Roz Nightlairde's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Roz Nightlairde stood in the yard behind Goblin Corp with a red pen in her teeth and no complete handbook in her hands. The stone pillar in front of her held three metal plaques at staggered heights, each one bolted flat against the rock. Each plaque showed a different handoff format from a different department. She had posted them herself eight months ago, on the day page forty-seven of the handbook failed her for the last time. Nobody had touched the plaques since. Today she meant to replace all three with one rule, but she could not write that rule without knowing every rule already in force. She crossed the yard to the small shed at the property line. The tile roof leaked in two places. Inside, banker's boxes filled the shelves floor to ceiling, each one labeled in a different hand. This was every surviving copy of the Goblin Corp handbook, scattered across revisions no one had ever reconciled. Roz pulled the first box. Chapters one through four, no cover. Second box, chapters six through eleven, water-stained. Third box, a single volume with ragged holes chewed clean through the pages, whole paragraphs missing where something with teeth had eaten the paper. She set the damaged copy on the floor and kept digging. By the fourth shelf she had pieces of nine versions and one complete copy of nothing. Roz sat on the shed floor and laid the fragments out in a grid. She wrote the version number of each fragment on a slip and pinned the slips to the wood above. Where two fragments covered the same section, she compared them line by line and marked every place the rules disagreed. Where no fragment covered a section, she marked the gap in red. It took her until the light through the door went orange. When she stood, she had one stack of pages that agreed with itself, one stack of contradictions, and a list of thirty-one sections that existed nowhere at all. She carried the three stacks back to the pillar. She did not have the current handbook. There was no current handbook. What Goblin Corp had been enforcing for years was a rumor held together by whichever copy a department head happened to own. Roz flattened the list of thirty-one missing sections against the top plaque and pinned it there with the red pen. Tomorrow she would stop trying to revise the handbook. She would write the first one that had ever existed, and every department would answer to it, because nothing else on paper could contradict her.