And where two are taken, the greater harm shall be preferred. Salvos, order of the crusade, rule of preference
There were four ways out of the leat and he had known all four of them since the wall, and he had spent the last ninety seconds hoping one of them would improve.
He could go at the door, which was oak and locked and would take a man with two hands about four minutes.
He could go at the woman, which he had discarded before he finished thinking it, because he had a body of five foot ten that had been dead in the spring and she had thirty years of being taught how to put people in water.
He could go under the wheel, which would probably work and would probably also break a leg he did not own, and a broken leg in a hunted body is a slower version of the same afternoon.
Or he could stop running, which was the one he had been avoiding since the top of the lane, because it was the only one that worked and because he knew what it was going to cost and he had wanted very badly for the last three minutes to be a man who did not have to pay it.
He stopped running.
He turned around in six inches of black water with his back to a locked door and put his hands where they could be seen, and stood still, and waited for her.
She came the last twenty yards at the same pace as the first twenty, which told him a great deal.
Then she stopped about four feet off and looked at him, and he watched it happen: the shift behind the eyes, the small physical readjustment of a person who has been told a thing for years and has just had it confirmed in front of them for the first time.
“Ah,” said Rowe.
“Yes.”
“You are in there.”
“I am in here.”
She did not draw anything. That was the second thing that told him a great deal.
“I stood beside you in the church,” she said.
“You did. And you got nothing, and you have been going over that for two days and deciding you were tired.” Azaelis kept his hands where they were. “You were not tired. There is nothing to find on consecrate ground. That is not a thing I can do. It is a thing that is done to me.”
Rowe stood in the leat.
“The woman,” she said. “Is she.”
“She is here and she can hear you and she cannot answer while I am at the front of this, and she is going to be extremely angry with me for a very long time about what I am about to do.” He said it evenly. “Her name is Su’inn and she was hanged lawfully in the spring and resurrected in error by a priest of your faith who is standing his hearing at the eastern seat in six days, and every part of that is on paper somewhere and none of it is my doing.”
“That is a great deal of information.”
“You are going to have all of it in a week from a chapter room. I am giving it to you now because it costs me nothing and because I would like you to understand that I am not going to lie to you at any point in this conversation, and that you may check every word.”
“Why.”
“Because I am about to say something you will want very much to believe,” said Azaelis, “and I would rather you had four minutes of me telling the truth behind it.”
“There is a rule,” he said.
“There are a great many rules.”
“There is one about preference. Where two are taken, the greater harm is preferred. It is about a hundred and sixty years old and it was written for a plague year, when your order had eleven people and forty places to be, and it has been in the book ever since because nobody ever takes a rule out of a book.” He watched her face. “You know it. You will have been taught it at fourteen and you will have used it twice and hated it both times.”
“Three times,” said Rowe.
“Three times.”
She stood in the water.
“Say the rest of it.”
“I am four hundred years old and I have taken eleven bodies and every one of them was dead before I arrived and certified and lawful, and I have never in four hundred years killed a person,” said Azaelis. “You will not believe that. You should not believe it, because it is exactly what I would say. But it is in the records of the eastern seat in eleven places, and you have a firm of attorneys and a provincial office and a finder called Vasse who has been through eleven years of a certification queue, and if I am lying to you it will take you about a month to find out.”
“And?”
“And there is one three hundred miles north of here who does not wait.”
Rowe did not move at all.
“His name is Ammet,” said Azaelis. “He was old when I was young. He has not applied for a certified vessel in about ninety years, because a certified vessel is a corpse that somebody has finished with, and a corpse is a poor bargain when you can have a healthy man of thirty who has been walking around getting fed.”
“You are telling me there is one who takes the living.”
“I am telling you there is one who has taken the living forty times that I am aware of, and that I have known it for ninety years, and that I did nothing, and that I told myself for most of that time that it was not mine to do anything about.” His voice did not change. “I can give you the province, the pattern he uses, the six weeks of the year he is obliged to be somewhere he can be found, and the name of the family that has been quietly handling his affairs since before your order had a chapter house in this province. It will take me an hour with a pen.”
The leat ran past their legs.
“And what do you want,” said Rowe.
“To walk out of this water.”
She took nine minutes.
He stood with his back against the wheelhouse door for all nine and did not fill any of them, because a woman doing that arithmetic must not be helped, and because anything he said in the eighth minute would become the reason she said no.
At the ninth she said:
“You understand what I am.”
“I understand exactly what you are. You are a woman with three men, a description, and a fortnight, and there is a thing in this province that your order has wanted for two hundred years and a thing three hundred miles north that it does not know exists. And I am not asking you to let me go. I am asking you to prefer the greater harm, which is your own rule, which was written by people who were also standing in water.”
“I will find you again.”
“You will,” said Azaelis. “You will find me in about a year, when Ammet is finished, and I want to say now that I think that is correct and that I will not complain about it. I am asking for the year.”
Rowe looked at him for a long moment.
“An hour with a pen,” she said.
“An hour with a pen.”
“You will do it here. In this town. Today. And I will read it before I let you out of this leat, and if there is one thing in it that turns out to be a story, then everything you have just said about eleven lawful bodies and a priest and a hearing becomes a very different set of sentences.”
“Yes.”
“And I want the name of the family.”
“Yes,” said Azaelis. “You do.”
It took fifty minutes, on the wheelwright’s table, with two of Rowe’s men in the yard and Rowe standing at his shoulder reading every line as it came off the pen.
Right hand. Small and fast and even, in a hand that was not his and not Su’inn’s and never had been anybody’s, because handwriting comes out of the arm and the arm was hers and the arrangement of it was his and the result was a third thing that had never existed before and would not again.
He wrote it all down.
The province. The pattern, which was the part that mattered, because a thing that has been done forty times is a thing with a shape, and the shape was a man who arrived in a town six weeks before the ice and left after it and was never in the same ward twice in ten years. The six weeks. The family.
He did not embellish anything and he did not soften anything and he did not put in a single sentence that was there to make himself look better, because Rowe would have found it, and because after four hundred years he had come to believe that the only document worth writing is one that does not care what happens to the man holding the pen.
At the fiftieth minute he turned it round.
Rowe read it twice.
Then she folded it and put it inside her coat, and looked at him with an expression he had seen a very great many times in four hundred years and had never once enjoyed.
“I would like to be able to tell you,” she said, “that I am doing this because it is the rule.”
“I know.”
“Do you.”
“You are doing it because it is the rule and because it is forty people,” said Azaelis, “and because standing in a leat this afternoon you found out that I am not what you were told, and you have not decided yet whether that is a relief or the worst thing that has happened to you this year.” He got up from the table. “It is both. It is going to go on being both. I am sorry.”
“Do not.”
“No,” he agreed. “That was a discourtesy. I withdraw it.”
Rowe went out.
He gave it back on the bridge, an hour later, walking east, with the town going behind them and the light coming down.
He did it at the milestone because he had discovered, over eleven weeks, that he liked to do it somewhere that had a mark on it.
“Take it,” he said.
And she took it.
And he went down into the dark behind her eyes, and sat there, and waited.
She walked half a mile.
She did not say one word. Not out loud and not the other way. She walked east with her hands in her sleeves and her chin down out of the wind and she did not say anything at all, and he sat in the back of her and could not see her face and had no way in the world to know what was on it.
At the half mile she stopped.
He thought, with something that was almost hope, now.
She wiped her nose on the back of her wrist and started walking again.
She did not speak for two days.