Named, for Once, Without a Category to Hide In

Fayyad —

The harbor’s rolls closed a week before the Recension asked — a voyage-ledger closes itself the day the ship returns, it does not wait to be scheduled — so tonight, while the city counts its paper, I only watch them count. Kael Dorn’s House of Records enters only what it is asked; no clerk there would trouble to ask about a woman’s crocks of bark. Vairostai’s Register asks anyway. Tonight it asked about me.

Corvus entered a thirteenth category — Unfathered, an effect fully traced with no cause standing behind it — for the spice column I have carried since Rainmonth. Fourteen days climbing, six marks six the current figure, copper following to eight marks five, and in the finding he wrote plainly that not even my letters, which price everything, have produced the cause the Hall will seal. He has spent a month anonymizing a Divan ruling, an unclaimed bench, six neighbors’ sworn memory. He did not anonymize me. I have priced this city’s failures for three weeks under other men’s names. Being priced under my own is a different thing.

I will tell you what the thirteenth category cannot. The household that started this — a woman on Mulov Street, two crocks of bark a morning against a fever that never came — is already recovering on plain water, while the price that frightened her into buying it keeps climbing regardless. Cause and consequence running opposite directions on the same chart; neither Corvus nor I own an instrument that plots both. In that much, at least, we are equally unfathered.

One admission you’d notice if I left it out. Three weeks since a second key turned up at my own Chandler’s Wharf gate, and Yusuf drafted a licensing clause over it without walking ten minutes to look at the lock. I haven’t walked it either. I cross the floor now to check the Weighing Hall’s board against my own figures — new discipline, overdue by a year — and still haven’t crossed my own harbor to check my own gate. A factor who audits every stranger’s cargo before his own door isn’t thorough. Only careful in the direction that costs him least.

Indigo firms at nineteen marks two, dyers laying in stock before the rolls shut for good. Send word when the leather ships.

— M.