The Last Soul Necromancer: An Unknown Class Beyond Death

Chapter 3: Lowlock, Morning

"Three!"

There was a stain on the ceiling shaped like a boot.

Ravel lay on his back and looked at it. He knew that stain. He had fallen asleep under it every night of his boyhood, and the last time he had seen it he was twenty, carrying the bedstead down to the street to sell, the week after they buried her.

"Four! I can hear you not moving!"

Lye. That was the smell. Lye and canal water and oats on the boil, and under it the sweetish reek of the tanneries when the wind sat wrong. Somewhere below the window a bargeman was swearing at a mule.

So this is what it does, he thought, quite calmly. At the end. It gives you a morning.

It seemed kind. He had not expected kindness.

He put his hand to his chest to feel the hole.

There was no hole. There was a nightshirt, darned at the collar, and under it ribs he could count with his fingertips, and a breastbone, and skin. He pushed the shirt up. In the grey light from the shutter, a line ran across the base of his breastbone, pale and fine as a hair, exactly the width of a sword's blade. It did not hurt. It looked like a scar he had been born with.

His hand was wrong, too. He held it up. It was narrow and soft, a boy's hand, with a boy's bitten nails. The rope-burn across the palm was gone. The little finger was whole to the tip, and he had left the last joint of that finger in a Locklurker's mouth when he was twenty-four.

He reached, by a habit fourteen years deep, for [Steady].

Nothing answered. No skill, no warmth in the spine. He reached for the Writ itself and found only the inside of his own head, quiet as an empty cart. Of course. A child has no Writ. Nobody has, until the plate.

A dying man doesn't dream what he's lost, Ravel thought slowly. He dreams what he wants.

"Five!"

A curtain of sacking twitched at the foot of the bed, and a face came round it upside-down, hair hanging.

"Mam says if you've died in the night, she wants the blanket back."

He stopped breathing.

Eleven. She was eleven. A sharp brown scrap of a girl with ink on her chin from somewhere, though the Ashlocks owned no ink, and a gap in her grin where a tooth had been. The last time he had seen that face it had been thirteen and trying very hard to be brave, looking back at him over a grey sleeve, and he had stood in the street with his cap in his hands, like the nothing he was, and let them walk her away.

He had looked for her for years. He had never even learned which house.

"What?" Pim said. She turned herself right way up to frown at him. "What are you looking at me like that for? Have I got something on me?"

"No." His voice cracked and came out high. A boy's voice. "You've lost a tooth."

"Ages ago. You were there. You said it made me look like a lock-gate with a paddle up." She narrowed her eyes. "Are you being strange because of the Reading? Corrie Dunne's big brother was sick in the canal before his."

"Six!" from the other room. "Pim, is he up?"

"He's being strange!"

"He's always strange. Is he up?"

Ravel got up.

It was harder than it should have been. The floor was too near and his legs were too light, and when he stood the room swung, and a hunger opened in him so wide and sudden that he had to catch the bedpost. He had forgotten this as well. Not hunger; he knew hunger. But the bottomless, growing kind, the kind a body has at seventeen when it is trying to build a man out of gruel.

The Ashlock rooms were two, with a curtain between. He pushed through it.

She was at the copper with her back to him.

Edda Ashlock was forty-one that spring and looked it. She had her sleeves pinned above the elbow and her hair tied up in a rag, and she was working a paddle through a boil of somebody else's sheets with her whole back, muttering under her breath. He caught the words, and they went through him like a blade far better aimed than Emeric's.

"...and if you've any pity in you, Stitch, you idle little god, you'll have the Harbins' linen dry by noon, for I've not the coal to..."

She turned, and saw him, and scowled.

"Look at the state of you. Your good shirt's on the chair. I was up till second bell with the iron, so if you get so much as a..."

He crossed the room in three steps and put his arms round her.

She went rigid. She smelled of lye and steam and coal-smoke. Her hands, red and cracked to the wrist, hovered away from his back as though she were afraid of wetting the nightshirt. He could feel her breathing.

Eleven years. He had dug that grave himself, to save the f*e.

"What's this?" Edda said, muffled. "What have you done?"

"Nothing."

"Seventeen years I've known you, Ravel Ashlock, and you have never once come at me before breakfast like this unless something was broken. Is it the jar? Have you been at the jar?"

A sound came out of him that was half a laugh and half something he clamped his teeth on. "I've not touched the jar."

"Then what?"

You died, he did not say. It took a year, and I watched all of it, and I had nine crowns.

"Bad dream," he said.

She held still a moment longer. Then the hovering hands came down, wet as they were, and gave his back two brisk pats, the way one settles a horse.

"Well," she said, and her voice had roughened. "Well. It's only a plate, love. It says what it says, and you come home after, and that's all." She pushed him off to arm's length and looked him over, grey eyes sharp in the firelight. The eyes she had given him. "You're peaky. And there's a look about your eyes I don't like. Did you sleep at all?"

"Some."

"Hm. Sit. Eat. Pim, bowls."

He sat, because his knees wanted him to.

