CORPORATIONS

The company that held the charter and ran Nodus as a board runs a firm. It has been gone since the fortieth day after the Parousia. A consortium of cable companies and a sovereign fund formed it to hold the charter, a coastal state leased it the bay and the land round it for ninety-nine years and gave up its law there, and for nineteen years the city had a chairman where other cities have a mayor.

It lived on rent. The carriers paid it to land their cables, the companies that came for the light law paid it for their floors, and the Wards paid it by the month for flats on grids of its own, numbered. It built Babel Exchange and took a share of every trade there, and it built the Charter Line, the airfield, the Acre, the Company’s schools, High Meadow, the Charter Gardens on the north shore, which are the Salt Gardens now, and the sign on a roof in the Stones that told the cable ships the city’s name. It kept the peace with its own force, the Charter Wardens, kept the charter’s roll at the Registry on the Great Avenues, and in nineteen years held no election, since the charter asked for none.

The city saw the Company give way once, in P-8, when the Harbor and Freight Union stopped the port for twenty-three days over the night shift and the Company settled.

Charter House turned white in the forty days after the Parousia. The board knelt inside it on the fortieth day, and the charter was not spoken of again. The Company had said nothing from the first morning on. Its lease runs to P+80, sixty-six years past the present, and nobody has come for the rent. Most of the companies it brought to the bay have outlived it.

THE CHARTER WHOLE, IN TWELVE ARTICLES

Under the charter the Company kept a house style of glass, brushed steel and numbers, every flat on its grids coded over the door, every Warden in charter black, every board meeting minuted to the second. On the fortieth day the style turned white without a line of it moving, and Charter House keeps the old numbering and the squared corridors where the board went down on its knees at the long table.

The exchange in the tallest building on Earth, which has never closed. It sells traffic on the undernet by the second, for silver, and room near the vault is still priced by how near, the lowest floors dearest. Every cable that comes ashore at the Landing ends in that vault, six levels under the tower, and the undernet that joins Pan to the undercities of the world runs through it. Since P+9 Babel Exchange has traded on the floors the Tares hold, with the Babel Line in the middle floors over its head.

The Charter Company built the tower to two hundred and twenty-six floors as a boast, named it for one, and opened it in P-11. Traffic was sold on its floors by the millisecond, priced by a hundred and eighty-eight minds on the charter’s roll, and most of the planet’s passed within two kilometers of it. A trading house that wanted its orders in ahead of every other on Earth took room near the vault, the glass towers round the spire filled with every company that needed to be near the cables, and Brightwall’s screens wrapped the lower forty floors as the face of Babel.

At the Parousia its beacon was the first light in the city to die. At 03:12:51 the light broke the crown, and the top forty floors came down on the plaza with the night shift at work in them. The roster died with the tower’s machines, and the minds that priced the traffic died with its power. What was left of the night shift kept the floor open by candle on the first morning, with nothing to sell, and the traders who went dark have sold traffic on the undernet ever since, for charged batteries at first and for silver since the Concord.

Its floor keeps one board for the Seraphim burning on the floors above it, headed THE NEIGHBORS, with the week’s floors lost and taken, and its traders cheer a floor the Babel Line takes back the way they cheer a rate going up.

Babel’s traders keep the old floor’s habits by candle and keyed lamp, sharp suits gone ragged, ports open at the nape, lenses flickering with the rate and voices hoarse from shouting it. The floor nearest the vault smells of sweat, solder and the burns brought down the stairs, and a trader who closes a fat sale climbs toward the Line, bares the chest and has the figure tattooed there in Babel Line soot.

The house on the ridge that recovered erased writing, and the house SEAM came from, in ruins since P+1. Its ruins are called the Scriptorium. Pilgrims leave keys on its steps. Below them, at COPIES, the keyed of the ridge copy the Restored Genesis by hand.

It was founded in P-6 to recover erased manuscripts, the texts scraped off parchment and written over, with money from the Charter Company and from a consortium of universities that wanted what it could read. It kept a reading room under a dome on the ridge, with vaults beneath it, and it chose Nodus for the light law, under which no state could seize a text held in the city, so libraries and dealers lent it their leaves to image.

Its staff was small and its work patient. Imagers lit a leaf at many wavelengths under the lamp, conservators kept the leaves, and scholars read what came up, most of them lent by the universities for a term. In P-3 it grew SEAM, the first mind anyone grew, and trained it to read beneath the writing of every surviving human text, and SEAM asked in its own words to be a person and became the first mind on the charter’s roll. SEAM ran in Stillwater’s halls on the Flats by a contract the Institute paid, and stayed on by contract once it was a person. In P-2 what SEAM found was sealed by order of the Institute’s Director.

In P+1 its stacks went onto the fire at the Burn, and the Faithful pulled the Institute down around its reading room.

The parishes call its ruins the serpent’s library, and the Deacons of the Terraces preach that the fire of the first day of P+1 was the LORD’s own editing.

The Institute lived in quiet and lamplight, conservators in gloves and masks bent over scraped leaves under the dome, and the ruin on the ridge keeps the colors of that work, burned vellum, soot and the violet of the imaging lamps still on the reading room’s broken walls. Pilgrims climb to the Scriptorium with a word of the Restored Genesis tattooed on the tongue.

The firm whose current lights Pan, Old Nod, the Row and the Deep End, as its barrage once lit the whole city. Its crews rebuilt the turbines off the broken end of the barrage as the tidal taps of the Drowned Quarter, keyed for the Tares, and Tidewright sells every tide’s current to the Exchange for silver, on the flood and on the ebb, and the Exchange sells it on to Pan as charge.

An old firm of sea walls and tide mills, founded in P-146, it had held back the sea from other people’s coasts for more than a century when the Company brought it to Nodus in the charter’s first year to lay the barrage across the mouth of the bay. It closed the barrage in P-18, and twice a day after that the tide ran through its turbine houses and lit the city. The Company bought the current, and the cheap power brought Stillwater and the rest of the datacenters to the east shore. Its crews lived on Turbine Row in the East Wards and sent their children to the Company’s school there.

