Albright Slope had kept the same morning ritual for forty-one years, and it had kept him, which is what rituals are for.

He rose at six. He took weak tea and one slice of toast with the butter spread to the edges and not over them, because waste was an irregularity and irregularity was for other people, where it could be assessed. He walked to Wixon's Alley by a route he varied according to a private rota,1 greeted the clerks by surname, ascended to his office, unlocked the left-hand drawer of the desk the size of a tomb, and spent one quiet hour with his personal ledger — the ledger of ledgers, the index of the whole deep hole, written in a cipher of his own devising in a fine copperplate hand — before the day and its necessary fictions began.

On the morning after the Vortin residence complied with its assessment, Albright Slope unlocked the left-hand drawer, opened the ledger of ledgers, and found that someone had been marking it.

Small ticks. Precise ticks. Ticks the colour of fog, in the margins of a cipher that no living soul had ever read, in a drawer with one key, in an office with one chair worth sitting in, at the top of a building designed to be impossible to enter, leave, or assess. The ticks went down the columns of forty-one years like footprints down a private beach, and beside the entry for the late Mr Spindle — Sundries, August, water — the fog-coloured ink had written, in the margin, in a hand with no flourishes because flourishes are decoration and decoration is untruth, one word:

Confirmed.

Slope sat very still. The abacus clicked, far below, in the brown silence. And for the first time since the winter of his ninth year, when his father had explained to him with the aid of a strap what happened to boys whose figures did not balance, Albright Slope was afraid.

Not of discovery. Discovery had a face, and faces had prices. This was worse than discovery. Somebody was not exposing his books.

Somebody was agreeing with them.

He turned the pages with hands he kept steady by force of forty-one years, and found the second thing. It lay between the leaves like a pressed flower from a grey garden: a single docket, fog-grey paper, no letterhead, because letterheads belong to entities and what had left it did not condescend to be one. It read, in full:

RE: Entity LIPWIG, M. v. Scheduled closure (instr. piano) countermanded. The premature closure of an account under active audit is an irregularity. The entity LIPWIG is the responsible officer of record for the entity ANKH-MORPORK and will be retained until the audit concludes. Further attempts at closure will be debited against the originating account. SEE: SLOPE, A., file attached.

And there, pinned to the docket — pinned, with a pin, which was somehow the most dreadful detail of all, the small domestic instrument of it — was his file. One page. Forty-one years of the deepest hole ever dug in the city, and his file was one page, because the grey gentlemen recorded only what was authoritative, and what was authoritative, what the oldest official entry on Albright Slope said, in the Guild's own registry, in his own young copperplate, was the thing he had written in the winter of '79, when death duties had threatened to take a third of everything and he had solved the problem the way he solved every problem.

SLOPE, Albright. Deceased.2

He had been dead, on paper, for forty-seven years. It had saved him eleven thousand dollars. It had been, he had always privately considered, his finest entry.

Beneath it, the fog-coloured hand had written: Irregularity. Entity does not match entry. The older entry is authoritative. Reconciliation scheduled.

Albright Slope sat at the top of his unassessable building, in the heart of his perfect machine, holding the one page of himself, and understood with the great clarity of his trade that he had spent forty-one years building the instrument of his own execution, and that the only thing in the city that could possibly stop it was a true ledger older than his lies, and that there was exactly one man who might know where such a thing could be found, and that the man was the tenth reformer, and Slope had already priced his wreath.

He reached for his hat. The hat had been reaching for him, in a manner of speaking, for some time.

Mr Sideways opened the door of the Office of the Collector-General at eight o'clock precisely, as he had every working morning for fifty-three years, and found Albright Slope standing on the step, holding his hat against his chest in the manner of a man visiting either a grave or a bank manager.

The two old men looked at each other for a long moment. They had never met. They had been, for half a century, the two ends of the same sum.

'Sideways,' said Slope at last. 'The probationary clerk. I signed the freeze on your promotion myself, in '73. Nothing personal. You counted too well.'

'I know,' said Mr Sideways. 'I copied the order into my books. Volume forty-one, page nine, under O.' He stood aside with terrible courtesy. 'For Outstanding.'

