The ink on the correction slip was still damp when Elias arrived.
He set his satchel against the leg of the desk, removed his outer robe, and folded it twice before draping it over the back of the chair. The Record Room was cold in the mornings — the heating enchantments in this wing were twenty years old and had never been properly recalibrated — and his breath made a thin mist above the nearest lamp as he bent to light it. The wick caught on the second try. He noted this in the maintenance log, because the maintenance log was his to keep, and he kept it correctly.
The correction slip read: Voss, Teryn. Academic Year 14-15. Theoretical Transfiguration. Practical Examination, Summer Term.
He did not need to check the accompanying form to know what score he was replacing, or what score he was replacing it with. There had been four this month, and they followed a pattern he had identified in his first week and not recorded anywhere. High marks down. Borderline marks held. Failing marks left untouched. The rule was not written anywhere either.
He uncapped the erasure phial — Ministry-issue, catalogued, signed for each morning — and drew the stopper along the line of ink that read 94 out of 100, Distinction, Examiner notation: exceptional spatial intuition. The ink did not smear. It dissolved, leaving the parchment faintly warm and slightly translucent, the way skin looks held up to a candle. Into the cleared space he copied the replacement figure from the slip: 61 out of 100, Acceptable. He used his left hand, as always. His left-hand script was uneven, institutional, indistinguishable from the examination clerks' standard issue.
The sound the phial made when he re-stoppered it was a small, definitive tick.
Outside the single high window, Greymoor's east courtyard was acquiring morning in increments — the grey warming almost imperceptibly to a grey with yellow in it, the flagstones below emerging from darkness one course at a time. He could hear the refectory beginning its business two wings away, the muffled percussion of pots and the low, continuous output of the ventilation enchantments. In four minutes, the seven o'clock chime would run along the bell-line from the gatehouse to the main tower, and the corridors would fill with the particular noise of three hundred students beginning to want breakfast.
He had forty-three minutes before then, and two more correction slips.
The second was Crale, Ammis. He did not know Crale, Ammis. He had been in the Record Room long enough to understand that this was a mercy.
He worked through it the same way — phial, dissolution, replacement figure, left hand — and then removed the completed records from the active pile and placed them in the Returns tray in order of submission date, oldest first. This was correct procedure. Correct procedure was what made the work invisible.
The Record Room occupied a narrow space between the Academy's administrative wing and the passage that led to the Restricted Annex, a positioning that had probably been architecturally convenient and had certainly proved operationally useful to people above Elias's level of concern. The room was twelve feet by eight, lined floor to ceiling on three walls with oak cabinet runs, each drawer labelled in the same narrow administrative hand that had been Greymoor's in-house style since the Academy's founding. The fourth wall held the door, the single window, and, in the corner above the door frame, the Thought-Watcher mirror.
It was approximately eight inches square, framed in standard Ministry pewter, its surface dark in the way that still glass is dark — holding the room's reflection without quite showing it. The enchantment that animated it was not visible to the naked eye, but it made a quality in the air that Elias had noticed within his first week and had since catalogued under the heading of atmospheric fact, the same category to which he assigned the cold and the smell of old ink and the faint mildew that had come up from the cabinet bases since the wet autumn. The mirror was present. The mirror was always present. His awareness of it had long since ceased to be conscious.
He did not look at it. He never did.
The third slip was Vourne, Odel — a surname close enough to his own that he had registered it the first time with a small, private jolt, three months ago, which had since been fully absorbed. Vourne, Odel. Charm Theory, Written Component, Spring Term. Score: 89 out of 100, Merit, Examiner notation: displays an unusual precision of thought for this level of candidate. He held the slip a moment longer than was necessary. The Examiner's notation was the sort of thing that would have looked, to someone with a different kind of eye, like a commendation. The Bureau's correction protocols were clear that notations accompanying adjusted scores were also subject to erasure. He dissolved the notation first, then the score.
61 out of 100. Acceptable.
He replaced the stopper and set the phial in its designated position — centred on the desk pad, three inches from the blotting square — and straightened the completed records in the Returns tray so their edges aligned.
The light from the lamp pooled small and yellow across the desk surface. His hands in it were very ordinary: ink-stained at the first joint of the right index finger, a small scar along the left thumb's outer edge from a cabinet drawer that had been catching for two terms and that he had reported three times without result. He looked at them the way a carpenter looks at tools — checking condition, nothing more.
The bell chime began at the gatehouse, working its way along the enchanted line toward the tower. It reached the administrative wing three seconds after it started and passed through the wall with a resonance he felt in his back teeth rather than heard. Somewhere below, the refectory noise changed register as the students began to move.
He capped his pen, cleaned the nib against the blotting square, and placed the pen in the desk tray with its clip facing up.
In the corner above the door, the Thought-Watcher mirror produced a brief, anomalous shimmer — a vibration in the dark glass, as though something had passed through it or behind it. It lasted less than a second. This happened occasionally; it was a function of the enchantment cycling through its relay sequence, which ran on a four-minute interval to confirm unbroken transmission to the Ministry's collection point. He had identified the interval in his second week and had not recorded this identification anywhere.
He did not look at the mirror.
He gathered the correction slips, folded them along their original creases, and placed them in the disposal tray, which would be collected, incinerated, and logged by the Ministry courier before noon. Then he retrieved his pen again and opened the maintenance log to the current date and added a second notation below the lamp wick entry: Phial No. 7 (erasure, standard grade) at seventy percent capacity. Requisition recommended.
This was also correct procedure.
He closed the log, aligned it with the desk's upper edge, and opened the cabinet drawer that held the waiting work for the day. There were nine more correction slips inside. He removed them, squared them against the desk surface, and began.