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Chapter 91: The Lag
"What does it say?" said his mother.Evan did not answer. He was looking at the leaf at his feet, with the cold typed capitals running across the cream like a row of small black teeth, and the whole of the great domed chamber was full of falling paper, and for the length of one long breath he could not make his mouth do anything at all.It was Voss who moved.He stepped between Evan and the drift of leaves and put up his hand, very slowly, palm out, in the gesture a man makes to a horse that is thinking of bolting."Do not read it out," he said. "Please. Mrs. Vale. Mr. Fenn. Do not say what it says." His voice was pitched low and flat, the voice of a man who has been trained for thirty-one years to be audible only to the person he is addressing. "I should like everyone to be quiet for a moment. I should like to try something. I have an idea, and it is a very unpleasant one.""I will be quiet," said Evan's mother, "when I am told what I am being quiet about."A leaf fell onto the lamp
Chapter 90: The Schedule of Expectation
It did not open all at once.That was what saved them, Evan thought afterwards. If the whole of the floor had gone, in a single heave, as the Needle had meant it to, there would have been nothing left to see. But the rim was cracked and frayed and four hundred years from sound, and what it did was only to ease, as a door eases that has been held shut against a weight and is no longer held. A hand's width of dark appeared in the middle of the stone. Then two.Then the paper began to come up.It rose out of the hole like moths. A few at first. Single cream-coloured leaves, a handspan square, turning slowly in the wind that came up from underneath, and then a dozen, and then hundreds, thousands, a slow soft blizzard of paper filling the whole domed chamber and rising to the black stone roof where it hung, rustling, like a flock of pale birds that has found a place to roost.Voss came out of the corridor at a run.He had not run in thirty-one years. He ran like a man who has never been ta
Chapter 89: In My Own Name
He turned round.She was standing on the pale lip of the stone, six feet from the black hole in the floor, with the frayed thread of the last stitch trembling beside her foot. She had taken off her shoes. He did not know why. She stood on the bare stone in her stocking feet, in the plain grey dress that was the only thing she owned, and the light from the vial-lamps, which had followed them down the corridor like a tide, laid a thin gold edge on the whole of her.She was looking at him. He thought he had never seen anyone look at him like that. It was a look with no hurry in it, a look that had made up its mind to take the whole length of a thing.He opened his mouth.Nothing came. It was only his own voice, thin and rough from eleven hours of being used for something else, and it did not know where to begin."I have lost your name," Evan said.Behind Serena, in the dark, something breathed in and out."I am sorry. It is the stupidest thing I have ever done. I know every single other
Chapter 88: The Coat
They went down the way they had gone before, but there were more of them now, and it felt like a procession.The room under the stairs was waiting with its door open. The old brown coat hung on Serena's shoulders as they stepped into the plaster cell, and she looked back once at the lit kitchen, at the soup bowls and the biscuit tin, and then she followed Evan down the stone stair into the smell of salt and river and iron.Evan's mother came after her with a lamp, and Voss behind with his hat clutched to his chest, and last of all Tobias Fenn, who had insisted, who had said in a small cracked voice that he did not know why but he would feel a great deal worse if he did not.The vials had brightened.It was the first thing Evan saw as the stair turned. All along the shell-coloured wall, in row on row of little glass niches, the tiny lights had grown, as if a wind had gone down the gallery and fanned them. They were beating faster. He saw Tobias put out a hand to one without touching, a
Chapter 87: Everything He Knew
It turned out to be very difficult to drink tea and whistle at the same time.Evan found this out at the kitchen table at ten o'clock that night, with his mother holding the cup an inch from his mouth and the tune running steadily on, and he found it out all down the front of his shirt."Do not look at me like that," said his mother. "You will take it in the gaps.""There are no gaps," Serena said, on his behalf, since he could not. "He does the hang and the settle and goes straight round. There is no place to put a cup.""Then he will go thirsty." She set the cup down with a clack. "I will not be told by a tune what my son may drink."Tobias Fenn, at the far end of the table, had a bowl of soup in front of him and was eating it with a total, dazed concentration, as though it were the first soup in the world. Voss sat beside him with his hat on his knee. He had said that he did not eat. He had been given a bowl anyway. It was empty. He looked at it with the wondering embarrassment of
Chapter 86: Do You Consent (b)
Evan had never seen the whole of the board at once. It had always been a place where one name lit at a time. Now it was covered, floor to ceiling, in small white script: every name that had ever been ranked in Halcyon, in rows, thousands upon thousands of them, each with its single letter at the side. A. C. F. B. F. D. F. He saw his own, near the bottom, in the F column.They were coming off the glass like snow.Each letter fell as a spark falls, slow and bright, and as it fell it loosened, and each spark that dropped from the board drifted out over the heads of the people in the hall and went, like a moth to a lamp, to somebody.A woman in the gallery put both hands to her mouth. She had been standing at the rail with a clipboard, a clerk, a stout grey woman who had stood at the back of every Ceremony for thirty years. She said, in a voice that carried, quite distinctly, "Hush-a-bye, my little one," and stopped, and stared at her hands, and sat down on the floor and wept.A young man
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