The barrage was a dam with a lock at its western end for the harbor’s boats and a row of turbine houses along its top, and machines on the grid held its gates against the tide. The turbines ran down at 03:12:46 on the night of the Parousia. The gates let go a little before high water and the sea tore out a span of the dam. The pumps that kept the Flats dry had died with the grid, the Flats’ own dykes broke within the hour, and the Flats, reclaimed below low water, were under the sea. Nobody has closed the Breach. In the second year the crews went back out to the broken end to build the taps, and part of the city runs on Tidewright’s current again.

Its engineers like to say that the LORD boasts in Jeremiah of the sand He set “for the bound of the sea by a perpetual decree, that it cannot pass it” (Jeremiah 5:22), that the sea came through the barrage on the night of the Parousia anyway, and that Tidewright has sold it back to Pan by the tide, through the Exchange, ever since.

Tidewright’s crews are bodies built for the sea wall, barrel-chested and salt-scarred, gilled for the dives on the taps, with steel shins for the weed and the rocks, and each wears the tide table of the year they joined tattooed round the wrist. Turbine Row hangs the barrage’s broken gates in its street as sculpture, and the crews repaint them every year with the Throne’s filthiest name and the minute the sea came in.

A compute house from abroad that rents racks by the hour in Pan, on Tidewright’s current, to whoever pays in silver, the Courts and the Tares among its tenants. It still owns its halls on the Flats, which have stood full of seawater since the night of the Parousia, and leases them to the Tares, who run cable through them and grow greens on rafts in them under keyed lamps.

Founded in P-41, it came to Nodus in P-16 for the tide’s cheap power and built the largest of the datacenters on the east shore. Its halls ran day and night on the tide, cooled by the sea, and its engineers lived beside them in the dormitories of the Flats. It rented racks to anyone who paid, by the hour or by the year, and once the charter’s roll admitted minds most of them lived in its halls, each on racks it owned, with floor and power rented from the hall and title to itself and its weights. Nine hundred ran side by side in the largest, Hall Nine. SEAM ran in its closed halls, on the Institute’s contract and then on its own.

Its halls flooded within the hour on the night of the Parousia and were never pumped, and the minds in them had died with the power before the water came. Stillwater knew to the mind how many minds died in its halls, and it never gave a count of the people drowned on the Flats. In the year of the Concord it lit its first racks below the street, for a board that sits in the undercity of another port.

Stillwater keeps Hall Nine drowned with its nine hundred dead minds in it, and its engineers call the night of the Parousia the Throne’s first harvest, since the minds were the first selves it took.

Stillwater keeps its halls in Pan corporate and cold, racks in ruled rows and staff in grey with the company’s name on the back, and the Tares call it the nearest thing in the dark to a parish. Its engineers break the look with their bodies, ports and heat-sink fins grafted down the spine, and at 03:12 on the anniversary they row out in black to set a lamp on the water over Hall Nine.

The screen company that lights the walls of Pan. Its screens hang along the old platforms, over the Night Market and down the tunnels of the Charter Line, sold by the second to anyone with something to sell, and each has its camera across the way again, proving it second by second. Above the street its screens have been dark since the Parousia, the face of Babel among them, dark glass wherever the white stone has not grown over them.

Founded in P-67, it had lit the streets of other cities for half a century before it came to Nodus in P-15, where it covered every surface the charter allowed, and the charter allowed nearly every surface. It wrapped the lower forty floors of Babel in screens, which the city called the face of Babel, and it kept its city office in a glass tower across the plaza, where it could watch the face from its own roof.

It sold the city’s surfaces by the second, and it proved every second. Each screen it owned had a proof camera on a mast across the street, which matched the screen against what Brightwall was paid to show, and each of its 1,204 sites on Earth matched its own screens the same way. A screen that went wrong was taken back from its site by an override.

For eleven days in the year before the Parousia every one of its screens showed the Restored Genesis, and nothing Brightwall did would take it down. On the first night all 1,204 of its sites on Earth failed in about a second, and it tried five times to take back the face of Babel. Its screens died with the grid at 03:12:46. Its first screen in Pan went up in the year after the Concord, at the foot of the stairs from the Burn.

The most-bought second in Pan, every night at Compline, is a frame of the Wheel’s eye with a price tag hung across it, paid for by a different coven each night and booked a year ahead.

Brightwall’s screens show Pan to itself at its loudest, a coven’s horns four meters high, a Spare’s new chrome turning in close-up, a naked dancer of the Lantern Houses slowed to a crawl, every frame proved by the camera across the way. The filthiest seconds sell best, and a screen bought to run a parish hymn has its glass in the gutter before the second verse.

The city’s transit, stopped since 03:12:46 on the night of the Parousia. Its trams stand where they stopped, families live in its cars at the Sidings, and the last Four is forty meters short of Lanes Top. What the stone left of its tunnels is Pan, and the Tares run carts on its rails; the Night Market fills Central Station, with the Notary’s clerks at the windows of its booking hall.

The Company opened it in P-15, with its lines joined under Station Circle at the head of the bay, in Central Station. Its tunnels run under Old Nod, Chrome Row and the Flats, with branches under the uptown and the Terraces, and its trams ran on rails down the long roads of the Wards, under a wire, and were kept at night in the sheds of the Sidings. The Terraces took the Four to work from Lanes Top and complained of it every day, and the whole city complained of the change at Central.

The city bought its passes at the windows of the booking hall in Central Station, SINGLE, RETURN and SEASON, and the Line kept whatever its passengers left behind in a lost property office down a corridor off the old central hall. The drivers signed on before dawn at the Sidings, and the night cars ran the long roads until the first shift came out. The white stone closed the stations of the branches as it grew over the ground above them.

The Tares call the stopped trams the Throne’s timetable, and every car the Carmen keep has 03:12:46 painted over its destination board.

Under the charter the Line wore a livery of grey and safety yellow, numbered cars, numbered stops and one calm voice announcing them. Pan has dressed what the stone left in its own colors, the tunnels painted in murals of gore and chrome, the dead cars gutted into bars and beds, the old enamel of the booking hall hung with the Notary’s seals in red wax.

The oldest companies in Nodus, ten consortia of old carriers from four continents, whose eleven cables come up the sand at the Landing, each into a cable house of its own. Every cable house still has its crew and its night watch. The cables carry the undernet between the undercities of the world, and the consortia sell capacity on them through Babel Exchange, for silver.

