The Tithe of Hollowmere

Every seventeenth year, the mire takes a soul.

The town of Hollowmere has paid the tithe for two hundred and thirty-eight years. Barley at forty bushel, geese at twelve, and every seventeenth year one soul of the town's blood, walking down the Drowned Causeway to the black pool the old maps call the Mereheart and the town calls nothing at all. The god of the mire holds the deep water from the dykes, and the town pays, and nobody reads the contract.

Nobody but a copyist.

Rodrick Vale has spent eleven years copying other men's ledgers, and he reads every page three times: once for the words, once for the seams, once for who profits. When the Lot falls on his sister Wren, he does the one thing no tithe has ever thought to do. He reads the covenant. Three times.

He finds a substitution clause. He finds a scraped hollow where a clause about wages used to be, and a margin note pressed deep by a weaver who walked seventeen years ago: WALK. DO NOT BE CARRIED. So he walks.

Down in the mire, the god is not what the stories say. It is starving. It lives on literal readings and stale paper, and its own great book, which cannot write a lie, has spent two hundred years being fed forged town receipts. So Rodrick does what a clerk does with a dishonest account. He takes the job. He becomes the god's tally-keeper, and from the inside he opens a payback ledger of his own: a weaver with her wage still unset after seventeen years, a dead soldier drilling eighty-five years of laps, a goose girl who counts the drowned instead of the geese, and eleven souls from North Hook that the mire took in one night and wrote up six years later in one pot of ink.

But paper cuts both ways. The keeper who should be his ally has spent thirty years polishing his seal and longer than that lying with it. The town's elders would rather feed the god forever than audit it once. And the god can flood a street, freeze a summer, and spend a winter like a lamp; it has two hundred years of practice at making its problems walk down a causeway and not come back.

At the Reckoning — the audit night written into the covenant at the founding and never once kept — the parties must set their tallies side by side, and what either party took beyond its due must be returned with increase. For the first time in the history of the parish, the god's own book will lie open under lanterns, and the hand across the stone will belong to a trained copyist who has found the seams in every document he has ever read.

A dark fantasy of ledgers and leech-water, for readers who like their magic in the fine print: a god that cannot lie, a town that cannot afford another tithe, and a clerk who has never yet lost an argument with a document.

The audit is coming. The god keeps the books. The clerk keeps score.