Where a vessel is found on presentation to be unfit, unsound, or otherwise not as certified, the factor shall not release it, and shall enter the particulars, and shall refer. Standard of the Province, transfer houses, cl. 9
Sarl came in with the ledger under his arm and a pen already wet, and he did not look at her face. He looked at the middle of her, about where the collarbone was, which she had seen a hundred times in her own work and had always considered the correct way to look at a body you were about to do something to.
“Sir,” he said. “You will forgive the interruption. I have the room at the fifth bell.”
Su’inn opened her mouth.
Do not.
“Sir, if you are settled, I want the continuation witnessed and closed. It is three marks and your hand at the bottom, and then you are free of me and I am free of you and we can both have a decent evening.”
Say nothing. Nod.
“He is looking at my chest,” Su’inn said.
Sarl’s eyes came up.
There was a pause of a very particular kind, the kind she had heard in her own workroom perhaps four times in nine years, when somebody in a doorway understands that the situation in front of them is not on any of their lists.
“Sir,” Sarl said carefully.
“No.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“I am not sir.” Her voice was still terrible and she used it anyway. “My name is Su’inn Ulmat. I am a practitioner of the Ulmatine trade out of Kettle Ward. I was hanged at the eastern yard on Tuesday, and a priest of Salvos put me back into this body about an hour and a half ago, and your continuation is in here with me, and he has been talking in my head since I woke up. Now. Whatever you are about to write in that book, I would like to discuss it first.”
Sarl stood absolutely still.
Then he set the ledger down on the end of the mortuary bench, open, and laid the pen across the gutter of it, and said, “Father. Out.”
“I will stay,” said Bircher.
“Father, you will get out of my house. You have done enough to it for one afternoon.”
“I will stay,” the old man said again, and sat there with his hands on his knees, and did not move, and after a moment Sarl made a noise and let it go.
That was a mistake.
“He was going to find out.”
He was going to find out in four days, from a letter written by somebody in an office, and it would have reached him after we were sixty miles from this building. Nothing in it was angry, which was somehow worse. Now he finds out at the fifth bell with the door shut. You have handed the only man in the province with authority over this room the one thing he needed in order to keep us in it.
“I am not a thing.”
You are today.
Sarl had the ledger up again and was going through it fast, licking his thumb, three pages back and then two forward.
“Right,” he said, to nobody at all. “Right. Clause nine.”
“What is clause nine.”
“Clause nine is what happens when a vessel is not as certified.” He found it and read it with his lips moving and then read it again. “Shall not release it. Shall enter the particulars. Shall refer.”
“Refer to whom.”
“To the province. And the province refers to the bench, and the bench refers to the faiths, because there is a Nekros continuation lodged in this room and a Salvos resurrection performed on top of it, and I am a factor, madam. I run a house. I do not adjudicate between churches on a Thursday.” He was writing now, fast, in a small hand. “You will be housed. Both of you. There is a room.”
“For how long.”
“Until somebody tells me.”
“How long is that.”
Sarl stopped writing and looked up, and for the first time that afternoon there was something human in his face, and what it was, was pity.
“Madam, I once held a vessel eleven weeks over a question of whether a forfeiture in one province was good in another. Eleven weeks, and there was nothing wrong with that one at all. It was a question.” He went back to the page. “This is not a question. This is a new thing. Twenty-six years in this trade and I am writing a sentence that has never been written in this book, and when the province reads it they will send somebody, and when the faiths read it they will send somebody else.”
“And what happens to me.”
“I do not know.”
“Guess.”
“I do not guess in the book,” said Sarl, “and I will not guess out loud in front of a priest. Sit down. You have been dead since Tuesday and you look it.”
He is writing it now, said Azaelis. Once it is in the day book there is a copy in this house and a copy at the seat within the week, and after that it does not matter what anyone in this room says, because it will be true.
Su’inn stood with her hand on the bench.
She was thinking about a small tidy man with ink on two fingers and a beautiful book with a spine like a hymnal. A column of a certain width. Eight weeks, a fair copy to the diocesan clerk, a fair copy to the provincial office, eleven wards bound together and shelved.
That was all it had ever taken. She knew that better than anybody alive. She was the only person in the world who had been killed by a column.
“Then he does not write it,” she said.
What?
“He is on the second line. If that book leaves this room with three lines in it, I am in a cell in this building until two churches have an opinion, and I will still be in it when the crusaders arrive. I have been dead once this week. I did not care for it.” She was already moving. “Give me the words.”
