The Body That Is Not Cargo, Whatever Ledger Holds Him

I was not sent for. Maro’s clerk mentioned it in passing, the way men mention things they would rather someone else decide about: the fourth man from the tow, the one no instrument reaches, had been set in the Customs Shed’s cold locker three days past, between a barrel of spoiled dye-stock and a crate of Serevan citrus gone soft. No one had ordered it. No one had a place with better authority to put him, so he went where things go when no one owns them yet.

I examined him this morning, uninvited, on my own standing as Healer and nothing more binding than that. Three days in a locker meant for fruit and dye is not three days in a proper cold room. The skin at the hands and face had already begun the changes I would expect at this interval, in this heat, even with ice against the worst of it — the ice itself half-melted, draining faster than the shed’s boy was refilling it, because refilling it required someone to say the order came from an office, and no office had said so. I found no mark on him I would call a cause beyond the water itself. I would need another day, properly cold, to be more certain than that, and I told the clerk so plainly.

I told him to move the body to true shade and pack it in salt, not ice, and to do it now rather than wait on a written order, because a written order was not coming today and the body was not going to wait for one either. He did it. He did not ask whose authority I was giving him, and I did not offer one, because I do not have an office that reaches him any more than the Temple’s does.

The instruments will settle whose he is eventually, or they will not. He is decaying at a fixed rate regardless of which ledger claims him, and that rate is the only fact in this argument that nobody has to sign for.