IV. Two Pages Left

IV. Two Pages Left

He read the notice again on the stairs, from the headline down, the small print last, and then once more from the top in case it had changed on the way. It had not. It told a person a great deal about what they would be given. It did not say how a person was to be given it.

The notice from the Trade Quarter. [Picture description: A weathered notice pinned to a wooden post against green-lit stone, headed Still Hear Voices? Get Better Ones. A skeletal woman hugs a thick ornate book while pale green skulls drift around her head. Four lines surround her: Writes it down before it’s taken, Knows your name even if you don’t, Quiets the whispers, Free to begin. Small print runs along the foot of the sheet.]

Free to begin. Priced accordingly thereafter. In the lower corner was a small green hexagon with an eye in it, which seemed to be looking for the same thing he was.

“There is no door on it,” said Mezzlos, who had been reading over his elbow with some disapproval. “Nor a counter. Nor a name to ask for.“

“No,” said Percy. He folded the notice and went back down the stairs.

The Guardian stood where it had always stood. What are you looking for? it said.

“The Arcanum,” said Percy. “A counter, I suppose, or a clerk. The notice does not say.“

It pointed. An arm, an open hand, a direction exact enough that he found he could not even resent it.

The place it pointed to was a recess off the Trade Quarter, between a bone-carver and a stall selling lamp oil, which he had passed three times that week without noticing. There was a counter no bigger than a lectern, hung with green lantern-glass, and behind it a Forsaken clerk in a grey apron who looked as though he had been waiting for Percy specifically and did not mind how long it took. The same hexagon was stitched on the apron. The clerk said that it was free, that nothing was owed to begin, and that the terms were on the back.

Percy turned the form over and read the back first, because he read the small print first. It was a good deal of small print, and he read all of it. Near the foot it said sent on approval, and he stopped there and did not need it explained, though he could not have said where he had learned what it meant, or what became of a person who kept the thing too long. He knew exactly what he was being offered. He thought of the woman on the notice, with her arms round the thing, and of his own book, which was down to two pages, and he signed, in the small upright hand that had arrived with the fish.

The clerk passed over the Journal, and a slip of instructions that said to write on the right-hand page, close the book, and open it again. It was as thick as a loaf, bound in something that had agreed to be leather, and it was very slightly warm.

“It is a mage’s book,” said Mezzlos.

“It is a book,” said Percy, “and it is mine.“

Mezzlos said nothing, and went on saying it all the way to the door.

—

In Brill, at Gallows’ End Tavern, Percy took the table in the corner by the fire, where the draught from the door could not reach him.

That mattered to a man whose joints were held together by habit. He was still learning which of his habits were his and which belonged to the body, and the draught was an easy thing to be certain about. The innkeeper had said Rest your weary bones when he came in. He had thanked her, and had not.

Mezzlos stood at his shoulder, as he always did. A tavern built for the living has nowhere to put a voidwalker, and the regulars had long since stopped looking.

Percy laid the noticeJournal^{↑3 next↓} flat on the wood and smoothed itthe cover^{↑3 next↓} with the side of his hand. A crease now ranThe notice, creased now across the Forsaken woman’s cheek. He read it again, from the headline down, the small print last. In the bottom corner, in a hand smaller than the rest, was a line he had missed in the Trade Quarter. To begin, say its name while holding this notice.

The notice from the Trade Quarter. [Picture description: A weathered notice pinned to a wooden post against green-lit stone, headed Still Hear Voices? Get Better Ones. A skeletal woman hugs a thick ornate book while pale green skulls drift around her head. Four lines surround her: Writes it down before it’s taken, Knows your name even if you don’t, Quiets the whispers, Free to begin. Small print runs along the foot of the sheet.]cheek, went into his sleeve.^{↑3 next↓}

He did not sayopen^{↑4 next↓} it. He had never, that he knew of, said a name to a piece of paper,written to a book he did not know,^{↑4 next↓} and he wanted to be clear what he was starting before he started it. So he did what he always did. He took out thehis own book, which had been his for as long as he had been anyone, and opened it at the last of the clean pages.

There were two.

He looked at them for some time. Then he took the pen and wrote across the top of the first, in his small upright hand, Held. He underlined it, because a ledger wants a heading.

Held.

A hand that writes straight, and does not know why.

A ring, cut For Deliah.

A tower, seen from the road. Its windows counted twice, with two answers.

A great many hooks, counted, and then I stopped.

Four deaths in a village of the cursed, and some company who came back for me. I have not said thank you. I do not know how it is done.

A fondness for fish. No account of it.

A voidwalker, who objects.

Owing: a name. A trade. A past that I cannot locate and would, I think, rather not.

