Sect Year 4 · seventh month · night of day 9 · the thirty-eighth life: the Vault quarter of Serai, his twentieth year
The clerks’ strike-room lay at the back of the Vault, past the copy benches and the lamp-smoke of the tally-cutters’ hall. It was a long, low room with a floor of worn flags and one bench down its length, scarred from end to end by three ages of blades. A dead cord lay on the bench that morning, the kind the Vault kept for practice: old hemp, its notches half gone, its carrier’s tag rubbed blank. Above the bench a rack held the strike-blades in a row, each in its own sheath of oiled leather.
Jorn had been coming to this room for three years. He was twenty now and taller than his father, and the bench no longer needed a stool for him. He stood at its far end with the practice blade in his right hand and waited for the old clerk to finish with the tally-book.
The old clerk had no name that anyone in the Vault used. He had come to the strike-room before Jorn was born, and he would still be there when the cords outlived the bench. His hands were thin and spotted, with long fingers that folded over one another when he was thinking. He didn’t look up from the book.
