The Last Soul Necromancer: An Unknown Class Beyond Death

Chapter 4: The Reading

The Chartery hall of Greywater had nine steps, a door of black oak twice the height of a man, and a bell that struck the third hour while Ravel was still on the fourth step.

He ran the rest. His legs were not ready for it. By the top his chest was heaving and his sight had gone grey at the edges, and the great door was already swinging shut on the lamplight inside.

A hand caught it.

"In you come. No harm done. They've only just started on the quality, the wards won't be called for half an hour yet."

It was a big hand, square, freckled across the knuckles, with a sword-blister healing at the base of the thumb.

Ravel knew that hand. He had watched it open, one night and fourteen years ago, and let a sword fall on a black stone floor.

He looked up before he could stop himself.

Eighteen. Emeric Lyle was eighteen. Tall already, and fair, in a squire's tabard with a door-ward's sash across it and a new brass tag at his collar that read KNIGHT. D. No grey in his hair yet, and not a line on him. Just that open, easy, hopeful face, the face of a young man who liked people and expected, on the whole, to be liked back.

"Here, are you all right? You've gone the colour of tallow." The hand left the door and reached for his elbow. "Lean on the..."

Ravel went backward so fast that his heel came off the top step.

He caught the rail. Emeric had frozen with both palms up and open, the way one stands for a spooked horse.

"Easy," he said. "Easy, friend. I'm only the door." A laugh, a little uncertain. "First one's the worst, they say. I was sick twice before mine, and once after, on the examiner's boots. She has never forgiven me. Go on in. Whatever the plate tells you, it's only where you start."

Ravel found that he could not look at the face. He looked at the door instead: the iron studs, the grain of the oak.

"Thank you," he told it, and went in.

"Good luck!" Emeric called after him. He meant it. Anyone could have heard that he meant it.

He doesn't know, Ravel thought, walking blind into the crowd. He has done nothing. He is eighteen years old and he held a door for a stranger.

It did not help at all.

The hall was long and high and smelled of beeswax, wet wool and three hundred frightened children. Down one wall ran the rank board, slate after slate of chalked names under letters as tall as a man's arm, F at the door and S so far up the room it was lost in the lamp-smoke. The benches at the front held the quality, in house colours, with their mothers. The wards stood at the back in their good shirts, by district, and tried not to touch anything.

He found the Lowlock corner by its smell of lye.

The last time he had stood on this spot he had been sick with hope. He remembered that now, with a kind of pity. A boy of seventeen who had honestly believed the plate might say Knight. Who had practised, in the coal-hole, with a stick, what his face would do when it did.

At the far end stood the dais. On it: a lectern of black oak, and on the lectern a slab of grey metal polished bright as a mirror, its edges worn round by more hands than the city had ever held at once. The plate. To the right sat a clerk with the roll. To the left, in a cushioned chair, a very old priest dozed with his chin on his chest, and behind the chair, just where the lamplight gave out, a younger one stood with his hood up and his hands folded in his sleeves.

Behind the lectern stood the examiner.

She was whip-thin, near sixty, with grey hair cropped like a soldier's, and the first two fingers of her left hand were gone at the knuckle. Ravel remembered her. In another life she had glanced at his plate, said Bearer. It's faulting on the fourth line. Next, and never once lifted her eyes to see whom she was saying it to. The hall called her the Grey Auditor. He had been afraid of her for fourteen years on the strength of eight words.

"Vey," she said now. "Castor. Of House Vey."

The boy who came up the aisle did not walk like a boy. He walked like something drilled. Pale gold hair, a hawk's nose, a white surcoat without a crease in it. He laid his palm on the plate as if he were taking an oath.

Light came up out of the metal. It poured between his fingers, gold and hard and clean, and threw his shadow the whole length of the hall.

"Sunblade," said the examiner, in the tone she might have used for Thirdday.

The front benches went up like a flock of pigeons. House Vey was on its feet. Somebody was weeping. Castor Vey did not smile. He took his hand from the plate, crossed to the old priest's chair and knelt, and Ravel, who had known him only as the Dawn Saint laughing in a practice yard, watched his lips move and understood with some surprise that the prayer was real.

Then he rose and came back down the aisle, and his eyes went over the wards at the back of the hall the way a man's eyes go over weather.

After the quality it went quickly. A hand, a word, a stamp, the next. Carter. Washer. Smith. A girl from the Foundry Ward drew Warrior and her whole row roared. A boy drew Sweeper and went down the steps with his face burning.

