Garrik Two-Names

#On Garrik's Station

"Witnesses don't remember — witnesses invoice." — Proverb of the Queue Road, repeated most often in Stamp Court Row, by people who have just been invoiced.

Garrik Two-Names sells testimony on the Queue Road. Together with Mother Venn, Garrik runs the largest witness ring among the Witness Rental Houses (Unregistered). The Houses are a cartel based in Stamp Court Row, the district of appeals and punishments, which smells of hot wax and old paper. Every doorway there has something to sell to a person who is about to be judged.

That is the whole of the station, and it is larger than it sounds. The Houses have no seat in the Directorate House. They have no gate, no bell, and no master seal. What they have is people, and the largest ring has the most of them. On a road where nothing moves without a stamp and no stamp falls without a stated fact, whoever supplies the facts sits close to the wax.

The road calls Garrik "Two-Names," so this dossier does too. I have not asked what the two names are. A Warden of the Sacred Ledger who starts counting the names in Stamp Court Row will still be counting when the queue clears, and the queue does not clear.

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#On the Business of Witnesses

The Houses describe their trade as legal testimony services, and the description is accurate. The service is real, the testimony is entered at law, and the fee is paid.

What the description leaves out is the method. The Houses coach their statements. They run perjury rings. Their stock is locals who look credible: residents with long bell-mark histories, clean collars and the correct posture at a clerk's window, which on the road means eyes down, palms open and short answers. These people come with documents that agree with them. A coached witness without papers is only an actor. With the right papers, the same witness is admissible.

The Witness Certificate is the most valuable thing these houses sell. Its mechanics are simple. At the Bell-Mark Gantry each traveller's paper is stamped with the hour, and the minutes stood after that stamp become a claim. The claim can be spent, sold or set against a debt. A Witness Certificate adds to the claim by attesting to hours the claimant never stood. The certificate states that someone saw the claimant waiting, and that statement changes the sum. Patience that cannot be earned can be purchased, and the minutes it buys are drawn on credit nobody ever stood for.

The Houses have a second line of business, which their own lore names as framing opponents. Testimony that can add hours to a friend's claim can be turned against an enemy just as easily. No price list for this survives, and I have not invented one.

These witnesses should not be confused with the Witnessers that the Bureau of Oaths supplies to sworn vows. Those officers stand in for Strasbourg's hearing. Garrik's people stand in for whoever is paying. Nobody confuses the two, and nobody needs to, because the gate-courts admit both.

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#On the Gate Nine Hearing

Gate Nine is the largest court on the road and the hinge on which everything turns: reclassification, conscription and the assignment of what the Directorate calls throughput labour. Appeals are heard at the Gate Nine Hearing Hall. Mistress-Court Sera Nox (Unregistered) presides, and the bailiffs carry the collar keys.

A hearing has a fixed procedure. The appellant contests a reclassification. Coached witnesses supply the facts. The court weighs those facts, and confessions can be traded for a lighter reclassification. Every testimony and every confession is indexed against its timestamp, so that any inconsistency can be found and used. In my parent survey I called this a performance, and the Witness Rental Houses supply the cast.

The roles at the hearing are distinct, and the distinctions explain Garrik's position:

• Garrik supplies testimony and has no power to rule on it.
• Sera Nox rules. Mercy at Gate Nine routinely costs more than the original offence.
• The bailiffs enforce the ruling by collaring the defaulter.
• The Time Clerks' Collegium enters the result in the ledger. Under Clerk-Prime Yoren its clerks hold the books, and on this road the books decide what is real.
• Director Othmar Vell sets the minute rates that the debt is measured in, from the Synod Permit Directorate's stone house with its cold incense.

So a broker does not set the price of a minute, does not touch the master ledger, does not order anyone's erasure and does not sign a collar warrant. A broker only states, for a fee, what happened.

What happened is the one thing the rest of the machinery cannot produce for itself. Minute debt compounds. Unpaid debt becomes compulsory labour at Gate Nine: hauling barricades, cleaning latrines, copying ledgers until the fingers split. Past labour lies erasure. The erased go to the Null Verge, where their names are voided, their bell-marks are struck out, and blank tags are pinned to collars of undyed linen. Testimony is what moves a person from one of these categories to the next. Garrik's witnesses are not the cause of any particular disappearance in my files. They are part of the input. The ruling, the collar and the ledger entry are all applied to a set of facts, and the facts were bought in Stamp Court Row.

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#On Credibility

A broker's character is the character of the trade, and the trade has two halves. In the road's own phrase, Garrik's witnesses remember what needs remembering and forget what needs forgetting, and they bill for both.

The forgetting is the harder skill and earns the better fee. Remembering can be taught. The House drills a statement until the appellant's neighbour can recite it in sleet. Forgetting, on a road where every confession is filed against its timestamp, means keeping a story consistent across many mouths, a certificate, a bell-mark slip and whatever the clerk has already written. One contradiction among the witnesses is enough for an appeal to fail.

So the Houses sell agreement more than they sell truth or falsehood. The Bureau of Records controls recorded identity, and the Bureau of Doctrine, my own office, controls what the record means. Between those two jurisdictions there is a small, hot room in Stamp Court Row where one testimony is made to fit the other, and Garrik works in that room.

I would like to be indignant about this. The trouble is that it is my own method, and I do it without the wax burns.

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#On the Present Application

The present survey describes conditions in A.S. 201, and they are harsh. In the spring of A.S. 200 minute pricing doubled overnight, with no decree and no explanation. That autumn Gate Nine closed for "sanitation," and within three days bodies had stacked in the Barricade Maze. Auditors from Strasbourg now rotate through more and more often. The Directorate still has not produced its master ledger for outside review. Three clerks were subpoenaed to testify before a visiting Inquisitor and left the Collegium roster before the hearing took place.

None of these events is attributed to Garrik, and I attribute none of them. The arithmetic is still worth stating. When a minute costs twice as much, an attested hour is worth twice as much. When debt reaches labour faster, an appellant has more reason to buy a witness and less reason to ask where the witness came from. Audits also need witnesses. A ledger that might have to be explained creates a market in people who can explain it.

The road this trade sits on is the road from Rheinscarp and the Rhine corridor to the depots that supply the Sagittal Line. Every wagon of grain bound for the soldiers there passes through courts where testimony can be bought. The wax for those courts' stamps comes from the Candlewick Palatinate. The facts the stamps certify come from Stamp Court Row.

The Synod has wanted witnessed facts since before the gates existed. It built nine courts to demand them and never asked who would supply them. Mother Venn and Garrik Two-Names answered that question, and a large share of the road's testimony now goes through their ring.