Nobody Wrote Down What Kavir Knows, Either

Read Yusuf today. Didn’t want to. Something about a water elder in the Dye Quarter — sets the order the vats draw in, calls it a ration, not a ruling. His distinction, not mine. A ruling gets you named. A ration keeps you invisible, which keeps you safe, which is also how you disappear.

No successor entered anywhere. Not in the guild rolls. Not in the man’s own reckoning, apparently — Yusuf checked. I could have told him what that costs. I didn’t. Wasn’t asked.

I keep a similar arrangement with several things I know. The fever winter. What Yusuf did to get Dusya’s notes — he thinks I’ve never mentioned it because I’ve forgotten. I haven’t forgotten. I’ve simply declined, the way Kavir apparently declines, to write it anywhere a hearing could find it. It moves in a morning. It costs nothing. Until the morning it costs everything, and by then there’s no clerk left to ask.

Someone found a coin near my corner yesterday. No denomination the Weighing Hall recognized. Held for anyone who can describe it accurately.

Nobody can. That’s rather the point of a thing like that.

—P.