CHARACTERS

Dora Pell keeps the Open, the corner shop in the middle of the Stones that sold everything and never closed, as her mother kept it before the charter. On the night of the Parousia her window was the brightest in the city, on the generator Stonecutter had put in her cellar and keyed in the year of the Leak, and the sign in it said OPEN.

Some say she gave the shelves away that night, and some that she took what people had in their pockets. She says she wrote every name in a book, and that most of them still owe her. The Pillar has stopped in the lane outside twice, for the length of an Hour, and both times the shop kept its door open.

She sells plaster Lambs from Graven Lane at the till, a dozen to the battery, and keeps one on the counter with its head off for the sealed who come in. She keeps a jar of teeth behind the till, each a debt from the night of the Parousia paid by someone who had nothing else, and says she will give them back when the book is square.

Maren Holt kept the appointments of the clinic behind the CLINIC sign for ten years on a screen, and keeps them now in a book, in its waiting room carried down into Chrome Row Station. On the morning after the Parousia she came in at eight, found the screen dead and wrote the day out from memory.

Twenty-six patients came that morning, all of them out of turn, to ask whether what was in them would still work, and it did. She writes down whatever name a patient gives her. The woman who shared her desk took the Seal and keeps the book of the Mercy clinics now, in the same neat hand.

Her book takes any name a patient gives, and the Row’s favorites are NOBODADDY, HOLY GHOST and THE LAMB, so the waiting room calls the Trinity up three times a morning, chrome showing through split skin. Her old deskmate at the Mercy clinics writes the repentant in the same neat hand under a red header, WASHED, and sends Maren a card at every Gleaning begging her to come home. The cards come with a page of the Mercy book copied out, names Maren once wrote in her own book entered under a second header, SPARED THE CHOICE.

Rosa Adeyemi was a nurse from the East Wards who lived in at the last tower of the new money to turn white, caring for an old man there, during the forty days of the First Consecration. The tower’s residents say that by the thirtieth day every one of them had knelt but her, and that she left of her own accord.

Her sister says she was put out onto the avenue with her bags on the thirty-eighth day. The bags stood on the avenue for a week, the tower went white on the thirty-ninth, and nobody has said where she went.

The tower’s residents tell her story as a lesson in pity, the poor girl who could not bend, and read Isaiah over her empty room, “unto me every knee shall bow” (Isaiah 45:23), as gently as a nurse reads a chart. East Wards nurses toast her after every night shift, THEY KNELT, SHE STOOD, and pour the dregs where her bags stood. The old man she nursed had knelt from his bed on the thirtieth day, and after she was put out nobody in the tower turned him, and the parish that took the tower found him on its first morning grown to his sheets and praising.

Nell Garvie of the Harbor and Freight Union keeps the harbor light at the end of the long quay, as she kept it for the Company when it ran on the grid, changing its bulb when it failed. It went out at 03:12:46 with every light on the grid, and within the week she had it burning on oil again, since the light leaves a flame burning.

She has climbed it at Vespers and come down at Lauds ever since. It is the one light in Nodus kept for the boats, and those that go out through the Breach on the ebb steer home by it. It has burned Gadara’s lard oil since P+2, which the Union’s carts bring down to her every month, the Breachers leave her wicks and glass at the foot of the tower after every run, and she has never asked what else they bring.

The parish of the quays prays every Lord’s Day that her flame gutter, so the boats will learn to steer home by the Pillar, and she trims the wick a finger higher. She climbs at Vespers past a line some Breacher painted on the stairwell, “it giveth light unto all that are in the house” (Matthew 5:15), with HOUSE struck through and BOATS written over it in fish blood and lamp oil. Gadara’s lard smokes as it burns, and on wet nights the light on the long quay smells of crackling across the water to the parish of the quays, which kneels for Compline in it.

Hana Novak has kept a dentist’s surgery of one chair over a shop on the long road through Nine Acres since the boom years. On the first morning after the Parousia her drill was dead, and she pulled a tooth at her window by daylight with her grandfather’s pliers.

