A Correction: A Living Name

aka the cooper's record, the strike that names the living

The record that turned Adept Corren back and frightens the College: a fresh strike naming a living Valenfeld cooper, his debt, and a date of closure that has not yet come.

You have read the dead ones now — the grain, the men — and told yourself the engine only counts backward, over what was. This crystal is warm the way the others are warm, freshly struck, and it names a man you could walk to. HOLDING: Aldous Ferre, cooper, Valenfeld market row. OBLIGATION: Counting-Floor pledge, forty measures, at interest. STATUS: current, arrears mounting. CLOSURE: rendered in full. DATE OF CLOSURE — and here the strike gives a day, a real day, a day this coming autumn, not four hundred years gone but forty weeks off. The count is not recording that Aldous Ferre died. It is recording that he will, on that date, his debt closed in full by the only settlement a dead man makes. It has scheduled him. He does not know. The engine is very sure, and it has never in four centuries been told it was wrong.

This world ships in Valenfeld. Play the game →