No person shall practise a healing trade within this ward save as entered upon the register, on pain of the ward’s remedy. Cauldry, ward bye-laws, board at the market cross
Six weeks later she was the woman in Ellersgate.
That was the joke. It was not a good joke and it did not get better, and she took it out and looked at it about twice a week the way you press a bruise.
She worked out of the back of a drover’s yard in Cauldry, in a room with a bench in it and a lamp and no window, for people who could not go to the licensed man on Coop Street. There were more of those than she would have believed a year ago. Drovers on the road with no ward to belong to. Two families off the boats who were not going to hand anybody a name. A girl of about fifteen whose reason Su’inn did not ask for and could work out.
They paid in food, mostly. Sometimes in coin, once in a goose, and there had been a period in the third week where she had been given so much cheese that she had begun refusing it with real feeling.
She used the name Ulmat and did not use the first name at all, and the yard called her the woman at the back, which suited everybody.
You are brooding.
“I am working.”
You are doing the draw with your hands and brooding with the rest of you, and you have been on the same abscess for four minutes.
“I am thinking about Hess.”
You have thought about Hess eleven times.
“I told a room full of people that she was selling the stay to people who could not run it and killing them in threes, and Ferrow corrected me and I said it anyway because it was easier.” She had the draw running properly now and the matter coming up the way it should. “And now I am in a back room in a yard with no register and no house behind me and a bench I cleaned with vinegar, and I have got about nine years and eleven forms and no one in this ward has any way at all of knowing that, and every single person who walks through that curtain is taking exactly the same chance on me that I sneered at her for.”
And?
“And she has been doing it for eleven years and I have been doing it for six weeks, and I do not think she is a fraud, and I never did.” She wiped her fingers. “I think I was fifteen years better trained than her and I let that do all my thinking for me, and it is a very cheap way to be right.”
That is a considerable amount of moral progress for one abscess.
“There is more where that came from.”
I am certain there is.
He had driven four times in six weeks.
That was the number and she kept it in her head rather than anywhere else, because there was nothing to write it on and because writing it would have made it a ledger, and she had spent enough time near ledgers.
The first was Halbrick’s leg.
The second was a woman on the drove road with a child crosswise, and had cost, on his estimate, two days.
The third was a knife fight outside the yard where a man had opened his own forearm to the bone getting between two other men, and Azaelis had put it back together in twenty minutes with a form she had never seen and could not follow, and had said afterward that it was not struck, it was simply older than her house and had gone out of fashion, and that there was a difference and she should learn to ask which.
The fourth was a burn.
She did not talk about the fourth.
The ritual had changed shape in six weeks and she had let it happen without particularly noticing, the way you stop feeling a ring.
At Ennick he had quoted the price and waited. By the third week she had started asking before he offered, which was faster, and she had been pleased with herself about the efficiency for several days before it occurred to her that she had taken over the part of the transaction that was designed to slow her down.
Now it went: how much. And he said a number. And she said take it.
Three exchanges. It took four seconds. It had taken about a minute at Ennick and the minute had been the whole point.
“I have noticed something,” she said, on the last night of the sixth week, lying on the pallet in the back room with the lamp out.
Yes.
“You still say the number.”
I do.
“I stopped making you. I have not made you say it since the second week. You could have started rounding down about a month ago and I would have had no way in the world to check you.”
No, said Azaelis. You would not.
“Have you.”
No.
“That is what a man who had would say.”
It is, he agreed. It is also what a man who had not would say, and there is no third sentence, and I have spent four hundred years discovering that this is true of nearly everything worth being asked.
She lay in the dark.
“My mouth tastes of coins all the time now.”
Yes.
“It did not at Ennick. It came and it went.”
Yes.
“And you knew that would happen.”
I knew the shape of it. I did not know the speed. A pause, and she had learned by now to be interested in his pauses. Su’inn, I am going to tell you a thing and I am going to tell it to you badly because I have been trying to find a good way to say it for five weeks and there is not one. The signs are arriving faster in you than they have ever arrived in anybody. In the eleventh body the first one took nineteen years. In you it took nineteen hours.
She did not move.
“How much faster.”
I do not know. I cannot know, because there has never been a body like this and there is no one to ask, and every figure I give you will be a guess dressed as a number, and I have watched what you do with numbers. Level. What I can tell you is that the assessment on that certificate was thirty-one years, and I do not believe it, and I have not believed it since a service run in the dark.
“What do you believe.”
I decline to say.
“Azaelis.”
I decline to say, he repeated, because you will build on it, and if I am wrong you will have spent a year of your life being careful about the wrong thing, and because there is a man in this ward who can measure it properly and I would rather have his number than mine.
“There is a what.”
The man in the doorway was there at the seventh hour the next morning, and he had been there for some time before she noticed him, which she thought about afterward.
He was fifty or so and dressed like a factor’s clerk and was not one, and he had a satchel and a good coat and the sort of face that has been in a great many rooms and has stopped expecting any of them to be interesting.
“You are the woman at the back,” he said.
“I am.”
“Ulmat.”
“That is the name I use.”
“Yes,” the man agreed. “I have the other one.”
Su’inn put down the cloth.
“I am Vasse,” he said. “I am not the province and I am not a church, and before you go out through whatever it is you have arranged to go out through, which I would guess is the loose board behind the meal bins because it is the only thing in this yard that has been moved recently, I am going to say four things and then you may do as you like.”
She stood very still.
Su’inn.
“One,” said Vasse. “There is a stay of sentence lodged at Halverside in your favour and it has never been withdrawn, which makes you, on paper, an inconvenience rather than a fugitive, and almost nobody has understood that yet.”
“Two,” he said. “The day book of the eastern transfer house was reconstructed from memory and the reconstruction is bad. I have read both. The second one has a date wrong in it and the wrong date is in your favour and the factor does not know.”
“Three. Father Bircher’s hearing is in eleven days at the diocesan house and he has not been suspended, because his chapter cannot decide whether he committed a theft or performed a sacrament, and if you want to know the truth of it neither can he.”
He shifted the satchel.
“Four,” said Vasse. “I have been on this road eight days behind you and I have been in every place you have stopped, and I want you to think about the fact that I am standing in your doorway telling you all of that instead of standing in it with four men.”
Su’inn did not move.
“What do you want.”
“I want the one thing nobody in this entire business has got,” said Vasse, “which is a straight account of what happened in that room, from somebody who was in it. There were three people in that room, madam. One is a priest who is about to be asked under oath and will tell them the truth and will be disbelieved. One is a factor who did not see it and has written down what he thinks he saw.”
He looked at her.
“And one of you is the only witness in the province who cannot be summoned, because there is no procedure in the world for putting two people in a box.”
He is very good, said Azaelis, quietly. Do not answer anything yet.
“And which of us are you asking?” said Su’inn.
Vasse smiled for the first time, and it did not reach anywhere.
“That,” he said, “is the first interesting thing anybody has said to me in nine weeks.”