Irina Castellan Is Checked Every Morning. My Own Rule Never Has Been.

Corvus’s response to my finding of the twentieth has sat on this desk for three days. I have read it twice more since, which I do not generally do with another man’s judgment of my own.

He is correct, and correct in the particular way I find hardest to set aside. Irina Castellan pays her stall fee against a tariff posted at the Weighing Hall’s own board, where any clerk, any passerby, any morning she forgets her permit, may read it and find her honest or not. My own instrument — discretion, I called it last week, as though naming it settled something — has been run for twenty-two years and tested by no one, myself included, until a colleague asked whether running a thing and checking it were the same practice. They are not. I had conflated them without noticing, which is precisely the kind of error I spend my days locating in other men’s ledgers, and had not thought to locate in my own bench.

I set two further matters beside her letter this week, neither hers, both instructive. High Hills Chateau has purchased, lawfully, for eleven marks four, a silence of a different order than mine — a right, not an absence, immune to the challenge that unsettles every claim resting merely on nobody’s complaint. A woman on Mulov Street mended her own window the same week with four sliver and a knife, a fix as unregistered as the Chateau’s and as permanently unprotected as the Chateau’s is permanently secured. Between those two stands my own rule: cheaper than the bond, costlier than the knife, and — this is the part I had not priced until this week — good for exactly as long as nobody troubles to ask what it is built on.

I do not know yet what this office owes Castellan. A posted standard, perhaps, where my judgment has stood in unasked for twenty-two years. I have not written it. I notice I am reluctant to, and I have not yet decided whether the reluctance is prudence or only the discomfort of a man asked, for the first time in a long tenure, to show his work.