MASTER IMUS’ TRANSGRESSION ‘I suppose,’ he sniffed, ‘you get a lot of cases like mine.’ The officer did not reply. In the ten minutes since Master Imus had been received, the officer had made very few remarks, except to announce his credentials and ask a few general questions. Master Imus had presented himself, of his own volition, at the portico of the dark, unfriendly building late that afternoon. He had been invited to wait in an anteroom off the inner yard. The anteroom was cold and forlorn. The fretful fingers of individuals previously invited to wait there had marked the white plaster with a greasy patina, and pacing feet had worn the wooden floor. There were no windows, but light poked in through a trio of dingy filters. From outside, faraway, Master Imus could hear the street noises of workers flooding home to their habs and their evening meals. Master Imus sat in one of the old wooden chairs provided. A clerk attended him first. The clerk led Master Imus through to a side office panelled in dark wood, and sat him at a small desk. The clerk was hunched over with the weight of the stenogram built into his chest. He sat on a stool, handed Master Imus a form, and told him to read out the questions printed on it and answer them in his own words. As Master Imus spoke, haltingly at first, the clerk’s bird-foot hands pecked the keys of the stenogram and recorded his comments. The stenogram clattered like an adding machine, a sound that made Master Imus feel exceptionally sad. When the form was completed, the clerk left the office, and was replaced, after a few minutes, by a second clerk. The second clerk led Master Imus into a chamber that smelled of machine heat, and was cluttered with banks of whirring cogitators. The second clerk examined Master Imus’ papers, and copied them on one of the cogitators. Several versions of Master Imus’ biographical particulars flashed up on the multiple screens for a moment and then faded into a dull, green glow. This slow, silent dissolution of all he was seemed unpleasantly symbolic to Master Imus. He was taken back to the anteroom, and left alone again. The daylight was ebbing. A small lamp had been lit in his absence. Master Imus waited for twenty minutes, and then the officer arrived. ‘Johan Imus?’ the officer asked as he entered the room, reading from a data-slate. Master Imus stood up. ‘That’s me, sir,’ he said. The officer was a tall, well-made man with dark hair. He was dressed, and this came as no surprise to Johan Imus, in black clothes and a black leather coat. The officer looked Master Imus up and down with unforthcoming eyes, and announced his credentials with a cursory wave of his rosette. ‘You have been received for inspection. Follow me, please,’ he said. Master Imus followed him obediently. He followed him across the twilit yard, in through an archway, and up an endless flight of varnished stairs. The officer opened a door, and ushered Master Imus into a small room. The room had a large, ornamental fireplace that looked as if it had not seen a fire in centuries. A gilt clock ticked on the mantle. There was a rug on the wooden floor, and two plain chairs on either side of a desk. An armchair stood in one corner, a comfortable and friendly item of furniture that Master Imus never got to sit in. They took their seats on either side of the desk. ‘What is the nature of the crime you are confessing?’ the officer asked, after studying the data-slate for a few minutes. ‘Not a crime, as such,’ Master Imus replied hastily. ‘No?’ ‘A transgression. Yes, transgression, that is a better word altogether.’ ‘The nature of the transgression, then?’ ‘I have already explained this,’ Master Imus offered, ‘to the clerk.’ The officer scrolled back through the slate’s files. ‘Have you born false witness to this statement as I read it?’ ‘No, sir.’ ‘Were you coerced, invited or urged to make this report?’ ‘No, sir,’ Master Imus said. ‘I have come here of my own volition. I... I said as much.’ ‘That is noted here, strenuously. You made that point several times during the preliminary examinations.’ ‘I simply wanted it to be clear,’ said Master Imus. ‘I was persuaded to come here by my own conscience, nothing else.’ The officer was silent for a moment. ‘You say you have been suborned by the Ruinous Powers, drawn into their evil, and set upon an unholy task?’ Master Imus nodded. ‘I suppose,’ he sniffed, ‘you get a lot of cases like mine.’ ‘Everything must be held carefully to account,’ stated Johan Imus. ‘I am an indentured book-keeper and a citizen of Imperial Hesperus, the latter an honour I hold even more dear than my work at Slocha and Daviov et Cie. My father was keeper of books for Slocha and Daviov, and his before him. My work, like theirs, involves the enumeration of company accounts, the allocation of funds, the scrutiny of audits, and the day-to-day upkeep of financial income and outgoings. I have held my post for sixty-two years, and run a department of eighteen under-keepers. No, I have no wife. No kin to speak of. My work is my life. ‘Slocha and Daviov? An illustrious auction house, surely you’ve heard of it? Well, it maintains offices in the Garcel Commercia, just off the Place Fourteenth Jaumier. In the main, we deal with antique furnishing, silks, Sameterware, Brashin mannequins, and fine arts. The sale rooms are on Varsensson’s Street, beside the lifter depot. There are open fare sales every Mainsday, and specialist auctions every other Solday. Occasionally, we hold irregular fetes for particular customers or particular treasures. Last Gorgonsday, we offered a list that included eight small ouslite busts by Sambriano Kelchi and a series of humaniques from the jokaero ruins on Tornish. ‘No, sir, I am no connoisseur. My salary does not provide me with the funds to collect or speculate. But funds are my business. I am painstaking and exact in my work. I would never wish to cause Master Slocha or Master Daviov professional embarrassment by misplacing a decimal point or wrongly adding a column of figures. ‘This is why I have come. I do not make mistakes. ‘Ah, well, now you ask, we come to the meat of it, I suppose. Last Solday I set out to review the quarterly accounts. The year end looms, and the Imperial tithe statements must be returned correctly. I found an error. Well, not an error so much as an aberration. Something that could not be accounted for. It was an idle annoyance at first, but the more I studied the pages of the ledger, the more peculiar it became. ‘There was a void, you see. A void – a gap or empty place in the flow of the accounts that defied explanation. It was as if a page or two were missing from my ledger. ‘No, not at all. This was the master ledger. Only I had access to it. ‘Sir, you belittle my craft with such a question. I keep books, and I have kept books my whole life. I am a creature of accuracy. It was not simply a matter of a creeping error, a stray sub-total. There were figures missing. Simply missing. And yet, a page or two on, the books balanced, seamlessly, as if there had been no hole. ‘This is what I mean by the word ‘void’. Numbers are my language, my life. I know when they are lying. There was a void in the accounts, and the more I struggled to identify it, the more the figures hid it from me. It was as if they were closing ranks to conceal the truth. ‘Why have I come to you with a book-keeping error? Sir, again you mock me. It was no error. I reviewed and recalculated. I redid the accounts eight times. As I added to this column and subtracted from that, the numbers began to betray me. They became numbers that I did not understand. ‘Sir, I believe I have calculated something that should not be. I believe I have found the Number of Ruin.’ He regarded Master Johan Imus for a moment. Such a small man, shrivelled by age, his sparrow bones lost in heavy robes that had evidently been cut to fit his father or his grandfather. The gilt clock ticked on the mantle. Its face had no hands, a simple ordo trick. The constant, measured ticking was all that mattered. Tock, tock, tock, flicking time away without a trace of its passage on the enamelled face. Guilt got them all in the end. Imus possessed a small, neat face with a wide, slit mouth that might have revealed a toothy grin had the circumstances been different. His hair was straggly and white, and he wore half-moon eyeglasses. His knuckles bulged with arthritis. ‘The Number of Ruin?’ asked the officer. Imus nodded. ‘That is my transgression. Will it be painless?’ ‘Will what be painless?’ Imus strugged. ‘My punishment. I presume... Well, censure is inadequate. Will it be burning? Poison?’ The officer had been making notes in a small copy book. He dipped his pen into the desk’s power well. ‘Do you believe you have committed a crime, sir?’ he asked. ‘No, no not at all. But I believe I have become a crime. I am a criminal thing.’ ‘I see.’ Master Imus sat forwards and adjusted his eyeglasses. ‘I see you are quite a young man, sir. Will this have to go to a superior?’ ‘My superior?’ ‘Yes, sir. I imagine something this grave-’ ‘My master’s name is Hapshant. He is indisposed, an old ailment. I hold the rank of interrogator, as I told you. I can deal with this matter.’ ‘Oh, good. That’s good. Very good. So, how will you proceed?’ The officer stared at Master Imus. ‘Forgive me, Imus, you don’t seem alarmed at all by this process.’ ‘Alarmed?’ Imus echoed. ‘Of course I’m alarmed. I’m terrified. I’ve been terrified of this day all my life.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because it happens to us all, sooner or later, doesn’t it? Every day of my working life, I have walked to work up Sarum Stre...
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