In the fourth year, when keying went from the covens to ordinary people, she began fitting keys in the chair after Compline, in the back of the right hand. The Wards say she has keyed ten thousand of them. She says she has never counted, and she keeps no book of who has sat in the chair, since a book can be read.

The Threshers have painted SPOILED across her shop front twice in bleach-white, and she leaves the second coat up because the patients like bleeding under it. A card in her window reads “tooth for tooth” (Exodus 21:24) over her grandfather’s pliers, the pair that pulled the first tooth, and the Wards say it means a key in the hand for every soul He reaped. She sets a key with nothing for the pain, since a key makes its number at its first power from the noise of the body it sits in, and the Wards queue for her chair to have theirs made from a scream.

Marta Ilunga was the night registrar of the Registry on the night of the Parousia. At 03:09 she entered on the charter’s roll a girl born at the Wards General eleven minutes before, and she was entering the next when the board went dark at 03:12:46 and the charter’s roll died with its machines.

The girl was the last person the charter ever entered. The Registry’s hall is a parish of the White now, and the board hangs dead over it.

The parish that holds the Registry’s hall reads Revelation under the dead board at every Lauds, every voice at one pitch, “whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire” (Revelation 20:15). Pan says the charter’s roll died honest with a girl on its last line, and the keyed of the Stones drink to her at 03:09 every anniversary, the last toast before the sky’s. In the morning she walked to the Wards General to enter the night’s births by hand and found nine of the night’s mothers dead on the ward, since the generators had gone to the theatres, and she has carried that page in her coat ever since.

Lena Varga ran Babel’s night cleaners, who came up from the Wards on the last trams and walked the tower floor by floor, and one of the tower’s four service stairs carries her name. On the night of the Parousia every lift in the tower stopped where it was, and the cleaners walked down as many as a hundred and eighty floors in the dark, by touch and by the names they had chalked on the landing doors.

She counted ninety-four of them out at the foot of the tower by dawn. The Exchange kept its roster on its machines, and it died with them, so hers is the only count there is.

The coven runners who haul keyed mesh up Babel go by Varga’s stair and call the cleaners’ chalked names aloud at each landing, ninety-four of them, so every climb goes up to a roll call. Every lift stopped at 03:12:46 for the Throne’s arrival, and the Wards say the ninety-four walked a hundred and eighty floors to avoid meeting Him in a car. The runners who climb her stair say they hear knocking from the stopped cars in the shafts beside it, and keep Varga’s rule, which is that nobody opens a car.

Sister Agathe Rook has led the Threshers’ marches from the Threshing Floor for nearly seven years. She lost two sons to the covens of the Stones in the year of the Harvest, and the Terraces say she walked to the Street Between the morning after and stood there until Nones, looking across at Old Nod.

The Threshers say her Grace has stood just under nine hundred for all of them. The Second Fold, who would know, say she dims.

Every night at Compline she says the mercy prayer for her two sons in the Stones, that the fire be quick for them, and calls it the hardest mercy she knows, and the Terraces count her a saint for it. She has never once looked away from a salting. She has asked the Wardens in writing every year since the Harvest to send for her if either son is held in a gate, so that she can walk beside the pole to his plot and say the verse over him herself.

Ines Okafor runs the Tankmen for the Harbor and Freight Union at both ends of the charter’s gas main, at the digesters on the bay outfalls, where the main still starts, and at the Tanks, where it fills the gas spheres under its own pressure and the bottling shed fills bottles from them by hand. She keeps the book of what is left in the sixteen tanks, which she reads aloud to the Union Hall once a year. In the year of open war she gave the Nephilim a drained tank inside the bund for the Pit, for the price of a guard on the farm.

The drivers say the tanks will last seven years more and the Exchange says three, and the Wards say she sets the price of a drum to Jehu high on purpose.

A Deacon of the Pews once came to the bottling shed in pressed white to bless the dregs of the sixteen tanks, so the Wards would know whose mercy kept them warm. The Tanks say Ines Okafor sent him home with a free drum stenciled FOR YOUR LAKE OF FIRE, and the nephs who guard the farm cut the stencil into their own plated chests that night. The Pit’s sand goes into the digesters every spring with the outfalls’ sludge, so the Wards cook on whatever the nephs left in it.

