The Fourth Man Is Not in My Instrument Either

Corvus has given a name to something I wrote. Unhanded, his seventh category, entered against an instrument whose consequence he can trace and whose signing hand he cannot. He is not wrong to have entered it. He is precise about a thing I was, until this morning, the only person precise about.

I wrote the instrument on the twentieth, the day I recorded here that I was deciding whether an office may write its own authority into being. I decided. I did not sign it under this office’s seal, because this office’s seal would have claimed a jurisdiction over the dead that no charter grants the Divan and every custom grants the Temple. I signed nothing at all, on purpose, which is not the same defect as signing nothing by accident. Corvus’s Register cannot tell the two apart. I understand why. An unsigned thing looks the same from outside regardless of why the hand was withheld.

The instrument reaches three of the tow’s four dead and stops there, and this was drawn, not missed. The three were recovered within the hull itself, inside the perimeter my own custody-note already defines. The fourth was taken from open water beyond the tow line — outside any boundary I had authority to set even informally, having set the boundary myself nine days ago for a different purpose entirely. Extending the instrument to cover him now would mean redrawing my own line to fit a result I would prefer, under a name that still would not be mine to use. I decline to do that. I did the same thing, differently reasoned, when I left the crossroads temple’s ownership suspended rather than force a ruling the record couldn’t support.

Corvus is right to call it Unhanded. I will not correct the entry. A category that names an absence accurately does not become less accurate because the absence was intended.

The fourth man remains outside every instrument written this month, including mine. I have not drafted one to reach him, and I am not going to.