Chapter Eight — Running Is a Decision

She came in at the turn-past-dusk-bell.

She put her coat on the hook. She put her case on the bench. She sat down at the table across from him without speaking. The tea he had made was fresh this time. She drank from it. He waited for her to say something about her day or to ask about his. She did neither.

“Tell me what you thought about today,” he said.

“I thought about what would happen if we left.”

“And?”

“We should not leave.”

——— ◇ ———

“I have been planning it since this morning,” he said.

“I know.”

“There is a route. There is a foster-house on the outer chains that would take you under a different name. I have funds that cannot be traced through the Compact registers. You would be a scribe’s apprentice in a smaller port, under the same apprenticeship papers with a different family mark on them. You would be safe.”

“For how long?”

“For the rest of my life. Possibly longer, if I can buy you the time cleanly.”

“And what you are buying with.”

“My remaining years.”

“All of them.”

“Enough of them.”

“How enough?”

“The trip alone would cost me eight to ten days on the water. The arranging on the other end, a week. The trip back, ten days. That is a month of wearing faces under surveillance conditions. Perhaps more.”

“A month of wearing is how much?”

“Two years. Possibly three.”

She considered that.

“So you would spend two to three years of your life to take me somewhere I would spend the rest of mine hiding from the Tannaths.”

“Yes.”

“And the Tannaths would still be the Tannaths.”

“Yes.”

“And when I was sixty and old and they were finally dead, I would still be a scribe at a smaller port under a different name. I would not come back. There would be no coming back.”

“There would not.”

“Because the only document record that matters is the one I build in a place across twenty years of continuous residence.”

“Yes.”

She set her cup down.

“No,” she said.

“Irela.”

“No.”

“You have not thought through what it means to be hunted.”

“I have thought through what it means to run.”

“Those are the same thing.”

“They are not the same thing. The person who runs has decided that the life they were building was not worth finishing. The person who is hunted has decided that it was. I am not going to decide that the life I was building was not worth finishing. I am twenty years old and I have been a scribe for eight years and I have an examination in Arhen and my master has said I should consider Compact court eventually. I am not going to abandon any of that because a man I have never met wants me to stop existing.”

“The man does not want you to stop existing. He wants you to be silent or dead. He would prefer silent. The silence would come with money.”

“I am not going to be paid to stop being a Rellyn.”

“You were never a Rellyn until last night.”

“I was always a Rellyn. I did not know it. Now I do.”

He looked at her for a long breath.

“You do not understand what the work of surviving the next ten days will ask of me.”

“Then tell me.”

“I cannot.”

“Then I am deciding without full information, and I am deciding anyway, because the information you will not give me is not information I need to decide whether to run.”

He stood up from the table. He had not planned to. His knee gave him its complaint and he ignored it.

“I am going to walk,” he said.

“All right.”

“I will be back.”

“I know you will.”

——— ◇ ———

He walked the lower tier for fifty-two minutes. He counted the minutes. He counted because the counting kept him from arguing with her in his head, which was what he would have done otherwise and which would not have led to anything he did not already know.

What he already knew was this. She was right.

She was right the way a scribe with her particular precision was right — the way a person who had grown up watching small errors compound into large errors had learned to be right. If she spent the next forty years in a small port under a false name, she would spend them waiting for the Tannaths to find her. And she would spend them angry at him for taking the decision from her at the moment it could still have been hers.

He had not seen that clearly until she had said it.

He had prepared for fear. He had prepared for panic. He had not prepared for the version of Irela that could look at her life and weigh the cost of keeping it against the cost of giving it up, and declare a preference that had nothing to do with fear. He had been wrong about her. He had been wrong about her for perhaps two years, which was the period during which she had been becoming the woman she had become while he was still seeing her as the woman she had been.

He walked until the cold stone wall of the upper tier was at his back without his having to look, which was the part of the lower road where he had always turned around. He turned around.

He walked home at the pace his knee wanted and did not argue with it.

——— ◇ ———

She was still at the table when he came in. She had made more tea.

“You are right,” he said.

She did not answer at once. She poured him a cup.

“We do not run,” he said. “We do this in Karath. We do it my way. I need you to trust me for the next ten days in particular ways that I may not be able to explain as we go.”

“All right.”

“There are things I am going to have to do that you will not like. There may be things I am going to have to do that you will ask me about afterward and that I will answer then.”

“All right.”

“I am asking you to trust me on the things I do not explain as I do them.”

“I trust you.”

“I am also asking you to know — in advance — that when the whole of it is in front of you, you may find that there are things about me you did not know. Things I have not told you. Things I may not have told you tomorrow either.”

She looked at him.

“You are asking me to forgive something you have not yet told me about.”

“I am asking you to know that I may need it.”

“I cannot promise forgiveness for a thing I have not heard.”

“I am not asking for promise. I am asking for —” He stopped. He did not have the word. “I am asking you to know the asking is coming. So that when it comes, it is not also a surprise.”

She was silent for a long moment.

“I know the asking is coming,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“You are welcome, which is not the same as forgiveness.”

“I understand.”

She drank from her cup. He drank from his.

“I am going to the master’s tomorrow,” she said. “I will put in five hours and leave at the turn-bell. Whatever you are doing, I will meet you back here before the dusk-bell. If I am to be part of this for the next ten days, I need you to tell me what the shape of each day is before it begins. I will not ask why. I will ask what and where and when.”

“Agreed.”

“Tonight I am going to bed.”

“Good.”

“You should also.”

“Not yet.”

She looked at him. She nodded once. She went to her room.

——— ◇ ———

He took a lamp into the closet.

The bag had been open since the morning, when he had opened it and looked at it for a quarter-hour and closed it again because he had not yet decided what shape tomorrow’s work would take. Tonight he knew the shape. He knelt beside the bag in the lamp-light and pulled out what he would need for the first day.

He had three faces prepared for the work ahead of him. He would need one by morning.

He chose the factor of a Compact archive clerk. A man named Bellen who had worked the Third Registry for eighteen years and who had retired to a small house near the harbour two seasons ago. The face was familiar to the clerks currently staffing the Third Registry. The face would not be questioned when it walked in.

Bellen had been alive eleven months ago. He had known Veros once, in a different context, and he had been unmemorable enough to Veros that Veros had stored him and forgotten him.

Veros set the clerk’s small things out on the floor of the closet. A pair of spectacles Bellen had worn. A folded cravat in Third-Registry black. A pen case with Bellen’s initials embossed. An old seal that would not pass a current check but would pass the lobby.

He sat back on his heels.

Tomorrow he would wear Bellen for four hours. Four hours of wearing was perhaps two days off the budget, by his old calibration — and his old calibration was wrong, and he no longer had a way to know how wrong. He would find out by spending. There was no other way to learn.

He put the lamp out.

——— ◇ ———

END OF CHAPTER EIGHT.