Upon consecrate ground the dead have no office. Salvos, common rubric
They did not speak for four hours after the square, and it was not the freezing out and both of them knew it.
She bought boots. She bought a coat and a shift and a second shift and a comb, and she got two shillings changed into small so as not to be a woman producing gold in a market town, and she did all of it with a thing sitting in her chest that she could not get out by walking.
You are not going to feel better about it, said Azaelis, eventually.
“I am aware.”
I have been thinking about whether to say the next part and I have decided to say it, because you will get to it yourself in about a week and you will be angrier if I let you.
“Go on.”
The paper is not the thing you are sick about. If I had died in that chair in April, Marren would have opened a notice inside the month, and there would have been a body somewhere and a family somewhere and none of it would have troubled you at all, because you would never have heard of it and you would have been dead. Level, as always. What is in your chest is that you have found out what it is like to be the body on somebody’s list. That is all. And there is no version of me that does not have a list.
Su’inn stood in the middle of a market town with a new coat over her arm.
“That is worse.”
Yes, said Azaelis. Nearly everything I can tell you honestly is worse. I have been keeping a great deal of it back on the theory that you were having a difficult year.
She saw them at the second hour of the afternoon from the top end of the square.
Two men and a woman, off horses, at the moot hall steps, talking to the boy from the records office who was doing a great deal of pointing.
The men were in travelling clothes and the woman was in a coat that had been made to be plain and had failed, and there was a shape under it at her hip that was not a working knife, and she stood the way a person stands who has been taught to stand somewhere for a long time.
Do not run.
“I am not running.”
You are going to want to run in about four seconds and you will be visible for two hundred yards in every direction, and there is nothing in this town that says fugitive like a woman going quickly with a coat over her arm. Very fast, very flat. Walk. Down the near side. Do not look at the moot hall again, you have had your look and it was a good one.
She walked.
“They will have the day sheet.”
They will have the day sheet by now, yes.
“I made him write it down.”
You made him write it down, Azaelis agreed, and it was the right thing to do and it is going to cost us this afternoon, and I want you to understand that both halves of that are true and neither cancels the other.
“Where.”
The church.
She stopped, which was exactly what he had told her not to do.
“You are joking.”
I am not, and we do not have the twenty minutes it would take me to be funny about it. A pause of about a second. Su’inn, there is a thing about consecrate ground that I have not told you and I have not told you because it is the single worst thing about me and I did not want you to have it before you needed it.
“Now would be the time.”
I go out.
“You go out.”
On consecrate ground I am not able to take the wheel and I am not able to speak to you and I am not able to do one single thing, said Azaelis. And the woman on those steps has been trained since she was fourteen to find what I am at forty paces, and she will find it in this square, and she will not find it in that building, because there is nothing to find in that building. You will be a tall woman at the back of a church.
Su’inn stood on the near side of the square.
“How long can you do that.”
Indefinitely. It is not a strain. It is not anything. And then, and it came out at a different speed from everything else he had said in eleven weeks: Go in. Sit at the back on the left where the pillar is. Do not come out until it is dark. And Su’inn, when you go through that door I will not be able to tell you that I am still here, and I would like it on the record now, in the square, that I am.
She went across and up the steps and in.
He went out on the fourth step.
There was no sensation to it at all. That was the thing she was not prepared for. She had expected something, a going, a diminishing, and instead she took a step and there was a person in her and she took another step and there was not.
The church was cold and mostly empty and smelled of stone and old smoke. She sat at the back on the left where the pillar was, and put her hands in her lap, and waited to feel relieved.
She waited about twenty minutes.
The relief did not come, and what came instead, gradually, in the way that cold comes up through a floor, was that she was alone in a way she had not been since the fourth bell on a Tuesday in the spring.
She had spent eleven weeks wanting exactly this. She had said so out loud in a dairy at Ennick and she had meant it. She had wanted an hour, one hour, of a room with one person in it.
She had it, and it was a stone box with a dead man’s silence in it, and she sat in the middle of it and thought: he is here.
And then: or he is not, and I would not know, and I will not know until I walk out of that door, and if he is not I will find out by nothing happening.
The crusader came in at about the fifth hour.
Su’inn heard the door and did not turn, because turning is what people do who are waiting to be found, and sat with her hands in her lap and her eyes on the front of the church like a woman with something to be quiet about, which she was.
The woman came up the aisle without hurrying.
She was perhaps forty and she had a plain hard face with a great deal of weather in it, and she went to the front and knelt and did the thing properly and at length, which Su’inn had not expected and found she resented, because it is easier to be hunted by somebody who does not mean it.
Then she got up and came back down the aisle and stopped at the end of Su’inn’s row.
“Afternoon.”
“Afternoon.”
The woman looked at her.
She looked at her for perhaps four seconds, which is a very long time, and Su’inn sat with a rope mark under a new collar and her burned hand under her good one and let herself be looked at, and did not do anything with her face.
“There is a soup at the door on a Thursday,” the woman said. “In case you did not know. It is not much of a soup but it is hot and nobody asks you anything.”
“Thank you.”
“Aye.” She moved off, and then stopped again. “Are you all right?”
Say yes, said nobody at all.
“Yes,” said Su’inn.
The crusader nodded once and went out.
She sat in the church until dark, which was three and a half hours, and did not once fall asleep and did not once stop being aware of the size of the building.
At some point in the third hour she started talking to him.
Not out loud. She was not going to be a woman muttering at a pillar in an empty church in a town where three people were looking for her. She simply talked, in her head, the way you do, and got nothing back, and kept going.
She told him he was right about the coat. She told him she had been wrong at Cauldry about Hess, twice now, and that she was not going to say it a third time. She told him that Onnie Fell had said you have got a mark on your neck and shut a door, and that she had been thinking about it for two days and had decided it was the kindest thing anybody had said to her since the eastern seat, because it was a warning and it cost Onnie nothing to give and she gave it anyway.
She told him she was still sick about the notice.
She told him she understood why he had done it and that understanding it had not helped in the smallest degree, and that she was going to be sick about it for a while and he would have to sit through that.
Nothing came back.
At the fourth hour it was properly dark and she got up, and her legs had gone, and she stood holding the end of the pew until they came back.
Then she walked down the aisle and out through the door and down the steps.
On the fourth step from the bottom something arrived in her like a light coming on in a house across a valley.
I am here, said Azaelis.
Su’inn stood on the steps of a church in Halverside in the dark and put her hand over her mouth and made a noise that she was extremely glad nobody was there to hear.
“You were there the whole time.”
The whole time.
“You heard.”
I heard nothing, he said. I want to be exact with you, because you have just spent three hours being exact with me and I could not have it. I could not hear you and I could not see out and I could not feel the building. There is no in and no out. There is the fourth step, and then there is the fourth step again, and everything between them is a thing I am told about afterward by the light.
She stood on the steps.
“That is the interval.”
That is the interval, said Azaelis. That is precisely the interval, and I have had eleven of them and one of them was nine days, and this afternoon was three and a half hours and I did not know that until you told me just now.
“I am sorry.”
Do not be. You did exactly the right thing and I told you to do it. A pause. Su’inn. What did you say to me. In there.
She started down the steps into the dark.
“I said you were right about the coat.”
Su’inn.
“That is what I said,” she said, “and it is going to have to do you, and you are going to have to sit with the fact that there are three and a half hours in this world that you do not get.”
There was a silence about the length of a breath.
That is the cruellest thing anybody has done to me in two hundred years, said Azaelis, with what she was almost entirely certain was admiration.