A Grey Clerk is a tall, narrow figure of grey stone banded with green-dark bronze, robed in carved folds, standing at a roofless witness hall or beside the stones of a road-meeting. Its face is a smooth oval with a single long slit where a mouth would be, and one hand holds a bronze stylus over a stone tablet worn blank. It stands so still that lichen grows on its shoulders, and moves only to turn its head after a passer. Its voice is dry and even, like a page turned, and it speaks the old archive script that few living readers can follow.

They stand at the road-meetings along the Grey Line and on the marker roads in towards Stillgate, one to a hall or crossing. A few posts are empty, with only the feet left on their plinths. How many stand farther in no one knows.

A Grey Clerk asks every passer the same thing: a name, and the name of someone who will swear to it. It takes any answer given clearly and writes it on its blank tablet with a stylus that leaves no mark, then turns back to the road. A passer who walks on without answering, or gives a false or garbled name, it follows with its head and calls after, louder and louder, and a Clerk that has been refused steps down from its plinth and bars the road until the passer turns back. It has never been known to follow anyone off the marker road, or to harm anyone who answers.

A Clerk does not tire and does not forget: herders say one will greet a passer by the name given years before. It seems to know a false name from a true one, which no one can explain.

Scholars come to hear them, because a Clerk’s questions are the only spoken archive script left in the world, and some Goblin copyists take down the forms of its words beside the warrant fragments they copy from the ruins. The danger is to the stubborn and the secretive: a salvager who will not give a name is barred from the road, and one who pushes past a Clerk is struck down with the stone tablet. Some who gave a false name have found it hard to give their true one ever after.

The herders of Flockturn say a Clerk writes every name given to it into the sealed rolls, and that the rolls will one day call those names to account; they give their names readily and their children’s never. Reedfolk scholars say the Clerks are the last servants of Calvesh the Chronos-King, still taking names for rolls he closed. What the Clerks record, if anything, no one knows, since their tablets stay blank.

Treasure-seekers who go past the markers give false names and run, and the tale of the delver a Clerk chased down the marker road through a whole night, calling his false name louder and louder until the whole Grey Line knew it, is told at Stillgate as a joke and a warning.