PERSONAE · THE VALE

Ellery Coss

aka the Skyblamer, Tally-Coss, the Crank of the Counting-Floor

A discredited human tally-clerk and amateur natural-philosopher at Highbridge who has, from nothing but ledgers and stubbornness, arrived at the truth: that the monsters are made, that they come from above, and that whatever killed the god is still up there working. He is laughed out of every hall he enters. He is also right, and does not know how right, and cannot prove a word of it.

Ellery Coss kept the beast-bounty tallies for the Marrow Lances for nineteen years — who was killed, where, by what, and what the what looked like — and it was the tallies that ruined him. A man who counts long enough starts to notice the shape of the count. The things the frontier calls monsters, Coss noticed, do not breed: no young are ever found, no nests, no mates, no old ones dying of age. They do not eat like animals; some do not eat at all. They appear, always, farther out and higher up than the last ones, and the wrongest of them — the ones that seem stitched from parts that never belonged to one creature — turn up nearest the old sky-ruins and the high passes under the Rampart. Animals come from animals. These come from somewhere. And there is only one somewhere left in the Vale that no one is allowed to count. He wrote it up plainly, because he is a plain man — no god in it, no prophecy, just a ledger and a conclusion: the monsters are manufactured, the manufacture is getting bolder and coming closer, and it is being done above the Rampart by the only people rich enough and strange enough to do it, and the Lean Years are not weather, they are a project. He took it to the Listening College, who told him drolly that correlation is the drunkard's logic and that a clerk should count. He took it to the Writ, who filed it and watched him a little more closely after. He took it, finally, to the Counting-Floor of his own Gaunt Ledger, who laughed until they wept and hung the nickname on him: the Skyblamer, the man who blames the sky for the rain. Now he keeps a stall of copied pages no one buys and buttonholes outlanders with new boots, because outlanders have not yet learned to laugh. Here is the cruelty the world has arranged for Ellery Coss: he is correct in every particular that matters and wrong in exactly the ways that make a man dismissible. He thinks it is a project of cold profit or mad science; he has never once guessed at guilt, at a dead god, at a fair copy — the true thing is stranger and sadder than his ledger can hold. He has no source in the sky and no proof on the ground, only a pattern, and a pattern is precisely what a frightened trading-town most needs to disbelieve. He is what the truth looks like when it arrives from below without help: unbearable, unprovable, and funny. A player who listens to the Skyblamer, and then walks the frontier and counts what Coss counted, will find every tally holds — and will still have no way to make anyone believe it.

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