THE CITY

THE PARISHES

The sealed wake and kneel on their beds or at their open doorways while the Hour holds, and sleep again. The Satisfied past eight hundred have not slept in years, and kneel on in their halls with their halos burning. The stairwells of the Wards hear them through the walls, whispering the Hour’s psalm on tongues gone dry and split.

THE WARDS

The Nightmen take the buckets down the stairs and along the unnumbered streets to the manholes of the old trunk sewer, the Offering. A block that sleeps in shifts changes beds.

PAN

The Night Market is loudest at Matins. At the turn of the Hour jubal plays Fuck God and Die on Radio Pandæmonium, as every night since P+7, and gall reads the Matins reading after it, a passage of the King James read straight and chosen for cruelty. The Quiet Rooms in the Stones are full, a bunk for a battery.

THE PARISHES

The gatherers come in off the white streets with the manna, saying the fifty-first, the sixty-seventh and the last three psalms, and the Satisfied give their share to the embers of the parish. The Wheel opens its day watch. The gardeners of the Salt wheel the night’s pillars to the Gardens along the same white streets, and the gatherers step round the handcarts without lifting their eyes from the stone.

THE WARDS

The manna roads have been full for an hour. Darkwell’s Wellmen carry the morning’s crates out of the Well. The fish market opens on the quays, and Nell Garvie comes down from the harbor light.

PAN

The Cold Store closes and the keyed go below or indoors. On Burn Day the fire on the plaza goes out.

THE PARISHES

The Charter Wardens stand before the barracks and hear the day’s orders in Tongues through their commander’s mouth. On a march day the Threshers go out from the Floor under PERFECT HATRED and sing the end of the hundred and thirty-seventh psalm at the Stones. On the first of the month the eldest Deacon reads the Order’s questions in the Tabernacle.

THE WARDS

The Liftmen’s first wind, the bread queues at Leaven’s forty bakehouses, and on a march day the keyed of the Wards keep indoors with the doors shut while the Pestilence plays Fuck God and Die at the Threshing Floor for as long as the Threshers sing. On a march day the Wards count their children in off the street twice, since a child of the Wards caught on a white street by the march has been carried to Gate 1 in a Thresher’s arms with the march singing over it.

PAN

Pan sleeps. The runners of the night are paid at the Undertow before they go down.

THE PARISHES

On the Lord’s Day each parish kneels in its hall, hears the Directive in force and then its Grace in Tongues, soul by soul, through its Deacon in the Choir’s voice, and the Deacon chalks it on the ripening board while the mothers read their children’s numbers. A child whose number fell kneels facing the board through Sext with the number chalked on its forehead.

THE WARDS

At Turbine Row School the sealed teacher kneels at her desk while the room waits with its pens down. The sealed of the blocks kneel on the landings, and the rest step round them.

PAN

The booking hall’s windows open, SINGLE, RETURN and SEASON, and the queue for the Notary’s clerks begins. On the Lord’s Day the Golden Calf holds the Unmass and reads the week’s Grace off the dead, Dagon’s knocks a plaster Throne off its plinth, and every glass in the Lantern Houses goes up to the Wheel and comes down empty.

THE PARISHES

The Faithful kneel wherever they stand, in the street or in the doorway, and get up when the Hum falls back.

THE WARDS

On the Step the sealed go to their knees in the middle of a sentence and the keyed across the street wait for them to finish it. On the boards of the Union Hall the sealed kneel and the rest wait with their caps in their hands. On the West Road the Union’s sealed drivers kneel between the shafts of their carts and the traffic goes round them, and twice a year one of Jehu’s lorries keeps going.

PAN

Below the street nobody kneels. The bars lift a glass to the Wheel and empty it, and the children at the Benches read their lessons aloud twice.

THE PARISHES

Bethel’s workshops at the top of the Terraces, the parishes’ looms and benches, kneel at the Hour and go back to the bench. On the Lord’s Day the families of the Terraces walk the rows of the Salt Gardens to look at the week’s new pillars, awake in the salt, and lift their children up to see.

THE WARDS

The Union’s sealed drivers carry their loads across the open edges of the Wards, never through a gate. Hana Novak’s chair is busy with teeth until dark, and with other work after Compline.

PAN

The Exchange’s brokers set the evening’s rates for the stalls of the Night Market. The Shambles hoses the day’s tables into the Row’s drains, which run red to the bay until Vespers.

THE PARISHES

On Burn Day the Faithful carry what they have surrendered to the Burn from Vespers, and the Kindlers work the edges of the pile in the dusk.

THE WARDS

A block’s quarrels are heard on the middle landing of its stairwell after Vespers. Children play Salt in the street, Nell Garvie climbs the harbor light, and the turners close their stalls. In Salt the others wait to splash the salted child until it cries, which the Wards call making it real.

PAN

The Psalters on the quays write out the week’s hymns for the unsealed, a battery a sheet, and the runners come up to the Undertow for the night’s jobs.

THE PARISHES

The Faithful kneel for the Hour and say the fourth, the ninety-first and the hundred and thirty-fourth psalms under their breath, and every hall says the mercy prayer, that the fire be quick for the goats. Then the streets on the parishes’ rolls are Heaven’s ground until Lauds, and nobody walks them. The halls say it with their windows open toward the Wards, so the goats can hear themselves prayed for.

THE WARDS

The criers climb to the roofs with the week’s chart of the Pillar’s round and a whistle. Old Nod stands at its windows through the Hour, which it calls standing by night, and when the Hum falls back it does the Bray, every window on the Street Between open and the whole district howling filth across at the Pews for as long as the psalm took.

PAN

The Night Market opens under the Burn, and the Cold Store, the Golden Calf and the Pestilence open their doors. Radio Pandæmonium comes on in the Low Tuning with the Bray under it.