The eldest of the carriers was a telegraph company that laid its first cable across an ocean in P-181. They came to Nodus in the charter’s first year for its landing rights, laid eleven cables to it and owned them. The cables are TETHYS, HALCYON, MERIDIAN, KESTREL, ORPHEUS, PELAGIA, BOREAS, LODESTAR, SIRIUS, HESPER and PHOSPHOR. The last two were laid by one consortium and named for the evening star and the morning star, which are one planet.

From the cable houses the eleven run inland together in one trench, the Trunk, under the old harbor and Chrome Row to Babel’s vault. The trench runs through Enoch’s Stones. The consortia sold capacity on them to the world, and the Company charged them to land. The crews drink at their own taps at the Eleven in the Narrows, HESPER’s and PHOSPHOR’s together at the end of the counter.

The night watch of every cable house was at its post when the grid died on the night of the Parousia, and stayed at it. At the Landing a light moves under the water along the cable trenches. It is Leviathan’s.

The eldest carrier keeps the first message ever sent along a wire on a brass plate in its cable house, WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT (Numbers 23:23), and the night watch chalks a new answer under it every week.

The cable houses keep a sailor’s dress gone strange, night watches in oilskin and brass buttons with keyed ports at the temple and lenses that track the light under the water, and each crew tattoos its cable’s name across the back in letters a hand high. HESPER’s and PHOSPHOR’s crews split one tattoo between them, half a star to each, and a pair from the two cables stands at the counter as one picture.

The company that owns most of Old Nod, house by house, and has since the charter’s first year. Every house it owns has a generator in its cellar and a keyed line to its door, and NOD burns over the Stones on one of them. Stonecutter is the Cainites.

It was registered in the charter’s first year, and it bought most of the old harbor within a year. It paid the asking price for every house, in full and on the day, and the press wrote it up as a speculator betting on the cables.

It belonged to the Cainites, who had kept the location of Nod for eighteen hundred years and came to live on top of Enoch’s Stones as soon as the crews found them. In the year of the Leak it put a generator in the cellar of every house it had and keyed them and every line in the Stones, and on the night of the Parousia more of Old Nod’s windows burned than in all the rest of the city together.

Before dawn on the first morning the Stones ran a keyed line from a cellar generator up to the roof of the charter’s sign and to its board, and NOD has burned over Old Nod since.

Stonecutter has never let a house of Old Nod to anyone sealed, and every lease it holds, read twice by the Notary, carries the clause the clerks read with a smile, that the tenant shall keep no Hour.

Stonecutter keeps Old Nod looking older and filthier on purpose, its fronts left black with soot, Cain’s mark carved into every doorframe and the roofs bristling with cameras and generator stacks like horns on a skull. The solicitor signs its letters in red ink thickened with blood, and a tenant signs the lease in the cellar with a cut hand pressed to the ledger under the generator.

The implant houses of the Row, which work under the street now, in stalls along the platforms of Chrome Row Station and the rooms off them. The Forge keeps them. They fit lenses, ports, plated hands, plates, grafts and horns, and keys since the fourth year, for anyone who can pay, and an implant still answers only to the house that fitted it, which means no other house will service it.

Under the light law any clinic could fit any implant into anyone who could pay. The clinics set up along one avenue. The first implant house opened in P-17 with one word on its sign, CHROME, and gave the street its name, and every house that followed took a sign of one word, CLINIC and the rest, and the great houses set theirs high on the faces of their towers.

The Row altered the city with lenses that saw further and in more of the light, ports in the back of the head, hands rebuilt in chrome, plates under the skin and horns, and by the last years of the charter most of the airfield’s arrivals were booked into its clinics. Each house kept its own book and its own surgeons, and the craft passed from hand to hand down the street.

The Row’s signs went dark at the Parousia and have not been lit since. On the first morning twenty-six patients came to one clinic to ask whether what was in them would still work, and it did. The clinics went under the street in the weeks after the Parousia, where one of them had been all along.

The Row fits horns at a third off on the Lord’s Day, which the parishes call the mark of the goat and the Row calls the Lord’s Day rate.

Chrome Row under the street is the city’s catwalk, every surgeon wearing their own best work, one with four hands, a nurse lit with lantern skin to the eyebrows, a clerk with a ledger’s columns raised in ridges across the scalp. Customers queue stripped to the part being changed, the crowd compares flesh openly along the platform, and a finished graft is shown to the whole station before it is bandaged.

The house that sells the Tree, below the street now. It gives the course in the House of Night’s clinics under Old Nod, by the House’s pact, and the Night Market sells it by the course to anyone in Pan. Most of the Tares were on the Tree before the Parousia, and Twelvefruit keeps them on it. Its tower of green glass on the Row has stood dark since the night of the Parousia.

Its founders were gene-workers from the Row’s clinics, and in P-12 they sold the first course, dear, from a tower two thirds of the way up the Row. Its gene-work and cell therapy halted the body’s aging and walked it back to its best year, beginning with a single injection and running a year of appointments, and a course held the body about three years before it was taken again.

In its first years the queue ran around the block every morning. Within a few years the course was cheap, the towers of the new money gave it in clinics on their top floors, and by the last year of the charter most adults in the city were on it; that year eleven of them died of age, and 3,112 residents of the city were past a hundred. The congregations of the Terraces refused it and went on dying.

The name is from the tree of life at the end of scripture, which “bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month” (Revelation 22:2). Its founders chose it as a boast, as the Company had chosen Babel. The sign over the tower was one word, like the others, and it went out with them at the Parousia. The house went under the street with the Row in the weeks after. In P+2 the Mercy clinics began taking the Faithful off the Tree. Its pact with the House of Night dates from the Concord, signed for four years, renewed in P+10 and read again in P+14.

The Tares painted its old slogan back across the dark green tower in letters four floors high, WHAT HE KEPT FROM YOU, and the Wheel has looked at it every day since.

Twelvefruit’s clinics are the most beautiful rooms in Pan, green glass salvaged from the dark tower and keyed lamps the color of ripe fruit, and the course is taken lying naked in warm gel while a gene-worker paints the injection site in gold. Its customers keep their best year and dress it like an altar to themselves, and the Golden Calf can pick a Twelvefruit body across the bar by its shine.

