Vessel presenting as certified. Continuation lodged and witnessed. Room to be turned by the fifth bell. Transfer House, Eastern Seat, day book
The first thing was that she had not breathed in a day and a half, and her body had noticed.
It came up out of her like something surfacing off the bottom of a river, one enormous ragged pull that hurt everywhere it went, and then another, and then a run of them, too fast, no rhythm, her chest going like a bellows in the hands of somebody panicking. She could not stop it. She got her elbow under her and the elbow went out from under her and she came down hard on her shoulder on a stone table and lay there with her cheek on the stone breathing like a run horse.
Cold. Very cold, in the deep way, in the marrow, cold the way a thing gets when it has been cold for a long while and has stopped arguing about it.
Somebody was shouting. Two somebodies.
She got her eyes open.
There was a ceiling. There was a lamp on a chain. There was a man in a grey apron standing about four feet away with a ledger open in his two hands and his mouth open too, and behind him in the doorway an old man in Salvos green, out of breath, one hand still up in the air where he had been making some sort of shape with it, looking at her with an expression she would remember for the rest of her second life.
“Oh,” said the old man. “Oh no.”
“Get out,” Su’inn said.
It came out as nothing. There was no voice in it at all. The throat had been through something and had not been asked its opinion.
She tried again and got about a third of a word, and gave it up, and lay on the stone with her heart going and tried to work out where she was, and got as far as not the yard and indoors and that is a mortuary bench, I have seen forty of those before the last one arrived and sat down on her chest with its full weight.
She had been hanged.
She had been hanged in the rain on a Tuesday and she remembered the hand on her shoulder.
Do not sit up.
She stopped.
She lay very still on the stone with her breath still going wrong and she thought, quite clearly, no.
You have been on a table for a day and a half and your blood has all gone to the low side of you, and if you sit up now you will faint, and I would very much rather you did not faint.
It was not a voice. That was the thing she kept trying to explain afterward and never got right. There was no sound in it. It was more like being handed something. It arrived already understood, the way your own thoughts do, except that it was not hers and there was never for one instant any confusion about whose it was, and that turned out to be the worst part, because if there had been confusion she could have talked herself into a fever, or a bad dream, or the ordinary derangement of a woman who had recently been killed.
There was no confusion.
There was a man in her.
“Practitioner,” the old priest was saying, coming forward, “practitioner, can you hear me, can you.”
Tell him to send for water and get him out of the room.
“Get out,” Su’inn said, and this time it worked, and it came out of her like a door closing.
The old man stopped where he was.
“There is water in the corridor,” she said. Her voice was terrible. “Get it. Take him with you. Shut the door.”
The factor found his own voice at last, and it was several notes higher than it had been. “Madam, this is a certified room, you cannot, there is a procedure, this vessel is.”
“Shut the door,” said Su’inn.
They went.
She lay on the stone for a while with her eyes shut.
“All right,” she said, out loud, into the empty room. “Say something.”
You do not have to speak aloud.
“I am aware. Say something.”
My name is Azaelis.
“That is not what I asked for.”
It is what you are getting first, he said, because you are lying on a mortuary bench with two men outside the door who are going to come back with a third, and because in about ninety seconds you are going to try to work out whether you have gone mad, and I would like there to be a name in the room when you do it.
Su’inn thought about that.
“Fine,” she said. “What are you.”
I am an Eternal.
“I do not know what that is.”
There was a pause. She could feel the pause. It was not silence, exactly, it was more like standing next to somebody in the dark and hearing them decide.
No, he said. Very few do. It is not a secret, it is simply not interesting to anybody it is not happening to. Another pause. I have been alive for about four hundred years. I do not have a body of my own. I have not had one since I was younger than you are, and I get through on other people’s, and when one is finished I am transferred into another, lawfully, with a certificate, by a qualified man in a room like this one.
“And this is.”
This is the room. Yes.
“And I am.”
You are the certificate.
Su’inn lay on the stone and looked at the lamp on its chain and felt the cold coming up out of the table into the whole length of her back.
“How long.”
I do not know. It should have been fifteen or twenty hours. Something in the corridor took longer than it should have.
“No. How long do you get. In a body.”
Ah. Something went through him that she felt and could not name. Twenty years and a little. Sometimes forty. It is assessed at the transfer and the assessment is a guess.
“So you have thirty years of me.”
In theory.
“And what am I supposed to have.”
I do not know, said Azaelis. This has never happened.
She got up eventually. It took three attempts and on the second one she went grey and had to put her head down between her knees on the edge of the bench, and he did not say I told you, which she noted, and did not credit him for, and did not forget either.
The room had a mirror in it. Of course it did. Somebody had thought about that, a long time ago, and had put a mirror in a mortuary transfer room on the theory that a man in a new body would want one, and that man had been right.
She stood in front of it holding the bench.
It was her. That was the thing. There was no film over it and no shine in the eye and no stranger looking out. It was a forty-three year old woman with her hair coming down out of a work tie that had been tied two days ago by her own hands, grey in the face, with a rope mark, and it was completely and entirely her, and she watched her own face while a dead man used her lungs to take a breath he did not need.