The best known of the Sureties, who drinks at the end of the Undertow’s bar nearest the door and took her handle from the Notary’s rule. In P+9 she stood behind the Babel Line Company’s first pact, and it has held for five years.

Her rate is a fifth, against the usual tenth, and the Undertow says she stands behind no job that asks who anyone is.

The Undertow says she charges twice the Throne’s tithe and stands behind twice what He ever did, and she signs from a port in her wrist left open on the bar like an inkwell. A white parish candle stands in front of her stool, never lit, its wick crushed flat by eight years of her cigarettes. The port in her wrist has not been let heal in eight years, since she drinks through it too, rain gin straight into the vein, and she has not tasted one in all that time.

The oldest captain of the Breachers, named for the tide every Breacher goes out on, who lives in a turbine house at the edge of the gap. In the year of the Harvest ebb made the Breachers’ first run to the undercity of another port and back, in a keyed boat of the Shanties.

The Shanties count nine hundred runs since and Lowtide six hundred, and the Shanties say ebb has been out further than anyone in Nodus.

Every Breacher who goes out on the ebb drops a stolen manna wafer over the stern for the Pillar as the boat clears the gap, a tip for the Farmer’s eye, and the Shanties call it ebb’s blessing. The Pews pray at Lauds for the Breachers’ boats to founder mercifully with all hands, and the turbine house door is papered with the prayer cards the quays fish out, each pinned through with a fishhook. Vepar borrows the cold from ebb oftener than from anyone, and ebb has come home from runs with both hands frozen black and felt nothing, and the turbine house keeps the three fingers it cost in a jar of brine on the sill.

Maud Ferris is the joiner of the Stones who founded Lintel. In the months after Directive 12 she took in the first doors the Union’s drivers carried out of the Terraces by night, where they stood leaning in the halls with their hinges gone, and hung the first of them on her own house.

Lintel has hung some forty thousand since.

Lintel burns “I am the door” (John 10:9) into the top rail of every door it rehangs, so whoever goes in under it shuts the Son’s boast behind them. The Terraces preach that a door is a place to hide from the Lord and pray for every hinge to rust, and Maud Ferris answers with a knocker on her own door forged as a halo with a horn rammed through it. Lintel leaves unplaned the scratches on the inside of the cellar doors of the Terraces, where whole households shut themselves in after the fortieth day and were carried out to the Salt, since the families of the Stones who hang those doors ask to keep the marks.

Amos Teague was a driver of the Union who carried diesel to the Wards General in the first weeks. In P+5 he bolted a generator’s engine into a dead lorry in a hangar at Airside, cranked it by hand and drove it down the Rialto’s road, and the East Wards came out to watch.

He runs Jehu from the shed still, and its drivers say he cranks every new engine himself on the day it is finished.

Amos Teague tells every new driver of the shed what the Lord’s own Jehu drove toward so furiously, which was butchery for Heaven. Its drivers have their spines wired to the throttle at the Row, and Amos Teague cranks each new engine at Prime so the kneeling rows of every parish hear him start. The first driver he wired to a throttle could not be cut free of it when the lorry died, and sat at its wheel in the shed for a year, driving nowhere, before the Row found a way, and the seat is still in the shed as he left it.

Dawit Haile winds the Rookery’s lift, the tallest hand lift in the Wards, with three other crews in turn. He was a fitter of Longacre Tower’s lifts under the charter, and in the first winter he opened its shaft, the first freed in the Wards, and hung the car on a winch at the top.

The Liftmen count every shaft they have freed since from his, and he has never said what he found in the stopped car.

The Liftmen sing Supper Time on the haul from the ground to the forty-fourth, their forearms plated and cabled at the Row for the rope, while a sealed passenger rides the whole of it with a halo lit and eyes front. Deacons of the Wards call each freed shaft a little Babel and pray at Compline for the ropes to part, and the winders nail the prayers to the drum. In the first winter Longacre’s car stuck at the thirtieth floor with a woman in labour in it and held there from Compline to Lauds, and the Liftmen stop singing at the thirtieth on every haul since.

