On Hogswatch Eve, the city held its breath, and a procession went down into the earth.

It went by the second stair, behind the lectern marked HOVELS, because everything official has a second stair, and this one had been built by a master. It went in single file through four buried centuries of brick: Albright Slope first, bare-headed, carrying a lantern he did not appear to need, a man descending into his own life's work for the last time. Then Moist von Lipwig, in the gold suit, because if you are going to argue with the end of the world you might as well give it something to look at. Then Mr Sideways, cuff-guards squared. Then Of-the-Twilight-the-Darkness and nine goblin elders, each carrying a clan pot older than agriculture. Then Adora Belle Dearheart, who had been told quite firmly to stay behind and had replied with a look that had ended the discussion, the marriage remaining otherwise sound. Then Commander Vimes, in full armour, with his badge polished, who when asked in what capacity he was attending had said, 'If reality's getting decided tonight, then the law's going to be in the room when it happens,' in a voice that had closed that discussion too.

And then the golems. Dorfl first, and behind him ninety more, coming down the centuries of stair with the patience of the clay they were, each one carrying on his shoulders a bound volume of the General Ledger of Everything Actually Owed — for the Ledger now ran to ninety-one volumes, and paper is heavy, and truth, it turns out, is heavier, and there is nothing on the Disc better suited to carrying both than a person who has been property and does not intend to be again.

The vault had grown. That was the first thing they understood at the bottom of the stair: the grey light had eaten the walls, and the room of chained ledgers now stood at the centre of a flat grey plain that went out in every direction to a horizon ruled perfectly straight, as though drawn against the edge of the world's file. The Auditors stood among the lecterns. There were six of them, and there were a thousand of them, and the eye gave up trying to resolve the question and looked away, watering.

'You are not scheduled,' said the grey voice, arriving inside every skull with its dreadful familiar postmark. 'Reconciliation commences at midnight. It is eleven minutes to midnight. No action is required.'

'We're not here to act,' said Moist von Lipwig, stepping out onto the plain in a suit that blazed in that grey light like a sin in church. 'We're here to file.'

It took nine minutes.

The golems set down the volumes in a ring, in order, and the goblin elders set the pots upon them, unsealed, and the chant began — quiet, in the old tongue, the smell-tongue, the tongue of carried-forward — and Mr Sideways stepped up to the nearest lectern with Volume One under his arm like a man presenting his life for inspection, because he was, and said, in the voice of fifty-three years of eight o'clock sharp:

'Junior Probationary Clerk Second Class Sideways, presenting the General Ledger of Everything Actually Owed, and citing, with respect, the first rule of records: the older entry is authoritative. You'll find our instruments go back ten thousand years. Continuous. Witnessed. Cross-indexed by weight and smell.' He opened Volume One to page one. 'I'll wait while you verify. I'm good at waiting. I've had the practice.'

The Auditors read.

They read the way fire reads a library, all of it, at once; the pages of all ninety-one volumes turned without being touched, and the pots sang their beads, and the grey light flickered as something that had never been wrong before checked its working and found — entry by entry, debt by debt, window by window, soul by soul — that the city's books were older than the lies. The Vortin residence, restored to the record at one hundred and eighty-two windows, attested by four centuries of glaziers' bills, the goblins having beads for every pane. The golems, persons, the debt of their freedom carried in the pots since the first clay walked, because the goblins had counted the golems as people back when nobody else counted goblins as people, and the entry was very old, and the entry was authoritative. And SLOPE, Albright: Living. Attested. Pending before the law of Ankh-Morpork, like everybody else — and the old man stood under the grey light while the universe corrected its opinion of his existence, and Vimes stepped up beside him, not in comfort, but in the way a bailiff stands beside an asset, and Slope, being who he was, appeared to find this enormously reassuring.

The reading stopped. The plain was silent.

'The entries are accepted,' said the Auditors, and one million, one hundred and forty-two thousand, seven hundred and eighteen discrepancies were resolved in favour of the city of Ankh-Morpork, in the time it takes a clock to clear its throat.

