The Last Soul Necromancer: An Unknown Class Beyond Death

Chapter 9: The Rite of Passing

Lowlock burned its dead quickly. Nobody on Tanner's Row had a room to keep them in.

By first light the pyres stood ready at the Ash Stair, where the canal widened below the Ninth Lock and the smoke could go out over the water. There were three.

Ravel went on a stick. The numbness had left his calf some time before dawn, and what came after made him wish it back.

"Nobody," he had told Captain Rusk, in the lantern-light. "I used to watch the delvers drill in the Chartery yard. I copied what I saw."

Rusk had stood with his thumbs in his sword-belt for a while.

"Your father stood like a lock-keeper," he said at last. "Feet wide, for a wet gate. That was a soldier's guard, boy, and an odd one. I never saw it drilled in any yard." Then he had looked at the three sheets, and at his dog, and let it lie. "Come by the watch-house when you're mended."

It had not sounded like an invitation.

The Writ had come for its accounting in the small hours, when he could not sleep. It placed four of the points itself, as it always did, and did not say where until they were gone. The six it left him he spent the way a porter would, on not dying.

LEVEL 3 (+2)PLACED WIL +2 INT +2CHOSEN VIT +6HEALTH 24/90SOUL ENERGY 12/12SOUL CAPACITY 5BLEED 12%TITLES none

It had not given him a title for a rift closed on the day of his Reading. It never gave porters titles. He found that he had been hoping, a little, and was ashamed of it.

This morning it was not all there.

His mother had cleaned the leg herself, with lye-water, by the light of one candle, and had not been gentle about it. She had asked him nothing. She had looked at the ring of punctures in his calf, and then at his face, and said only, "Hold still." He knew her. The questions were not gone. They were being kept, the way she kept the good shirt: folded, for when they were wanted.

The whole Row had turned out. So had the watch-house, in a body, for Wend; a man who dies running toward the trouble is the Lockwatch's own, whatever his trade. Widow Marsh had a sister after all, a tiny bent woman who kept telling people that Lettie always stopped home on a Reading night, always, she could not think why anyone had said otherwise.

Mother Hesk stood at the back and did not speak to anybody.

And then the porters came.

They came down from Chartery Row at first bell, forty of them, every carry-class in Greywater who was not under a load that morning. They wore their frames on their backs, empty. That was the custom. A porter went to the fire on a frame, with his own trade under him.

They let Ravel take a corner. He could not truly bear his share, and every man there knew it. They took the weight between them without a word, so that all he had to do was walk.

He had been one of them for fourteen years. Not one of them knew it. They only saw a lad that Brann had been fond of.

One other had come down from Chartery Row.

She stood by herself at the top of the Ash Stair, well back from the crowd: a thin grey figure with cropped hair and one hand tucked inside her coat. Ilse Varga did not look at the pyres. She looked at the curate, steadily, the way a carter looks at a bridge he does not quite trust. Then her eyes moved to Ravel, and rested a moment, and gave him nothing at all.

When he looked again, she had gone.

The curate of the parish took the rite. Old Father Corwin's chest was bad.

Ravel had braced himself for a monster. That would have been easier.

What he got was a tired young man who had plainly not been to bed. Who knew the name of Wend's widow, and of each of her children. Who had sat up until dawn with the Tolley girl, because she would not stop screaming and her mother was past helping. Who had paid for Widow Marsh's wood out of the poor-box, and when the poor-box fell short, out of his own purse, turning his back so that nobody would see.

He went from one family to the next. He said nothing clever. He held their hands. People went to him bent, and came away a little straighter, and it was not an act. Ravel would have known an act. He had spent nine years beside this man.

He believes it, he thought. Every word. He is good at this because he means it.

And in fourteen years he will have me killed, and he will mean that too.

He did not know what to do with the two thoughts. They would not fit in one head.

Then the shrouds were laid on the wood, and he stopped thinking about Anselm.

They were still there.

He had not known they would be. From each of the three, a line still stood. They were fainter than on the night, thin as breath on cold air, going up into the grey morning. But they were taut. Whatever held the far end had most of what it wanted and was in no hurry for the rest.

Three days, he thought. Three days, and no longer. So that was what the three days were.

Brother Anselm opened his book.

Ravel had heard the Rite of Passing two hundred and eleven times, cap in hand, at the back. He had thought it beautiful. He supposed it still was.