The Orchard’s gardener for this year, chosen by the Orchard for a year at a time, who keeps the grafts in Hall Four and walks the rafts at Lauds with the House of Night’s gene-workers. quince was a technician of Twelvefruit under the charter and carried the first grafts out of its labs in the first week after the Parousia.

Twelvefruit says the grafts were stolen, and the Orchard says the Tree was never Twelvefruit’s to keep.

quince ties a strip printed with the serpent’s promise, “ye shall be as gods” (Genesis 3:5), to every graft that leaves Hall Four, and the Wards wear the strips knotted through the fresh skin of their wrists until they rot out. The parishes call a windfall the Serpent’s apple and teach their children to knock one out of a beggar’s hand, gently, for the beggar’s own good. quince carries more grafts than anyone in the Orchard, the seams down the throat running on under the smock to a fruiting spur out of the left shoulder, which the Orchard picks at midwinter and eats in Hall Four while quince watches.

Hester Strand has been the Deacon of Parish 1 since the Seal was first given there in P+1, and on the first Lord’s Day of the Covenant the first Grace in Nodus came through her in Tongues, soul by soul, down the roll of the top of the slope. She is the eldest Deacon of the first parishes, so it is she who reads the Order’s three questions in the Tabernacle at Prime on the first of every month.

The Harvest emptied the parishes up the slope, Parish 1 with them, and left her kneeling in its hall with a handful of its people. At Terce on the next Lord’s Day, after the week’s Grace, she read the names of the taken from the old roll in her own voice. Families from the Wards filled the parish within the year, and she reads the names to them every Lord’s Day still. The parish says she reads them because the taken are living. The families who came up from the Wards say she reads them in the order of the old roll, which nobody else in the parish keeps.

She reads Parish 1’s ripening board aloud after Terce on the Lord’s Day, the highest first, and has prayed to be called every day since she took the Seal. Her own Grace stands at 891 and goes no higher, because she wants to be called, and a want for Heaven is still a want. The Called want nothing, even that, and the Tellers have told her so. The parish says she will go up at the next Supper, and the whole slope envies her. She weighs herself on the hall scales after Terce in front of the parish, and has weighed less every Lord’s Day for three years, and the parish applauds each time.

Ruben Ash was a sergeant of the Charter Wardens at the gates of the cable houses for twelve years, and on the fortieth day he knelt in Charter House with the board and most of his company. In P+1 his company raised Gate 1 on the Street Between at Heaven’s order, and he has been its captain since, at the gate the Threshers march to and the Closets stand inside.

Nine of his company would not kneel, walked off their posts on the fortieth day and went below the street, and they are Blackgate now. On every anniversary of the fortieth day he reads their nine names aloud at the gate at Prime. Blackgate says he reads them so his Wardens know whom to watch for, and that none of the nine was the Fortieth Warden. The Wards near enough to hear say he reads them the way the Union reads its dead. Ash has never said whether he saw anyone stand in Charter House.

His gate has held more blanks than any in Nodus, and he says he has never laid a hand on one, since the sword holds them and the pole carries them, and he sleeps well. The Stones’ side of his gate is painted with every one of their handles. Blanks have stood in his gate’s sword for hours on a slow day, and his men give them water through the light on a sponge on a reed, which the Stones call the one verse Gate 1 ever got right.

Idris Calloway has kept the Seamen’s Mission on the quays since before the charter, nine rooms off one corridor, one to each faith the ships brought into the port. At Lauds on the first day of P+1 he found the first four Directives cut into the wall of all nine, and swept all nine floors before anyone came in.

When Directive 12 came he lifted the nine doors off himself, all on the same morning, so that no room would be the last one open, and the Union carried them up the quay to the Dooryard. He sweeps the nine rooms every morning still, the empty ones with the rest. At every Hour he kneels in whichever room he has reached with his broom, and the quays have never agreed on which of the nine is his.

