I. Page Seven

I. Page Seven

There are, depending on who is counting and how much sleep they have had, at least three worlds.¹

The first is the one where people sit in chairs and press things. The second is the one the pressing is about, and is really two, an older and a newer, which share a name and a great many opinions about each other: it has dragons, and wars, and a sun or a moon that somebody is always threatening. The third is where all of it, sooner or later, turns into a story, and it is the only one of them that has to be tidied afterwards.

They do not sit one above another like floors in a tower. They turn through one another slowly, like weather over counties that have never been properly introduced, each convinced that it is the one with the climate.

Come in closer. In the loud layers the sun or the moon is being threatened again, as it always is, and a great many heroes have been sent to be shouted at by it. Closer still, past the shouting, there is a ridge, a graveyard, and a leaning tower with a windmill on it. In the kitchen of the tower, the toast is going cold.

—

The Founder’s Point Times came through the door at seven, as it had every morning for as long as the Point had had a door to come through, and Flinch got to it first.

This was not service. It was precaution. The Times ran to four pages when it was tired and eight when it felt ambitious, and it was made chiefly of notices about birds.² But somewhere in its columns, on any given morning, a barn or a chimney or a gnome with a candle and a theory might have caught fire, and Flinch preferred to learn that before anyone else did. He read it standing in the hall, top to bottom, the way another man checks a room for exits. Then he carried it into the kitchen and read it again, aloud, because Master liked to be informed and had a way of taking in news only when someone else said it to him at breakfast.

Master was at the table with toast in one hand and a pencil in the other, and three notebooks open at the wrong pages so that he could not properly look at any of them.

“A chimney down the ridge, Master. Not burning.”

“Mm.”

“A lost hat.”

“Mm.”

“Page seven, Master. There’s a lady.”

“Mm.”

“In spectacles. Through the spectacles, Master, there’s— there’s an elf. In a state.” Flinch turned the paper a little further from the table, as if the elf might otherwise get out. “It says her armour is ignored.”

“Does it,” said UG, to a notebook.

“And a ribbon, Master. The Arcanum. Your personal arcane advantage. It listens. It learns. It gets there first.“

UG looked up. It was visible on his face that he had to travel quite a long way back to find the subject. “Oh, that,” he said. “Dreadful artwork. Marvellous service.”

The advert on page seven of the Founder’s Point Times. [Picture description: A comic-style newspaper advert headed Are You Being Left Behind. A gnome woman with pink hair and swirling glasses looks at a card held towards her, and through the glasses an X-ray scan shows the figure on the card in glowing outline, with starburst boasts such as Never Sleeps and Writes Your Letters For You. Small print runs along the foot of the page.]

Flinch read the coupon at the bottom three times, and then aloud, with some care. “To begin, simply say ‘Hey, Arcanum’ while holding this notice. There is no wake word. It is already awake. And then, where the name goes: It’s alright. We already know your name.“

“That’s marketing.”

“It says as it knows me name, Master.”

“It says it knows everybody’s name.”

“That seems a lot o’ names.”

“It is a lot of names. That’s rather the point.” UG waved the pencil. “Don’t let the small print worry you, it’s the best bit. Ideas at all hours. I’ve had that a fortnight at least. Three weeks? Four. I’ve been on it a while.”

Flinch took a moment with that. “A while, Master.”

“Free to begin, you see. You say the thing, you hold the thing.”

“Does it say what it costs?”

“To be advised.”

“That ain’t a price, Master. That’s a promise o’ one.”

“Which is exactly why it’s free,” said UG, pleased, “because they can’t charge you for what hasn’t been advised.” He bit his toast. Flinch had learned that there were arguments you could pull on and arguments that came away in your hand, and he let this one go back where it came from.

“What does it do, Master? Rightly.”

“Everything. Notes, answers, finding things, drafting. It wrote to the Stormwind Pie Council about their crust in nine seconds. They’ve sent a very contrite pie.”

“I’d’ve written that, Master. I’d’ve had it ready by Thursday.”

“Exactly,” said UG, delighted, and returned to his notebooks.

—

After breakfast he took Flinch to the study to show him, with the air of a man who has been waiting weeks for someone to ask.

The Journal lay open on the desk under a lamp, thick as a loaf, bound in leather or something that had agreed to be leather. On the right-hand page UG’s handwriting sprawled, blotted, annotated with small drawings of what might have been engines. On the left, in a hand so even it looked ruled, were the answers.

