The body had been assessed at thirty-one years and had given him nineteen, which was not a scandal. Assessment was an estimate performed on a stranger by a man with a dozen other bodies waiting. Azaelis had never once complained about a number.
He complained, privately and at length, about the gums.
They had begun receding in the spring, in the unhurried way that decomposure preferred, and by midsummer the teeth had grown noticeably longer, which was a thing that happened to the very old and to no one else. He had adjusted. He smiled less. He had already stopped smiling with any breadth some years ago, on account of the color, and the new economy of it was simply an extension of an existing policy.
There was a system. There was always a system by this point in a body.
Mornings began with the hands, because the hands were what people looked at. Oil first, worked in slowly, then the gloves, which were thin and gray and had been made for him in a shop where the measurements were kept on file under a name that was not his. Then the collar, high. Then the scent, which was cedar and something bitter under it, applied to the cloth rather than the skin, because applied to the skin it went strange within the hour and became a thing people noticed without knowing they had noticed it.
Then the mirror, and the honest minute.
He gave himself an honest minute every morning, and had done in every body, because a man who lies to himself about the state of a house will be surprised by the roof. This morning the honest minute reported: the left eye had gone the color of weak tea, the jaw was holding, the smell was manageable at conversational distance and unmanageable in a closed carriage, and the fingernails of the right hand had stopped growing in the last two weeks, which was new, and which meant the extremities were beginning to go quiet.
Six months, then. Possibly nine, if the weather stayed cold.
He put on the gloves and went down to breakfast, because Marren would be at breakfast, and Marren counted.
She was sixty-eight and she had the family’s chin, which was a thing he had watched come down through four generations without once being able to say what he felt about it. Her great-great-grandmother had worn that chin. He had worn a face that kissed it.
“You are late,” Marren said.
“I am deliberate.”
“You are late, and Ostrand’s man has been in the front room since the second bell, and he has now read the entire wall.”
“There is very little on the wall.”
“He has read it several times.” She poured for him, and he took the cup and held it and did not drink it, and she watched him not drink it the way she had been watching him not drink things for forty years. “Your color is off.”
“My color has been off since the reign before last.”
“Your color is off since Tuesday, Azaelis.”
He set the cup down.
“The nails have stopped,” he said. “The right hand. I noticed this morning.”
Marren’s face did not do anything at all, which was how he knew. She had learned that from her mother, who had learned it from hers, and somewhere at the top of that staircase was a woman who had learned it from him, because he had been the one in the household who did not react, and children copy what is in front of them, and then they teach it to their own, and four generations later a woman he had known since she was an infant could receive the news of his death without moving a muscle in her face.
He had made her. Not in the way that mattered legally. In the way that mattered.
“How long,” she said.
“Six months. Nine if it stays cold.”
“It will not stay cold.”
“It will not stay cold,” he agreed.
She got up and went to the window and stood with her back to him, and he let her, and he counted, because he had learned in the third body that people needed a specific and generous number of seconds and that giving them fewer was the cruelest small thing a man could do.
At eleven she said, “Then we start.”
“We start.”
“I will write to the provincial office.”
“Marren.”
“I will write to the provincial office,” she said, in the tone she had used since she was forty, “and you will not tell me not to, and we will not have the conversation about whether it is unseemly, because I have had that conversation with you twice and I have won it twice and I do not intend to spend a third afternoon on it.”
“I was going to say thank you.”
“You were not.”
“No,” Azaelis admitted. “I was going to say it is early.”
“It is not early. It is nine months, and last time it took eleven, and the time before that you very nearly went into a girl with a bad heart because we were down to weeks and there was nothing else certified inside the province.” She turned around. “You promised me you would never do that again.”
“I promised you I would try.”
“You promised me.”
He inclined his head, which was not agreement, and she knew it was not agreement, and she let it stand because they had thirty years of practice at letting things stand.
The truth, which he did not say at breakfast and had never said to any of them, was that he could already feel one.
It had begun perhaps two weeks ago, faint, the way a change in the weather is faint before it is a fact. Somewhere out past the eastern wards, a man was coming to the end. Not sick, not yet. Just closing. Azaelis could not have said who or where within twenty miles, and he could not have said whether it would be a month or a year, but the direction of it sat in him the way north sits in a bird.
He had felt it in every body he had ever worn. He had felt it as a boy, before he knew what it was, when it had only been a strange sourceless attention that made him look up at nothing. He had felt it standing in a field at eleven years old and turned his head east and known, without any of the words he would later have for it, that something over there was finishing.
