Item, one day book, recovered. Item, one clerical person, detained. Item, the room not turned. Transfer House, Eastern Seat, loose leaf
They put her in a room on the north side with a bed in it and a jug and a chair, and a window that was too high and too narrow to be anything but a window, and Corvel outside the door on a stool.
Corvel was about nineteen and had been hired in the spring and had spent the last hour being shouted at by a man he admired, and he had brought her the jug himself and had not been able to make his mouth work while he did it.
“Thank you,” Su’inn said.
He fled.
She sat on the edge of the bed for a while with her hands in her lap and let the room be quiet.
Nothing hurt, which was the strangest part. Her shoulder should have been ruined from the flags and her throat should have been a horror and neither of them was. There was a stiffness and a sort of general wrongness in her, the way a house is wrong after a flood even once the water is out, but the shoulder was fine. She put two fingers on it and pressed and got nothing at all, and sat with that.
It heals while you have it.
“What?”
The body. It heals while you are driving it. A pause. It does not while I am.
“That is a very large thing to say in one sentence and then stop.”
Yes, said Azaelis. It is.
They took Bircher at the sixth bell.
She heard it happen, because the north side of the building was built with the corridors carrying, which she would learn later was not an accident. She heard Sarl’s voice going up and up and then not going up at all, which was worse, and she heard the old man say something short, and then she heard four sets of boots and one set of very slow ones going away down toward the front hall.
Su’inn stood at the door with her hand flat on it.
“What happens to him.”
Theft from a certified house. He will be charged. His own chapter will suspend him before the province gets to him, because that is what a chapter does when it wants to look ahead of a thing. He is sixty-odd and he has a bad heart and he will not hold a station again.
“They will not.”
They will. It is not personal. He took a book out of a transfer house in front of witnesses.
She stood there.
“He did that because I told him to.”
Yes.
“You did not say anything.”
No.
“You were in my head the entire time. You had the whole of it in front of you, you knew what clause nine was before Sarl found it, you know what a chapter does to a priest, you knew all of that in the moment I said it and you said nothing.” She had her forehead against the door now. “One word. You had one word to give me and you have been giving me words all afternoon and that is the one you kept.”
There was a silence.
Yes, said Azaelis.
“Why.”
Because it was the correct move and you would not have made it if you had understood the price.
She turned around and put her back against the door.
Su’inn. In four days that book would have been at the seat. Now it is not, and Sarl is reconstructing it from memory tonight, and a reconstruction is a weaker document than an original in every province I have ever been held in. Nothing in it was defensive. It was the voice of a man reading out a schedule. You bought us a night and a flawed entry and you paid an old priest’s pension for it, and if you had known that in the moment you would have stood there and let the entry be written, and we would both be in this room anyway with nothing.
“You let him be ruined.”
I let you ruin him, said Azaelis, which is not the same thing, and I want you to be clear about which one happened, because you are going to be angry with me about it for a long time and I would rather you were angry about the true version.
Su’inn did not say anything for a while.
“There it is,” she said at last.
There what is.
“I have spent all afternoon deciding you were a tired old man in a bad situation. And you have been very good, and very useful, and very sorry about the breathing.” She looked at the high narrow window. “And the first time it cost something that was not yours, you spent it and did the arithmetic afterward.”
I did the arithmetic at the time.
“I know,” said Su’inn. “That is what I said.”
Sarl came at the ninth bell with a lamp and a clean quire of paper and stood in the doorway and did not come in.
“The mail rider goes at first light,” he said. “It will be on it.”
“You have written it out again.”
“Twice. The second one is better.” He looked exhausted. He looked like a man who had been in a job for twenty-six years and had it come apart in an afternoon. “The referral goes to the seat, and the seat will have it Monday, and there is a copy going to the diocesan house at the same time because I am obliged, and I want you to hear that from me rather than find it out.”
“Thank you.”
“Do not thank me, madam. I am the one holding you.” He set the lamp down on the floor just inside the door, which was the only thing he did all night that she could not account for. “The old man asked me to tell you something. I said I would not carry messages. Then I thought about it on the stairs.”
