Episode 02
The Kanzlei
Right. History. I'll be quick, because you'll need all of it in about four days and none of it makes sense in the order it happened.
This is the second thing I have off the network that isn't mine. The first was the zoo. Same source: the old one, who put it on the line for whoever came next. I'm the whoever.
Six things. Then we go back to Berlin.
One. The boy was punished for the dog.
You remember the dog. Door left open, mice in a room, one small death going down the line and taking the whole floor with it. The prince was eight.
He got a year in his room. Study only, food brought up, no riding, no visitors, no yard.
That sounds like a father. There wasn't one. It was the only thing his sisters could think of that would keep him alive: eleven families had filed for compensation by the end of the first week, two had filed for something else, and every dead mouse in that basement had been somebody's aunt.
He came out on his ninth birthday. His sister Chanel collected him and said: "You're old enough now. Come and see what we actually do."
Never, ever say that to a nine-year-old you like.
Two. That city was rich in a way you have to be told about.
Not rich like a country. Rich like a bank. Everything worth having in the old world went through them and left a percentage behind, for so long that nobody remembered starting.
And they were, by an embarrassing distance, the best physicians who have ever existed. Not magic. Doctors. Thousands of years of watching what a body does, writing it down, and affording to be wrong.
Result: twelve thousand years. That's the allotment, for everyone born inside the walls. Not as a hope. As a number.
Three. The number lived in a ledger.
Family time account. One per household. Births added, deaths closed, and every fine and debt and interest payment out of the same column, because that city worked out early that the only currency nobody can forge is how long you get.
Calculated by hand.
That's the part that gets me. A civilisation that could keep a person walking around for twelve millennia, and the ledger was ink, men on ladders, a clerk carrying a total across a page, and once in a while, over eleven thousand years, inevitably, getting it wrong.
Somebody in that hall once wrote a four instead of a nine and ended a family. Nobody knows who. The old one called it the most frightening fact in the world, and he'd met gods.
Four. The Kanzlei is the office where the ledger got enforced, and it looks like an office.
Not in the palace. Down a service stair under the eastern quarter. Long, low, warm, lamps in rows, men who don't look up. If you've been to a tax office you've been there, apart from three details, which are the entire chapter.
The rail. They called it the Schiene, which is just the word for it, the way everything in that place was called just the word for it. Polished brass, waist height, the length of the hall, with a seat on it. The seat has a footplate. The footplate has two pedals.
The pedals are connected to nothing.
The prince got down on the floor and checked, because he was nine. No linkage, no chain, no gearing. Pedals, seat, rail, and at the end of the hall a wall with a hundred small doors.
"You don't press them with your feet," said Chanel. "Not really. You press them with the other thing. The feet are so you know which one you're pressing."
The doors. Mice. Four hundred and change, descended from the ones that worked, all linked, all listening.
The room at the end. Behind a door with two guards on it, in a cage designed by people who'd thought about it for a long time: four dragons.
The old one skipped the cage. He skipped things he'd looked at too long. I'm skipping it too, and I'd like you to notice I'm doing it on purpose.
Five. Here is how the machine worked, and it is the only mechanism in this book you have to remember.
A dragon can feel where a thing is. That's the family; that's why we were hunted for a thousand years.
A mouse with a thumbnail of a person in it can be felt.
So: put a dragon in a room at the end of a hall and use it as a lens. Sit a man on the seat. Now he isn't a man in a chair; he's four hundred small bodies in four hundred places at once, and he can push, gently, on any of them.
Not control. Everyone gets this wrong. A pushed mouse does the thing it was already halfway to doing. You can't make it be what it isn't. You can only make it more of what it is.
Which is, if you think about it for eleven seconds, the whole of governance, and I don't believe one man on those ladders ever did.
"That's the reports," said Chanel, walking her brother down the rail. "Everything you've ever been told about this city came up this track. Who's ill. Who's hiding. Who's short. Who's lying. You've been reading it since you could read. You thought it was paper."
