“My father died when I was thirteen,” said Isra. “A friend of his stole almost everything of value from our cabin.”
“Oh,” said Alfric. “Oh, I’m so sorry, that must have been horrible.” He had the familiar feeling of shame because his problems were so much smaller and more pathetic. He had a good life, he knew that. He had good parents, his health, access to money, all kinds of advantages. “And your mother—”
“Died in childbirth,” said Isra. “It was just me and my father. I’ve been alone since his death.”
“Sorry,” Alfric said again, as if an apology would do anything. “All alone? At thirteen?”
Isra nodded.
“How did you,” he started. “How did you survive?”
“My father taught me,” she said. “Trapping, hunting, making fires, getting through the winters. How to make and string a bow. How to preserve food. How to hide.”
“And you’ve just been doing that for the last five years?” he asked.
Isra looked at him, almost glaring. “How did you know how old I was?” she asked.
“The censusmaster,” he said, feeling slightly surprised. “That was how I knew about you in the first place.”
“Oh,” she replied, frowning. “What else do you know?”
“Nothing much,” he replied. “Name, age, gender, occupation, residency status, elevation, eye color, skin color, and hair color are the main things. The censusmaster can give weight and height, but I didn’t ask about those. Guild status, which I did ask about.”
“Occupation?” she asked, still frowning. He was tempted to ask how she didn’t know any of this, but if she’d been living in the woods by herself for the last five years with both her parents dead, it was small wonder. He wondered whether she’d attended the small schools they had in a hex like Pucklechurch and decided she probably hadn’t.
“A lot of what the censusmaster knows is an approximation,” said Alfric. “The Editors—do you know about the Editors?”
Isra frowned. “Vaguely.”
“Well, the Editors are a council of people who are, basically, in charge of the shape of the world,” he said. “They’re not the ones who make the changes, but they’re the ones who decide what changes need to be made. A lot of what the Editors have focused on in the past three hundred years is legibility and information.” He tried to organize his thoughts. “The censusmasters have only been around for the last two hundred years, and some of the information structures put into place from earlier are, uh.” He stopped. “Is this too much for you?”
“I just want to know what he says about me,” she said.
“He?” asked Alfric. “Oh, the censusmaster. She’s a woman. Well, it’s not really what she says, because the information comes to her from a construct that was created by the Editors about a thousand years ago. The construct thinks, though that’s not the right word, that you’re a ranger.”
“A ranger,” she said, as if tasting the word. “I suppose.”
“It’s not a very good system,” said Alfric. “The categorization system predates the censusmasters and hasn’t been updated in a thousand years, so you get weird things like ectad engineers being labeled as cobblers. Unfortunately, the category system is kind of broken and apparently hard to fix, so everyone just kind of lives with it.” There were many things that were broken and hard to fix, which greatly informed the policy of the modern Editors, which largely involved getting it right the first time and future-proofing as much as possible.
“How do you know so much?” asked Isra.
“Oh,” said Alfric. “Well, no offense to Pucklechurch, but I was raised in Dondrian, which has a good education system, even if your family can’t send you to a private school or hire tutors. My parents could afford both of those. All of this kind of thing was covered in our civics class, because the census stuff is a basic part of governance.” He hesitated. “If you want, I can give you a quick lesson. It’s good stuff to know.”
Isra nodded. “They don’t know where I live, though.”
“Er,” said Alfric. “Well, there are seven positions of civic power within a hex, and the censusmaster only knows who lives in or is visiting the hex, not where they are. The structuralist knows where all the buildings are, so if you live in a building, and the censusmaster and the structuralist talk to each other, they might be able to figure out by process of elimination where you are. I don’t know if they’ve done that.” He stopped himself before saying that they should do that.
“Censusmaster, beastmaster, structuralist, cloudmaster, plantmaster,” said Isra. “What are the others?”
“Hexmaster and collector,” said Alfric. “Arguably the two most important.” He hesitated again, unsure of how much to add. “The hexmaster is elected by everyone who has occupancy, and the collector is in charge of information related to aether, mostly as an early-warning role.”
They walked in silence for a bit after that, and Alfric resisted the urge to speak more. He had a bad habit of explaining things to people that they didn’t care to know, and he’d been working hard to curb it. If Isra was ignorant of even the basics of governance and civics, possibly everything, then that might be a problem, but not all that much of one. It was a mark of failure on the part of Pucklechurch that a child had been left out in the woods to raise herself, but that was neither here nor there.
“The beastmaster spoke to me,” said Isra. “She said I was taking too much. She can track the animals through magic?”
“Yes,” said Alfric. “Animals are categorized and tracked. In the city, it’s mostly used to make sure that people aren’t bringing in the wrong sorts of animals, fighting them, things like that. I’m not too sure about in more rural areas.”
“The world is so… ordered,” said Isra. That, Alfric could agree on and had said many times. He was just about to enthusiastically share her unease when she asked a question. “It’s the same in every hex?”
“There are a few that are unsettled,” said Alfric. “It takes, I think, about twenty people to get a vote going, and once that happens, the positions are filled by the hexmaster, who’s usually also a mayor, by tradition.” He wondered whether she had ever gone through a vote before. “But in those cases, it’s just a matter of knowing things. They don’t really have any power to do anything, and a different group could move in pretty quickly to take the position, if they wanted to.” He shrugged. “We’ll be passing through one of those small hexes soon. Not small in size, they’re all the same size.” He had no idea whether that needed to be said. “But probably not more than a hundred people there.”
Alfric had come in from the west, and they were now going east, down a path he hadn’t seen before. He was enjoying the change in scenery, which was largely woodlands instead of farms. The land wasn’t particularly suited to agriculture, the rough terrain broken up by large slabs of rock sticking up from the ground. The path was in good repair though, which he couldn’t say about all of the hexes he’d passed through on his way to Pucklechurch from the fortuitously timed portal. It was pretty common for a hex to have six roads going directly to the hex borders, though it took a fair bit of labor, and local geography sometimes stymied these efforts.
They soon reached one of those places where the geography was definitely not ideal, a steep hill where the road became a series of switchbacks that carefully navigated the outcroppings of rock. In a few places there were short wooden bridges and embankments holding back trees and dirt. The whole thing was in good repair, but it had a rustic quality to it that Alfric still found somewhat unsettling. Something like this in any of the city hexes would be solid stonework, and if it was a road that was going to the hex boundary, it was much more likely that the city would just make a tunnel straight through the rock.