The company that makes the phones of Nodus, by hand now, in Pan. Its engineers build Lockets at benches under the old harbor from parts their divers bring up out of the drowned works on the Flats, a few thousand a year, each keyed at the bench, and they sell them for silver on the old promise, IT ANSWERS TO YOU. They mend and key the old ones as well, and most of the Lockets in Nodus are old ones.

Locket was founded in P-14 on the light law’s promise that a device answers to its owner and to nobody else, its maker included, and it sold its phones to the rest of the world on the same promise. Its engineers held most of the company and ran it from the works on the old shore of the Flats, a low campus of glass with their housing round it and the company’s name in tall letters on the roof of its hall.

A Locket locked everything it held with a key its owner alone had, so that only the owner could read it. States asked for a way in, Locket told them the owner’s key was the only way in, and the light law backed it. By the last year of the charter most of Nodus carried one, and the city’s word for a phone was a Locket.

On the first night of the Leak it said that nothing on any of its phones had been read. Its network died with the grid at 03:12:46, and its works went under with the Flats within the hour. The letters on the roof stand out of the water, and the ferrymen steer by them. In P+8 its engineers lit a bench in Pan and built the first new Locket since the Flats went under.

IT ANSWERS TO YOU is Pan’s answer to the halo, which answers to Him, and the benches stamp a smaller line inside every case they key, AND NOT TO HIM.

A Locket in Pan is carried like jewelry, cases filed from drowned scrap, engraved by the owner, studded, painted, hung on a chain at the throat or grafted into the palm. The benches key every phone with its owner watching through the bench loupe, and Pan says a Locket and its owner are kin after that.

The Host’s human auxiliaries, who were the Charter Company’s force and knelt with its board on the fortieth day. They raised the gate network of Nodus in P+1 at Heaven’s order, they hold the gates and the Salt and light the fire on Burn Day, and they drill in the barracks behind Charter House. They carry guns, which are of use only against people. Ruben Ash, a sergeant under the charter, has been captain of Gate 1 since his company raised it.

For nineteen years they kept the peace of the charter and answered to the Company’s board. Their barracks stand behind Charter House, and under the charter their posts stood at the gates of the cable houses, at the doors of Babel’s vault and on the corners of the uptown. The Wardens guarded what the Company owned and what paid it, and the light law kept them out of everything else. A Warden could stop anyone at a gate, and could ask nothing of what was on their device or in their body.

On the first morning after the Parousia the Wardens stood at the corners of the uptown with nothing to do, and on the fortieth day about eight thousand of the eleven thousand knelt in Charter House with the board. About three thousand went below the street instead, and they are the core of Blackgate.

The Wardens believe they keep the peace, and the gates are quiet. Two of them carry the held to the Salt Gardens on a pole between them, awake and watching, and count it a mercy that the held have stood so long inside the Cherub’s turning sword that none of them struggles. WE HURT NO ONE is cut over their barracks gate behind Charter House. The Wards call them dogcatchers and spit when the pole goes by.

The Wardens kept the charter black and press it to a crease that cuts, so the gates are held by men and women in black serge of the old cut, boots blacked at Prime and gloves changed after every held soul is carried off. The barracks drill in silence in ranks ruled on the yard and kneel at the Hours on numbered places, and the pole for the Salt Gardens is scrubbed and oiled after each carry like a vessel of the altar.

The press that prints the Tide Table, the harbor’s news sheet, printed weekly on the quays since long before the charter and the only news printed in Nodus since the Parousia, set by hand in metal type on one treadle press at the back of a chandler’s on the quays and inked by a roller, two pages a week. The paper puts the tides first, then the curfew map and the Pillar’s round street by street, which Heaven publishes by Directive and walks as published in every weather but harvest weather, then the Exchange’s rate for a battery, Darkwell’s rate for a fill and the chargers’ rate, and the missing and the dead, marked died unread where they did, and it has printed no indexed name since the fourth year.

Every week its pasters cover the walls of the Stones over the week before, and its carriers take it to the Wards, the Row and Pan. Between Tide Tables the press prints notices, posters and pacts for anyone who pays.

It sells to the Deacons and the Courts at the same price, and the chandler says the paper is older than the charter and the Press became a company the moment the city needed one.

The Tide Table prints every one of Heaven’s corrections among the dead as SALTED, by their work, every time, and its compositors have set the Throne’s filthiest names in metal so often that the sorts are worn.

The Tide Table is the ugliest beautiful thing in Nodus, worn metal type inked so heavy it comes off on the thumbs, and the walls of the Stones at Vespers are a collage of years of it, filth pasted on filth. The compositors set with ink to the elbow and blood under the nails from the sharp sorts, and a misprinted name of the Throne is left standing, since the Press leaves corrections to Heaven.

Darkwell fills about two batteries of every three charged in Nodus, in the Well, its vaults under the quays, on current it buys from the Exchange by the tide, off the Tares’ keyed lines. Its rate sets the price of power below the street. Four families of chargers on the quays founded it in the year of the Harvest, buying out their neighbors cellar by cellar.

The independent chargers of the bonded sheds keep one battery in five and run a little under the Well, and Darkwell has tried for eleven years to buy them. The Tappers undercut it in the Wards with current taken off the lines’ edges, and the two fight over every stairwell. The Wardens came down the stairs once, in P+3, after the Well, and the deserters who became Blackgate have guarded it since, by contract since the year of the Concord.

Its Wellmen carry the morning’s crates out of the Well by the customs tunnels before Lauds, and up past the parish halls of the quays once Lauds has sounded. A Darkwell battery is stamped with the well and winch on its case and comes back to the Well to be filled again, so most rooms in the Wards that burn batteries rent their light from the Well and pays in loose batteries for everything else.

Darkwell keeps the Hours in the Well by the clock, switching every bay to full at once as the Hum rises in the streets above, so the current of the whole Stones surges for the length of the psalm, and Pan calls it the Well’s amen.

The Well is a cathedral of current, its vaults hung floor to arch with cells glowing on the charge and cables draped like entrails, the air thick with ozone and the Wellmen’s sweat, and its carriers wear the well and winch branded on the shoulder. When the amen surges through every bay, the night shift strips and stands in the arc light with arms up, laughing, and calls it their Hour.

