The Claim Adjusters Guide to the Apocalyse

The claimant had summoned a fire elemental in his own dining room. To impress a woman. Val read the incident report twice. Not because it was complicated, it was the least complicated thing to cross her desk all week, but because she wanted to be certain she'd followed the precise sequence of decisions by which a grown man came to conjure a being of living flame between the soup and the fish. She had followed it. It held up. He had wanted, in his own words on page two, to demonstrate my command of the higher arts. Page three listed what the higher arts had commanded: the curtains, the sideboard, an imported Cyrne rug, the lady's hair (minor), and the lady (departed). Departed. As if she'd caught a coach to the city center. Val uncapped her pen. Under Cause of Loss she wrote, in the small even hand the divisions preferred, Conjuration, unsupervised — self-inflicted. What she did not write, because the form did not allow and the world had never once asked, was the truer version: that a man had set his life on fire to be gawked at, and very nearly succeeded, and would probably do it again. She capped the pen. Reached for the next file. She'd lost her pencil somewhere in her hair an hour ago and stopped looking for it. The two cardigans, the inner grey, the outer greyer, had stopped being a decision years back, because the hall was a cathedral, and cathedrals are built to humble the body, not to warm it. Eighty feet of stone overhead held the cold the way a well holds water. The division's braziers had been positioned, with what Val could only assume was deliberate institutional malice, to warm the wide aisles where no one sat rather than the desks where everyone did. So: wool over wool, and a long-standing understanding with the cold that neither of them was going anywhere. The hall had been raised a thousand years ago by people who believed a room ought to make you feel the weight of what magic was living in it, vaulted so high the ceiling kept its own weather, the great pillars cut with ward-runes of considerable and specific power, every surface insisting on awe. The awe had not survived the renovation. One of the runes, a sigil that had, per the small brass plaque no one read, once sealed this chamber against the unquiet dead, now wore a laminated arrow directing claimants to WINDOW 4. A take-a-number dispenser had been bolted to the base of a column raised for some grander purpose; it was presently serving number 71. The whole vast space smelled of cold tea, wet wool, and the particular dust of stone that has been important for too long. Somewhere a stamp came down, once, twice, with the flat authority of a god deciding something minor. Out the window, a city of impossible spires. In here, a queue. The work came in two kinds. There were the easy ones, like the dinner-party arsonist, which asked only that she translate human folly into the categories the form allowed: Conjuration; Negligence; Act of Beast; the broad and merciful country of Other. Those she could do with most of her mind elsewhere. And there were the ones the others couldn't close. Those arrived on their own, more or less. A clerk would drift over and set a folder on the corner of her desk with the particular gentleness of a person handing off something they had privately given up on, and drift away again before she could decline. She never declined. She didn't say much of anything. She opened the folder and read for the place where the story stopped agreeing with itself. There was always a place. That was the thing none of the others seemed to get, that a claim which lied would, somewhere, contradict its own numbers, and that the contradiction could be found if you were only willing to read all of it, the dull middle included, instead of the parts that were interesting. Most people read the parts that were interesting. Val read the dates, the quantities, the order in which things had supposedly burned, and the lie rose off the page like a watermark held to a candle. This morning's gentle folder claimed a faulted drying-charm had taken a grain store, valued generously at four hundred crowns. She read it once for the shape and once for the seams. The charm had overloaded and thrown fire, the claimant swore, and it spread to the stores along the west wall. Page four put the charm on the east. A small thing. The kind of small thing a man says when the truth is that the grain was sold off three months back and the fire was simply an opportunity that came along afterward, and a faulted charm was simply what the reserve paid out on. Val flagged it for review and felt nothing toward him at all, beyond the distant contempt of one craftsman for another's shoddy work. If you're going to torch your own grain store for the payout, she thought, at least have the f*****g decency to remember which wall you hung the charm on. "You're doing the face," said Willa. Willa Penhallow occupied the desk to Val's left, and a generous portion of the air above and around it. She was the only person in the division who spoke to Val as though Val might speak back, a faith that had survived eleven months on thin evidence. She had a cardigan too, but Willa's was a choice: a deliberate, alarming coral, the colour of a woman who expected to be looked at and had decided, some time ago, to enjoy it. "There's no face," Val said flatly. "There is a face. The one you do when you've caught somebody." Willa wheeled her chair over, which she was not supposed to do, the casters shrieking across flagstones laid down for the processions of the honoured dead. "Is it the dinner one? Henny had the dinner one before it came to you. She said he lit his own curtains showing off, and the lady walked straight out the door before the fire brigade walked in." "He summoned an elemental he couldn't hold," Val said. "It's a containment failure. Quite common." What she did not say, what she filed instead in the place where she kept the things that were true and useless, was that the man had not lost control of a single thing. He had reached for the biggest, brightest, most dangerous object in the room on purpose, because some people believed, all the way down in the dumb animal cellar of themselves, that if they could only be impressive enough, on fire enough, that others might like them. As if you could frighten someone into love. As if anyone worth a damn ever stayed for the f*****g spectacle. She had watched men try it with no magic at all, and watched it fail, every single time. Cause of Loss, she thought. Wanted to be loved. Went about it like an arsonist. "Containment failure," Willa repeated, visibly deflating. "You make everything sound like plumbing." "Most things are boring." Willa stayed anyway, chin propped in both hands, and narrated the queue: who was weeping, who was lying, who had put on their one good coat to come and file a claim and by doing so, broken her heart a little. Val let it wash over her and said almost nothing, which Willa had long ago decided to interpret as warmth. It was, in its own way. There was no one else on the floor whose noise Val would have chosen to sit inside. The forms had never once asked Val what truth she saw. Eight years, and not a box on any of them for the watermark, the seam, the real version of events. The forms wanted a cause off the approved list and a figure in the right column, set down in the small even hand the division preferred, and then it wanted the next form. This suited her precisely. A job that required her to be right and declined to require a single further thing of her was, as far as Val was concerned, the only sane arrangement anyone in the entire building had going. By six, the queue had thinned to the stubborn. Val squared the day's folders into a stack with edges true enough to satisfy her, which took three attempts. The edges were the one thing in the whole cathedral she could get to come out exactly true, and she was not, at the end of a Friday, inclined to settle for approximately. "You're coming tonight," Willa said. Not a question. Willa had learned that questions only gave Val somewhere to go. "Coming where." "The Gull. Penna's leaving do — except Penna left in the spring, so by now it's only the do." Willa was already winding her coral self into a coat. "Toby will be there." Val knew several things about Toby, from Flooding. He was kind, uncomplicated, and built like a man who had never once lain awake wondering whether he was worthy of anything, on the grounds that the question had genuinely never occurred to him. He was also, she recalled, quite stupidly good-looking in a plain, undemanding way that asked nothing and offered a few plain things back. There were worse ways to spend a Friday. "I have files to finish," Val said. "You have a stack with perfect edges and nowhere to be." Willa held out one arm, the gesture of a woman who had decided, on no evidence whatsoever, that Val was worth waiting for, and meant to go on deciding it indefinitely. "Come and be a person for two hours. You can go back to being an ink smudge on Monday." And because it was Willa, the one person in the building whose company had never once registered, to Val's exhaustively kept internal ledger, as a tax, Val reached up, drew the pencil out of her hair, set it down precisely beside the squared stack, and stood. "Two hours," she said. "Two hours," Willa agreed, in the tone of a woman who had never once in her life meant two hours.