SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 864: Missing Pages

The lamp in his room had burned down lower than he liked, and Trafalgar did not get up to see to it.

There was nothing outside the window worth looking at. Meraval had no night sky, only the dome and all that weight sitting on top of it, and at this hour the working lights along the outer structures dimmed to a colour that could almost pass for dusk, if a man wanted it to badly enough.

He untied the cord and spread the pages across the desk.

'Three weeks of her patience. Let's see what it bought.'

He began where anyone would begin, which was the beginning, and the beginning was fish.

Deliveries. Salt by the barrel. Lamp oil, laundry, the price of freshwater rations in a city drowning in the other kind. Staff rotas written out in Nerith's small fast hand, four hundred names he would never need, each of them signed in and out of a shift by somebody who had died of nothing more interesting than time.

It was the dullest reading of his life, and he was thorough about it, because that was the job.

Half an hour in, he stopped being thorough about it and started paying attention.

The notes were in the margins.

She had marked them as she copied. A word or two, never more, in the same clipped hand as everything else. Pages absent, 44 to 51. Hand changes here. Signature does not match earlier entries. Two lines struck through in the original, not legible.

She had seen all of it. The woman kept her office like a chandler's shop and she had sat in a watched room for three weeks with a pen and missed nothing.

And near the front, in a longer note than the rest, she had told him what she thought it meant.

My mother was ill for most of this year. Others signed in her place. The household kept poor books through that period. I do not read anything into these gaps and neither should you.

Trafalgar read that one three times.

'You don't believe that. You wrote it so that you'd have written it, in case somebody else ever read this. But you don't believe it, or you wouldn't have copied out every gap by page number.'

It was actually a good explanation.

A woman dies slowly across a year, the house runs itself badly while everyone is frightened, a secretary signs what needs signing and forgets to file half of it. Any magistrate on the surface would accept that in a heartbeat, and any magistrate on the surface would be right nine times out of ten.

So he stopped reading forward, and started reading the holes.

He turned over a clean sheet and wrote out every gap she had marked, one under the other. Page numbers, dates, and which register each of them had been torn out of.

It took him most of an hour. Carelessness spreads out. That was the thing. A badly kept house loses a bit of everything, a laundry account here, a delivery slip there, a rota nobody bothered to file the week three people were sick. The damage would be everywhere and it would be shallow.

This was not everywhere.

Every gap in the year belonged to the same kind of page. Not the kitchen, not the accounts, not the deliveries, all of which were intact down to the last barrel of salt.

The attendance registers.

Who had been on the residence floor. Who had been admitted to her rooms and at what hour. Who had signed in, and who had signed them in, and when they had gone back down again.

That was all that was missing. That was the only thing that was missing.

Trafalgar sat back in the chair and looked at the list for a long while.

Then he found the second thing, and the second thing was worse.

He had expected the gaps to fall at the end of the year. That was where they should be, if the story were true. The final months, when she was at her worst and the house had come apart at the seams and nobody had the heart to keep a register properly.

They were at the beginning.

The first four months. The stretch where every other page in the bundle was immaculate, where the accounts balanced to the coin and the rotas were filed the same evening and somebody had written a polite complaint about the quality of the lamp oil. A household running exactly as it should.

And in the middle of all that order, eleven days at a time, the one book that said who walked into her room simply stopped existing.

'So it isn't what's gone,' he thought. 'I don't care what's gone but I do care that somebody decided it should be gone.'

Carelessness does not decide. Carelessness has no opinion about which register is important.

And a decision like that could only be made afterwards, by someone who already knew how the year had ended, who had gone back into those archives with a clear idea of which pages would eventually be read by somebody like him. Sat down. Chose. Left the salt and took the door.

Two years ago, a woman had been slowly emptied out in a room at the top of this castle.

And somebody had gone downstairs afterwards and quietly removed every trace of who had been in it with her.

Trafalgar let out a breath and rubbed the heels of his hands into his eyes.

Days in this city. Four factions who smiled at him, three doors he could not open, a dead clerk he was not permitted to look at, and now this. The first solid thing anyone had put in his hands since he stepped off that submarine.

Then he lowered his hands and looked at what was actually on the desk.

Paper. Loose, folded, tied with cord. All of it in one handwriting.

A copy, made by hand, by an heir with the most direct interest in the world in how this ended, of documents she was not permitted to remove, taken out of a room where a man sat at the end of the row from morning until night with no reason to be there and no intention of explaining himself.

He could take it to Ithanne in the morning. She would be perfectly courteous about it. She would read every page, and she would set it down, and she would ask him one question.

Where is the original?

The original was four floors up, behind a door, on a floor that somebody was watching.