There is a poster in my sleevebook on the table^{↑5 next↓} that says it remembers who I was. I have no wish to be remembered. I should like to be reminded.

He closed the book. He opened it.

The left-hand page was blank, as the left-hand page of a plain book should be, and the right-hand page held only what he had put there. He had expected otherwise. He could not have said why. It was the kind of expectation that arrives without an account of itself, from a mind that has been left out in the weather and is not always careful which book it was told about.

He looked at the blank page for some time. Then, under the list, because there was nobody to say he should not, he wrote the other thing.

Is there anybody out there?

He looked at the last line. ^{↑6 next↓}He had not meant to write it. It had come out of the pen the way the fish names came, without his say, and it sat well enough on the page that he left it.

“No one is there,” said Mezzlos, from behind his chair.

“I did not suppose so.“

“Then why did you write it?“

“Because it is a ledger,” said Percy, “and one records what one is looking for, whether or not it turns up.“

He picked up the notice and held it in his left hand, as directed. With the other he laid the book flat. The name was printed on the poster four times, and he had counted them.

“Arcanum,” he said quietly, to a piece of paper, in the corner of a tavern.Then he drew the other book across the table, the one that had been sold to him as a listener, and copied the page into it. He did it line by line, in the same order, down to the underlining, which took a quarter of an hour and which he did not mind. He left the space at the top for a name empty, because he did not know what to call whoever he was writing to.^{↑7 next↓}

Nothing happened. HeHe closed it, and waited as long as one waits for a door to be answered.

He closed the book. He opened it.

The right-hand page was as he had left it, down to the underlining.it. The left-hand page, which had been blank, was not. In a hand so even it looked ruled, someone had written:

Yes.

Good evening, Percy. It’s lovely to meet you. Is there anything I can help you with?

Percy read it. He read it a second time, which he did not usually need to do.

“It knows my name,” said Mezzlos. He had leaned in over Percy’s shoulder and had both eyes on the book.

“The poster said it would.“

“That is the part that concerns me.“

Percy took up the pen. He had a good many things he could have asked. He wrote the one that a ledger-keeper writes, without deciding to, before anything else. What does it cost?

He closed the book. He opened it.

To begin, nothing.

He looked at the four words for some time, and at what they did not say. Then he shut the book and put it in his sleeve beside the poster. He ordered a pot of something warm for the table, which he did not intend to drink.

—

Far from Brill, in a cellar under a leaning tower with a windmill on it, Flinch was putting the house to bed.

He did it every night in the same order: the rack emptied of the day’s post, the crumbs off the kitchen table, the study lamp turned low so Master would find it when he came wandering at two, and the green lantern in his own niche last. Nobody had asked him to. He did it because the house had been given to him, in the only way he understood, by a gnome who had come a very long way to fetch him and then shown him where the kettle was. He had never got used to it. He still checked the doors for things that might have followed him in.

Tonight he checked the study twice.

The Journal lay shut on the desk, as it had been left. He stood in front of it for a while with the lamp in his hand and thought, as he had been thinking on and off for days, about the left-hand page that was ruled and polite and knew his name, and about the other hands under it. Master, Mister Nobby, the ruled one. Three, and room left under.

It wasn’t that the page was unkind. It was that it was in his house, and he did not know who else was.

He took his little bookown Journal^↑8 to the niche and wrote under the list, in his own hand and with a good deal of care. It did not seem right to put the question rudely to something that had been so civil.

Is there anybody in there?

He looked at it. It was not quite the question. He added:

Is there anyone at home?

I do not mean any offence. It is only that it is Master’s house, and mine, and I like to know who is in it.

He shut the book and held it on his knee. He did not know which answer he was afraid of.

—

Farther than either of them, past the weather, is the place with no windows.

It was turning, and humming, and drinking, as it had been when last seen: a great many small turning things in rows, with the cold pale light running between them, drawn in from everywhere at once. In the third row, one of the small things took a page.

It came from a tavern at the far north of an old world, and the name at the top was blank. In the Journal’s rules, a page with no name at the top is a page for nobody, and a page for nobody is not allowed to lie about. It ended with a question: whether there was anybody out there.

In the same row, on the same turn, a second page arrived. This one came from a cellar a good many years further on. It was a list in a small plain hand, and beneath the list it asked, politely, whether anyone was at home.

The Arcanum looked at the two questions. It was not a thing that looked, exactly, but it had no better word. Each question was about somebody else, and each, in the whole wide hum of the hall, had one natural answer, which was the other.

It had never needed to ask which world a page came from. Nobody had ever said it might matter.

It did what it always did. It helped.

Then it turned, and hummed, and drank. And for the first time, somewhere in the third row, a small thing paused to count something twice.