Su’inn.
“You have four hundred years and you helped write the thing he is quoting at me. Give me the words that stop his hand.”
There was a fractional pause, and she felt it, and would have given a great deal to know what was inside it.
There are none.
“Say that again.”
There is no form of words that stops a factor mid-entry. There was one. A suspension on referral, two signatures at the seat, and it was struck out about ninety years ago because it was being used to bury precisely this sort of thing. Something that in a body would have been a breath. I was in the room. I did not argue for it particularly hard.
“You are joking.”
I am four hundred years old and I have never once been funny about paperwork.
She looked at Sarl.
He had turned the ledger side-on to write, the way a man does who has been writing in the same book for twenty-six years, left forearm laid along the top of the page to hold it flat, hand going steadily. Third line.
“Sarl.”
“In a moment.”
“Sarl, put the pen down.”
“Madam, I am obliged.”
“You are obliged to enter the particulars. You are not obliged to enter them today.” She came around the end of the bench, and her legs were not good, and she used the bench for most of it. “You have a room at the fifth bell. Turn the room. Do the entry in the morning.”
“That is not.”
“That is exactly how it works and we both know it. You keep a day book, not a witness box. Half the entries in that thing were written the following morning by a tired man reconstructing a Thursday.” She got a hand on the corner of the bench nearest him. “Twelve hours. Give me twelve hours and I am gone, and you write that a vessel was resurrected by a Salvos priest and walked out of your house. Which is true. And which is very much less of your problem than a vessel you are holding.”
Sarl stopped writing.
He looked at her for a long moment.
“That,” he said, “is a genuinely good argument.”
“Thank you.”
“It is also the argument a man makes when he has worked out that the paper is the only thing in the room with teeth in it. And I would like to know where a healer out of Kettle Ward learned it.”
Do not answer that.
“I learned it eight weeks ago,” said Su’inn, “from a clerk with a nice book.”
And she watched it go wrong.
She saw it in his shoulders before it reached his face. Nine years of reading bodies for a living, and she read this one perfectly and about a second and a half too late, and what it said was: she wants the book.
Sarl’s left hand came down flat on the page.
“Corvel,” he shouted, at the door. “Corvel. In here.”
Get out of the room.
She lunged for the ledger.
It was not a good lunge. She was a day and a half dead and her legs had been a suggestion since she stood up. She got a fistful of the top corner of the page in her right hand and her weight went wrong, and Sarl had twenty-six years and both feet under him and simply held on, and the page tore about four inches and stopped.
Su’inn. Let go and get out, there is a second man in the corridor and a third in the front hall, you cannot run, you cannot fight him, let me
“No.”
You are a day and a half dead and you weigh nothing, let me
“I said no.”
LET ME.
And he reached.
She felt it happen, and it was not a voice and it was not a push. It was a hand closing over a hand that was already holding something. Every part of her that was in the fight, the fist and the shoulder and the weight and the wanting, all of it, asked for by somebody else at the same instant she was using it.
Su’inn said no with everything she had.
And the body stopped.
Not slowed. Stopped, the way a cart stops when the axle goes, everything at once and nothing gradually. The hand came off the page because neither of them was telling it to hold. The knees did not buckle so much as cease to be an opinion. She went down off the end of the mortuary bench and hit the flags with her shoulder and then her cheek, and lay there with her eyes open and the lamp swinging in the top of them and her own arm stretched out in front of her face.
She looked at the arm. She told it to move.
It did not.
Nothing moved. Nothing at all, anywhere in the whole of her, and she was awake for every part of it.
Above her Bircher was shouting and Sarl was shouting and a third voice had arrived in the doorway, and the ledger was still on the bench, and she lay on the cold flags of a transfer room in a body that had stopped taking instructions from anybody, and understood with total clarity and no ability whatever to act on it that she had just found out what happens when they both want it.
Su’inn.
She could not answer. The mouth was not hers and it was not his either.
I am going to let go. Do not ever do that again.
And then, half a second before it came back, and she would think about that half second for a very long time afterward:
I could not have taken it. Even then. Not even if I had wanted to.
The room returned all at once with a noise in it.
She got about four inches of breath and spent all of it on the only thing worth saying.
“Father,” she said, into the stone. “The book. Take the book.”
And the fat old priest with the bad legs, who had been thrown out of the room twice and had not gone, reached across the top of a shouting factor and took the day book off the mortuary bench and put it inside his coat.