“Do not do that.”
I beg your pardon.
“The breathing. That was not me.”
No. I apologize. It is habit, and it is a bad one, and it takes me a few days. A beat. You will find you can feel the difference. Not everyone can.
“Everyone.” She turned the left arm over and looked at it, and the arm did what it always did, which was most of it. “How many have there been.”
Eleven.
“And how many of them woke up.”
None, said Azaelis. Not one. Not ever. They were dead, and lawfully, and every one of them was dead before I arrived and none of them were in the room when I got there. And then, and she heard the change in it, I want to be extremely clear about that, because you are about to ask me the other question, and the answer is that I have never killed anyone. Not once. Not in four hundred years. The state does that. I collect afterward and I bring a paper.
Su’inn looked at herself in the mirror for a while.
“That is worse,” she said.
Yes, said Azaelis. I have been told.
The old priest came back with a cup of water and no factor and shut the door behind him, and sat down on the stool by the wall as though his legs had been waiting for permission.
“I wrote to the bench,” he said.
“I know. You told me you would.”
“They granted it.” He was still holding the letter. He had been holding it for some time and it had gone soft at the corner. “Nine days. Nine days, and it went to the eastern seat, and the eastern seat sent it down here, and it came to me this morning and I came directly, and there was a cart on the Halverside road with a broken axle and I sat behind it for two hours, and I got here at three, and it was done at three.”
“How long ago.”
“An hour,” said the old man. “Perhaps a little more.”
Su’inn drank the water. It went down badly and she got most of it.
Ask him what the letter says.
“I know what it says. It says I should not have been hanged.”
“It says the sentence is set aside,” the priest said, “pending a new hearing, on the grounds that material bearing on the night was never put before the bench, which is true, and which is true because you would not put it there, and I want you to understand that I did not tell them what it was. I told them there was one. I told them a physician’s note said unknown and that unknown was doing a great deal of work in that file.” He looked at his hands. “I did not have the right to tell them the rest. It is yours.”
She stood there with the cup.
She had been ready, at the fourth bell in the rain, to take it into the ground rather than let four men in a room decide whether it had been enough. She had been entirely at peace with that. She had thought about it and made her decision the way she made all of them, once, and had gone out into the yard with it settled.
And a fat old man with bad legs had gone and got it overturned without her, using nothing at all, using the absence of the thing, and had sat behind a broken axle for two hours, and had missed by an hour.
“Father,” she said. “What is your name.”
“Bircher.”
“Father Bircher.” She set the cup down on the mortuary bench. “You did that with nothing. You had nothing and you did it anyway.”
“I was too late.”
“You were an hour late,” said Su’inn, “on a two hour axle. I want you to go home and be very clear with yourself about which of those two numbers was yours.”
The old man put his face in his hands and made no sound at all.
He is going to be a problem, Azaelis observed.
“Shut up.”
He is a Salvos priest who has just resurrected an occupied vessel in a Nekros transfer house, and the factor is currently down the corridor writing it in a book, and in about a week there is going to be a great deal of interest in this room from a very great number of people, and I am telling you now because you are the only one of the two of us who is going to be able to walk out of the door.
Su’inn stood in the middle of a room she had never been in, in a body she had been hanged out of, with a dead man of four hundred years in her and an old priest crying on a stool.
“I know,” she said. “Give me a moment. I have had a day.”
He waited nearly a minute, which she would learn, over the following decades, was the most consideration he had ever shown anyone on short acquaintance.
May I ask you something.
“You may not.”
It is a very small thing.
“Then it will keep.”
It will not, actually, said Azaelis, because in a moment that door is going to open and a man is going to come in with a ledger and ask us both a question, and he is going to ask it of me, because as far as the province is concerned there is only one person in this room and it is not you. A pause. And I am going to have to answer him. And when I do, I am going to have to say a name.
Su’inn stopped with her hand on the bench.
“You do not know my name.”
No.
“It was on the paper.”
It was on the first page, he said. I have never in eleven transfers read the first page. There has never been anything on it that would change anything.
She turned around and looked at the door, and then at nothing, and she began, helplessly and entirely without wanting to, to laugh.
It hurt. It hurt in the throat and the ribs and everywhere the rope had been, and it kept going, and Father Bircher lifted his wet face off his hands and stared at her in open alarm, and she waved him off with her right hand exactly as she had waved off the physician in the yard.
“I stood in the rain,” she said, when she could, “and I worked out what the man with the ledger was for, and do you know what I thought.”
I cannot imagine.
“I thought, he is going to be so annoyed about the hand.”
There was a very long silence inside her.
I was, said Azaelis. Very briefly. I want you to know that I was, and that I am not going to insult you by pretending otherwise, and that it lasted about four seconds, and that I have spent the last hour being annoyed about a very great many other things instead.
“Good.”
Your name.
“Su’inn.”
Su’inn, he said. And.
She looked at the door.
Down the corridor, at a brisk administrative pace, somebody was coming with a book.
“Ulmat,” said Su’inn. “Su’inn Ulmat.”
Thank you.
“Do not thank me. It is not mine either.”