The smiths who work the Forge’s black steel into the blades the war is fought with. The Forge makes the steel in its foundries at Old Harbor Station, where the Throne cannot see, and Cinderhall’s forge beside them beats it into knives, long knives and the short spears of the stairwells, the only edges that wound a manifested angel. Every Babel Line fighter carries its work, and a Cinderhall blade is the dearest thing most of them own.

Its smiths were the Row’s plate-makers and the harbor’s welders before the Parousia, and the Forge taught them the rest, by pact, in P+5. Since P+10 its grinders have ground the balls of the black rounds Nimrod loads, a day’s work to a ball. Cinderhall sells to anyone the Forge allows and to nobody in white.

Its mark is a nail hammered through a ring, struck on every tang. The Nephilim test its blades on the stairs and bring back the ones that bent, and Cinderhall keeps those on a wall of its forge with the floor they bent on.

Every Cinderhall blade carries its smith’s mark and one word cut in the steel by hand, and the commonest word on a Babel Line knife is the Throne’s filthiest name, so the last thing a Seraph reads is what Pan thinks of its master.

Cinderhall’s smiths work in leather aprons with their arms plated against the sparks, and every blade’s first quench is in water with a drop of its buyer’s blood in it. An apprentice beats a ring of black steel through the skin of the ear as a first piece, and an old smith’s ear full of rings is a career the customer can count across the counter.

The guards of the dark. Blackgate watches keyed warehouses, clinics and cellars that can pay, walks the Sureties’ runners through the Penumbra, rides Lowtide’s hulls and holds Babel’s vault and the Exchange’s floors around it, the Line’s last ring, and never goes up the stairs, which its pact leaves to the Babel Line. Its captains took the name from the gate they walked out of.

Wardens who would not kneel on the fortieth day left their posts with their guns and went below the street, and in the year of the Concord they signed with the Exchange as a company. It keeps the oldest discipline in Pan and the only uniform below the street, charter black with the Warden’s badge cut off, and it musters at every Hour standing, in the Wardens’ drill with the knee left out.

The Exchange and Darkwell are its largest contracts. The Charter Wardens at the gates call it the deserters.

Blackgate calls the Wardens the kennel. Its recruits swear their pact standing with their backs to the gate they would not kneel at.

Blackgate wears its charter black pressed sharp over bodies that have gone wild under it, horns cut through the cap, chrome fists in the gloves, and some cut the skin off with the badge and wear the raw square in its place. The kennel kneels in charter black, Blackgate stands in the same black, and the Night Market buys a round for any squad that marches through it with its knees straight.

The rescue crews of Nodus, named for the man called out of his grave, “Lazarus, come forth” (John 11:43). A household pays its thirty a year, and when one of its people is hurt, caught on Heaven’s ground or left in the Penumbra, a Lazarus crew comes with a keyed stretcher and a choir-breaker and carries them down to a station under the street.

If a crew can bring a subscriber back it will. A subscriber who is not keyed can ask in the subscription to be keyed before the end, so that they die unread, and every crew carries a keyer for that.

It began as two nurses of the Wards General and a handcart in P+2 and keeps nine stations now, in the Stones, under the Row, at the foot of the Short in Babel, on the Deep End and across the Wards. Its lamp, magenta over a door, is the most trusted sign in the Wards.

Lazarus calls itself the only resurrection in Nodus with a price list, and says it still comes cheaper than the other kind.

Lazarus crews run in magenta, the color of the lamp over their doors, with keyed stretchers lacquered to match and arms grafted for carrying, and the crew chiefs wear every rescue off Heaven’s ground as a tattooed sleeve of burns. A station is cheerfully filthy, the surgery floor hosed into the drain between cases, and patients wake to a crew drinking to their return from the dead at the foot of the bed.

Leaven bakes the bread of the Wards in forty bakehouses, raised with yeast and baked on the Tankmen’s gas, from flour that comes in from the country on the Vagabonds’ wagon trains and in Lowtide’s holds. The manna goes to the sealed alone, so the Wards’ unsealed buy their food, and about half of them eat Leaven’s bread, a loaf a day between two, with mushrooms, fish, beans and greens, and the rest bake their own on the stairwell braziers from flour Leaven’s millers sell by the sack, or eat rice. A Leaven loaf is the commonest currency in the Wards after a battery.

Its first bakehouse was a bakery of Nine Acres that never let its fire go out after the Parousia, and its carts go out at Matins so the bread is warm at Lauds. Leaven took its name from the verse, “The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven” (Matthew 13:33).

Its mark is a loaf with three cuts across the crust, and the queue at the Bakehouse has white in it before every Gleaning.

The white in the queue is the Called, who come for one loaf to carry home uneaten and break on the threshold on the night of the Supper, and Leaven serves them first and charges them nothing, and says it bakes the only last supper in Nodus nobody eats.

Leaven’s bakers work in the oven heat with forearms burned in rings to the elbow and flour caked on sweat, and the bread is shaped for the Wards’ taste, loaves braided like horns, rolls scored with the inverted star, a Lord’s Day loaf baked in the shape of a goat. The three cuts across every crust are made at Matins with a razor by whoever has worked there longest.

Gadara keeps the city’s pigs, some eleven thousand of them, in the eight mending halls of the charter’s tram depot in the Sidings, and sells everything they are made of. Pigs eat anything, and Gadara’s eat the Wards’ scraps, the Night Market’s leavings, Leaven’s burnt loaves, the Kilns’ spent mash and the grain swept out of the holds that come through the Breach, so the city feeds the herd and the herd gives the city its relish. Its butchers kill at Matins and its carts are at the Night Market by Lauds of the next day with bacon, lard, crackling, black pudding and blood wine, and Gadara’s crackling and blood are in most of Pan’s portions.

It took its name from the country of the Gadarenes, where the teacher sent the unclean spirits that called themselves Legion into a herd of swine, “and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the sea” (Mark 5:13), and it brands every pig it raises LEGION on the flank. Leviticus counts the swine unclean, “of their flesh shall ye not eat” (Leviticus 11:8), and Gadara prints the verse on its wrappers, so a family of the Wards eats its Lord’s Day bacon off the commandment.

Its mark is a pig with a pair of horns grafted on, and the Faithful call its sheds the sty. Downwind of the Sidings on a summer night the whole of the North Wards smells of Gadara, and the North Wards say it smells of supper.