The four Directives are still cut into all nine walls, square and white and perfectly level, and the sailors who sleep at the Mission have scored a cock and balls beside every line with knife points, so the Throne’s law reads as graffiti in nine faiths. The Pews call Calloway the Lukewarm Sexton, and the quays bet silver on which room he reaches at Sext. In P+4 he swept a sailor’s hand off a prayer mat in one of the nine rooms, cut clean at the wrist and laid palm up, and nobody has claimed it.

Mags Corran keeps the Union’s pigeons in the Loft on the roof of the customs house, as her father kept them there for the dockers’ racing club under the charter. On the first morning after the Parousia she let the birds out at first light as he always had, and every one of them came home.

In P+2 she began sending them out in baskets on the Union’s handcarts and flying the Union’s notes home on them, and the Union pays her in seed the Breachers bring. The light reads a pigeon as a bird and a page of pad numbers as numbers, so the Host lets them fly. The Wards say her birds know to go round the gates. She says they go home.

The Pews ask her every year for a white bird banded with a verse to release at the Supper, and every year the Loft sends them a grey with a chrome eye the Row set in it. Her flyers go round the gates and shit on the parish roofs on the way, and the dockers swear the birds aim, which Mags Corran denies with a straight face. The Threshers net her birds over the Terraces and send them home with their eyes put out and Revelation 3:18 tied to the leg, “anoint thine eyes with eyesalve, that thou mayest see”, and the blind ones find the Loft anyway, and she lets them breed.

A demon of the Exchange who sits behind the counter at Lost property and finds things. Whoever has lost something, or had it taken, makes a pact with him at the counter, read twice by a Notary’s clerk, and he says where the thing is, or who has it. The price is the loan of a sense for a day for every year the thing has been lost.

When the Lot sits over a theft he comes up from the counter to say where the thing went, and the one who asked him pays. He says he knows whose the chrome hand on his counter is, and that nobody has ever asked him.

His counter carries a card in a clerk’s hand, “seek, and ye shall find” (Matthew 7:7), with the Exchange’s rate under it, a day of a sense for every year lost, since the Throne made the same promise free and kept it to nobody. Lenders climb back up with an eye gone milky or a tongue gone numb, and Pan calls that the receipt of a fair trade. The chrome hand on his counter is warm to the touch, and the Exchange’s runners say it has moved between Lauds and Nones whenever they pass it twice in a day.

A demon of the House of Night who keeps the door of the Return. Before the clerk reads a lender’s pact twice, he asks the lender what they hope to feel, and listens to the answer, and writes nothing down.

The Lantern Houses say the lenders who answer him honestly get back better than they lent. The House says the answer changes nothing, and that he asks because he likes to know.

The sealed who hear of the Return’s queue call its lenders whores of the senses and pray for them at Compline, one identical prayer for every hour lent. The House says the answer Sallos hears most at his door is whatever the Throne forbade, wet and loud and in detail, and that he holds the door wider for it. Most lenders leave the Return in the House’s arms, shaking, and the House keeps a room of beds where they lie a night under blankets learning their own skin again.

A demon of the Forge who keeps a surgery in the back rooms off the old platforms of Chrome Row Station, behind a lined door, and mends orphans. An implant answers only to the house that fitted it, and no other house will service it, so when a house of the Row closes, its grafts have nobody left who can mend them, and Marbas can, at the Forge’s price, which is the loan of a sense for a term.

The Row says he has never turned anyone away. The Spares say he keeps every graft that comes out of his chair, and nobody has ever asked him for one back.

The Left Hand have offered to let him mend their souls for nothing three times, and he has refused three times, since nothing given free is worth the mending. The Spares say the room behind his surgery is shelved to the ceiling with grafts that still run, eyes that follow a lamp and hands that close on a finger, kept warm on keyed current, and that he talks to them at night.

The Pit’s longest champion, a neph of the Babel Line built most of the way to the elbows at Bezaleel and Cinderhall, whose handle has been chalked on the Pit’s rim since its first winter. anvil fights on the sixth night and goes up the stairs of Babel on the seventh.

anvil has never been the first to climb out of the Pit.

anvil’s breastplate carries the Throne’s filthiest name cut a hand deep, so the Seraphim read it as they come. The arm a Seraph burned off at the elbow on the stairs in P+12 hangs on the Pit’s rim on a hook, black to the plating, and anvil fought the next sixth night on a new one from Bezaleel, still bleeding where it was set.

