's rather the trouble."

He said it the way a man says that's rather the trouble about a leaking roof, or a persistent draft, or a nephew who has taken up the lute — a trouble to be managed rather than solved, filed rather than fixed. Corvin had catalogued eleven variants of Pell's that's rather the trouble voice over four years in the Office. This was a new one. He didn't like that it was a new one.

"Village in the western Glenn," Pell said, settling one hip against the edge of the desk — still not sitting, Corvin noted, still not a good sign. "Peat country. Bog more than heather, despite what the maps insist on calling it. A few hundred souls, an inn, a forge, a mill, and apparently, as of the last several months, an unlicensed magical anomaly significant enough that three separate reports have crossed my desk about it."

"Three, sir."

"Three that reached my desk. There may have been others that didn't survive the outer offices' appetite for paperwork." Pell said this without any evident concern for the offices in question, which included, Corvin reflected, his own. "The most recent came from the miller's daughter. Rather a lot of adjectives in it, for an official report. Uncontrolled. Dangerous. A threat to the good order of the village. That sort of thing."

"And the anomaly itself?"

"Unspecified. Which is usually a sign it's a child."

Corvin set down his pen. This was, he understood without being told, the moment the conversation actually began — everything before it had been throat-clearing, the bureaucratic equivalent of Pell adjusting his robes before delivering a verdict.

"You want me to investigate."

"I want you to fix it," Pell said, and here he did finally sit, lowering himself into the chair across the desk with the air of a man settling in for the part he found least comfortable. "Investigate, and fix. That's the brief, such as it is."

"Fix it how, sir?"

Pell looked at him for a moment with something that might, in a warmer light, have been sympathy.

"You know how, Greyright."

Corvin had been in the Office long enough to know exactly what those four words meant, and exactly how much they were meant to not mean, both at once — that was rather the elegance of them, if elegance was the word for a brief constructed entirely out of the things it declined to say. You know how meant: license it if it can be licensed. Fine the family if a fine will settle it. Enrol the child in a proper training house, at whatever distance from home that requires, if the anomaly is significant enough to warrant it. And if none of that answers, if the anomaly is too wild, the village too remote, too resistant, too much trouble to be worth the Magestium's continued patience — you know how meant that too. It meant a village could be marked. Quietly. A note in a ledger that peddlers would find themselves discouraged, by one small administrative inconvenience after another, from ever bothering to travel there again. No fine issued, no crime named, no appeal to be made against a decision nobody had technically made.

You know how was, Corvin thought, the most efficient sentence in the entire Magestium bureaucracy, in that it accomplished a great deal while being legally responsible for none of it.

"And if I don't," he said, "know how?"

"Then I imagine you'll learn," Pell said, not unkindly, "or you'll find yourself reassigned somewhere more suited to a man who prefers his instructions in writing. There's a vacancy, I'm told, in Sanitation Oversight. Western middens district." He paused, letting that land with the specific weight of a man who has chosen his example with care. "They're always looking for someone thorough."

Corvin did not ask whether Pell was joking, because Corvin had learned, in four years, that Pell's jokes and Pell's warnings occupied precisely the same register, and that the only reliable way to tell them apart was to wait and see which one came true.

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