The Grandmaster's Gambit

35. Unverified

[Day-39 (10:25)]

(Registry branch office, south of Market Row, Sector 9, Alexandria)

*Six doors.* Kai watched the brass lamp, because it wasn't Voss. *A Collector walks down a street, stops at six doors, looks at them, and takes nobody. Do I believe that? I've seen one Collector. It took a man off a road I was standing on and looked straight through me like a window. Six doors and nobody was collected? I have no idea. No idea at all.*

"I don't know," said Kai.

The rune did not change. For a second he thought that was it, that it had gone through.

"That is the answer of a man who has lost a memory," said Voss. He put his pen down. "I did not ask what you remember. Belief is not kept in the same place. A man who has forgotten a road still knows whether he thinks it's there."

*Oh, that's good. That's really good.* It was a hot little flash of admiration, and he had no room for it. *He's shut it. "I don't know" was the door, and he's shut it.*

The rune came up bright under the skin, a small coin of pale gold, and stayed there. Voss waited with it. In the shaft outside a pipe knocked twice and quit. Kai's rib started up under the strapping, one dull line down the left side.

*Yes. If I say yes it's a lie, I've no reason to think so, and it'll weigh like one. No. Then I'm calling a dead man a liar, to the one man who might know, and he'll ask me why. And why is a hole. Damn it - all of this is ridiculous.*

For one stupid second he thought of asking The Arbiter. His own rule said never, unless he was dying. He wasn't dying. It only felt close, in that chair, with that lamp.

*Think. What do I believe? Never mind the doors. He isn't asking about the doors. He's asking about me. What do I actually...*

*He walked in here. He sat in this chair and said that to a man with a rune on his wrist. You don't do that for a story. You don't do it if it's half true, because you know what the rune does. You'd only do it if you believed it right down to your boots.*

"I believe I believed what I saw when I gave that account," said Kai.

The rune stayed bright for a long breath. Then the glow came up a shade and settled, level and even.

"Is that so - ," said Voss.

"I think of myself back then as a different person. I don't remember much about my life from then. The man in your file." Kai kept his voice flat. "I don't remember him, so I can't say for certain."

*Every word of that's true.*

"That is a careful answer."

"It's the one I've got."

Voss's thumb found the rune and rested on it, on the cool quiet gold. *The rune says he believes what he is saying. It does not say what he is leaving out. For years I have weighed grief, and every one had a body at the end of it, or a name on a wall. This one has neither. There's a clear disconnect between who he claims to be now and who he was back then. Maybe this memory loss is true.* He picked up the pen and turned it over once, and in the end he wrote nothing at all.

"That will do," he said.

He slid the old statement into the grey folder, squared the edges and tied the tape in a flat bow. The rune had begun to sink back into his wrist, the glow going down slowly, like a coal under ash.

"I weighed you, you know. That day." Voss kept his eyes on the folder. "If you want a figure, it was the heaviest statement I took that year. You sat where you are sitting and did not look away for the whole of it. You weren't asking me to like you. You wanted it written down. There was no Default on the Almonry's book for that night, and no patron named. I asked you three times. Nobody else saw it. The form has a line for 'unverified'. It hasn't one for 'I think he's right'."

"I keep a file on people who weigh strangely," Voss said. "It isn't a threat, Mr. Cross. It's a habit."

"Will you want me again?"

"I don't set days. I send when I have a use." He looked up. "If the words come back to you, I would like to hear them. In whatever order they come."

"If they do - you will be the first to know." said Kai. That was true however you weighed it.

He bowed the old man's bow, and Voss gave back the finger's width. At the door Kai looked round once. Voss had rolled his left sleeve down over the rune and was doing up the cuff. He had not done that in the yard, with the whole lane watching.

The hall had gone on without him. The board said forty, and the woman with the baby had been taken through. Kai got as far as the end of the nearest bench and sat down on it, because his knees had voted.

Then something came up his chest, past the rib, and he laughed. It was short and dry and it hurt. The old man on the next bench looked round.

"Sorry bout that" said Kai. "It's my rib - I'm injured."

*The location of that Collector sighting was Brewers' Cut from earlier. Low, on the left side of the map. I'm gonna have to have a proper look at that.*

His stomach complained. He had not eaten since the barley at dawn, and he was suddenly, enormously hungry. There would be a stall on Market Row selling something hot in a twist of paper. He would think about the rest of it after that.