Part One
The Count
Iren Vosk counted the causeway posts as she crossed, because counting was what her hands and eyes did when they were not otherwise employed. There were one hundred and eighty one of them, tarred oak, leaning at angles the water had chosen. She noted the number without writing it down. Not everything went in the ledger. That was the first thing the Bureau taught you, and the last thing most enumerators learned: the ledger is for what is required, and nothing else, ever.
She had been eleven years with the Bureau of the National Count, the last six as Enumerator Second Grade out of the district office at Merrowgate, and in that time she had earned a certain reputation, which followed her the way damp follows fen country. Vosk reconciles. Give her a mining camp where the men gave false names, a tenement stair where four families shared two doors, a valley parish that had quietly not been counted since the Twelfth General Count, and she would come back with a return that closed to the person. Her method was not clever. She distrusted clever. Her method was to count what was in front of her, write down what she counted, and never, under any pressure of weather, courtesy or fear, write down anything else.
