The Hollow Chantry stood two hours out along the marsh road, where the causeway bent, with its back to the reeds.Three weeks had gone by since the Canon's envoy rode on to his next town. Ravel had spent them carrying for Tessa Brandt, and paying a little off what he owed in the Old Cut, and learning that there was nothing left under Lowlock that the Writ would pay him to kill. He was level eleven. He had been level eleven for every day of them.And there was a line of violet handwriting that had not come again, because it did not need to. Witness the unburied beneath the chantry.So on a Secondday, before light, he buckled on the hanger and walked out by the marsh gate. Captain Rusk had sold him the hanger out of the watch-house lumber, for eight bits and a promise not to stand like that in front of the recruits.It was a small house of grey stone, with most of its roof. A lych-gate. A yard of leaning stones. A porch, and in the porch a door of black oak banded in sunbrass gone green

"Nothing," Ravel said."That isn't an answer.""It's the only true one I've got." He made himself look at the man. "You've done nothing to me, Lyle. Not one thing. You shared your bread. You carried a dead man's bones up a hill for me. You walked out into that, this morning, to keep it off my neck.""But.""But I knew somebody once. He was like you. Open-handed, and brave, and everybody's friend. I'd have followed him anywhere. I did. It ended badly.""What did he do?""What he was told."Emeric did not answer at once. It had gone home somewhere. Ravel saw it go in, and could not tell where it had lodged."I'm not him," Emeric said at last."No," said Ravel. He wished that he could hear it the way it was meant.They stayed two days in the porch, while the knight slept and woke and slept, and the colour came back to him by inches.Ravel put the three back as he had found them. He had said that he would. Kheshi shot teal off the marsh and would let neither of them cook it. She sat each

There was one more line, cut by itself across the lintel.Tobiah read it three times, and then put it into Brannoch with the air of a man setting down something that might go off."Let him enter who comes bearing the dead." He pushed up his spectacles. "Him. One. It's quite particular about the number. And bearing is the same root as the word on the roll. It's a pun, or a title, or an office. I should say an office. You would have to be one of them, and they have been dust since before there was a Brannoch. So that's that." He sounded heartbroken. "We could take a rubbing."Ravel looked at the door for a while."What if it only means what it says?""I beg your pardon?""Bearing the dead."He went back up the thirty steps and through the three rooms. In the porch he knelt by the nearest of the roof-breakers, the one he had stood up twice."Third time," he told it. "But I'll carry you this once. That's different."He lifted the bones onto the frame, a piece at a time, in the order a por

He had three flasks of oil, and his own lamp, which a porter never lets go of.He spent the first flask before he had drawn ten breaths. He ran a line of it across the gallery from wall to wall, ten paces down from the gate, and put the lamp flame to it.It went up blue, and then yellow. The white sheet that was pouring up the slope came to the edge of it and stopped, and heaped, and began to pile against itself like sand against a board. The smoke rolled back over them. Where the smoke went, the heap drew off.So they did not like fire, and they did not like smoke. That was two things known."That'll burn a quarter-hour," he said. "No longer. We can't be here when it's done.""There's a door," said Nessa Brill.Her voice was thin, but it held. She had Odo Pike's head in her lap and both her hands on the strap above his knee."On the way down. I was in front. Second turning on the left, forty paces along, there's a door with iron on it. I looked." She swallowed. "It's a store. There's

He went back to the Hollow Chantry on the fifth day after the hill. He went alone, with the frame on his back and nothing on it.That was the custom, when a porter went to fetch one of his own.He had spent the points first. There were eighteen of them, and he put every one into the body. It seemed only decent to come down those steps as much of a man as he could make himself.The lead had not grown back across the door. Tobiah had said that it would not. A core that has paid out sleeps for a season, and a seal with nothing to drink from is only lead. The wind had swept most of the wings out of the nave. By the lych-gate there was a mound of new earth, with a mason's bar set upright at the head of it. He touched two fingers to the iron as he went by.Then he went down the three rooms and the thirty steps, and stood in front of the slab.The cold came out and felt him over, as it had before. It went along the straps. It stopped where the frame bit. It did not draw the stone aside. It w