He had tried the deer once.
Fourth body, a woman named Ilve who had asked him kindly and who had earned an answer, and he had given her the hide coming off whole, the way a hunter takes it, one long committed pull with the whole weight of the arm in it. She had gone pale and thanked him and changed the subject, and he had sat there afterward feeling that he had told her a lie.
It was not the deer.
The deer keeps its shape.
They put him in the chair at the third bell and Sarl stood in the corner with the ledger open, and the qualified man washed his hands for a long time at the basin and dried them on a cloth and said, “Whenever you are ready, sir.”
There was no ceremony. He had opposed ceremony. There had been a faction, two hundred years ago, that wanted the transfers done with a rite over them, and he had argued them down on the grounds that a rite implies the thing is bearable if performed correctly, and that the day the province started pretending this was bearable was the day it stopped being careful.
He had won that. He was proud of it. He had been proud of it for two hundred years and he was proud of it sitting in the chair with his gloves off and his hands on the arms of it, and he would have given every year of that pride for somebody to be saying words over him now.
Marren was not there. He had asked her not to come and she had come as far as the front hall and no further, and was sitting in the waiting room with the window in it, and that was the last coherent thought he had that was about anybody else.
“It is time,” Azaelis said.
The qualified man put a hand on his chest.
And
peeled is wrong.
Drawn is wrong. Drawn is a word for smoke and water, a coward’s word, it means a thing moving in the direction it already wanted. Torn is closer and torn is still a word about cloth and cloth has no opinion. Every language he had learned he had learned partly to find this and none of them had it, and he understood at last, in the middle of it, why they did not: because nobody who could describe a thing has ever been the thing being described.
Every part of him that had been fastened to something was not fastened to it.
Four hundred years of being fastened.
The teeth. The bad left eye going the color of weak tea. The nineteen days. The gloves made in a shop under a name that was not his. Marren at the window, and him counting to eleven. The chin coming down through four generations. A field in the east when he was a boy, and a strange sourceless attention, and turning his head to look at nothing.
All of it had been held on by the body.
He had not known that. He had done this eleven times and he had never known that, because you cannot notice what is holding you while it is holding you, and every time it came off it took the noticing with it.
And then the going.
The going was the part nobody survived intact. There was no stopping and no steering and no being anywhere, and the room was gone and the chair was gone and the qualified man’s hand was gone, and there was only direction, and the direction was not his.
He fell.
East.
He was going east.
Out past the transfer house, past the eastern wards, out where the country flattened toward the coast, toward the thing that had been slowly closing since spring, and it was not two rooms away on a table with a certificate on it, it was ninety miles off and it was a man and it was right there, it had always been right there, and for the first time in four hundred years the fall and the sense agreed with each other and both of them were pulling the same way and he was going, he was going, he was almost
Something caught him.
He came back into the room like a man dropped onto a floor.
There was a great deal of noise for a moment and then he understood that the noise was one sound, close, and that it was breathing, and that it was going in and out very fast, and that it was his.
He was lying on his side on the table.
He made the eyes open. That took a while and came in pieces, the way it always came in pieces, and the first thing was the ceiling of the transfer room, which was a good ceiling with a proper fall on it, because he had argued about ceilings too.
“Sir.” Sarl, somewhere above and to the left, sounding bored and a long way off. “Sir, in your own time. Nobody is charging you by the hour.”
Inventory.
He did the inventory the way he had done it eleven times, in order, because the order was the only part of this that had ever been his.
Breath. Present, and going far too fast. He caught it and held it, because it was not needed and because a body that breathed when it did not have to was a body that would forget to stop and be noticed.
Sight. Both. Good. Better than good. Better than anything he had had in nineteen years.
The mouth. Sound. All of them.
The hands.
He brought the right hand up in front of the face and looked at it. Long fingers, a working callus across the pads, a nail bitten short on the thumb and nowhere else. It came up smooth and stopped exactly where he told it to stop, and he turned it over once and felt something he had not felt since the ninth body, which was the plain animal pleasure of a hand that did what it was told.
Then the left.
It came up slower and it came up wrong, and he watched it come and knew what it was, because it was in the notice, because he had read the second page. The forearm was a long dull sheet of old burn from below the elbow to the knuckles, and the fingers had a curl in them that was not going to open, and the wrist turned about two thirds of the way and then stopped against something that was not going to give.
So there it is, he thought. Twenty years old, this one, and I shall be working around it for thirty.
Sarl was saying something about the yard and the cart and the paper and Azaelis was not listening, because he was doing the last item on the inventory, which was the one that had never been on any list because it had never once been in question.
He was in.
He was fastened. He could feel the fastening in every part of it, the way a foot feels a boot. There was no drift and no slippage and nothing wrong with the anchor at all.
He was also, entirely and beyond any argument, in the wrong body.
He lay on the table in a woman who matched the notice in every particular that the province could measure, sound of tooth, tall of frame, forty-three years old, burn to the left forearm with restricted function at the wrist and fingers, cause recorded as unknown, and he knew the way he knew north that this was not where he had been going.
And out east, past the wards, out toward the coast, the man was still there.
Still closing. Not moved. Not one hair.
Whatever had caught him had not been the sense and had not been the certificate, and in four hundred years he had never heard of a third thing.
“Sir,” said Sarl. “Sir. Can you sit.”
“In a moment.”
“Only I have another at the fifth bell and the room wants doing.”
“Yes,” Azaelis said. “In a moment.”
He lay still and listened to a body that was not breathing and had no reason to, and he thought, with the first thin edge of something he did not yet have a name for: ask now. Ask him now. Ask him what her name was, ask him who signed the schedule, ask him why nineteen days.
He got as far as opening the mouth.
And down the corridor, past the good sightlines, someone was coming at a pace that no one in that building ever used, an old man’s pace, hurrying badly, and Sarl straightened up from the ledger with an expression of pure administrative outrage and said, “Father. Father, you cannot be in here, there is a procedure, there is a room for it.”
“I have a letter,” said a voice out of breath from the corridor, “from the bench.”
And Azaelis, lying on the table in a body that fit him perfectly, turned his head toward the door.