Miren Ost understood that he had been killed when he saw his own signature on a death certificate.
The signature was neat. The hand had not shaken, the pen had nowhere pressed harder, and at the end of the surname there remained that small hook he had hated since he was fourteen. But the date frightened him more than the signature: the document had been made out for tomorrow.
There were four hours left until tomorrow.
It was cold in the Bureau of the Last Entry in Lambern even in summer. In winter hands froze in the corridors, ink thickened, and the clerks wrote more slowly still. Lamps of blue gas burned on the walls. Under the ceiling ran the copper tubes of the dead post, which brought requests, inventories, complaints and sometimes last words down to the morgue.
Miren was given night shifts because they paid less for them. He was a junior archive clerk and the son of an executed forger, he walked carefully, and he irritated his superiors with his retentive memory. It was enough for him to see a seal once to remember the crack in its left rim a year later. On hearing a surname he could name the debt, the marriage, the registration, the dispute over an inheritance and the date of the first complaint.
Men like that were kept in the Bureau as long as they were useful, and not promoted as long as they were inconvenient.
That night he was copying out the register of the drowned from the North Canal when there were three knocks at the window for urgent applications. Wrong. For the police it was two knocks and a pause. For doctors, one long one. For the mourning houses, five light ones, as though they were embarrassed by death, though death was exactly what they earned from.
Three knocks meant that behind the door there was either a fool or somebody from the Lower Arches.
Miren raised his lamp. Behind the glass stood a girl of about twelve, soaked to the skin, her hair under a newsboy's cap, with eyes that already knew how to count the ways out of a room. She was holding a leather folder under her arm, tied with twine.
"The Bureau is closed to the living," Miren said.
"I'm not living," the girl answered. "I'm nowhere."
He should have called the watchman, but instead he drew back the side bolt. The girl had said she did not exist far too calmly.
The girl gave her name as Tilya Braks. She said it hurriedly and unwillingly. Tilya laid the folder on the table but did not take her palm off it.
"A death needs entering, backdated," Tilya said.
"That costs more than everything you have managed to steal."
"I didn't steal it. It was given to me."
"People who give children forged death certificates usually don't want the child to live until morning."
Tilya smirked, and the smile disappeared at once.
Inside the folder lay a certificate. The paper was genuine. The watermark of the Ministry of the Census was genuine. The seal of the Bureau of the Last Entry was genuine. The name of the deceased had been scraped away so finely that an ordinary clerk would have taken it for a flaw in the fibre. Miren was not an ordinary clerk.
Under the scraping there remained an empty line.
He ran a finger above the paper without touching it. Ink did not care for the warmth of living skin, if it had not been written for the living. The watermark stirred, like an eye under a lid.
"Who gave you this?"
Tilya hunched and looked away. Street children always tried to become less noticeable when adults asked a dangerous question.
"I was told to take it to Brunn Kal. If Brunn wouldn't have it, then to the clerk Ost."
Brunn Kal had looked after the city morgue for twenty-seven years and called all living people temporary errors. If somebody had sent the girl to him first, then the body was already lying downstairs.
Miren put out two of the three lamps, closed the ledger and took the key to the morgue stairs.
"You walk behind me. Touch nothing."
"And if I already have?"
He looked at her sleeve. Brass gleamed under the cuff. While Miren had been reading the document, his spare seal had gone from the table.
"Then try not to die before I decide what to do with you."
The Lambern morgue occupied the floor beneath the Bureau. Lower still were the ice-houses, the old gas shafts and the tubes of the dead post, which nobody had cleaned for a long time. The walls here were covered with white tiles threaded with fine blue cracks. Brunn said that what stayed in those cracks was the truth that had found no room either in the ministry reports or in the burial records.
Brunn himself was waiting at table number seventeen. Enormous, bald, in a leather apron, with a butcher's hands and a permanent irritation in his eyes.
"Too late," Brunn said.
"For whom?"
"For you, Ost."
On the table lay the body of a tall, thin man with no visible wounds. The face was not damaged: it was as though it had been wiped away. Where the nose, the mouth and the cheekbones should have been, there was smooth skin.
Behind Miren, Tilya let out a sharp breath. She was not frightened. She had recognised the dead man.
"Who is he?"
Brunn pointed at the card by the head of the table.
"That is what you are here for."
Miren picked the card up with tongs. You do not touch a document until you know who wrote it. That was his father's first rule. The second was simpler: don't trust paper that wants too badly to be read.
In the field for "the deceased" there was an empty line. In the field for "witness" there was Miren's signature. In the field for "officiating official" there was his signature as well.
And in the field for "date" was written: tomorrow, the third of the month of snow taxes, the second stroke after midnight.
Brunn watched him with an unpleasant sympathy.
"I never took that card in," Miren said.
"I know."
"The seal isn't mine."
"It is."
"The date is impossible."
"In Lambern the impossible costs less, once it has been through a ministry."
The tube of the dead post above their heads clicked. A cylinder dropped out of the brass mouth, rolled across the tiles and stopped at Tilya's foot. The girl picked it up before Miren could forbid her.
Inside was a narrow strip of paper. On it stood a single sentence, set in printer's type:
"The witness has arrived. Begin the write-off."
At that same moment the dead man on the table opened his eyes.
There were no eyes. Under the lids lay the same smooth skin. But the head turned towards the sound of Miren's breathing, and the mouth that did not exist spoke straight out of the throat:
"You are late, Miren Ost. You have already been written off."
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