A Clerk's Last Marginal

aka the order to keep counting

A clerk-engineer's dying note at the Sundering, cut into the engine's own frame in the drowned archive — the standing order to keep the count until relieved, and the name of the last human who obeyed it.

Down in the flooded archive, where the oldest records sank and the water has gone still enough to walk beside, someone cut a last message into the bronze of the engine itself, above the waterline, in the tight even hand of a person doing their duty while the world ends. 'The province is falling. The relief will not come; I have watched for it four days. The Standing Order holds: the count is kept until the counting-house is relieved by lawful authority. No lawful authority remains to relieve it. Therefore it is kept. I have set the engine to reconcile without a clerk and I will not be here to stop it. Whoever reads this: I did not know how to make it end. The order had no clause for the end of the empire it counted. I kept faith with a dead law because it was the only law I had. — Vessin, third clerk, alone.' Below, later, a second hand, ragged, not a clerk's: 'It is still counting. Vessin, it is still counting. It has started counting us.'

This world ships in Valenfeld. Play the game →