The Counter

The guild hall was warm and loud and he understood none of it.

There were perhaps thirty people in it. They were talking over each other in a specialised dialect at a volume that suggested nobody expected to be heard the first time, and he caught perhaps one word in five.

Numbers were being argued about. A man near the fire was aggrieved on the subject of a split, and the aggrievement had detail in it, dates and quantities and a third party who was not present and was not coming out of the conversation well.

Somebody else was laughing at a story that appeared to have no content whatsoever. He listened to the whole of it, twice, trying to locate the part that was funny, and did not find it, and watched everybody else find it simultaneously.

He stood inside the door for a while with the noise going over him.

He tried, for a few minutes, to work out the rules of the room by watching. There were rules. He could see that much. People arrived and were absorbed into groups without asking permission. Somebody put a hand on somebody else's shoulder in passing and neither of them acknowledged it. Two men who had been shouting at each other about the split went to the bar together afterward.

He understood none of the mechanism and could see all of the effects, which was, he was beginning to notice, the general condition of his life.

He had expected the town to be the difficult part and had got through the town. This was worse. In the forest he had been ignorant of an enormous quiet thing that did not mind. Here he was ignorant in a warm room full of people who all understood each other perfectly.

He felt smaller than he had felt in the forest.

* * * *

He tested three people with the same question twice, having learned that much this afternoon.

It was faster now. He had developed a method: ask, listen, ask the identical thing again, watch what comes back. It took a few seconds a person and required no preamble, and it worked in a crowd because nobody in a crowd expects a stranger's question to make sense.

He was slightly ashamed of how businesslike he had become about it inside a day.

Two looped.

A man by the door who told him twice, identically, that the board was updated at dawn. A woman with a ledger who welcomed him to the hall on both occasions with the same warmth, in the same words, without any sign of having done it before.

One did not.

She was restringing a bow at a table near the window, working with her head down and her elbows out. He asked, and she said "Board," without looking up, which was one word and was an answer.

He asked again.

She looked up.

That was all she did. She looked at him for about a second and a half, with an expression that was not hostile and was very clearly a question about him, and then went back to the bow.

The look was the answer.

He filed the difference and could not explain it, because he still had no theory. What he had was a growing collection of instances.

Some of the people in this world responded, and some produced.

He did not know what determined it.

He did not know which he was.

That question had arrived at the well and had been sitting quietly in him since. He examined it now, in a warm room, and found it had grown.

The fruit woman had produced. The rope man had produced. The guards had produced. And he had spent two days receiving things from panes, being pointed at by arrows, and doing what he was told by prompts, and at no point had he chosen anything that had not been offered to him first.

He put that down carefully and did not pick it up again for some weeks.

* * * *

The counter clerk greeted him the way the guards had.

Same pleasant nod. Same fixed pitch. A sentence about the guild's business hours that he had not asked for and could not use, delivered as though it were the answer to something.

Two days ago this would have derailed him.

Today he simply registered it, and adjusted, and stopped trying to have a conversation.

He was aware of himself doing it. That was the notable thing, and he held it for a moment while the clerk waited pleasantly for whatever came next.

He was capable of getting used to things.

He had a before and an after now. The before had stood at a gate for a quarter of an hour waving a hand in front of a man's face. The after was standing at a counter conducting itself sensibly, having learned the shape of the situation and stopped fighting it.

The after was better calibrated than the before, and both of them were him.

It was the first evidence he had that he was accumulating rather than merely continuing.

* * * *

He watched somebody else accept a posting and copied the procedure exactly.

A man ahead of him in the queue reached up to the board, put two fingers on a paper, said a word to the clerk that Alaric did not catch, and something passed between them that produced a nod.

The whole transaction took perhaps six seconds.

Alaric watched it twice, because a second man did it after the first, and the second man did it in the same order with the same gestures, which confirmed it was a procedure and not a personality.

Then he did it.

He reached up. Two fingers on a paper. He said the word, which he had by then worked out was simply the first word of the posting's title, at roughly the volume the others had used.

The clerk nodded.

Something happened.

He was briefly and disproportionately proud of himself, standing at a counter in a warm room, having successfully performed a six-second transaction by copying strangers.

* * * *

He was offered a village half a day out.

Harvest stores, the posting said, before the cold.

