They read Jorun Tosk's tag in the hall a second time.It had been read once, three weeks before, and Garth had said not found. Now there was a body. A retriever had brought it up out of Brackenfell with his own hands, on the worst day that hill had ever given the Chartery. So Garth struck a line through two words on the roll, and read the name again, and the hall answered carried out. Men took off their caps. One or two of them looked round at Ravel as they did it.He had not thought that there could be anything worse than the first reading. He had been wrong.They burned him at the Ash Stair the same afternoon. Brida Tosk was a small, fair, tired woman, seven months gone, with three children holding to her skirt. She had grieved him once already, over an empty bier. Ravel watched her do it again. The quiet man had told him how that would be, in a gallery, in his own words. He had asked for it not to happen.A chaplain said the Passing. It was a broad brown man with a cropped head. He

"Mind your heads, my loves," said Dagna Ironwrit. "I'm sorry for the boots. It can't be helped."She was talking to the dead. She had not stopped since the cage touched. She stood at the bottom of the pit on a floor that was made of people, in a dusty bar of moonlight, with a wedge in one hand and a maul in the other. She set the iron against the great pale trunk as tenderly as a woman pinning a hem.Ravel stood beside her, and held her lantern, and tried not to look at what he stood on.They had come down in threes. It had gone exactly as a lamp-boy said it would. The hill had not known that its own throat was a road. The dead were on the ledge above, at the breach, with five of the living behind them. Kheshi and Nessa had the windlass at the top. He had told Maren not to draw until he gave her the word, and she had called him a name that he had not heard before."Five," said Dagna, and knocked it home. The trunk shuddered. Somewhere through the wall, the thing in the dome had begun

For a fortnight it was the best time that he had ever known.He could admit that, afterwards. It was part of the cost. The Settling passed. Lowlock touched its cap to him. His mother had a pew cushion sent down, unasked, by a house on High Quay. Children on the Row played at pallbearers, with a plank and a cat. Jem Harrow's apples came every third day in a basket, and Pim ate them in bed.He went up to Underfell once, alone. He walked down the one street at dusk. He had walked it before, in a year that was not coming. Every door had stood open then, and he had learned forty-one names from the lintels. The doors were shut now. There was lamplight under them, and somebody was scolding a child.He stood there until it was quite dark. He thought that this was what it had all been for. He had come back for his mother, and his sister, and this.The letter came on the day that Brackenfell should have broken.Fesk had it read out in the hall, because it came under the League's seal and concer

The High Canon had been in Greywater for nine days, and Lowlock was in love with him.Ravel had the story from his mother, before he had his boots off. She told it flatly, with her red hands folded on the table. Vaudric Ansell had come up the Reach by barge, without a guard. He had gone first to Underfell, on foot, in the snow. He had knelt in the field for an hour. He had said the Rite of Passing himself, over four hundred mounds, and wept. Then he had stood up and told the Lockshire that certain servants of the Assize had exceeded their office. There would be an inquiry. The guilty would answer for it."He kissed Jem Harrow's wife on both cheeks," said Edda. "She's not washed since.""And you?""I think that a man who weeps so readily has had practice." She did not look up. "But I'm a laundress. I don't say it on the Row."He had taken the scandal and made a procession of it. Ravel saw that. He had seen it done once before, in another life, by a quiet priest who was sorry. It had be

Ilse had told him how it was done. It took her four sentences."You go where you are most yourself. You say it aloud, once, and you mean it. The Writ sets it against everything that you have ever done. If the two agree, it takes." She had pulled on her gloves. "If they do not, it will tell you so, and it is not gentle.""And if I try twice?""Then you had better be right the second time. A soul is not a door, to be tried with every key on the ring."He spent thirty of his days on the marsh first. There were three small stones in the creeks below Saltgate, and he broke them one after another with the Host about him. It was dull and wet, and it paid badly.[Level 63.]He knew that he was putting it off. Marta said so. She said it on the twenty-ninth evening, while she scraped mud from her greaves."You've cleared three ponds that a brass party could have managed, sir. There's a thing you're not doing. I had a corporal who used to count the blankets whenever he was afraid."He went back