Edra Evensong had ninety-nine years left to sign every soul in Hollowsong, and he did not know where most of them lived. He sat on the sand floor of a driftwood hut, contract scroll unrolled across his knees, and counted the names he had gathered in three months of walking the coast. Forty-one. The scroll had room for thousands. Somewhere out in the marsh villages and the cliff hamlets, people were dying old and quiet, and every unsigned death was a soul he would never find again. He pressed the black onyx of his ring against the parchment. The gold rim warmed. A drop of ink beaded at the tip of his quill without him dipping it. That was the trick of the ring — it wrote what he already knew. It could not write what he did not. He needed a map. Not a coast map. A living map. Names, roads, who had a grandmother past eighty, who lived alone up which creek. No such map existed. The fisher-folk here traded with three villages and pretended the rest were rumor. Outside, something scratched at the crooked plank door. Edra opened it. A splitleaf climber sat on the step, six-limbed, tail fanned like a wet leaf. Around its neck was a braided cord, and tied to the cord was a folded scrap of hide. He knelt. The animal let him take the scrap. It was a tally — charcoal marks in rows, each row headed by a place name he had never heard. Coldwash. Ninebridge. Motherstone. Beside each name, a number. Beside each number, a smaller number in a different hand. Births. Deaths. Someone was already counting Hollowsong. Someone who knew he had come. He turned the hide over. On the back, one line: *You sign. We list. Half of every name is ours.* Edra sat back on his heels. He had made deals in worse rooms than this. A deal meant a contract. A contract meant he could shape the terms. He took his quill, pressed the ring to the hide, and wrote beneath the line: *Agreed. Bring me the first hundred by the next low tide.* The ink sank in and did not smudge. The climber sniffed the hide, took it in its teeth, and slipped back through the gap in the door. The carved face on the middle plank grinned as the animal passed under it. Edra rolled up his scroll. Forty-one names. Soon a hundred more, if the tally was true. He had a supplier now. He also had a partner he had not seen, who knew his work, who wanted half of every soul he signed, and who had reached him first. He smiled too wide at the empty room. The century was long. But he had just promised away something he did not yet own.