Moist let out a breath he had been holding since roughly Chapter Two.

'However,' said the Auditors.

'Oh, here it comes,' muttered Vimes.

'The audit concludes at the conclusion. One matter remains. The foundational matter.' The grey light leaned in; the horizon shortened on every side, the great file closing. 'Your ledgers record what is owed between you. They are accepted. They do not record by what right you exist at all. Every entity on these books is operating alive. No licence is on file. No fee schedule. No issuing authority. Ten thousand years of accounts, and the underlying asset is held on no valid title whatsoever.' The voice did not rise. It had never once risen, in the whole history of everything, and that was the horror of it. 'The position of this Bureau is that life is an unlicensed irregularity, and at midnight it will be reconciled to the authoritative state of the universe, which is —'

THE AUTHORITATIVE STATE OF THE UNIVERSE, said a new voice, IS A MATTER ON WHICH I BELIEVE I AM THE RANKING EXPERT.

He had been standing among them for some time; that was the thing about him, he was always already there, it was merely a question of when you were permitted to notice. He stood at the centre of the ring of volumes with the lantern-light on the blade of the scythe and the grey horizon reflected in his eye sockets, where the blue fires burned it politely away, and in one skeletal hand he held a document.

GOOD EVENING, said Death. I AM HERE IN A PROFESSIONAL CAPACITY. He paused. I AM ALWAYS HERE IN A PROFESSIONAL CAPACITY. He laid the document upon Volume One of the General Ledger, squaring its edges with a fingertip of bone, the small courtesy of one record-keeper among others. I UNDERSTAND THERE IS A QUESTION REGARDING THE LICENSING OF LIFE. I HAVE BROUGHT THE FILE.

'There is no file,' said the Auditors, and for the first time in the history of the universe, there was something in the grey voice that a connoisseur might have identified as the beginning of doubt. 'We have searched. There is no licence. There is no fee.'

THERE IS A FEE, said Death. THERE HAS ALWAYS BEEN A FEE. IT IS COLLECTED AT TERM. IN FULL. FROM EVERYONE. WITHOUT EXCEPTION, WITHOUT EVASION, AND WITHOUT, he added, AND I WISH MY COLLEAGUE THE TAX MAN EVERY SUCCESS IN MATCHING THIS FIGURE, A SINGLE INSTANCE OF NON-PAYMENT IN THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF THE SCHEME. He tapped the document. THE LICENCE TO LIVE IS ISSUED AT BIRTH. THE PREMIUM IS A LIFE. PAYABLE AT THE END. I AM THE COLLECTING AUTHORITY. MY RECORDS COMMENCE WITH THE FIRST LIVING THING, WHICH PREDATES, he consulted the document, unhurried, YOUR NOTICE OF COMMENCEMENT BY APPROXIMATELY THE AGE OF THE UNIVERSE. AND I BELIEVE YOU HAVE A RULE ABOUT OLDER ENTRIES.

The grey plain was very, very still.

YOU WILL ALSO FIND ATTACHED, Death went on, in the tone of a craftsman who has waited a long time to present a particular piece of work, AN INVOICE. ITEM: ONE MILLION, ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY-TWO THOUSAND, SEVEN HUNDRED AND EIGHTEEN COLLECTIONS, SCHEDULED BY YOURSELVES FOR MIDNIGHT TONIGHT, WITHOUT REFERENCE TO THE COLLECTING AUTHORITY. THAT IS POACHING. ITEM: ONE COLLECTION, LIPWIG M. V., CANCELLED BY YOURSELVES IN SEKTOBER, WITHOUT REFERENCE TO THE COLLECTING AUTHORITY. THAT IS ALSO POACHING. I AM TOLD THE CUSTOMARY PENALTY IS THE FEE, PLUS INTEREST, PLUS, said Death, and the blue fires flared, and the temperature of the grey plain dropped by an amount that the instruments of the universe declined to record, AN ADMINISTRATION CHARGE.