“What did he say.”
“He said, tell her I did it with my hand and my paper, and she could not have stopped me.” Sarl’s mouth did something complicated. “I do not know what that means.”
“It means he was listening the first time.”
“Well.” Sarl straightened. “First light.”
He went. The lamp stayed.
She did not sleep, and neither did he, and she found out around the second hour of the night that she could tell.
There was no sound to it and no movement. It was simply that a room with two people awake in it is a different room from one with one, and she was the room.
“You are still there.”
I am always still here.
“Do you sleep.”
No. I have not slept in four hundred years and I will not sleep again, and it is the single thing about this that I have never made peace with, because a body sleeps whether or not I am in it, and so for about a third of every night of my existence I have been awake in the dark inside somebody who is not. A pause. You will be asleep in about an hour. I will be here. That is simply how the nights go and there is no version of it that is not what it is.
Su’inn lay on her back and looked at the ceiling.
“That is horrible.”
Yes.
“I am sorry.”
Do not be. You will be much sorrier about a great many other things and you should ration it.
At the fourth hour there were boots in the yard.
She was up before she was awake, at the window with her fingers in the stone, and the window was too high and too narrow and she got about a third of the yard through it, and what was in that third was two horses and a cart and four men, and one of the men was in a colour she had seen twice in her life, both times at a distance, both times in a procession.
Ah, said Azaelis.
“What is that.”
That is not the province.
“What is it.”
Somebody in this building sent to the diocesan house last night rather than this morning, he said, and I would not assume malice, because a man with a copy in his hand at the ninth bell and a rider available is simply a man doing his job eight hours early.
“Azaelis. What is in my yard.”
Crusade.
She came off the window.
“Sarl said Monday.”
Sarl is a factor and he told you the truth about the mail. This is a different institution with a different rider and a shorter road, and I have been expecting them since about four o’clock this afternoon, and I did not say so because there was nothing you could have done with it and you needed the night. Boots on stone, in the building now, moving. Su’inn. Listen to me and do not speak.
“I am not.”
The front hall has one door and they are already through it. The yard door is barred from the yard side and the kitchen is on the far end past the front hall. There is a third way out of this building and it is not on any plan in the province, because when I argued for the sightlines in ninety-one I lost the ventilation, and when you lose ventilation in a house full of bodies you get given a service run instead, and nobody has ever put a service run on a plan because nobody thinks about air.
Su’inn stood in the middle of the room.
“Where is it.”
It does not matter where it is, because you will not find the hatch in the dark and you do not know which of the two runs goes to the outside wall, and I do, and I know it because I stood in this building in ninety-one with a bad drawing and argued about it for four days. Very level. There is a price and I am going to say it and then you are going to decide, and there is not time for both of us to think about it.
“Say it.”
The body decays while I am driving it. It does not while you are. Whatever I use tonight comes off the total, and the total is the whole of what you have left, and I am not able to tell you what it will be because I have never done this in a body I share. A beat. My estimate is a day. It could be three.
“Three days.”
Of your life. Yes. Boots on the stairs. And I want to be very clear, because you are going to hold me to this later and you should: I do not know that it is three. I know that it is not nothing. Every time I am at the wheel you are spending, and tonight is the cheapest it will ever be, and it will never once be free.
“And if I say no.”
Then they take you downstairs, and there is a room, and there will be a hearing in eleven weeks, and I have some idea what they do to an occupied vessel in the interval and I am not going to tell you what it is at four in the morning through a door.
The boots stopped outside.
There was a voice, and Corvel’s voice under it, very young.
Su’inn.
She had her hand on the frame of the bed.
She thought, with perfect clarity, that she did not trust him. That he had spent an old man’s whole life six hours ago and told her the arithmetic afterward and had not once said sorry. That she had known him for eleven hours. That she had no idea what he would do with her hands once they were his, and no way to find out, and no way at all to take them back once they were gone.
That she was going to have to do this before she knew.
Su’inn, I cannot take it. I need you to give it to me.
The latch went.
“Take it,” said Su’inn Ulmat, and let go.