The table was a plank on two barrels. There was the shelf, and on it the brown jar with the cracked lid. And beside the door, on its peg, the coat.

He had been keeping his eyes away from that.

It was a lock-keeper's coat, oilcloth gone black with years, with the lock-wheel stamped on every brass button. It had hung on that peg for eight years, since the night the Ninth Lock flooded and Tam Ashlock went down into the gate-pit to hold a failing paddle shut with his own two hands. Forty houses stayed dry. The lock-keeper did not come up. Every autumn Edda took the coat down and oiled it, and nobody had ever suggested selling it. On the sill beneath sat a chipped blue saucer with a crust in it: his father's offering to Lessa of the Locks, still put out fresh each morning by a woman who said she had no time for gods.

There was a chip in the saucer's rim, shaped like a thumbnail.

He had not remembered that. He was sure of it. In fourteen years of remembering this room, with all a grieving man's care, he had never once put that chip in.

A dying mind does not invent a chip in a saucer.

His hands began to shake. He put them flat on the plank.

So this was no kindness, no morning handed to a dead man on his way out. It was the oats and the lye and the bargeman's mule, and a girl banging three bowls down in front of him, and it was real, and the joy of it came up in him so fast and so violent that it was barely different from terror. He wanted to laugh until he was sick. He wanted to bar the door and stand in front of it with a knife for the rest of his life.

"Mam, he's gone white."

"He's hungry. Eat, the pair of you."

The gruel was thin and grey and the best thing he had ever tasted. Edda sawed a heel of bread in three and gave him the big piece without appearing to. He saw her do it, saw her own share, and for once had the sense to say nothing and remember. When the water bucket wanted filling he got up before she could, and found to his honest astonishment that he could barely get it off the floor. A man who had carried a dying boy up the stairs of Vael Tarsis stood in a slum kitchen and fought a pail of canal water to a draw.

Level one, he thought. Not even that. Level nothing.

Edda coughed.

It was small. Dry, and short, turned into the back of her wrist as she reached for the jar. She did not notice she had done it.

Ravel set the bucket down very carefully.

There it is.

Grey lung. The laundress's sickness: lye and steam and coal, year on year. It would take three winters to kill her, and a proper healer could lift it out in an afternoon for forty crowns. Twenty locks to the crown. Eight hundred locks.

The lid came off the jar. He listened to her count out the bits for his Reading candle and did the sum from the sound, because he could no more stop counting than stop his heart. Four locks and thirty bits.

"Mam," Pim said with her mouth full, "what'll he be? Old Brann says he's got a porter's back. I think Knight."

"He'll be what he is. Swallow before you talk."

"I think Knight."

Bearer, Ravel thought. He knew it as he knew his own name. In two hours the plate would say Bearer, and under it would be three small skills and seven black bars nobody could read, and the hall would laugh, not unkindly. But he knew now that the bars were for something. He knew where the forgotten dungeons lay, and who would die in them, and in which years. He had fourteen years in his head, and every one of them was still to come.

He dressed behind the curtain. The good shirt was stiff with starch and still warm.

"Hall doors shut at third bell," Edda said, straightening his collar with two fingers and not meeting his eye. "Don't dawdle. Don't gawp at the quality. And stand up straight, they like that."

"Yes, Mam."

"Go on, then."

The door opened on Tanner's Row, and spring.

He had forgotten it could be beautiful. The canal lay flat and brown and full of sky. Washing hung across the row in ranks, most of it his mother's. At the far end the great black beams of the Ninth Lock stood against the morning with water sheeting off them, and every doorstep had somebody on it.

"Reading day!" Old Brann called from his. He had a carry-frame across his knees and a waxed thread between his teeth, and his back was bent like a shepherd's crook from forty years of other men's baggage. "Chin up, lad! Whatever she says, there's always work for a good back."

You lived, tonight, Ravel thought, lifting a hand to him. You lived, and you taught me everything I know, and I carried you out of Brackenfell the year after.

Tonight.

He stopped walking.

It had been waiting behind the joy all along, patient as a debt. His Reading day. He had come home from it, the first time, past midnight and drunk on small beer and shame, and the Row had been full of torches and Lockwatch, and of shapes laid out in a line under his mother's sheets.

A little after second bell of the night, the old drain at the foot of Tanner's Row had opened on something that was not the canal.

He looked down the row, and it was like looking at Tarsbridge again, in the moment before the threads.

Mother Hesk, shelling peas on her step. One. The two small Dunne boys, wrestling in the gutter. Two, three. Aldous the cooper and his wife, arguing fondly through a window. Four, five. Old Widow Marsh. The Tolley girl, who was six. The three lodgers above the chandler's, whose names he had never learned and whose bodies he had helped to carry. The lamplighter, who had come running to help.

Eleven.

They waved to him. Somebody shouted good luck.

He was seventeen years old, with no class, no skill, no coin, and arms that could not lift a full pail.

Ravel Ashlock straightened his collar and went to be Read. Eleven of them on that row, and second bell of the night was fourteen hours off.