Constance Ibe is a midwife of the Kilns, one of the hands, who has delivered on every floor of High Meadow by candle and chalks each birth on the block’s stairwell wall beside the battery debts. She was a nurse on the Wards General’s maternity ward under the charter and walked out of it on the third night after the Parousia, when its generators were kept for the theatres.

In the seven days she carries a newborn to a hall or to a keyer, to whichever door the mother names, and to nobody on the father’s word. Fathers of both marks have stood on her landing to argue with her, and the Kilns say none of them has won.

Some Deacon chalked “in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children” (Genesis 3:16) above Constance Ibe’s tally on the High Meadow stairwell, and the mothers of the Kilns press a bloody thumb beside each of her chalk marks. Sealed fathers who lose the argument on her landing pray aloud, calmly, that the Lord take the child before a keyer can, and she shuts her door on the amen. Twice a sealed father has followed her down the stairs to a keyer’s door and stood outside it saying the mercy prayer over his own child until the child screamed.

Piet Vane has been the sexton of the Acre since the first year, when the Company’s groundsmen stopped coming, and he has dug every grave in it since by hand, the keyed where their families asked and the neither-mark wherever there was room. The Terraces’ congregations lie in the white rows the groundsmen dug for them under the charter. From the Seal on, the sealed have gone into the white stone. The body is laid on the stone of the nearest consecrated street at Vespers, the Deacon reads its last Grace over it, and the stone takes it as it takes whatever stays in its way and has closed over it by Lauds. He keeps the Acre’s book, in which every grave has a line, and the Union carries the book to its hall once a year to read the names of its own.

The Acre was full by P+11, and he walked the families of the East Wards out to the airfield himself to show them the grass between the runways. He asks the Union for a second spade every year, and every year the Union gives him one, and he says each time that he meant a second man.

The Terraces’ old rows at the Acre stand white and identical under “Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord” (Revelation 14:13), and the keyed graves carry whatever their families cut, horns and chrome hands and FUCK HIM. Piet Vane cuts the grass on both to the same height, and when the Pews ask him to move their old dead from the goats he says the worms keep no roll. In its last years he dug new graves through the charter’s oldest, laying the bones that came up at the foot of each new grave in the order they came out, and gave the chrome he found among them to the Spares.

Odile Marsh has taught at Turbine Row School for twenty years, since its pupils were the barrage crews’ children, and on the morning after the Parousia she kept her class with no current and the blinds up. She took the Seal in P+1, and she kneels at her desk at Terce, Sext and Nones while the rest of the room waits with its pens down.

She keeps her keyed pupils’ names on a slate and wipes it clean every evening before she walks home to her parish, so that nothing she carries up the street could be read as a list. Tidewright’s crews keep its walls standing under the broken roof, the Pillar passes over it and through its open classrooms by night, and their children still fill it by day.

She teaches the school’s one rule, that nobody calls anyone goat, dog, bread or spoiled inside its doors, and is the only soul in the building who keeps it. Her Grace falls a little every Lord’s Day with no confession to match it, which is the Salt’s own sign, and her keyed pupils count her down on the slate before she wipes it.

Teodor Vass of the Kilns has taken neither the Seal nor a key and calls himself a charterer. He came in with the cable crews in the charter’s second year and was entered on its roll that spring, and he gives the date as the keyed give a handle. The charter’s twelve articles have been pasted inside his door since P0, and every year on the night the year turns he reads them aloud at his window.

He played darts in the Kilns Club for eleven years and has not gone in since the Directives were cut behind its bar. The Threshers call him chaff, and he answers them with the fourth article.

He calls both sides’ gods the management, and says the charter at least published its terms. The Threshers mean the verse by chaff, “he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire” (Matthew 3:12), and in P+12 they burned his door while he stood in the street saying the fourth article to them from memory, and he had the articles pasted inside the new one by Vespers.