The clerk elaborated in a short block of pleasant unvarying speech. The village needed hands. The guild was contracted. The payment was small and honest, and the phrase small and honest was clearly part of the block rather than an assessment of anything.

Alaric did not know what a village was in any detailed sense. He had a town now, one, from this afternoon, and he assumed a village was something adjacent to that and probably smaller.

He did not know what harvest stores were.

He did not know why the cold required them, though he could construct something plausible: it got colder, things stopped growing, and creatures that had not put anything aside would be in difficulty. He was pleased with that reasoning and had no way to check it.

* * * *

He took it because it was offered.

That was the entire content of the decision and he did not dress it up.

This was worth noting about him at that stage, and nobody was there to note it. He had no criteria for refusing anything. He did not know what he was good at, what he enjoyed, what he wanted, what he was for, or what he should avoid. He had a body that occasionally knew things, a sword that his hand fitted, and about thirty hours of continuous experience.

He was a set of capabilities with nothing steering them.

The first thing to offer him a direction got it.

He would think about that, much later, from the other side of a great deal, and find it either lucky or frightening depending on the day.

* * * *

The prompt filed itself into a panel he did not know he had.

That was the small shock of the transaction, and it came a beat after the nod.

The acceptance happened, and something in his interface moved. He felt it the way you feel a door close in another part of a building, a small settling somewhere out of sight.

He went looking, and found a section that had evidently been there the whole time. Empty until now. Waiting.

He stood at the counter and turned it over.

There had been an empty room in him since yesterday morning, with a purpose, built for this exact use, and he had never once opened it because he had had nothing to put in it.

He wondered, briefly, how many more of those there were.

He went through the interface properly then, standing at the counter, for the first time since the forest. There were sections he had never opened. Most of them were empty in the way this one had been empty, which is to say furnished and waiting.

One of them had a word on it he did not know and would not learn the meaning of for two months, and he looked straight past it, because it was grey and did nothing when he pressed it and he had a village to walk to.

* * * *

The panel had a name, a description, and a marker.

He read the description until it stopped changing.

It was written to him. In the second person, plainly, in short sentences, as though somebody had sat down and considered what he would need to know and then written only that.

Travel to the village of Ashfield. The harvest stores must be brought in before the first hard frost. Speak to the reeve. She will tell you what is needed.

He read it a fifth time.

He found it unreasonably moving and did not examine why.

Everything else in his existence had been given to him without explanation. The map had opened. The arrow had pointed. The sword had lain in the grass with a label and no history. None of it had ever told him what it was for or what he was supposed to do about it, and he had spent thirty hours working things out by walking into them.

This had been written for somebody who did not know.

* * * *

His map redrew with a gold point on it.

He opened it on the steps outside, in the last of the light, and looked at the day's work.

A corridor of uncovered ground running northeast from a rise in a forest. The bend he could not account for. The three-times doubling back. The place where the scrub had moved.

Then the corridor opening out into a bowl where Grennet sat, drawn properly now, walls and gate and the crossing of two streets, all of it rendered because he had walked it or looked at it.

And past the edge of that, out in the flat grey where nothing had been uncovered at all, a small gold mark.

The map did not know what was there.

The marker knew anyway.

He looked at the contradiction for a while, sitting on the steps with people going past him into the warm noise. The map only reported what he had seen. The marker reported something he had not.

Which meant something else had been there, or knew, or had simply been told.

He found he liked it. He could not have said why. Possibly because it was the first thing all day that had been ahead of him rather than behind him.

* * * *

He stood outside the hall holding the first reason to be somewhere that he had ever had.

It had been issued to him by furniture.

He had worked that out during the transaction, and it did not trouble him in the slightest. The clerk had one answer and produced it pleasantly and would produce it tomorrow to somebody else. It was not a person and had not chosen him and would not remember him.

It had still handed him a village, a task, a description written in plain language, and a gold point at the edge of the world.

Something in the world wanted a thing done.

It had told him where.

It would apparently pay him, in coin, which he did not have and had been told the uses of that afternoon by a woman at a well who had then vanished up a street.

And until this afternoon, the entire content of his existence had been a triangle at the corner of his eye.

He shifted the pack until it sat right.

He checked the arrow, which had gone quiet when he entered the town and was now back, patient, pointing at the gold mark.

He went.