Eleven inquiries, four wards. Advice rendered at Lady Day and Michaelmas. Ostrand and Sons, schedule to the general retainer
She let go without asking the price.
He noticed it going in, in the half second of arrival, and put it somewhere to think about later, because it was the first time in a year and a half and because there was an old woman at a gate.
Then he was standing on a wall in a fen looking at Marren.
“It is me,” he said.
Marren’s face did not do anything.
That was correct. That was exactly correct and he had spent forty years teaching it to her without ever once saying so, and he stood on the wall in a body that had been hanged and watched his own work look back at him out of a sixty-nine-year-old woman’s face, and thought, with great clarity: this is what I did.
“Say something only you would know,” said Marren.
“You were four years old and you put a dead wren in my coat pocket because you had been told it was rude to talk about death at table, and you wanted me to find it later, and I found it in the church.”
“Anybody could.”
“Nobody could and you know nobody could, and you are asking because you have been walking for a mile deciding what you would say and that was the only thing on the list you could get out.” He kept his hands where she could see them, out of habit, out of a leat. “It is me. Sit down before you fall down. There is a stone by the gate.”
She sat down on the stone.
“Are you angry with me,” said Marren.
“No.”
She had been braced for it. He watched her not be braced for the other thing, and watched it arrive, and it took about four seconds.
“I would rather you were.”
“Yes. I know.” He crouched down, which the body did not enjoy, and put his forearms on his knees so that he was under her eyeline rather than over it, because that was the other thing he had spent forty years doing in front of her. “Marren, I have had eighteen months to be angry with you and I have not managed a single hour of it, and the reason is not that I forgive you and it is not that I did not know. It is that I would not have the standing.”
“You did not know.”
“I did not know the particulars. I have never asked you one question about how a vessel arrives, in forty years, and I have signed everything you have put in front of me, and I have been the client of a firm that keeps a schedule of eleven ripening inquiries and I have never once read the schedule.” He said it flatly. “I built the instrument that makes a conviction into a vessel. I sat in a room in the year eleven-forty and I argued for a fortnight about the wording, and I lost on two words and thought it was a good day’s work, and it was. It stopped grave robbery. It stopped men going into the living.”
“It did.”
“And it turned a bench into a supplier,” said Azaelis, “and I have had three hundred years to notice that and I did not, because it was feeding me, and you are the fourth generation of a family that has spent its whole existence catching what I let fall.” He looked at her. “You did not invent anything, Marren. You are not a monster and I am not going to insult you by treating you as one. You did the sum I taught you, with the machine I made, and you did it better than I ever did because you had the courage to do it on purpose.”
Marren sat on the stone with her hands in her lap.
“That is a great deal worse than angry,” she said.
“Yes,” said Azaelis. “I am aware. I have been arranging it for a mile as well.”
“I want the eleven closed.”
“No.”
“Marren.”
“They are in my name and my retainer and you cannot touch them, and I have checked, because I knew you would ask me eventually.” She said it without any triumph at all. “And I am not going to close them, and I want you to hear the reason, because it is not sentiment. You have got thirty years in that body. In about twenty-eight I will be dead, and my daughter does not know, and my granddaughter does not know, and there will be nobody. And if there is nobody, then in twenty-eight years you are a man of four hundred and thirty in a failing body writing his own letters to a provincial office, with a queue of eleven months, and you will do what you nearly did before.” She looked up. “I have watched you nearly do it once. I am not leaving you to do it when I am not there.”
He crouched in front of her in the wet grass.
“Marren.”
“No.”
“You do not have thirty years to plan for.”
She stopped.
“There was an assessment made in the spring,” said Azaelis. “In the eastern house, by Enner, who has done it for thirty-one years and who did it twice because he did not believe it the first time. You have a copy. You told this woman at the gate that you had a copy and did not get it honestly.”
“I have not read it,” said Marren. “It came in June and I have not read it. I have carried it about for four months.”
