Vessel collected the fifth day. Notice retired. Continuation unbroken. Provincial office, eastern seat
He was in the dark for four days.
Pell found her in the morning and did everything correctly and was sensible about all of it, and there was a letter with the parish priest that had been there for nine years, which said what was to be done and who was to be written to and where the money was, and none of it was a surprise to anybody.
They came for him on the fifth day, from a house in the north, with a cart and a qualified man and a dormant notice that had been lying in a drawer at a provincial office for forty-one years with a description in the margin.
He had known they would. He had arranged it himself, in a room over a saddler's, on an afternoon he had paid four hours and twenty minutes for, and he had been extremely pleased with the arrangement at the time and had spent about forty years being unable to think about it.
Four days.
The shortest had been four hours and the longest had been nine days in bad country in the fifth body, and he had spent four hundred years arranging every part of his existence around not being in the dark inside a dead thing, and there was nothing in the world he had ever been more afraid of, and he lay in a house at Cadder Fen for four days and was not afraid.
He counted.
He counted the flags in a front hall he had argued about in eleven-forty, and a hoop going over on stones in a lane at Halverside, and eleven forms and the names of five of them, and a page and a half that had taken four hours and that a woman had thrown away six times.
He counted a boy in a leat and a boy on ice.
He counted two hundred and forty refusals, of which she had caught nine, and eleven hundred hours of which about six hundred were still in a body going cold in a chair and would go into the ground with it, unspent, which he had decided some years ago was the correct outcome and had never once said so.
He counted her.
That was most of it. That was nearly the whole of the four days, in fact, and he did it in order and slowly and without hurrying, because he had four hundred and forty years of practice at being the last person who remembered a thing and he had never before had one he wanted to keep.
On the fifth day there was a cart on the causeway and boots in the room and a man saying something about the weight.
And Azaelis, in the dark, in a body that had been a practitioner of the Ulmatine trade for forty-one years, thought: I have got her. I have got the whole of her and there is nothing they can do about it, and I will carry her into the next one and the one after that, and in four hundred years there will be a man in a room somewhere who will not know why he stops in the middle of a sentence and looks at the window.
Then a hand came down on him, and it began.