"Out of the dark water, into the unsetting light. What was lent is returned. What was scattered is gathered..."

On gathered, Widow Marsh's thread ran.

It went all at once, like line off a dropped reel, thinning as it climbed, and was gone. And a sigh went through her sister, and through the old women round her. He saw their shoulders come down. They had felt it. A weight lifting. A thing finished.

That was the comfort. That was why the Rite was loved in every street of the kingdom. It did exactly what it promised. It let the living feel the dead go.

It only lied about where.

Wend's went next. His widow made a sound, and then was quiet, and her eldest put an arm round her.

Then the priest turned to the frame.

Ravel's hand had come up off the stick.

He looked at it. He had not told it to.

He had twelve points of soul. He had counted them at dawn. Twelve was one heartbeat, with two points over.

He could do it. He could reach up in front of the parish, the Lockwatch, forty porters and the one priest in Greywater who had already come forward to look at his plate, and he could close his fist on that line. He could hold Old Brann in the grey morning for the length of one heartbeat.

And then he would have to let him go again. He had nowhere on this earth to put him. Whatever a Soul Capacity of five was for, he did not know how to open it, and there was no one alive to ask.

Carry them out.

He had carried him out. He had got him as far as this. And here the road was shut, and the man who kept the gate was a kind, tired curate with ink on his cuff, reading from a book.

Ravel put his hand back on the stick.

It was the right choice. He knew that. A boy who clutched at the air over a pyre would be in a cell by noon, and under a different rite by the week's end, and then there would be nobody left who could even see the thing, let alone stop it.

He stood in the smoke, and he hated that it was right. There was no heat in the hatred at all. It was cold and patient, and it frightened him a little. He had been angry before. He had never before felt anything settle into him like a foundation.

He looked at the stroke at the base of his thumb. One. He thought he knew, now, whose it was.

"...and let nothing be left behind."

The thread ran.

He watched it. He made himself. All the way up, until there was only smoke where it had been. Somebody ought to see it go. That, at least, he could carry.

The eldest of the porters, a man as bent as Brann had been, put the torch into Ravel's hand.

"He'd want the one who brought him up out of that pit," he said.

So it was Ravel who set fire to the wood.

Forty voices spoke together, not loudly. It was the custom, and it was two words.

"Carried out."

Pim was crying into his sleeve. His mother's hand was on his shoulder, gripping hard, and he understood that she was holding herself up as much as him.

When he brought his eyes down out of the sky, the curate was looking at him.

Not at his face. At the place where his eyes had just been.

It was a while before the crowd thinned. The porters went first, each one touching two fingers to the frame's cold iron as he passed. Then the watch. Then the Row, in ones and twos, back to streets that still stank of burnt oil.

Brother Anselm came through them toward him. Close to, he smelled of smoke and ink.

"Ravel Ashlock." The mild voice. "I am sorry for your loss. He spoke of you, you know. He came to me last winter, quite worried. He thought you were too clever for the frames, and that the frames would have you anyway."

Ravel had not known that. It went in under his guard like a knife.

"I have something for you, I am afraid, and it is a poor day to bring it."

A folded paper, with the parish seal.

"A Canon's envoy comes to Greywater at the end of the month. Every class the Chartery has entered as unverified this spring is to be Read again, on the Church's own plate. Thirty days from today." A small, apologetic smile. "It is a formality. The hall's plate is older than the hall; the Examiner says so herself. But Summoners are rare, and the Canonry likes to know its own."

Thirty days.

Ravel took the paper. He said thank you, to the seal.

The priest did not go.

He stood turning the book over in his soft hands. When he spoke again, it was lower, and gentler, and it was the breakfast voice exactly.

"You saw something last night, I think."

The smoke went out over the water.

"I do not say it to frighten you. People do, sometimes, when they stand very close to a death. It is nothing to be ashamed of." His eyes were kind. They were so kind. "But it is a heavy thing to carry alone, at your age. Come and talk to me. When you are ready."

Then, as though it were nothing, the kind eyes went down to Ravel's left hand on the stick. To the base of the thumb, where a stroke as fine as a pen-line lay under the skin. They rested there for the space of a breath.

Ravel did not know whether a priest could see it. He found that he could not move his hand to hide it, because that would be an answer too.