Emma la Chapelle (Human, Field Officer, Survey Corps delegation)

Emma had heard the line from the oldest shelf and had written it down before the reciter had finished, in the reciter's words, with the reciter's pauses marked, because a chronicle line was said in a shape and the shape was part of what was said.

A door was given. She had the band for that already; it had sat at the bottom of her register for two years, under the Kingdom's word for give, which the court used of the Castle and of nothing else, and which she had asked about once and been told meant give. She did not move it.

What she noted, without a band, because it was not a reading, was the Abbess's answer. The Accounting has what it has. Not yes and not no. The Abbess had answered a court reciter at the top of the steps the way she answered the delegation, which was with the record and not with herself, and had then sent the new novice to a shelf Emma had never been let near, and said the Castle's count as if everyone had always known there was one.

Emma had not known there was one. She wrote that down too, under her own name, because a thing the delegation had not known for three years was a reading about the delegation and belonged in the file.

Then her reader chimed, once, the way it did when the relay had passed over and left something, and she opened it under the desk because the scriptorium did not care for the reader and she did not care to make it.

The instrument log. From Krilzat. Three weeks of it, in the delegation's flat format, from the unit de Courtney had asked for and the court had let go as far as a keeper decided, which Emma had thought at the time was the most the court would ever grant and had been right.

Placed. Interior, floor level, against a wall. Optical channel: a standing figure, outline consistent with the population's, at lamp wavelength, present for 00:04:11. Thermal: nil. Sound: nil. Absent thereafter. Then nothing for a day. Then: Optical: standing figure, same position, lamp wavelength, 00:02:50. Absent thereafter. Then nothing. Then once more, shorter.

Present for exactly as long as a lamp was in the room. Absent otherwise.

She read it three times, and did not file anything, and looked up to where the new novice was standing at a shelf with a loose page in her hands and the face of a person who has found a thing she was sent for and did not expect to.