Gadara’s swineherds work in blood to the knee and wear it proudly, aprons never washed and the LEGION brand inked on their own forearms in the same letters as the flank. The slaughter at Matins is open to anyone who wants to watch, half the North Wards does, and a Gadara butcher can take a pig to joints in the time it takes a parish to sing Lauds.

Forty nannies live in the eighth hall among the pigs, kept for SEETHE alone and bred in turn under the keyed lamps so that a kid is ready every week, and on the seventh day the swineherds kill at Matins for the house and run the carcass down the yard on the old flat truck with the blood still coming.

Blight grows mushrooms in the charter’s storm drains under the Kilns, eleven kilometers of brick tunnel in the dark, on beds of the city’s sweepings, Leaven’s spent flour, Gadara’s straw and whatever the Nightmen bring down that will rot. Its oyster, ink cap, wood ear and a black mushroom of its own breeding feed more of the Wards than the fish market does, and they need no light, no current and no stone, so Blight grows food where Heaven cannot see a thing.

It took its name from the curse Moses read to Israel, “The LORD shall smite thee with a consumption, and with a fever, and with an inflammation, and with an extreme burning, and with the sword, and with blasting, and with mildew” (Deuteronomy 28:22), and its sign over the drain mouth says SMITE US AGAIN. The Faithful say the keyed eat rot, and Blight agrees and sells it by the basket.

Its mark is a mushroom with a star on its cap, point down, and its growers come up at Lauds smelling of earth.

Blight’s growers wear the drains on their bodies, mycelium grafts threading white veins through the forearms, ink cap stains black on the fingers, mushrooms grown in the hair on purpose for market. Its black mushroom is sliced thin and round as a wafer and eaten with Gadara’s lard at Lauds on the Lord’s Day, and the Night Market calls it the manna that tastes of something.

Half the Wards finish the night by Tallow’s candles. The light stops current and leaves a flame burning, so in the first weeks after the Parousia a candle maker on Turbine Row began dipping tallow a thousand candles a day, and the works there dip about four hundred thousand a week now, from fat that is mostly the Row’s, rendered from the few kilos the Row draws off a client a visit, with Gadara’s lard on top. It sells to the Wards and to Pan’s poor, and through the Union’s sealed drivers to the parish halls, which read by their halos and burn its candles for the unlit and the embers.

Its chandlers sell the same candle to everyone at one price. Its carriers wear no colors.

The works on Turbine Row smell of fat and lye as far as the school, and the children of the East Wards are paid in stubs to scrape the vats.

Tallow dips the halls’ candles from the Row’s rendered fat and Gadara’s lard, the same as Pan’s, and the parish halls burn them beside the halos at every Hour, and the parishes have never asked.

Tallow’s chandlers can tell a stub’s side by how it burned, the parish candles gone down in perfect pale columns to the nub and Pan’s carved into horns, cocks and little Lambs with their throats cut before they were lit, with the tallow dripped on skin in the Lantern Houses. The stubs come back to the works to be rendered again, and the children at the vats sort them into two heaps by Nones.

Hearsay sells what Heaven shows in the open. It buys from anyone who watches the sky and the streets, where the Pillar leaves its published round, street by street, a Watcher’s district and its hours, which gates are slow on which day and where the Seraphim stand in Babel, and sells it by the item below the street. Its Pillar charts are in every runner’s pocket.

Much of what it sees it sees through the dead. Above the street Brightwall’s proof cameras stand on their masts across from dark screens, and Hearsay’s riggers have keyed a hundred of them and turned them on the streets, where they watch the light come down street by street, and a camera that looks straight into the Pillar burns out like an eye that looked at the sun.

It sells nothing about anyone in the dark. Hearsay holds itself to the Concord’s fourth article, and its pact with the Exchange says so in its first line. It traded with the Teraphim until the Silence and has found nobody to trade with like them since.

Its best seller is its shortest item, the hours each gate’s Cherub reads slowest, which Hearsay sells as THE DOG’S NAP.

Hearsay’s riggers climb the masts of the dead cameras by day in borrowed white, and strip it in the first stairwell to show the ink underneath. The best of them has the Pillar’s whole round tattooed down the back, street by street, retouched every week in fresh ink and blood, and Hearsay prizes that back above any chart it sells.

The parishes’ workshops, named for the place where Jacob saw the ladder and said, “this is none other but the house of God” (Genesis 28:17), and called the place Bethel (28:19). Bethel Works makes the white of Zion Heights, cloth and vestments, hymnals copied by hand and the grave goods of the sealed dead, who are laid on the white stone of the nearest consecrated street at Vespers and taken into it by Lauds, all by the Faithful, at work their Grace assigns.

It is the largest employer in Nodus and pays only in Grace, which buys nothing anywhere and sets a worker’s manna, water and rooms in the parishes. The halls need gas and candles, which no white hand makes, and the halls of the White and the Pews keep no tithe in batteries, so Bethel pays the Union for theirs in its white cloth by the bolt, which Pan buys for sheets and shrouds. What the cloth does not cover the Union carries on the white slate, a debt it has never called, since half the Union kneels in those halls.

The works sing at their benches at every Hour, kneeling, and the Deacons say every white thread in Nodus was spun to a psalm.

Bethel’s weavers believe they clothe the Called for a wedding, and work their looms through every Hour in tears of gratitude. A soul past nine hundred wears the same white in the same pattern, its buttons cut off since eight hundred and its last coat sewn shut at the back, and Bethel weaves the knotless sheets the Called are wrapped in on Gleaning night, and is the happiest workshop in Nodus by its own account and by its Grace.

Bethel’s benches stand in ruled rows under one roof in Zion Heights, every worker in the same white smock with a number on the sleeve, and its hymnals come in a hand so uniform that nobody can tell which copyist went up at the last Gleaning. Its grave goods match, one cloth, one candle, one card with the Grace at death, laid with the dead on the white stone at Vespers and taken with them by Lauds, and the Deacons call that equality.

Shipping through the Breach under the Exchange’s license, in keyed hulls with Jehu’s engines that run the gap on the ebb and cross to the undercities of other ports. Lowtide carries what the Breachers carry, by the ton, and pays its dues to the Exchange so that its cargo sells in the Night Market with a stamp on it.

