The matter being one upon which no single authority is competent, it is proposed that the province, the diocesan chapter, and the house of Nekros sit jointly, and that they sit at the eastern seat. Provincial minute, spring
She stayed at Loft through the thaw because she could not walk far and because there was nowhere else, and by the end of March she had a room over a cooper’s, a bench, a lamp, and about nine patients, and she had stopped waiting for it to feel temporary.
The ribs took six weeks. She had told a hundred people that ribs take six weeks and had never once believed it, and it took six weeks, and she was extremely bad-tempered about being ordinary.
Bircher wrote in March.
He wrote about the roof, at length, and about a man in the parish who had bought a horse he could not afford, and about the ice going out, and in the middle of the fourth page, in the same hand and the same tone, he wrote: A man came from the diocesan house on the second and asked me eleven questions and I answered all of them and told him no lies. He asked me whether I had seen a woman stand up. I said that I had seen a great many people stand up in forty-two years and that a fen is a confusing place in February. I do not think he believed me and I do not think he minded. He was writing it down.
And at the end: Do not come back. I am putting that in writing so that you have it in a hand you trust. There is nothing here that is yours anymore and I have said the same thing to myself about four things in my life and been right every time.
He is telling you he is dying, said Azaelis.
“I know what he is telling me.”
I am not certain you do. He is sixty-six and he has done a winter in a bog with a bad heart and he is telling you not to come, and there is only one reason a man of that sort says that.
“I know what he is telling me,” said Su’inn. “I have been reading it in my own trade for twelve years and I would like about an hour before I have to be sensible about it.”
Rowe came on the eleventh of April.
She came alone and on foot and she came up the cooper’s stairs at about the fourth hour of the afternoon, and Su’inn heard the boots on the fourth step and knew, and had about six seconds.
Do not run.
“I am not going to run. There is one door.”
Then sit down. You are standing like a woman with a knife on the bench and there is a knife on the bench.
She sat down.
Rowe came in and looked at the room, once, all of it, in the way she had looked at a church, and then shut the door behind her and stayed standing.
She had aged more than nineteen months.
“Practitioner.”
“Crusader.”
“Not for about five weeks,” said Rowe. “I am under examination. It is not a punishment, it is what they do when you come back from something like that, and it takes a year, and I am told most people are put back.” She said it flatly. “Some are not.”
Su’inn sat with her hands on her knees.
“Ammet.”
“Ammet is finished.”
“How.”
“That is not a thing I am going to say in a room,” said Rowe, “and I want to tell you why, because you are entitled to something. There were eleven of us. There are seven. And the paper your passenger wrote me at a wheelwright’s table in Halverside was correct in every particular including two that I did not believe until I was standing in the place, and if it had been wrong in one of them there would be four.”
The room was quiet.
Ask her how many, said Azaelis.
“He wants to know how many.”
Rowe looked at the middle distance for a moment.
“We found thirty-one that we are certain of,” she said. “There are more. There is a province up there with about ninety years of people who went out one morning and came back wrong, and their families all thought it was them going strange, and I have got a year of reading to do and I am not going to be the same afterward and I know it.”
Thirty-one, said Azaelis.
“He heard.”
“Tell him he was right and that it does not make it better,” said Rowe. “I have had four hundred miles to decide what I think of a man who sat on that for ninety years and I have not managed it, and I would take it as a kindness if he did not help me.”
Tell her I will not help her.
“He says he will not help you.”
“Good,” said Rowe.
She sat down eventually, on the edge of the bench, which was the only other thing in the room to sit on.
“I did not come to take you,” she said.
“No.”
“You are not surprised.”
“You came up twelve stairs on your own with nothing in your hands and you shut the door behind you,” said Su’inn. “I have been reading people for a living for twelve years. I stopped being surprised on the fourth step.”
Rowe almost smiled.
“There is a joint sitting,” she said. “The province and the chapter and the house of Nekros. It is called for the ninth of June at the eastern seat and it has been called because they have run out of ways to not call it.”
Su’inn did not move.
“They have got a chapter finding from year before last that says a resurrection was validly performed,” said Rowe. “They have got a transfer house day book with a continuation lodged and a reconstruction that does not match it. They have got an assessment made in a certified house on a living vessel, which has never happened, and which Enner signed twice and has been writing letters about ever since. They have got a stay of sentence lodged at Halverside that nobody has withdrawn in two years because nobody can work out who has the standing to withdraw it.” She counted them off without any relish at all. “And now they have got about forty people in a fen who watched a drowned woman stand up, and a priest who told them all a story about the Ulmatine work, and a man from the diocesan house who wrote the story down and does not believe it.”
“And they want to decide what I am.”
“They want to decide what to do with the file,” said Rowe. “Which is not the same thing and is worse, because a thing they cannot decide sits in a drawer, and a thing in a drawer gets handled by whoever is willing to handle it, and I want you to think very carefully about who that is.”
Rowe, said Azaelis. Ask her whether we are summoned or invited.
Su’inn asked.
“Neither,” said Rowe. “That is the entire difficulty. There is no writ that runs to you. You cannot be summoned because there is no procedure for summoning two, and you cannot be a witness because a witness swears alone, and you cannot be a defendant because nobody can settle what you would be charged with.” She put her hands on her knees. “They are going to sit on the ninth of June and talk about you for four days, and you do not have to be there, and there is no power on earth that can make you be there.”
The room was very quiet.
“And if I am not there,” said Su’inn.
“Then four men who have never met you will write down what you are,” said Rowe, “and it will be in a drawer for two hundred years, and everyone who ever comes for you after that will be coming with a piece of paper that they did not have to argue with.”
She did not answer that day and Rowe did not ask her to.
She sat in the room over the cooper’s for a long time after the boots had gone down the stairs, with the light going, and did not light the lamp.
Su’inn.
“Not yet.”
I am not going to argue with you. I want to say one thing and then I will be quiet for as long as you like.
“Say it.”
I have spent four hundred years staying out of rooms like that, said Azaelis. Every single one of them. There has not been one occasion in four centuries when I have stood up in front of an institution and let it look at me, and the whole of my life is arranged around that, and it has worked, and I am the last man alive who came out of the eleven-forties and there is a reason.
“I know.”
And in two years I have watched you decline to speak in a yard with nine people in it, and decline to give an account to a finder in a drovers’ shed, and decline a witness on a river path who had waited twenty-one years to give you one. A pause. You have refused everybody, and you have been right every single time, and I have never once told you so.
Su’inn sat in the dark.
“Say the rest of it.”
If you go to that room, said Azaelis, you will have to speak. Not about the house at Halverside. I do not think they will even reach it and I would fight them if they did. But about this. About what it is like. And there is no version where you sit at the back and let it happen, because the entire reason to go is that you are the only one who can say it.
“Yes.”
And I cannot help you, he said. Not in that room. The chapter will be there and the house of Nekros will be there and it will be held on consecrate ground, because everything that faith does is held on consecrate ground, and I will go out on the step.
She sat with her hands in her lap in the dark.
“I know,” she said. “I worked that out while she was still on the stairs.”