'The invoice is disputed,' said the Auditors, but the voice was thinner now, the voice of something that has discovered, very suddenly, that it is itself an entry in somebody else's books, and has been all along. 'The figures require... verification. The underlying inventory must be independently established before any liability can —'

'Oh, well, now, there I can help you,' said Moist von Lipwig.

He had been waiting for this moment the way an angler waits, the way a stamp waits for a tongue, and he stepped forward into the grey light with a single sheet of paper in his hand, and his voice dropped into the warm, confiding, deeply reasonable register that had separated half the Sto Plains from its savings, the voice that made the impossible sound like the obvious next step.

'You can't assess a liability without establishing the value of the underlying asset — you said so yourselves, it's your rule. And the asset in question is life. All of it. So before anything can be disputed, paid, or reconciled, you'll need a complete inventory of the assessable universe. Every entity. Every object. Every atom, since the small ones do add up.' He laid the sheet on the lectern. It was headed, in Mr Sideways' immaculate copperplate: UNIVERSAL SELF-ASSESSMENT, FORM ∞-1. 'We've taken the liberty of preparing the form. You'll note it's to be completed in triplicate — one copy for the assessor, one for the assessee, one for the file — and by hand, naturally, since mechanical reproduction can't be independently verified, and nothing matters more than verification. I'm sure you agree. You've never agreed with anything so hard in your existence.' He smiled the gold-toothed smile. 'There's just one small administrative point, and I want to be completely honest with you, because we're all professionals here: under the first rule of forms — and you have always known in your hearts that there is a first rule of forms — a form once begun must be completed. No blanks. Blanks are irregularities.' He took out a pencil, and held it out across the lectern, and the grey light shivered. 'So. Before you start. Are you quite sure you want to start? Because the universe is rather big, gentlemen, and it makes more of itself all the time, and you'll be wanting to count that too —'

The Auditors looked at the form.

It has been said by the philosophers of Ephebe that the gods make their cruellest weapons out of a creature's own nature, and the Auditors of Reality looked at a blank form, the largest blank form that had ever existed or could exist, a form with a box for everything, every box empty, every emptiness crying out — and they were lost, all six of them, all thousand of them, lost before the first one reached for the pencil, because not reaching for it had never been among the things they were able to do.

'We will require,' said the Auditors of Reality, in a voice already strangely distant, already receding toward a horizon full of uncounted atoms, 'additional pencils.'

MR SIDEWAYS, said Death, ANTICIPATED THAT.

The grey light went out — not like a fire dying but like an office closing, all at once, sensibly, last one through turns off the universe — and the plain folded up its horizon and was a cellar again, an ordinary buried cellar smelling of dust and varnish and four hundred years of brick, and far away, fading, going out and out toward the Rim and the stars and the endless infilling boxes, there could be heard a sound like a thousand pencils, beginning.

In the lantern-light, ninety-one volumes and nine pots and a dozen people stood in the sudden warm dark of a world that had been, on inspection, approved.

'Is that it?' said Vimes hoarsely. 'Forms? We beat them with forms?'

THEY WERE NOT BEATEN, COMMANDER, said Death, shouldering the scythe. THEY WERE GIVEN EXACTLY WHAT THEY WANTED. He paused at the foot of the second stair, a courtesy, since stairs were not a thing he required. THAT IS GENERALLY HOW IT IS DONE. IT IS CERTAINLY HOW IT IS DONE TO US. He looked at Moist, and something passed between the two collectors, professional to professional, the two certainties, momentarily side by side. THE INVOICE STANDS, MISTER LIPWIG. THEY WILL BE PAYING IT OFF FOREVER. He considered this. I FIND THAT I AM CONTENT WITH FOREVER. IT IS, AFTER ALL, MY USUAL TERMS.

And then there was a midnight, somewhere overhead, and bells — every bell in Ankh-Morpork, Hogswatch Eve crashing down out of the towers onto a city that was still, against the run of all the paperwork, gloriously, taxably alive — and the procession went up the second stair and out into the snow, and nobody was reconciled to anything, except possibly each other, and that only a little, and only for the night, which in Ankh-Morpork is as much as has ever been hoped.1