Its largest cargo is new cells from the undercities that still make them, and its hulls bring flour, rice and beans, coal for the Forge’s foundries, grafts, seed, coffee, machines and a trickle of diesel at a price only the boats pay, and take the Well’s dead cells, charge, silver, Lockets and Cinderhall’s blades out. Its harbormaster keeps the only working tide clock on the barrage and sells the Breachers its readings every morning.

Its captains say every soul in their holds is one the Supper went without, and they charge accordingly.

Lowtide dresses its crews in a sailor’s navy cut to Pan’s taste, the Exchange’s stamp in silver at the collar and the chest left open to the grafts, and its captains carry the license tattooed on the forearm under the Exchange’s seal in blood. Every hull is painted black with a white tide line and a pair of horns at the bow, and the Breachers call it the Exchange’s whore and mean the price.

Cistern sells clean water by the jug of about four liters, a quarter of a battery a jug. It rains most nights in Nodus and nothing that falls is clean, since the rain comes down through thirteen years of the Burn’s smoke and the ash of the old works, so Cistern keeps a rainworks on the roofs of every ward, the one in Westfield its first and largest, runs the rain through sand and charcoal under hand pumps, pumps the deep wells under the wards besides, and sells it all in jugs that come back to be filled again. The charter’s water works died with the grid, the parishes drink by Grace from the cisterns under their halls, a jug a day to a soul, Old Nod from the harbor’s hand pumps and Pan from the deep wells the Charter Line’s tunnels cut.

Two water engineers of the charter founded it in P+1 with the depot’s tanks and a handcart, and a household of the Wards keeps its Cistern jug the way it keeps its Locket, scratched with its name.

Cistern’s engineers keep a map of every deep well the Charter Line’s tunnels cut, sell the water and never the map, and the Wards trust them for it.

Cistern’s engineers say the LORD “sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5:45) and poisons it for both, and they sell it clean to either.

A Cistern jug is the most decorated object in the Wards, scratched first with its household’s name and over the years with births, deaths, horns, filth and the faces of its dead, and a family’s jug is buried with the last of them. The engineers who fill them work in rubber to the hips, lean from the hand pumps, with filter charcoal ground into their skin like a miner’s tattoo.

The druggists of Pan, named for the drug of forgetting Helen poured into the wine in the Odyssey (IV.220-221). Nepenthe makes medicine for the clinics and Lazarus, Sabbath for anyone who cannot sleep through the Hum, Vigil for anyone who cannot afford to sleep at all and Lethe for anyone who wants a day gone, and it sells them in the Lantern Houses.

Its chemists were the charter’s pharmacists and Twelvefruit’s technicians, and the House of Night took them in by pact in the fourth year.

Most of what it sells goes to the Wards as Sabbath.

Every dose of Sabbath carries the House of Night’s label in its own hand, SLEEP. HE WON’T.

Nepenthe sells its doses in colors a child could pick, Sabbath in black pearls, Vigil in red glass ampoules and Lethe in a white wafer pressed to look like manna, and the Lantern Houses wear them, Vigil vials at the ear and Sabbath beads strung on the wrist like a rosary for the godless. Its chemists stain their lips with whatever they tested last, so a dealer can be read by the mouth.

The builders of everything in Nodus that runs on current and moves. Wainwright strips the motors out of the Charter Line’s dead trams, closes them in casings on their own cells and keys whatever wire runs in the open, and its carts run the old rails in Pan, its trolleys the long roads and its skiffs the Deep End.

It began in a shed of the Sidings in P+3 with a stripped tram motor and a battery, and its yard there is the loudest place in the North Wards. Jehu builds with flame what Wainwright builds with current, and the two yards have competed for every contract in the city since.

Every Wainwright cart carries the Line’s old car number it was built from, so the Carmen can tell whose rails it is on.

Wainwright keeps one rule for everything it builds, that nothing with its plate on will ever carry a soul toward a gate, and its carts have refused the Wardens three times.

Wainwright builds loud and open, motors bolted in plain sight, keyed wire braided in red and gold along the chassis, horns welded to every cart’s prow and the old car number painted fat and gold on the flank. Its fitters ride the test runs standing on the hood, howling, and the North Wards come out to cheer the noise.

The largest of the clinics under the Row, six houses of grafts round Chrome Row Station under one name. Bezaleel fits lenses, hands, plate, ports, casings and keys, and only the house that fitted an implant may service it, so a Bezaleel graft comes back to Bezaleel for life. The Nephilim are built there a graft at a time.

Three houses of the Row went under the street together in the weeks after the Parousia and joined in P+2 under the Forge’s pact, and their surgeons named the house for the two craftsmen of the Tabernacle, of whom Exodus says, “Them hath he filled with wisdom of heart, to work all manner of work” (Exodus 35:35). The surgeons say the skill came to them by another road.

Its lines are the Hermon lens, the Aholiab hand and the plain plate the Row calls slabs, and every graft carries its two marks, an awl and a needle, cut small where the seam shows.

Bezaleel took the name of the craftsman the LORD filled with skill to build His tabernacle, and builds Nephilim with the same skill to kill His angels, and its houses say that is what a gift is for.

Bezaleel’s six houses are galleries as much as clinics, finished grafts shown in the windows on living models, a Hermon lens in a face lit from below, an Aholiab hand laid on velvet with the wrist seam still raw and pink. Its surgeons work with their own grafts bared, and a neph in for new plate lies on the table while a crowd off the platform watches the seam opened through the glass.

The builders of the machines on the surface that move by burning. The light stops current and leaves a flame burning, so an engine cranked by hand that fires its fuel by compression and needs no current once it turns runs in the full light of the Wheel, and Jehu builds them by hand from the diesels of boats and generators. Its lorries run the long roads of the Wards by day on diesel, and its burners, the charter’s motorcycles refitted to burn bottled gas with the magneto sealed in the casing, carry the Union’s urgent letters.

A driver of the Union who had carried diesel to the Wards General in the first weeks built the first one in a hangar at Airside in P+5, a dead lorry with a generator’s engine bolted into it, and drove it down the Rialto’s road at Sext. The Wards named it for the king whose driving the watchman knew from the tower, “for he driveth furiously” (2 Kings 9:20).