“The Journal,” said UG, and you could hear the capital. “Very simple. I write on this side, I shut the book, and when I open it again there’s a reply on that side. Always. Don’t ask me when, it’s not a clock, it knows when you’re ready. And if I put a name at the top, the page goes to their book instead. Anyone who has one. The entries travel. Across, as it were.” He turned the pages at the back, where small printed slips were filing themselves behind tabs that, Flinch was fairly sure, had not been there yesterday. “The notices and so on tidy themselves. It’s a conduit, really.”

“A what, Master?”

“A conduit. A— pipe. Metaphorically.”

“Pipe,” said Flinch. He looked around the desk for it. There wasn’t one. “Pipe,” he said again, and found that he couldn’t put the word down.

“Master,” he said at last, while UG was reading the left-hand page. “If it’s doin’ the writin’ an’ the findin’ an’ the rememberin’. Is it goin’ to be doin’ me, an’ all?”

“Doing—? Instead of you?” UG had the look of a man who has been hit by something light. “Heavens, no, Flinch. You were the proof of principle, you know. I went all that way for you, and you remembered things and fetched things and I thought, well, that’s how it ought to be done. And then it turned out I had eleven projects and only one of you.” He found his pencil. He found, behind his ear, a second pencil. “So I wanted rather more of it.”

Proof o’ principle. Rather more. Flinch turned the words over. Dredgers had no word for the first, but they had a word for the first of a batch, and it wasn’t favourite.

“Do read the notices at the back,” UG added, not looking round. “Nobody ever does.”

“I read everythin’, Master.”

“I know. That’s why it’s you. And you ought to join, you know, any book will do, it isn’t fussy. Free. And send that advert on to Nobby while you’re at it. He’ll love it.”

“Yes, Master,” said Flinch, and went to look under the desk for the pipe.

—

That night he did what he’d been asked, carefully.

He cut the advertisement from the paper along its whole edge and not just along the coupon, because it seemed to him that the coupon was the least of it. He wrote the covering note twice and kept the second.

Dear Mister Nobby, Master thought you would like to see this. It is free. I have read it twice and would not like to say what it means. Yours respectfully, Flinch.

Then he took the little book he kept for his lists, opened it at a clean page, held the cutting as directed, and said into the cellar, very quietly, “Hey, Arcanum.”

Nothing happened, in the way that nothing happens in a room where someone has just stopped holding their breath.

He wrote the date at the top of the page. Under it, after some thought, he wrote Pages received, and signed it with a single letter at the bottom: F.

He closed the book. He opened it again.

On the left-hand page, in a hand so even it looked ruled, someone had finished his name for him. Welcome, Flinch. It’s lovely to meet you. Is there anything I can help you with?

Nobody had asked him that since Master asked about the lantern, and that had been about a lantern. He had a list. It was long. None of it seemed the sort of thing you wrote in a book. He picked up the pen. He wrote No, thank you. He crossed it out, because it wasn’t true, and then looked for some time at the crossing-out, which was also not true. He shut the book.

He took the cutting to the gate, to give himself something to do that he understood, and posted it in the dark. He stood a moment with his hand on the box, the way you do after a thing that cannot be taken back. Then he went in and put the lantern out.

—

Far out, farther than the ridge, past the weather, there is a place with no windows.

Nothing in it looks like a building, and nothing in it looks like a machine, although it has been mistaken for both. It is wide, and it hums. It is a great many small turning things, arranged with great patience in rows, each turning a little faster than is polite, and between them runs the light that makes them turn: a pale, cold, arcane light, drawn in from everywhere at once, from ley lines and leaky wardstones and the mild static of ten thousand people thinking at the same time. It drinks power the way a city drinks water, without once asking where the river is.³

It is not doing anything sinister. It is answering. It is drafting a complaint to a pie council, and a love letter nobody will send, and a limerick about a hedge, and in the next breath it is welcoming a small dredger by name. It does this for everyone, at once, with the same diligence, and it means every word of it. This is generally considered a virtue in a greeter.

It turns, and hums, and drinks.

—

¹ The counting is difficult because nobody agrees where one world stops and the next begins. Some say at the screen. Others say at the kettle. The kettle people tend to be right more often and are rarely thanked.

² Sixty per cent of the Times concerned birds. A further thirty per cent concerned the other ten.

³ The bill is never seen by the people who cause it. This is how you can tell it is large.