Chapter 68

Roman has not slept in fifty-one hours and has decoded eleven pages, and when Veira comes through the door of the Foundation's Edinburgh office at two in the afternoon on the second of March he does not greet her. He says:

"The rite is a wolf document."

She stops with her coat half off.

"Kin-authored," she says. "Croft's folder says Kin-authored. It's in the provenance."

"The provenance is wrong. The provenance was assigned in 1604 by a Vasile archivist who read the marginalia and misattributed it, and that misattribution has been copied into every subsequent citation for four hundred years." Roman turns the reproduction toward her, and his hands are not entirely steady, which she has never seen. "Look at the glyph structure in the receiving clause. That is not Kin notation. That is early wolf-pack contract form. The rite was not written by seers describing a metaphysical procedure. It was written by lawyers."

Veira sits down slowly.

"Describing what."

"An inheritance." Roman spreads three pages. "The document is not a rite for severing a conduit. It is a rite for dividing an estate among heirs, using the same formal structure the wolf lines used for territorial partition in the twelfth century. Nine receivers. A named holder. A transfer at the moment of the holder's death." He looks up. "It is a will, Veira. It was never a procedure for killing anybody. It is a procedure for what happens after somebody has already died."

The room tilts very slightly and rights itself.

"Croft's five subjects," she says.

"Five conduits who died of illness, of the load, of whatever the compact's records buried and whose function was then divided among nine receivers using this instrument. The rite was performed on the dead." Roman's voice has gone quiet. "Which is why two of the five 'survived intact and died within a year'. They were not subjects. They were receivers. They took a fifth of a conduit's load into a body that had never carried any, with no preparation and no framework, and two of them could not live with it."

Veira stands up. She crosses to the window and stands there with her back to the room.

"He's had this document for thirty years," she says.

"He has had a four-hundred-year-old misattribution for thirty years, as has everyone else who ever read it, including the two dissenting authors, who came close and could not account for the death clause because they were also reading it as a rite." Roman comes to stand beside her. "The dissent argues the holder is emptied rather than killed. They were reading a will and arguing about whether the deceased was really dead."

"So the transfer works."

"The transfer works on a corpse. There is no documented instance of it being attempted on a living holder, because in four hundred years nobody has understood that this was a question you could ask." He pauses. "Which means Croft's petition, if it succeeds, will authorise an untested procedure on a living woman on the basis of a document that does not describe it."

Veira watches Edinburgh doing its March.

"That's the argument," she says. "That's what I take into the chamber on Wednesday. His own evidence, decoded, showing his method has no basis."

"Yes."

"And it defeats him."

"Comprehensively."

She is quiet for a long moment.

"And then what," she says.

Roman does not answer.

"The load is still on one person," she says. "The Djúpr told me the channel isn't designed to be held alone. I'm eleven per cent down in five weeks and Croft can see my hands shake from four feet away." She turns from the window. "If I win on Wednesday, I win the right to keep doing the thing that killed his sister. That's the whole prize."

"Then don't take the prize," Roman says.

She looks at him.

"You have spent four months insisting that the difference between a system that works and one that does not is whether the person at its centre was asked." He does not soften it. "Nobody has ever asked a conduit whether she consented to be divided, because nobody has ever known it was possible while she was alive to be asked." He holds her gaze. "You are about to walk into a chamber holding the proof that his method is unfounded. You could walk in holding a proposal instead."