"Do they know? The mice."
"Some of them."
"Do they mind?"
And his sister stopped walking, which is the single most important thing that happened in that hall.
Chanel was twenty-six. Black hair, up, in a way that took a servant forty minutes. She'd governed since nineteen alongside her twin, and everybody knew which twin did the governing. She wasn't warm. Gucci was the warm one: gold hair, a laugh you could hear across a courtyard, liked people, all of them, individually, which in a ruler is either a miracle or a structural fault and was, in her case, both. Chanel liked the city. Not the same thing, and she'd made her peace with that before she was twenty.
"Yes," she said. "Some of them mind very much. I read those ones myself. I don't delegate them." She started walking again. "You'll do it too, when it's yours. You'll want to stop, and you won't, because the alternative is not knowing, and a city this old can't afford a ruler who doesn't know."
"That's horrible."
"Everyone thinks the job is deciding," said Chanel. "The job is knowing and deciding anyway."
Six. And then she introduced him to my great-great-uncle.
Yes. Mine. Ricardo's family. That's what I've been walking you towards for six numbered points, and I'd like it noted I got here in under two thousand words, which the old one never managed once.
He was not in the cage. I want that on the record, because I've carried it for a fortnight, and I've already learned that the difference between the ones in the cage and the ones who aren't is mostly what you agreed to.
He was in a side room, in a chair, at a window that showed a wall. Six hundred years into that city; three sets of rulers watched being born, getting clever, getting tired. He stood up when the boy came in, which nobody in that building did for anyone.
"This is the executor," said Chanel.
That was the actual job title. It isn't a euphemism. It also isn't what you're thinking.
When a household's account emptied, when the debts and fines and interest ate the last of the time and a clerk carried the number across and found nothing under it, the family was removed from the city.
Not killed. Removed. By the mice.
They came at night, in the hundreds, up through the walls. They didn't bite. They didn't break anything. The household woke to a floor that was moving, every small body pushing gently the same way, the doors already open, the road out already lit. About an hour. People walked out of that city carrying their children and their coats, through streets lined with small quiet animals, and behind them the gates closed and the account was struck through and that was that.
Nobody was ever hurt.
The old one always said that bit in a particular tone, and it took me a while to place it: a sentence a man has been told so many times he can no longer hear it.
Very friendly. Walking them out of the city. Lalala.
And here's why it took a dragon. Four hundred mice pushing one way for an hour without one of them panicking, without starting the wave the dog started, needs somebody holding all four hundred at once. You can't do that from a seat with pedals. You can only do it from inside, and only something with the family in it can be inside four hundred things at once and still be itself when it comes out.
So my great-great-uncle sat in a chair at a window that showed a wall, and once or twice a year a household walked out of the eastern gate at four in the morning, and he held four hundred frightened animals steady the whole way so that nobody would be hurt.
Six hundred years.
It's why the last thing he ever said to his brother was never take the chair. It's the only instruction my family has. We have it instead of a religion.
The boy, who was nine, asked the only question anyone in that building ever asked him.
"Do you mind?"
"Every time, your highness."
"Good," said Chanel. "That's why it's him."
That's the tutorial. Six things: the punished boy, the money, the ledger, the office, the lens, the chair.
Learn the floor plan. We're going to be standing on it, and I'd rather you weren't reading a diagram at the time. Seat on the rail. Hundred small doors. The room at the end with the four in it. And above it all, in the hall with the high roof, a ring of the oldest objects in the world, which everyone in that city was told was there to keep bad spirits off the mice.
It isn't.
Last thing. Coming back up the service stair into the light, the prince asked why she'd shown him on his birthday, after a year locked in a room.
And Chanel, who would try eleven times to bring him back, and fail eleven times, and give up her body to keep trying, said:
"Because you're the one who left the door open. And a person who's left a door open once is the only kind I'd trust with the keys."