The service run shall be of sufficient section to admit one man at a stoop, and shall not appear upon the ground plan, the same being a matter of works and not of record. Standard of the Province, transfer houses, schedule of works, 91
It came into him like water into a boot.
That was the closest he ever got to it, and he tried for years afterward and never improved on it, which annoyed him, because it was an ugly image and he had four hundred years of better ones available and none of them fit. Water into a boot. The sudden cold total arrival of a thing into every part of a shape that had been sitting in it dry.
He had her.
The first thing he did, before the door, before the latch, before anything at all, was stop breathing.
The relief of it was indecent. Eleven hours of listening to a body take air it did not need, at a pace set by a woman who had no idea she was setting it, unable to reach it, and now it stopped, and the whole clamour of her chest went out like a lamp, and he stood in the sudden enormous silence of himself and had to spend a full second not enjoying it.
Second thing. The hands.
Right hand: excellent. Better than excellent. He flexed it once and it went where it was told and stopped where it was told and there was a working callus across the pads that would do very well.
Left hand: what it was.
Third thing, and this was the one that took him longest and that he would not have admitted to anybody, was that he had to stand still for a moment because he was on the floor of a room and the floor was under his feet and the feet were his and the whole of it was his, and after eleven hours of watching a woman cross a room he had forgotten in the intervening time exactly how much of being a person is simply the ordinary business of deciding where to put your weight.
Azaelis.
“Yes. A moment.”
The door.
“Yes.”
He turned around.
Corvel came in first because Corvel had been told to.
He was nineteen and he had a lamp in one hand and nothing in the other, and behind him in the corridor there were three men who had not come in yet, and the reason they had not come in yet was that they were not there for a woman on a bed. They were there for what a woman on a bed had inside her, and men who are frightened of a thing send the boy through the door first.
Azaelis had perhaps one and a half seconds and he used all of it.
There were four ways to do this and he knew all four of them by the time the lamp cleared the frame. Two were quick and left the boy on the floor of the corridor with something broken, and one of those two also put the lamp out, which would have been worth a great deal in the next ninety seconds. He looked at them the way a man looks at tools on a bench, without heat, and set them down.
Not because of the boy. He wanted that clear, afterward, with himself, in the honest minute. It was not about the boy.
It was that a house that finds a young man broken in a corridor searches it for eleven weeks, and a house that finds a young man sitting on a stool having been very sensibly persuaded does not.
“Corvel,” he said. “Put the lamp on the floor and sit down on your stool and say I went past you, because I am about to.”
Corvel put the lamp on the floor.
He did not sit down, but he did not do anything else either, and that was enough, and Azaelis went past him at the shoulder and into the corridor and turned left, away from the front hall, toward the north end, where the corridors carried and there was nothing at the end of them but wall.
Somebody behind him said a word in a voice trained to be obeyed.
He did not slow down, and it occurred to him somewhere around the fourth stride that he had not been given an order in nineteen years, and that he had missed it about as much as he had missed being shot at.
Where are we going. There is nothing down here.
“There is a wall down here.”
Azaelis.
“Do not talk to me for forty seconds, it is not that I mind, it is that I am counting.”
He was counting. He had been counting since the corridor because the north end of the eastern house was a hundred and nine feet from the stair head to the wall, and the second hatch was at eighty-one, and he knew that number the way other men knew their own doorway, because he had stood in this corridor in the winter of ninety-one with a bad drawing and a builder who kept calling him sir and had walked the length of it eleven times in one afternoon arguing about air.
At eighty-one he stopped and put the right hand flat on the panelling at knee height and pushed up and left, and the hatch went in about an inch and stuck, because it was thirty-five years old and had been painted twice.
“Ah,” said Azaelis.
He hit it with the heel of the right hand, once, hard, and the paint gave, and the hatch swung.
That is a hole.
“It is a service run of sufficient section to admit one man at a stoop. I wrote that.”
You are not a man at a stoop, you are a woman of five foot ten who has been dead since Tuesday.
