Distantly Falling Stars (GRAND WINNER * ONC 2019)

3. Threats and Reassurances

Three days later, the man Seti had been expecting appeared in the writing hall.   

Seti sat cross-legged at his station, a thick reed writing mat over his knees. His head was bowed in concentration as he copied a dispatch from a red, baked clay tablet onto the long roll of papyrus containing news from the eighth Nome. 

He was of a high enough rank that he no longer had to share his materials with the other scribes who sat around him bent over their own scrolls as they transcribed the morning's delivery of dispatches. He could arrange his workstation as he saw fit, and the small stone water jug for drinking and diluting ink, a papyrus scraper, a brush cutter and reserve disks of black and red ink in their holders sat neatly arranged on the personal work desk to his left. Seti was known to be one of the more fastidious scribes in the Third Writing Hall, even if he did have eccentric opinions about some of the information that came in. 

Moving the clay tablet to the pile of already processed ones, Seti reached into the burlap sack that lay on the floor on his right and pulled out another tablet. After reading it -- a few tools had been stolen from a building site near Tentuanak but no thief apprehended yet -- Seti set it down in front of himself and swirled his brush over the pad of black ink in his writing kit to wet it thoroughly. He glanced quickly up and around the Hall before he lifted the brush and began to write. 

His hand halted mid-swirl. 

The man was darkly tanned and muscular and wore no wig on his shaven head. Thick, gold and stone bracelets obscured each wrist and his kilt was of fine bull leather, not linen. He rapidly tapped a fly whip of long, white flax fibres attached to a gold handle against his leg as he scrutinised the directory of ghost-images --  exact likenesses of each scribe etched onto flat squares of clear glass with highly concentrated light and then backed with a lead plaque to make the shadowy, grey image visible --  affixed to the wall. He was clearly searching for a particular one. 

Ipy, the hall overseer, tucked his own brush behind his ear and lumbered to his feet to greet the visitor, who projected exactly the right amount of authority and impatience for Seti to have no doubts that he was there to talk to him personally. 

Or, far more likely, to threaten him personally. 

He turned his attention back to the clay tablet that lay before him and began to copy. Even though he'd been expecting this, he still felt the palms of his hands becoming moist and his breathing shallow and hurried.

"This way," he heard Ipy say over the scratching of an ink pad being worked with water and the clacking of clay tablets.  

The two men's feet came into his line of sight, the stranger's covered-toed sandals with thin sheet gold plating only a step away from the clay dispatch resting on the floor tiles. 

Seti looked up. 

"This is Seti, son of Ramu. Assistant scribe of the Third Writing Hall of the Office of Information, specialising in the receipt, logging and interpretation of news dispatches from al--"

The stranger raised his fly whip, cutting off Ipy's introduction.    

"Outside," said the man, staring flatly down at Seti before turning and marching briskly back towards the entrance of the Hall.  

Seti lay his brush on his writing kit and lifted the writing mat off of his lap. Ipy offered him a hand standing up and smiled encouragingly. "Take all the time you need," the overseer said quietly, peering at the stranger's retreating back with curiosity. "The transcribing can wait."

Seti nodded. 

Along both sides of the open courtyard ran a narrow-roofed gallery supported by wooden pillars carved and painted to resemble bundled papyrus rolls. The stranger had positioned himself in the gallery where he could be seen neither by the scribes in Seti's own hall nor the ones working in the hall opposite.