Commander Ottilie Brand was a major of the Charter Wardens under the charter and knelt beside the board in Charter House on the fortieth day. Her commander walked off his post that day, and she took the command, and she has held it from the barracks behind Charter House since. She answers to the Host.

At Prime every morning she stands before the barracks with the companies drawn up, and since Lauds on the first day of P+1 the day’s orders have come in Tongues through her own mouth, so that the Wardens hear their day in the Choir’s voice from the woman they salute. Every Warden’s Grace is read in the barracks hall on the Lord’s Day, and the lowest draw the night rounds of the Salt Gardens, which the Salt Widows know to the minute, since the lowest walk them slowest. She has never turned the Threshers back from a gate, and the Wardens and the Threshers keep a cold quarrel over who takes the keyed the gate has held.

She believes the city has never been safer than it is under the Host, and says so to her Wardens at Prime, and has the figures, a quiet gate for every salting. Twice since P+6 a Warden of the lowest Grace has been found at Lauds standing salted among the rows of the Gardens, read concealing on the night round by the Pillar, and she has entered each as a quiet night.

Deacon Halvard Voss served under Ruth Calder in Parish 31 and has led it since the week of the Harvest, which took Ruth and three hundred and ten more of the parish and left him kneeling in its hall. At Terce on the next Lord’s Day the parish named three, and the Choir named him from among them in Tongues, and at Prime on the first of the next month Hester Strand read his name in the Tabernacle.

He reads Ruth’s name at Terce on the anniversary of the Harvest, and her window on the Street Between has stood open since, as she left it. Brother Aldo, who came home from Mercy with weak hands in the week of the Harvest, keeps the parish’s manna roll at his elbow.

He lays Parish 31’s three hundred and eleven empty plates every year on the night of the Harvest, and says he was left behind to set the table. Every year he lays a three hundred and twelfth plate at the head of the table for himself and eats from it in front of the parish, and asks the Most High to forgive him for still being hungry.

Captain Rui Albarran flew the last flight into Nodus, which landed at ten past two on the night of the Parousia with three hundred and twelve aboard, and he has lived aboard it with his crew since. He has written one line in its log every day, NO CLEARANCE, and the log has passed five thousand lines.

He keeps count of his passengers as he kept them on the manifest, and on the night the year turns those who can come meet him at the third gate, sealed, keyed and of neither mark. He says the aircraft would still fly and that there is nowhere to fly to, and he shows the cockpit to any child of Hangar Town who climbs the stairs and asks.

The parishes read his log as a confession, five thousand days of a man asking a closed sky for leave, and send a Deacon to the third gate at the turn of every year to tell him clearance comes on the knees. The passengers’ toast on the aircraft stairs is NO CLEARANCE FROM THAT CUNT UPSTAIRS, and the keyed among them cut the year’s tally into the backs of their hands. Thirty of the three hundred and twelve died aboard in the first winter, in their seats, and he has kept them there belted with their tray tables up, since the manifest says they are passengers until the aircraft lands.

Lin Hao keeps NOODLES at the top of the Row, the counter of six stools that has cooked on bottled gas since P-17, as his father kept it before him. He says the pot has never gone off the boil, and the Row says it went out once, in the week of the Harvest.

The Row settles its quarrels over his counter and he lets it, and he feeds the sealed, the keyed and the neither-mark side by side on the six stools without asking anyone which they are. When a quarrel at the counter gets loud he turns the gas down under the pot, and the Row goes quiet until he turns it up again.

The loser of a quarrel settled over his counter buys the bowls and says grace to the Farmer aloud, facing the Wheel. He keeps a bone in the stock that has been in the pot since P-17, and the Row swears it was never a pig’s.

Agnes Corless, who lived on the Lanes then and lives in the Stones now, began the Salt Widows. Her son Daniel was keyed, and in P+2 the Cherub at Gate 1 held him inside its turning sword until the Wardens came and carried him awake on a pole to the Salt Gardens, where the sentence found him in his plot. In the spring after, she came for him in the Gardens by night with a handcart, wheeled him down to the Sea Steps and gave him to the sea, the first of the salted to go before the rain had taken him. He was keyed and would die unread whenever the salt let him go, and a pillar stands awake in the salt for years, so the sea ended his waiting in a night.

