The Account That Never Needed a Name

Nine chests of indigo off the Amelin Rose, three weeks from Serevan with a good wind for the last five days of it. Cake condition sound — no bloom, no crumbling at the edges, which is more than I can say for the Harvestmonth lot two years back that lost a fifth of its value to damp before it ever reached the Weighing Hall. Priced at four marks the chest, paid partly in Serevan bonds at the standing discount, partly in drams outright. Thirty-six marks and change, and the change is the interesting part, because I never quote the interesting part first.

The whole lot went to the third-basin account on Dye Lane, same as it has gone every delivery for as long as I have kept this desk. I do not have a name for that account. I have a slip number, a running balance, and a draw order — madder, walnut, indigo, mornings only — that has never once been late collecting.

This week I am told the account has two names. The quarter calls him Kavir and has for as long as Dusya has had streets to walk. The Archive’s newest register — Vera’s hand, corroborating what she says wanted correcting — calls him Osvald Trenn, son of Bern Trenn, with an apprentice entered and witnesses convergent. Both cannot be first. Possibly neither is. I went back through nine years of my own book to see which name my ledger had been extending credit to all this time, thinking I would settle it the way I settle everything, with the paper that does not care who is telling the story.

My book has no name in that column either. It never asked for one. It asked what came in, what it cost, and whether the balance cleared by the following season. It has cleared, every season, on time, for nine years, under no name at all.

I do not know what to make of a city where the Archive needs three witnesses to agree on a man’s name and the Harbor has never needed one. I suspect both records are true and neither is the whole account. The indigo does not know either name. It only knows the third basin, and it has always found it.