It was not a gift. He had never once been able to do anything useful with it. He could not tell whose. He could not tell when. He could not go and warn them, and in the four hundred years since the field he had tried, twice, and had been wrong the first time and appallingly right the second, and had not tried again.
What it was, was a smell of bread from a house he could not enter.
He had a body with six months in it and a sense that said a man was closing somewhere east, and those two facts sat together in him all morning while Ostrand’s man went through the papers, and he was careful, very careful, not to look at them side by side.
Ostrand’s man had a folder and a bad cold and no idea what he was in a room with.
“Continuation of interest,” he said, “in the matter of the Brannt holdings, and the instrument as drawn provides for the interest to pass on the demise of the current holder to the beneficiary named in the second schedule, which is, ah.”
“Which is myself.”
“Which is yourself, under the continuation, yes, sir, and I am obliged to say that the office has had some correspondence about the second schedule.”
“The office has correspondence about every second schedule.”
“The office does, sir.” He blew his nose. “It is the form of the thing. Continuations are unusual outside the province and the clerks in Fennering are not, if I may, they are not always, ah.”
“They are not always persuaded that a dead man’s estate can be inherited by the dead man.”
The clerk looked up, appalled.
“It is a fair summary,” Azaelis said mildly. “I have heard it put considerably worse. Give me the schedule and I will show you the language that settles it, and you may take a fair copy back to Fennering and the correspondence will stop.”
He turned the folder around one-handed and found the paragraph without looking for it, because he knew where it was, because it was in the third position, because it had been in the third position since the instrument was standardized and it was in the third position for a reason that had made sense at the time.
Continuation being the lawful persistence of a certified interest through transfer of vessel, the interest shall not lapse, abate, or be treated as an estate in death.
Twenty-one words. He had not written them. He had sat in a room with four other people and argued for a fortnight about eleven of them, and had lost on two, and had considered the compromise a good day’s work, and it had been. It had been. Before the standard instrument there had been grave robbery, and families ruined by a claim that arrived in a face they did not recognize, and Eternals who did not wait for a body to be finished with. He had watched all of that end.
“It is very clear,” the clerk said, reading it.
“It is very clear.”
“I do not know why they make difficulties.”
“They make difficulties because it is a strange thing,” Azaelis said, “and because a clear rule about a strange thing makes the strangeness portable. You can put it in a folder. You can carry it to Fennering.” He handed back the papers. “Do give the office my regards. I am told they have a beautiful new register.”
He walked in the afternoon, gloved, collared, at the hour when the light was low enough to be kind to a face.
The thing he was not thinking about, and had been not thinking about since spring, was the interval.
Nobody who had not done it understood the interval. They imagined death and then a new body, one and then the other, like stepping between boats. It was not like that. Transfer required a certified vessel, a qualified hand, and a place, and the vessel was never in the room where the old body finished. So there was a distance. There was always a distance.
And in that distance he was in a corpse.
Awake. Entirely awake, with everything working except the body, which was not working at all, because the body was dead and he was not a soul that flew but a thing that occupied. He could hear them. He could hear the cart and the road and the men complaining about the weight of him, and he could not open an eye, and he could not make a sound, and he could not be certain, ever, in any of the eleven times, that they would arrive.
The shortest had been four hours.
The longest had been nine days, in the fifth body, in bad country, and he did not think about the fifth body.
That was the thing. That was the whole of it, the reason for the gloves and the oil and the honest minute and the thirty years of letters to the provincial office, the reason he was gentle with clerks and generous with seconds and had never in four hundred years been late to an appointment. It was not fastidiousness. It was not even fear of dying, because he was not going to die.
It was that every body ended with him lying awake in the dark inside a dead thing, listening to strangers decide how fast to walk.
And the leaving itself, when it came, when the hand was finally on him and the vessel was ready and the thing was done.
There were no words for the leaving. He had four hundred years and eleven lives and nine languages, and he had never found a single word in any of them that came near it, and he had stopped looking, because looking meant thinking about it, and a man who thinks about it too often begins to arrange his affairs so as to postpone it, and a man who postpones it dies in a ditch nine days from anywhere.
Six months. Nine if it stayed cold.
Out past the eastern wards, faintly, in the direction of Fennering, something was still closing.
He turned his collar up and went home to write to Marren’s clerk about the schedule.