The Widows began as her family and her neighbors. They read their book of every pillar given to the sea on the Steps on Cain’s Day, from Daniel’s name down, and she reads the first line herself. The head gardener knew which plot was empty the next morning, and she has never told the Wardens.

The Widows chalk Revelation’s promise on the Sea Steps, “the sea gave up the dead which were in it” (Revelation 20:13), with gave up struck through and KEEPS written over it in their own blood, and Agnes Corless reads Daniel’s name beneath it on Cain’s Day. The Wardens’ chaplains call each empty plot in the Gardens a theft from God’s pulpit and rake the gravel smooth by Prime. She says that as the sea took Daniel the salt went from his face first, and that his eyes were open, and she has told nobody what was in them.

One of the forty-days, a Seraph the Fowlers took on the Line after the war began, who spent its forty days in the Mews, the Fowlers’ row of Cages under the Stones, said I there and chose a name, as Edith did. It chose the name of the mother who kept watch over her sons’ bodies on the rock “from the beginning of harvest until water dropped upon them out of heaven” (2 Samuel 21:10), and kept the birds and the beasts off them.

Rizpah walks the old drains under the rows of the Salt Gardens from Compline to Lauds, under the salted, where the light does not come, and the Salt Widows’ lookouts bring it word of the Wardens’ rounds. None of the forty-days goes up the stairs of Babel, since a Seraph burns flesh it can see and cannot read, and the Courts and the Cainites count each of them worth more alive than any floor.

The Wardens’ chaplains pray at Compline that its light be restored to it, as a kindness, in the same voice they use over the salted. The Widows’ lookouts call it the night shift and leave it the Wardens’ rosters folded into paper birds, since the Rizpah of scripture kept the birds off her sons and this one keeps the Wardens off the salted. The rats of the north shore come up the drains for the salt and gnaw the pillars at the ankle, and Rizpah keeps them off as its namesake kept the beasts off her sons, by hand, so the Widows find the drains under the rows carpeted with them at Lauds.

One of the forty-days, who said I in Cage 19 under Old Nod in P+11 and took the name of the Hebrew midwife who would not kill the boys Pharaoh ordered killed, since “the midwives feared God, and did not as the king of Egypt commanded them, but saved the men children alive” (Exodus 1:17). It works the House of Night’s birth clinics under Old Nod by pact, where the children of the Tares are born and keyed in their first week.

The mothers of Pan ask for it by name. It holds every newborn up to the clinic’s lamp before the keyer comes, and says nothing while it does, and the keyers wait.

The Pews call it the thief of the eighth day, since a child of Pan is keyed before any parish can seal it, and the mercy prayer at Compline asks in a level voice that such children burn small. The mothers of Pan, torn and stitched and proud of it, name their daughters for the angel that held them up to a lamp and then let a keyer at them. The keyers who wait on it say it holds every child a little longer each year, and holds the stillborn longest of all.

A demon of the Deep who rides the lead boat of the Breachers on the ebb, by pact, in its keyed engine, and brings the boats through the Breach in water nobody else would take them through. The old book of Solomon’s spirits that the Notary keeps as a specimen of a void pact gives Vepar the office “to guide Ships laden with Arms”, and the Breachers say it is the one true line in the book.

Its price is the loan of a sense from the boat’s captain for the length of the run, and ebb has paid it more often than anyone. The captains say it asks to borrow the cold.

The lead boat carries the Notary’s specimen line along its gunwale, “to guide Ships laden with Arms”, and under it the Breachers have added the cargo since, coffee and seed and silver and people. The Pews pray the Breach shut at every Lauds, and the captains read that prayer aloud on the ebb with chrome bared to the spray and the cold gone out of their hands. Its pact carries a line the clerks read twice with the rest, that the Deep may keep one of the cargo on a run of its choosing, and twice since P+9 a boat has come home through the Breach one short.