The Eyes Below. The Quill, #5

The water rises an inch at a time and takes only those who are not in the book. Temm the Fatherless came up from the very bottom - from peat briquettes to the Great Seal of Velmar - to find the throat at the top and close his hand on it. But there is no throat: there is the Code, the Ink Court and a breed of scribes who turn every mercy into a fresh debt. Below, people wait for a boat. Above, they wait for the right form, the right seal, the right clerk's hand.
The water gets there first. And on the rotting rafts Mara Verl still writes, for a copper, on behalf of people who do not exist on paper - certain that water eventually wears through any pile. The Eyes Below is the fifth and final book of The Quill: can the pen serve not the hand that holds it, but the people it refuses to count? Every account comes due here, and the price is named out loud.