The Last Soul Necromancer: An Unknown Class Beyond Death

Chapter 10: Thirty Days

"I will, Brother," Ravel said. "Thank you."

It was the first lie he had told that man in either life. It came out as smoothly as a cork from a bottle. He supposed nine years of saying yes, Brother had been practice for it.

Anselm smiled, and inclined his head, and went back to Wend's widow.

Ravel stood with the paper in his hand until the three fires had burned down to their iron.

His mother waited until Pim was asleep.

She sat at the plank with her mending in her lap and did not mend. He had worked out, on the walk home, the only thing he had to give her.

"I'll not lie to you, Mam. So there's a good deal I can't say."

"Can't, or won't?"

"Can't. Not yet."

Edda turned that over. "Did you know? Before the rats. Did you know it was coming?"

It was a long silence.

"Yes."

Her red hands went flat on the wood. "How?"

"That's the part I can't say."

She looked at him. She looked for a long time, and he let her.

"Your eyes were grey," Edda said. "Two days ago. I've looked at them for seventeen years; do you think I'd not know?" Her voice dropped, though there was no one to hear it but the copper. "Is it a thing the priests would want told to them?"

He said nothing. It was an answer.

Edda Ashlock feared the Church the way a laundress fears fire: sensibly, and from experience. She was quiet for so long that the candle guttered.

"Then I don't want it," she said at last. "Not till you can stand there and tell me it's safe to have. If they ask me, I'll say I know nothing, and it'll be true, and that's as well, for I never could lie to a priest." She picked up her needle. "But you come home, Ravel. Every night you can. You eat at this table. That's the price."

"Yes, Mam."

"And you keep that good shirt out of it."

He had eight bits.

It was the most money he had held in this life, and he had come by it honestly. The watch had no use for dead Locklurkers. An alchemist's runner would give two bits a pair for the glands behind the jaw, if a lad knew where to cut. He had known. He had waited until the sheets were down.

On the third morning he took six of them to the Chartery.

"Provisional," said the clerk, without looking up. "Six bits. Unverified wants an examiner's hand on it. Second door."

The examiner's room was the barest he had seen in a building full of rooms. A table. Two stools. A rack of wooden blades, worn pale at the grips. A window on the drill yard.

"Shut the door," said Ilse Varga.

She read his paper and dipped her pen, and did not sign.

"Sit. You're bleeding through that bandage."

He sat.

"Nineteen years I've stood behind that plate," she said. "I've read out Bearer to boys who wept and Sunblade to boys who thought it no more than their due. In nineteen years I have never once read out a thing the plate did not say." Her maimed hand lay on the table between them. "Two days ago I did it in front of the Church, for a slum boy I'd never laid eyes on. I should like to be able to tell you I know why."

He kept still.

"I saw what it wrote. All of it. The word, and the line where the Writ fell over its own feet, and those bars." The pale eyes did not blink. "Do you know what that word is?"

"A sermon."

"Do you know what's done to them?"

"Yes."

"Yes," she agreed. "You do. That is what I can't get past. A boy of seventeen sees that under his own hand, with two priests in the room, and he doesn't cry out. He doesn't so much as look at me. He looks at the door. Then the old priest. Then the young one." She leaned back. "I spent eleven years in a trade where I was paid to notice what a person looks at first. You counted the ways out, Ashlock. Like a man who has been in a great many bad rooms."

"I was frightened."

"You were. You were frightened like a veteran."

The pen scratched. She pushed the paper across and kept one finger on it.

"Here is how it stands. I lied on a Chartery roll, and I shall go on lying, because the other course is to hand a child to the Assize. I did that once. I'll not do it twice." She said it with no more feeling than the clerk had put into six bits. "But I will have the reason. Not today. You are no use to me frightened and less use dead. When I ask, you'll bring me the truth, or you'll bring me nothing. Bring me a lie, and I'll know it, and we are finished."

"And if the truth's worse than the lie?"

Something that was almost humour moved at the corner of her mouth. "It generally is."

She took the finger away.

"Don't use it where it can be seen. Don't use it on anything that ever had a name. And in thirty days the Canon's plate comes to Greywater, and that one does not go cold for canal damp, or for me. I can't help you there. Think of something." A pause. "What will you do for bread? Nobody hires a summoner with nothing to summon."

"Carry."

She looked at him oddly. "Most lads who draw a calling class would starve before they'd pick up a frame."

"There's always work for a good back."

It was out before he knew whose words they were.

Her eyes came to his face and stayed there. She had known Brann. He had carried out of her hall for longer than she had stood in it.

"Hm," said Ilse Varga. "Porters' roll is the desk by the door. Tell Garth I sent you. And have that leg seen to. I don't sign charters for corpses."

Garth turned out to be the bent old man who had put the torch into his hand.

