The Last Soul Necromancer: An Unknown Class Beyond Death

Chapter 8: Three Heartbeats

On the stairs of Vael Tarsis, a thread had gone through his fingers like light through water.

This one did not.

His fist closed on it. He never knew why this one let him. It was like catching a wire drawn out of a forge and a river at once: it burned, and it was cold, and it was pulling, straight up, with a strength that had nothing to do with muscle.

He held on.

Something tore loose behind his breastbone, and it was not blood but the other thing, the line he had spent to its last point on a swimming rat. The pull went looking for it, found the cupboard bare, and took what stood on the next shelf.

In the margin, quick and violet:

held

Brann's eyes had been going flat as a pond. They came back.

Thud.

He felt it through the wire. An old man's heart, one slow beat.

"There y'are," Brann said, quite ordinarily. "Flap's down."

"I know. I heard it. Brann, don't talk, there'll be a healer, Rusk's coming..."

"Two men's work." The ghost of a grin. "Told you. Had the dog."

Thud.

Slower. The pull was a hand inside Ravel's ribs, wringing. His sight was going white from the edges inward. He set his feet on the wet stone in a porter's stance, because there was no skill left to set them for him, and he held.

"Hark at me, lad." The small shrewd eyes were on his face. "Don't you go carrying this one about. I'd have come down for that wheel if the dog had asked me. Forty year on the frames, and never once the one who..." A breath, with a bad sound in it. "It's a good end. For a back."

"I sent you."

"Aye. And I went."

Thud.

That was three. He knew, the way a man knows the weight of a load before he lifts it, that there was no fourth in him.

Brann knew it too. He had watched a great many people come to the end of their strength. He lifted one hand off the stone, the fingers thick as rope-ends, and laid it over the fist that was holding him.

"Carry them out, lad," he said. "That's all there is."

It was what the old porters said. At dungeon mouths, to boys being sick over their first body. Ravel had heard it a hundred times. He had said it himself. A trade saying, worn as smooth as a doorstep.

He had never heard it said like that. As if it were not a saying at all, but a thing being put into his hands.

His hand opened.

He did not choose it. It opened the way a hand opens under a weight it simply cannot bear. The wire ran out between his fingers and went up into the dark above the lock, and Brann's hand slid off his and lay on the wet stone.

Ravel went down on his face.

For a while there was only cold stone and the taste of blood.

And something else, that was not his. A mountain track in the rain. A carry-frame biting into young shoulders, and on it the dead weight of someone he had loved. A thought, very clear, in a voice forty years younger than the one he knew: I'll not put him down. I'll not.

Then it was gone, and he was himself, and the Writ was waiting with its sums.

[Health 15/60.]

[Bleed, 12%.]

So that was the next shelf. Thirty points of his own life, for three beats of an old man's heart.

He would have paid sixty.

On the stairs of Vael Tarsis he had reached for a boy's thread with everything he was, and closed his hand on nothing. He did not know what was different now. He only knew that tonight, for the length of three heartbeats, something had let him say wait.

He got to his knees. Brann sat against the wheel-housing with his chin on his chest, as he had sat on his step every evening of Ravel's childhood. The dog lay with its jaws still shut on the thing it had killed.

Then he made himself look at the rest of it.

The first time. On this night, the first time, Old Brann had been two streets away in the Carter's Rest with his arm round a boy who had drawn Bearer, buying him small beer he could not afford and telling him there was always work for a good back. That was where he had been at second bell. That was the only reason he had lived to see the morning: because a boy had needed consoling.

Tonight the boy had not needed consoling. Tonight the boy had needed a wheel turned.

Eleven people had died on Tanner's Row, and he had come back from the grave meaning to save every one. He had changed a single thing. He had moved one old man two streets, and it had killed him.

"I'm sorry," he said. It was not enough, and there was nobody to hear it.

He got his arms under Brann's and lifted.

Nothing happened.

He tried again. He had carried men heavier than this up four hundred and twelve steps with a sword-hole in his chest. He set his back and heaved until his sight went, and Brann's boots scraped a hand's breadth across the stone, and that was all.

Strength, six.

So he dragged him. Backward, an arm's length at a time, to the foot of the steps.

They had called him the Pallbearer. Two hundred and eleven he had brought home, and never set one down. Here was the two hundred and twelfth, the man who had taught him how, and he could not get him up a flight of stairs.