They gave Slope the visitor's chair in the attic, which was a plain honest chair with four equal legs, and this seemed to unsettle him more than hostility would have. Moist sat on the desk. Adora Belle stood by the window where the light was behind her, smoking with intent. Of-the-Twilight-the-Darkness perched on the filing cabinet, and did not take his eyes off the old man once, and his nostrils moved the whole time, reading him, an audit of a kind older than paper.

Slope laid the grey docket and the one-page file on the desk, and talked for twenty minutes, and for probably the first time in his adult life every word of it was true. The vault. The ticks. Confirmed. The entry of '79. When he finished, the attic was silent except for the city below and the small bell-note of the goblin's pot as one long finger tapped it, thoughtfully, like a metronome counting something other than time.

'Let me make sure I have this,' said Moist. 'You've come to me — to this office — because the creatures beneath your Guild are going to enforce your own paperwork on you, and the only defence is a set of books older and truer than yours, and you believe I have one.'

'I believe,' said Slope, 'that you are assembling one. I have spent forty-one years watching this city for men who count what they are not supposed to count. It is how I found Mr Spindle. It is how I found the other eight.' He said it without flinching, which was its own kind of confession; he was done pretending, the way a man is done with a coat that has caught fire. 'I offer the Guild's true ledgers. The vault. Every window since the first hovel. The whole of the hole, Mister Lipwig, four centuries of it, delivered to this office, in exchange for one entry in your new general ledger. An entry that says I exist.'

'Nine men,' said Adora Belle, from the window, in a voice with frost on it. 'Nine funerals. And you sit there and offer us windows.'

'Madam, I offer you the evidence for nine murders, itemized, in my own hand,' said Slope. 'I am aware of what it convicts. I have totalled that column every morning for forty-one years. I do not ask to escape it. Commander Vimes may have me the day the audit ends, and I will save the court time, and the hangman will find me — ' the dry voice cracked, very slightly, on the only joke he would ever make about it, ' — cooperative. But I will be hanged, Mister Lipwig, as a man. Not corrected, as an error. There is a difference. I have spent my whole life on the wrong side of it, and I find, at the end, that it is the only thing I am not willing to sell.'

The attic was very quiet.

Moist looked at the old man — at the monster in the grandfather suit, the creaking respectability, the priced wreaths — and hated, with a deep professional hatred, the fact that he understood him perfectly. That was the trouble with being a con man among con men. You could always see the moment the mask came off, because you could feel the draught on your own face.

He glanced at Adora Belle. She gave the very small shrug that meant it's your soul, but I'm watching the exchange rate. He glanced at the goblin, and Of-the-Twilight-the-Darkness did the thing his people had been doing for ten thousand years: he picked up the pot of that-which-is-owed, shook it once — the bead inside that belonged to nine dead men rattling against all the other debts of the world — and then set it down again, gently, upright, open.

Room in the pot. The account stays live. Payment, said the gesture, in full, in time.3

'Mr Sideways,' said Moist. 'Open the new general ledger. First entry. Write: SLOPE, Albright. Living. Attested by witnesses. Disposition: pending before the law of Ankh-Morpork, like everybody else.' He looked Slope in the eye. 'That's the deal. You get to be real. Being real means Vimes. There's no version of this where you get one without the other — that's rather the point of the whole exercise.'

'I accept,' said Albright Slope, and stood, and creaked, and put on his hat. At the door he paused, and turned, and said, in the tone of a craftsman leaving the trade to a successor: 'The vault has a second stair, behind the lectern marked HOVELS. The grey gentlemen do not use it. They do not believe in second stairs — a thing should have one means of access, properly recorded.' The ghost of the office smile crossed his face, for the last time, and there was nothing behind it now but a tired old man. 'It has been my experience, Mister Lipwig, that everything official has a second stair. I should know. I built most of them. Use mine before they finish counting yours.'

And he went down, and out, into Pseudopolis Yard, where a grey gentleman on the corner raised a clipboard and assessed him as he passed.

The figure it wrote down was very small. But it was, for the first time in forty-seven years, greater than zero, and Albright Slope walked to Wixon's Alley through the rain with his hat off, like a man who has paid an enormous sum for one line of ink, and considers, on the whole, that he has the better of the bargain.