A big, slow lad from the tannery end drew Bearer.

The hall laughed. It was not an unkind laugh; it never had been. Somebody called out that he had the back for it. Ravel watched him take his tag and try to smile, and knew to the week what the next fourteen years of that boy's life would hold. He wanted to say something. There was nothing a stranger could say.

Ravel counted the heads in front of him. Fourteen. Nine. Four.

Bearer, he told himself. Say nothing. Take the tag. Walk out. You have done this once already, and it did not kill you. That came later.

"Ashlock. Ravel. Lowlock."

He climbed the three steps and laid his hand on the plate.

It was cold. Last time there had been a tingle and a word, no more than a shopkeeper's glance. This was not that. Something on the far side of the metal stopped what it was doing, and turned, and looked at him.

Letters rose under his fingers like breath on glass.

ASHLOCK, RAVEL

CLASS ■■■■■■

The line stuttered. It struck itself out and wrote again.

CLASS Necromancer [UNREGISTERED]

RANK I / none / ERROR

SKILLS Raise Husk

■■■■■■■

It did not say Bearer.

For a moment he could not make the word mean anything. Then it meant everything it had ever meant, all at once.

Every child in Brannoch knew that word. It was in the first sermon they ever sat through. The Devourer's thieves, who stole the dead out of the hands of the gods. Struck from the Writ three thousand years ago by the Four Who Hold, root and branch, so that no plate would ever speak it again. Mothers used it to get children indoors at dusk. Be good, or the necromancer will have your bones.

A heresy, in short, wearing a class's name.

And it was written under his hand in a hall with two priests in it.

He did not gasp. A boy of seventeen would have. But the man inside the boy had spent fourteen years walking into rooms full of things that wanted him dead, and that man did what he always did. He looked for the ways out.

The door: forty paces, and Emeric on it. The old priest: asleep. The young one: lifting his head.

The examiner.

Ilse Varga was looking at the plate. For the first time in two lives he saw her face do something. It did not change. It went still, the way a blade is still when it is halfway out of the scabbard. Her maimed hand lay flat on the lectern.

Then her eyes came up to his.

They were pale and hard and saw a great deal. They saw, he thought, a slum boy who ought to have been crying or babbling, and who was instead measuring the distance to the door. Something moved behind them that he could not read.

"Don't speak," she said. Her lips scarcely moved. "Don't lift that hand until I tell you."

Then, in the flat carrying voice of the Chartery:

"Ashlock, Ravel. Summoner."

A pause, exactly long enough for a clerk to dip his pen.

"Unverified. Plate's faulting on the line."

Her maimed hand had moved while she spoke. It lay across the top of the plate now, two fingers and a thumb, and it covered exactly one word.

The pen scratched. At the back of the hall the Lowlock corner whooped. A calling class, out of the slums! Somebody laughed and shouted, "Summon what? His mam's washing?"

"Unverified, Examiner?"

It came from the edge of the dais. A soft voice, a pleasant one, with an apology already folded into it.

"Forgive me. Might the Church look? Father Corwin would wish it noted properly."

The skin crawled on the back of Ravel's neck. He did not know why. He could not spare the thought to wonder; he was drowning in the word under his palm.

"The Church may look at my roll, Brother, the same as it does every year." Varga did not turn her head. "The plate's gone cold. It does that in the canal damp. Hand off, boy."

He lifted his hand.

The letters went out of the metal like breath fading from a window. There was nothing left but the plate itself, polished by a thousand years of palms, bright and blank as still water.

His face was in it.

Seventeen. Thin, hollow under the cheekbones, black hair that would not lie flat. He had forgotten that face. He would not have known it in a crowd.

And the eyes were wrong.

He had had his mother's eyes all his life, the grey of canal water under cloud. The eyes looking up at him out of the plate were violet. Not blue in a poor light. Violet, clear and deep, the colour of the sky over Tarsbridge in the moment before it opened.

Behind his reflected shoulder, a second face came into the metal.

The young priest had stepped forward after all. He had pushed back his hood to lean and look at a plate with nothing left on it. It was a mild face. A forgettable one. Unlined, fourteen years unlined, above a pair of soft folded hands.

He met Ravel's eyes in the metal, and smiled at him with real kindness.

"Congratulations, my son," said Brother Anselm.