One step. A rest, on his knees, with his forehead against the old man's shoulder. The coat smelled of pipe-smoke and frame-wax.

Two.

"Rav."

His mother stood at the top of the pit with a lantern.

Her hair had come down. She looked at Brann, and at the dog and the thing under it, and last of all at her son: the blood down his chin, the good shirt, one trouser leg in ribbons.

She did not scream. He had thought she would.

Edda Ashlock came down eleven steps with her sleeves still pinned from the day's wash, set the lantern on the stone, and took Old Brann by the ankles.

"On three," she said.

She had lifted wet sheets out of a copper every day for twenty-five years. They carried him up between them.

"The fire," she said, at the fifth step, not looking at him. "That was you."

"Yes."

"And the knife."

"Yes, Mam."

She said nothing for three more steps. Her breath came hard. He could hear the small dry catch in it, under the effort, and it frightened him more than anything in the street had.

"Not tonight," Edda said. "But you'll tell me."

As they came over the top step, the street breathed out.

He felt it under the cobbles: a long slackening, like a held breath let go. The cold went out of the air.

[Rift closed. Contribution recorded.]

[Level 3.]

He was nearly sick, then. The Writ had watched all of it. It was paying him.

They had three of his mother's sheets out on the cobbles by the chandler's. Widow Marsh. Wend, whom they had got out of the drain mouth with his own pole. They laid Brann beside them.

Three.

He made himself count the rest. Mother Hesk on her step with a coal shovel across her knees, not laughing. The two Dunne boys, wild with it, being cuffed by their father. The cooper and his wife, holding on to each other in their doorway. The Tolley girl's face at an upstairs window. The three lodgers above the chandler's, passing a bottle with white hands.

Nine, who had been dead. Three, of whom one had been living.

It did not come out even. He had been a fool to think it was the kind of sum that would.

Pim got to him before anyone could stop her. She had come down from the Harbins' landing in her nightshirt, and she ran straight into his bad leg and held on.

"You were on fire," she said into his ribs. "The whole street was. I saw." Then she looked past him, at the third sheet, and at the boots sticking out from under it, which she knew. Her face changed slowly.

"That's not Brann," Pim said. "Rav. That's not Brann."

He had no answer that was both true and kind. He put his hand on her head.

He found the rat by the lamp post, singed along one side. He picked it up and put it in his pocket. Nobody got left on the field. He had never said it applied only to people.

The Lockwatch came then, as the Lockwatch always did: late, and in step. Eight men with lanterns and halberds, and at their head a heavy man with a grey moustache, who walked with a limp and looked at everything once.

"Who lit the oil?" he asked the street.

"Tam's boy," said Mother Hesk from her step. It was the first thing she had said in an hour.

Captain Rusk grunted, and limped on, and stopped at the gate-pit. He stood there a good while.

"Soot," he said quietly. "Ah, you daft brave beast."

It happened while he was still looking down.

There was one they had missed. It had gone to ground in the cooper's flooded cellar, and now it came up the cellar steps into the lamplight, eight feet of it, toward the nearest warm thing in the street: the smaller Dunne boy, who had slipped his father's hand to go and see the soldiers.

Ravel was nearer than any halberd.

He did not decide anything. His left hand took the child by the collar and swung him behind. His right hand had the knife. Blade low. Weight back. The other hand full.

It reared. A hand's breadth behind the eyes. It went in like a key.

Then his wooden leg folded, and he fell over on top of it, which rather spoiled the effect.

When he had been helped up, the captain of the Lockwatch was standing over him.

Rusk did not look at Ravel at first. He looked at the eel. He turned its head with the butt of his halberd and studied the wound. Then he limped a little way down the Row and looked at another, and another. Most had been hacked to rags with shovels. Four had not. Four had a single hole apiece, in the same place, no wider than a kitchen knife.

He came back.

He had known Tam Ashlock. They had worked the Ninth Lock together, before the limp. Ravel watched him find the father in the son's face, and then find something there that he could not place at all.

"Ashlock's boy," Rusk said. "Read this morning, they tell me."

"Yes, Captain."

"Hm."

The lantern-light moved on the grey moustache. Down in the pit, two of his men were lifting the dog.

"Who taught you to stand like that?"

The true answer was a man fourteen years older, who died last night. Every other answer was a lie, and the captain of the Lockwatch had spent thirty years hearing lies by lantern-light. His hand had come to rest, quite casually, on the haft of his halberd.