The sitting having heard all that was offered, and being unable to arrive at a determination, it is recorded that no determination was arrived at. Joint sitting, eastern seat, minute of the fourth day
The second day was witnesses and the third day was the crusade, and she sat through both of them and said almost nothing.
Enner gave the assessment and gave it twice, once in the language of a certified house and once, when the young cleric said he had not understood a word of it, in the language of a man who had put his hands on a body. He said there were about eleven hundred hours. He said the body repaired when the woman had it. He said he had done it for thirty-one years and had never seen it and had no word for it, and that he had written to the Keeper of the eastern register nine times and had four replies.
The Keeper, without looking up, said that she had answered every letter that asked a question.
Sarl gave the day book and gave the reconstruction beside it, and did the thing she had not expected, which was to take them line by line through where he had got it wrong and why, in front of three authorities, for fifty minutes, with his ears going red and his voice perfectly level. At the end the Dean asked him whether he wished to say anything in mitigation, and Sarl said that he did not, that he had written a lie in a book, that it was the only one in twenty-six years, and that he had done it because there was no line in the book for what had happened and he had put down the nearest thing.
“And if there were a line,” said Tersey.
“Then I would have written it,” said Sarl, “and I have been asking somebody to give me one since April of the year before last, and that is what I understand this sitting to be for.”
Vasse gave everything else in about four hours without an ounce of colour in any of it, and Onnie Fell’s four pages went in on the second afternoon and were read aloud by a clerk in a flat voice, and Su’inn sat at the end of the table and listened to a girl of twelve be sent for water in a room full of men, and did not move, and did not speak, and did not look at anybody.
Nobody asked her about it.
She had been braced for four days and nobody asked her about it, and she understood on the third evening, lying awake, that this was Vasse, and that he had done it somewhere she had not seen and would never be told about.
The third day was the crusade and it was the worst one, because they were not fools.
Rowe was not there. She was under examination and could not be, and she had said so in April, and instead there was a man of about forty-five from the provincial chapter house who had read everything and been nowhere.
He put it very plainly and it took him about eleven minutes.
There was an undead thing in the province. It had been in the province for four hundred years. The order existed for exactly one purpose and had been founded to do exactly this, and every year they did not do it was a year the reason for the order got thinner, and he wanted it said out loud in front of three authorities that the question of what the woman was had been allowed to swallow the question of what was inside her, and that this had been convenient for everybody in the room.
“And the woman,” said the Dean.
“The woman is the difficulty,” he said. “I am not going to pretend she is not. I am also not going to pretend that this order has never in two hundred years had to weigh a difficulty of that kind, because it has, and it has weighed it, and I have read the book.”
“Say what you are proposing,” said Tersey.
“I am not proposing anything,” said the man. “I am putting on the record that we could, and that we have not, and that the not is a decision somebody is making by leaving it in a drawer, and I would like the drawer to have a name on it.”
Nobody said anything for a while.
“That is fair,” said Tersey.
“It is not fair,” said the man. “It is accurate. I have been in this room for a day and a half and I have not met a single person who wants this to be their signature.”
They came to her on the fourth morning.
“Practitioner,” said Tersey. “You have sat here three days. You may say what you like or nothing at all.”
Su’inn stood up, because sitting down had begun to feel like something.
“I am going to tell you what he has done,” she said. “Not what he is. I have got no opinion about what he is that is worth four days of anybody’s time, and neither has he, and I asked him.”
She had not written anything down. She had thought about writing it down for five weeks and had decided against it on the road, because a paper is a thing with edges.
“He has never killed anybody. Four hundred years and eleven bodies and every one of them was already dead, lawfully, by a bench, and he came afterward with a certificate. You have the eleven in your registers and you can check every one and I would like you to.
“He built the instrument that made that possible. He sat in a room in the year eleven-forty and argued about the wording for a fortnight and lost on two words. Before it there was grave robbery and there were Eternals going into the living. After it there was a queue, and a queue has to be fed, and a bench feeds it. He did not see that for three hundred years because it was feeding him.
“He knew for ninety years that there is one in the north who takes the living. He did nothing, because to tell anybody he would have had to put his own name on a letter. Two years ago he was cornered in a mill leat and he told a crusader everything he had, in eleven minutes and then in writing, and that woman went north with eleven and came back with seven and they are certain of thirty-one dead and there are more.”
The room was very quiet.
“He let an old priest ruin himself for a book because it was the correct move and he knew I would not have made it if I had understood the price. He took a form that was struck out of my house ninety years ago and used it on a boy of seventeen without asking him, and that boy has his leg and will be tired for the rest of his life and does not know why, and I have not told him, and that is mine and not his.
“He has been the client of a firm that keeps a schedule of ripening inquiries for nine years and never once read the schedule.
“And in February I went under the ice in a fen, and I could not give him the body, and there is a thing that can be done with a body that nobody is in, and it has a price you do not get to choose. He paid it. He does not know what it was until somebody tells him. A man came to my lodging on Monday night from Warring Cross, nine days on the road, with a book that was made for him at night by a schoolmaster fifty-two years ago.”
She stopped.
“He does not remember one face out of thirty-one years,” said Su’inn. “That is what he paid for eleven hours in a fen. He did not know he was paying it, and he could not have known, and he would do it again, and I have asked him and he says he would.”
Nobody in the room moved.
“That is what he has done,” said Su’inn. “You will notice I have not asked you for anything.”
She sat down.
Tobe Marchant asked to speak at the fourth hour of the afternoon and they nearly did not let him.
He had no standing. He was not a witness to anything. Tersey said so, twice, in a not unkind way, and Marchant stood at the back of the room with his hat and said that he had come nine days and would go when they told him to, and that he had one thing to say and it would take a minute.
The Dean said, “Let him have his minute.”
Marchant came to the end of the table and put the primer on it, next to the day book, where nobody could pick either of them up.
“I am not going to talk about what he is,” he said. “There is nobody in this room who has met him and I have. I was seven.”
He put his hand on the primer.
“You are all going to write something down and it is going to be in a drawer for two hundred years,” said Tobe Marchant, “and I have come nine days to say that whatever you write, he made this at night for a boy who could not read, and he did not put his name on it, and he did not tell anybody, and he does not remember doing it.”
He picked up his hat.
“And I would ask you to bear in mind,” he said, “that whichever way you go, you are the only people who will ever have known both halves of it, and I am sixty-two and I would not want it.”
He went and sat down at the back.
They took four hours and they came back at the eighth bell.
Tersey read it out himself and it was eleven lines long.
The sitting had heard all that was offered. The sitting recorded that the continuation lodged in the register of the house of Nekros was lawful and remained lodged. The sitting recorded that the rite performed by Father Bircher was validly performed and that the woman was living. The sitting recorded that these two findings were both correct and could not be reconciled, and that no authority represented at the sitting was competent to prefer one over the other.
The sitting was therefore unable to arrive at a determination.
It recorded that no determination was arrived at.
And it recorded, in the last line, that pending a determination no process should issue out of any of the three authorities against the person or persons concerned, and that the matter should be set down for further sitting at a date to be fixed.
“A date to be fixed,” said Su’inn.
“A date to be fixed,” said Tersey.
He looked down the table at her, and he had been doing this for twenty-six years, and he did not smile and did not need to.
“Practitioner,” he said, “there is no date.”