The lamp police arrived on the seventh stroke of the city bell, far sooner than usual.
Usually they took their time: first came a junior investigator, then a doctor, followed by a man with a folder who asked everyone not to interfere with procedure. But that night the upper staircase was flooded at once with the white light of portable lanterns. The gas in police lamps burned without soot or heat, but lit every corner so that no evidence remained in shadow.
Rona Veyr led the way.
Miren knew her from the case files. An inspector of the lamp police, twenty-nine years old, twice reprimanded for acting on her own initiative, with three closed cases that her superiors would have preferred to leave open. She read reports from the bottom up, because lies were more often hidden in the final lines. Rona looked neither tall nor formidable, but she spoke so calmly that making excuses to her was particularly difficult.
Rona looked at the body, at Brunn, at Tilya and at the card in the tongs. A slender ring set with lamp glass glowed dimly on her finger: the mark of her right to see and bear witness on behalf of the police.
"Who touched the document?"
"I did," Miren said. "Only with the tongs."
"Who touched the body?"
"The body moved by itself."
Brunn grunted. Rona did not smile.
"Miren Ost, you are under arrest on suspicion of falsifying a death, gaining unlawful access to the morgue level and possibly forging the certificate of your own write-off."
"My own?"
She took the card, read the date and looked up.
"A rare case. Most people wait until they die before they stop paying taxes."
"You've already decided I did it?"
"So far, I see only one person whose signature appears on an impossible document."
The accusation sounded reasonable, which made it harder for Miren to refute.
They took him upstairs to the Bureau's interrogation room. Tilya was led away separately, but before that she managed to show Miren the spare seal clenched in her fist. So the girl had not handed the evidence over to the police. Either she was cleverer than she looked or even more reckless.
Four lamps lit the interrogation room. Beneath each stood a separate inkwell. Black ink was for facts, blue for doubts, red for threats to the state and green for cases in which a person's legal status remained unclear.
Rona placed the green inkwell in front of Miren.
"Let's begin with something simple. Are you alive?"
"While I'm still talking, I try to consider myself alive."
"Don't be clever."
"I'm not being clever. It's a legal position."
She laid an extract from the city Register on the table. The name field read Miren Ost. Status: deceased. Cause: administrative write-off pending confirmation of the body. Property: seal. Post: vacate. Civil rights: suspend.
The extract had been created only moments ago.
Miren stared at it and felt the chill spread down his back. It was not death that frightened him, but the neatly documented procedure that had already been set in motion.
A knife could be dodged, an illness treated, a fire extinguished, an enemy met blow for blow. A document continued to operate even while the person whose rights it stripped away cried out against the injustice.
That was how they had executed his father.
Not in the square, as people later told it. First they executed him on paper: they took away his scribe's licence, his right to appear as a witness, his place on the register of living tradesmen and his ability to answer the charge. After that they led his father beneath the bell and carried out the sentence.
Rona noticed the way he was looking at the extract.
"Did you know the entry would appear?"
"If I'd known, I would have left Lambern yesterday."
"The dead aren't allowed out of the city."
"That's why I said yesterday."
The door opened and Otto Krey, chief of the lamp police, entered the room. He was a clean-shaven man with a heavy, impassive face. He did not sit down, as though afraid of lingering beside someone else's troubles any longer than necessary.
"Inspector Veyr, the detainee is registered as deceased. He cannot be held in a communal cell."
"He's breathing."
"Breathing is not grounds for reviewing his status."
Miren laughed softly. Not because it was funny. Because otherwise he would have had to hit the man, and the dead were probably fined for that too.
Otto looked at him with polite disgust.
"Pending clarification of the circumstances, citizen Ost is to be placed in the evidence store."
Rona narrowed her eyes.
"You want to put him on a shelf?"
"Legally, he is an item of evidence in the case."
Miren realised that this status gave him an unexpected advantage. A living person would have been kept in a cell, questioned and searched. An item of evidence merely had to be locked away, catalogued and left until morning.
He allowed them to take him away.
The evidence store lay between the armoury and the archive of minor offences. They locked him in a narrow cage among boxes of confiscated amulets, forged seals, glass eyes and a wedding knife which, according to its label, had been found complicit.
An hour later, the Bureau fell silent.
Two hours later, the copper tube in the wall clicked.
Three hours later, a cylinder of the dead post dropped from it, though there was not supposed to be a tube in that room.
Miren opened it with a shard from a glass eye. Inside was a letter on cheap grey paper. The handwriting was old, sharp and slanted to the right. He had seen that hand as a child in the margins of practice forms, where his father had taught him to tell a mistake from a lie.
The letter began without a salutation.
"If you are reading this, the city has finally found the empty line I left behind."
Miren closed his eyes.
His father had been dead for twelve years.
The letter was dated the day after the execution.
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