“I am aware of the height. I am the one in the shoulders.” He was already down and in. “There are two of these. The one behind us goes to the kitchen chimney and is a very poor idea. This one goes to the north wall and comes out in a stone box in the yard that everybody has always assumed is a drain.”
Everybody including the men in the yard.
“Everybody including the men in the yard.”
The run was three hundred and forty feet of stooping in the dark, and it was the first honest work the body had done since it stopped being hers, and about a hundred feet into it he began to feel the price.
It was not pain. He wanted to be exact about that afterward, when she asked, because she would ask and would want the truth and would be able to tell.
It was a taste.
That was all. A faint dark taste at the very back of the mouth, like a coin, coming up out of the tissue the way it always came up, the same taste in the second body and the ninth and the eleventh, arriving on the first hard day and never entirely going again. In an ordinary host it meant nothing at all. It meant a body had started, at some indefinable moment, being a thing that was going to end.
He had tasted it in the eleventh body in a summer nineteen years ago and had not thought about it twice.
He tasted it now, in the dark, at a hundred feet, on the first night.
Nineteen hours, he thought, with a clarity that he did not care for at all. It took nineteen years last time and it has taken nineteen hours, and either I have been badly wrong about how this works or she has considerably less than either of us has been assuming.
He did not say any of that.
What is it, said Su’inn.
“Stone in my shoe.”
You are barefoot.
“Then it is a very good stone.”
They came out into a wet stone box in the corner of the yard at some time past the fourth hour, and he got the grating up with the right hand and the left forearm braced under it, which was a technique he had invented on the spot and was rather pleased with, and lay flat in the box for two minutes listening to four men search a building.
The lamps went along the north side and then along the north side again.
He watched them go and did the arithmetic and found, with a mild professional interest, that he had already worked out four separate ways of making certain the search stayed on the north side for another hour. Two of them involved the cart. One of them involved the horses and would have been noisy. The fourth was very good indeed and required nothing but a stone and about six seconds, and he turned it over and admired it and did not do it.
Then he went over the wall.
It was a bad wall, badly climbed, by a body that had no business on a wall at all, and he went down the far side onto a road he had ridden past a hundred times in a coach, and stood there in the dark in the rain in a dead woman’s clothes with nothing in his pockets and no idea whatsoever where he was going, and discovered that he was, for the first time in a very long while, entirely and unreservedly delighted.
Azaelis.
“A moment.”
You are not breathing.
“I am aware.”
It is raining and you are standing in a road.
“Su’inn,” said Azaelis, “I have been in a chair, and then in a corridor, and then in a room, and then in your head, since three o’clock yesterday afternoon, and I am going to stand in this road for eleven more seconds and then I will be extremely practical for as long as you require. Eleven seconds. You may count them.”
There was a pause.
Fine, she said.
He stood in the road.
At the eleventh second he said, “There is a milestone about four hundred yards along and a fork after it, and the left is the Halverside road and the right goes north into the hills and neither of them is any good, and I do not intend to make that decision at four in the morning standing in the rain.”
Then what.
“Then we walk to the milestone, and we sit behind it out of the wind, and I give you your body back, and you decide.”
You do not have to give it back yet.
“No,” said Azaelis.
He started walking.
I would not know. If you kept it. I would sit here and I would not be able to do one thing about it, and you know that, and you have known it since the room.
“Yes.”
So why.
He walked about thirty yards before he answered, and he spent all thirty of them being aware of exactly how good it was: the road, the weight, the cold, the working of a hip that had spent nine years standing at a table, the fact that the rain was arriving on his face and it was his face for as long as he did not say otherwise.
Because you asked for the price, he said, and I gave you a number, and if I sit in you for one hour longer than the job took, then the number was a lie, and every number I give you after tonight is a lie too, and I will have spent the only thing I am ever going to have with you on a walk in the rain that I enjoyed.
He got to the milestone. He sat down behind it, out of the wind, and put the right hand flat on the wet stone, and looked at it for a moment.
“Take it,” he said.
And gave it back.