He kept the roll in a book as greasy as a saddle. He wrote Ashlock, R. at the foot of a long column, and took from a drawer a strip of leather the length of a finger, stamped with a carry-frame.

"Buckles to your strap. Lose it and it's a bit for another."

Ravel held it in his palm.

He had worn one for fourteen years. Same leather. Same stamp, a little crooked, from the same cracked die. He could have drawn it blind. He had come back from the dead with a forbidden class and seven black bars across his soul, and the first thing the world had put in his hand was a porter's badge.

He found that he was nearly laughing. He stopped, because the old man was watching.

"Not till that leg's sound," Garth said. "A fortnight. I'll not have Brann's lad drowned for want of a calf."

There was a box on the desk with a slot in the lid. Every porter knew it: the Frames' Box, which burned those who died with nothing. Ravel put his last two bits into it.

"That's Brann's."

"He owe it?"

"I owed him."

Garth looked at the box, and at him, and nodded slowly, as at a sum that had come out right.

So he had a fortnight in which he could not work, a stub of chalk from his mother's marking-box, and a wall.

He ruled four columns on the brick of the gauge-house, beside his father's table. WHEN. WHAT. WHO. WHY.

He began at the nearest end.

Summer's end, 3018. Brackenfell Deep breaks. Nine hundred. He wrote Brann beneath it, looked at the name, and rubbed it out with his thumb. That debt had been called early.

The year 3019: the Church comes to Lowlock, testing children for the healing light. Pim.

The same year: Dunmarch Pass. A knight's daughter, brought down by contract. Calder. He had never seen her face. He had only read her tag.

The year 3020: grey lung. Mam. Forty crowns.

The year 3021: the Empire crosses into the League.

The year 3023: Castor Vey takes the Dawn Saint's seat.

The year 3026: Tollenhaven. Forty thousand.

The year 3029: the Tanglewold. Sela. He could spell her name. He found, with a small cold shock, that he had to think to see her face.

The year 3031: Vael Tarsis. Hob. Dell. Tarsbridge. Everyone.

Under that he set down the dungeons: every one within a day of Greywater that stood uncleared in the spring of '17, and who would clear it first, and when, and how badly. He had carried for a third of those parties and brought out the dead for most of the rest.

Then he stepped back and looked at the fourth column.

It was almost bare.

Why had Brackenfell broken? He had been eighteen, hauling packs. Overdue, people had said. Why did the Church want his sister? Why had Sela's party walked into that hollow on a map Brother Anselm had vouched for? Why had the sky opened?

We unsealed it, he chalked against the last line. It was the only why he had.

That was the joke of it. He had been there. For fourteen years he had stood at the back of every room where the age was decided, holding the coats. A porter sees everything and is told nothing. He knew the day and the count of the dead for each disaster of his lifetime, and could not have named the man who had chosen a single one.

And the days would move. He had burned the proof of that yesterday, on a frame.

Fourteen years. At the end of them there was an autumn dusk in the Gate Court of Vael Tarsis, and a sky that opened like a ledger. He meant to be standing there with every name on this wall still breathing, and to see with his own eyes whose hand broke the seal. If it was a young knight's hand again, he did not know what he would do. He had not let himself think about it. He was going to have to.

He wrote what was left to him down the side, in the order it would kill him.

One. Thirty days. A plate that does not go cold. He had no answer.

Two. Forty crowns.

Three. Stop being level three.

Four. Two years, for Pim.

Five. Sixteen months, for nine hundred.

His eye kept returning to one line among the dungeons.

The Hollow Chantry. A ruin on the marsh road, behind a sealed gate. It would be opened in the summer of '19 by three scholars out of Highvault, and a week later a porter of nineteen would be sent in with a frame to fetch what was left of them. He had found two in the hymn rooms. He had gone deeper than he was paid to, looking for the third. There had been a stair. At the bottom, a door with no handle, and round it a long roll of names cut in a script he could not read. The last place on the roll had been left smooth.

He had not touched it. A Bearer of nineteen, alone, with a lamp burning low. It had been very cold down there, and he had not liked the cold. He had gone back up and found the third scholar under the choir screen, and had not thought of that door again in twelve years.

He was thinking of it now. He had learned, since, what a cold thing in a deep place could be.

He chalked: CHANTRY. A door.

He stepped back from it and decided the wall had said enough. He wet his sleeve in the canal and wiped his four columns off the brick, every line; he had them by heart. He left his father's table where it was.

He still had the chalk in his fingers when the Writ opened without being called.

Not the page. Only the margin, the strip outside the silver rule, and in it the slanting violet hand that was not the Writ's, writing as he watched.

Unindexed task. Witness the unburied beneath the chantry.

No reward. No term. The Writ did not set tasks for porters; in fourteen years it had not offered him so much as a cull. And this was not the Writ.

Something had been reading over his shoulder, and it had got to the end of the wall before he wiped it.