“Why.”
“Because it is a number about how long she has got,” said Marren, “and I have been able to do this for nine years by not knowing any of their numbers, and I knew what it would do to me, and I was right, and I did not read it.”
Azaelis put his hand over his eyes, which was hers, and which was a gesture he had never made in his life and had picked up in eighteen months from a woman who did it on church steps.
“Then I am going to tell you,” he said.
“The certificate said thirty-one years. That was ordinary occupancy. It was a good assessment and it was correct for what it measured.” He took his hand down. “It is not thirty-one years. There are two of us in here and the whole thing has come apart, and the body only burns when I am at the front of it, and it repairs when she is.”
“That is good.”
“It is extraordinary and nobody in the province has ever seen it. And the total is not in years.” He watched her. “Enner measured it twice. There are about eleven hundred hours of me in this body. That is forty-five days. I have spent about sixty hours of it since April of last year.”
Marren sat very still.
“Sixty hours.”
“Sixty hours in eighteen months.”
She did the arithmetic. He watched her do it, because she had always done it fast, because he had taught her that too.
“You have not got thirty years,” she said.
“I have got about eleven hundred hours of being a person,” said Azaelis, “spread across whatever this woman has left, which is between forty and fifty years, and it comes out at about four minutes a day, and she worked that out in October in the dark and laughed until she had to sit up.”
Marren put both hands flat on her knees.
“I moved a date,” she said.
“You did.”
“I took eleven months off a woman’s life and I did the sum and it came out, and I have said that at a gate this afternoon, out loud, to her.” Her voice had not changed and her face had not changed and something behind both of them had gone. “And the sum was thirty years.”
“Yes.”
“And it was forty-five days.”
“It was forty-five days,” said Azaelis, “and you could not have known, and Enner could not have known, and I could not have known, and I want to say all three of those now, at once, while you are sitting on a stone, because in about two minutes you are going to start telling yourself the version where you should have.”
Marren looked out at the fen.
“Eleven months,” she said. “For forty-five days.”
“Yes.”
“That is not a bad sum,” she said. “That is not a sum at all. That is a woman who wanted a thing and did the arithmetic afterward.”
And Azaelis, crouched in the wet grass in a stolen body in front of a woman he had known since she was born, said nothing whatsoever, because there was nothing to say, because she had just told him what he was in eleven words and had not meant to.
He got her back down the causeway to the chaise and it took a long time.
She did not cry and she did not apologise and she did not ask for anything, and at the bottom she stood holding the door of the chaise and looked up at him with the whole of four generations in her face.
“I will close them,” she said.
“Marren.”
“Not because it is wicked. I do not think it is wicked and I am not going to start now at sixty-nine.” She got the door open. “I will close them because they are not for anything. Nine years and eleven inquiries and four shillings a time, and it was all for a queue that does not apply to you any more, and I am not going to spend the last of my life farming for a man who is not going to need a vessel.”
“That is not what the number means.”
“It is exactly what the number means,” said Marren, “and you have known it since the spring, and you crouched down in the grass so that I would not have to look up at you while you said it.” She got into the chaise. “Come and see me before I die. I do not care what it costs her. Tell her I said that. I am too old to pretend I would rather have the hours.”
He gave it back on the causeway in the dark with his hand flat on a gatepost.
Four hours, said Su’inn.
“Four hours and about twenty minutes.”
You did not quote me.
“No,” said Azaelis. “You did not ask, and I have been trying to work out since half past one whether that was a kindness or whether you had stopped counting, and I would very much like it to have been the first.”
There was a pause.
It was neither, said Su’inn. I knew what it was going to cost and I did not want to hear the number said out loud in front of her.
She took the wheel and started walking.
Because she would have heard it too, said Su’inn, and I had decided at the gate to be as cruel to that woman as I could manage, and I got to the end of the list and there was one thing on it I would not do.