The merchant arrived on a Tuesday in early spring, when I was approximately fourteen months old.
He came from the direction of the main road, leading a cart loaded with goods from the town, the kind of generalist trader who covered small settlements that were not worth a dedicated shopkeeper. He had a portable rank scanner, which I gathered was a common enough product in the towns but relatively novel in places like Maxentius, and he had the entrepreneurial instinct to offer complimentary scans as a method of drawing people to his cart.
I heard about this from inside the house before I saw it, because Mara was told about it by the neighbor who knocked on the door, and the neighbor told her at considerable volume.
The village gathered in the way small villages gather, which is to say immediately and completely. Everyone came. This was the kind of event that Maxentius did not generate frequently, and the residents were not going to miss it.
Mara carried me along.
The scanner was a small device, palm-sized, that the merchant held near each subject for approximately three seconds while it processed. The result appeared as a glowing numeral above the device, visible to anyone nearby. This was, I understood, a simplified consumer version of the Conclave's official equipment. Less accurate at the higher ranges, but reliable for basic assessment.
The results proceeded as expected. F. F. F. One E, which produced a small stir of conversation around the young man in question, who looked simultaneously proud and alarmed. F. F. E. F.
Rynn was a solid F, which she received with a clenched jaw and the expression of someone making a private note.
Aldus was an F, which he received with the slight smile of a man who had never expected otherwise and had made his peace with this at some point in the distant past.
Mara was an F, which she received while asking the merchant if he also carried dried beans, because she needed dried beans.
Then the merchant turned to me.
I was sitting in Mara's arms, which put me at approximately the right height for the scanner without any particular adjustment. The merchant held the device toward me in the casual way he had held it toward everyone else, already beginning to look past me toward the next person in line.
The device made a sound I had not heard it make before.
Not a result sound. A different sound, lower, with a quality that made several people nearby frown slightly without knowing why. The numeral display flickered. Then it flickered again. Then it showed what I can only describe as visual confusion, several partial characters overlapping in a way that was clearly unintended, and then the device produced a small curl of smoke from its lower seam and went quiet.
The merchant stared at it.
He shook it. He pressed the activation surface again. Nothing.
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
He was, I gave him credit for this, a professional. He cleared his throat, pocketed the device, and said in a tone of practiced neutrality that the battery had run out, which was technically possible and also obviously not what had happened.
Several people looked at me. I maintained the expression of a fourteen-month-old infant, which required no particular effort because I had been practicing it for fourteen months.
Aldus, standing slightly to the side, said: 'Ah. Broken merchandise.'
He said it with exactly enough weight on the word broken to make it sound like a complete explanation, and then he took my hand and looked at the merchant's other goods with the easy interest of a man who had already moved on to other topics.
The merchant sold his beans and his cloth and his other goods and left before noon. He had fixed his scanner by the time he reached the road. It worked perfectly on the first test, which he ran several times to confirm.
He filed a report with the nearest Conclave collection point three days later. Not because he was particularly civic-minded, but because the form the merchant's guild required for equipment anomalies asked him to, and he had always been thorough about paperwork.
The report went into the standard collection pile.
In a room in a building in a city that was several days' travel from Maxentius, an analyst whose specific job was anomaly correlation pulled the report two weeks later, cross-referenced it against a prior report from a Conclave sensitive in the same region, and sat back in her chair for a moment.
Two independent anomaly incidents from the same general area within a short time frame was not unheard of.
She marked it for follow-up. Priority level: moderate.
In Maxentius, I watched Mara haggle for dried beans and thought about what kind of equipment could scan someone like me without immediately failing.
The answer, I suspected, was none that currently existed.
That was going to be someone else's problem.