Registrar Fane Oddlot

The Writ-House's under-registrar on the High Terrace — stamps four hundred years of dead-empire paperwork, and lives in low-grade terror that his own arrears will be the ones somebody finally checks.

Fane files conscription rolls and toll-tallies for an empire that stopped writing back generations before he was born, and he does it perfectly, because the one thing worse than serving a dead mandate is serving it badly. His private joke, told only to people he trusts, is that he's more afraid of Clerk Haddon's ledger than of the Hollow Writ's magistrate — Haddon's book is the one that's actually still being read. He is dry, precise, and funnier than his desk suggests, in the specific way of someone who has found the only jokes his job allows and worn them smooth with use.