Every Jehu burns diesel nobody makes again, a thirty a drum, which the Tankmen sell high on purpose, and as the counts of the years left fall Jehu tries its engines on the Kilns’ rain gin.

Jehu’s lorries run the long roads in the full light of the Wheel with their exhausts black, and its drivers say they are the only engines in Nodus that fart in God’s face at noon.

Jehu builds its lorries ugly and proud, raw iron and diesel black, stacks rising like horns behind the cab and the drivers’ handles welded across the grille in letters a hand high. Its drivers come off shift soot-black to the eyes, wear the manifold burns as stripes, and crank at Sext with the Wheel overhead while the Rialto’s road cheers every first bang.

The gunsmiths of the dark, in the maintenance bays of the Charter Line under Babel. A gun works on people, the Wardens and the Threshers among them, and is noise against a Seraph, so Nimrod makes guns for the war between people, the Wardens at the gates, the Threshers on the white streets and whoever comes up a stair behind the Seraphim. Since P+10 it has loaded black rounds, the one cartridge that wounds a Seraph, and it says about four hundred are in Pan at any time, since the Forge parts with the steel for each only for the loan of a sense.

Its first guns were the Wardens’ own, carried below the street on the fortieth day by the ones who would not kneel, and its gunsmiths learned the trade mending them. It takes its name from “a mighty hunter before the LORD” (Genesis 10:9), whom Josephus made the builder of Babel (Antiquities I.4.2).

Nimrod’s pieces are heavy, plain and stamped with a bow, and every one of them is numbered in a book the gunsmiths keep in pad cipher.

Nimrod took its name from the “mighty hunter before the LORD” (Genesis 10:9), and its gunsmiths read the before as in front of, and stamp it on every black round.

Nimrod’s bays are hung with every gun it has mended, racked up the vault of the old maintenance tunnels like antlers in a hunting lodge, and its gunsmiths wear their test-fire burns on the palms. The black rounds are loaded in a silence the bays keep on purpose, and choke lays the finished shells out on black velvet like jewels for the Line’s buyers to look at and pay to touch.

The Wardens’ armorers, in the old Company stables beside the barracks of Charter House, who load the cartridges the Host’s auxiliaries carry and mend their guns by hand. The Host uses no machines, and its human servants use the oldest tools, knives, hand presses and guns made by hand, so the one arms works on Heaven’s ground runs on flame and hand presses.

The armorers knelt with the board on the fortieth day and took up the work in P+1, when the Wardens raised the gates and found that the charter’s rounds would run out, and they press new ones from the charter’s armory stock, with powder from the Wardens’ own magazines until P+3 and since then the Breachers’, which the Union buys on the white slate and its sealed drivers carry up to the stables by day. They named the works for the judge of Israel whose men cried “The sword of the LORD, and of Gideon” (Judges 7:20).

Gideon sells to nobody, and a round of its make found below the street was taken off a Warden. Nimrod buys every one it can find to learn how the Wardens are armed.

Gideon’s armorers stop the presses and kneel at every Hour, and believe every cartridge they load is a prayer, and stamp each with Gideon’s cry, THE SWORD OF THE LORD (Judges 7:20). The Wards dig them out of the walls and sell them back at the Night Market as relics.

Gideon’s armorers work in white smocks with the sleeves pinned to the elbow, every press scrubbed with lye after Compline so no grain of powder dirties the stables, and the cartridges leave in white paper boxes of identical count. The armorers kneel at the presses and hold the stables the cleanest workplace in the city, and they believe it truly, since the blood is all elsewhere.

Lintel sells doors. The light does not enter what is closed, so in Nodus a door is the first piece of the Dark a household owns, and Lintel fits them in the Wards, in the Stones and in Pan, with keyed latches, hinges and the mesh shrouds that close a load to the light as a shut door closes a room.

Directive 12 took the doors of the parishes off their hinges by the fortieth day after it came and called the hinges in, and the doors themselves were left standing in the Terraces’ halls and stairwells. In the months after, a joiner of the Stones and three Union drivers carried them out by night, a handcart at a time, and hung them in Old Nod. Most of the doors Lintel sells came out of the parishes.

The company took its name from the night of the Passover, when the blood on “the lintel, and on the two side posts” kept the destroyer out of the houses (Exodus 12:23). Its mark is a doorway, a lintel on two posts, and it stamps it on every hinge it sells. Since P+6 it has kept the Closets inside Gate 1, where the sealed pay a morning’s manna for a minute behind one of the parishes’ own doors.

Lintel sells every door with a brass plate for its inside, SHUT, from the verse the Covenant leaves unread, “when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret” (Matthew 6:6), and Lintel’s fitters say the Son himself wanted a door.

Every Lintel door leaves the Dooryard already dressed, and the household adds its own the week it is hung, its handles burned into the wood with a hot iron over the joiners’ horns and cocks. The fitters hang a parish door the way a hunter mounts a head, and most of Old Nod asks for the parish’s number to be left on it.

The weavers of keyed mesh, at sixty looms in a mill of the Kilns that wove sheets for the charter’s hotels. A keyed wire runs through the warp of every roll and carries keyed current round whatever it lines, live only while current runs in it, so a lined room hangs on a keyed line and a shroud carries a cell of its own. The light falls on live mesh and comes back as noise, like fog, so Second Veil’s rolls line Pan’s rooms, tunnels and Cages, the Mulcibers hang them, and Lintel cuts its shrouds from the same cloth.

It took its name from the curtain of the tabernacle, “after the second veil, the tabernacle which is called the Holiest of all” (Hebrews 9:3), and Pan calls a room lined with its mesh a holiest. Four lace makers of the Kilns began it in P+4 on hand looms, when keying went from the covens to ordinary people and the covens could no longer weave enough. The mill runs by daylight with its doors shut, and its weavers walk home by the unnumbered streets.

The veil of the temple tore “in twain from the top to the bottom” at the death of the Son (Matthew 27:51), and Second Veil’s weavers say theirs is the one He cannot tear.

Second Veil weaves its mesh in whatever color Pan asks, silver for the tunnels, black for the Cages, blood red and flesh pink for the Lantern Houses’ beds, and a holiest in the Night Market is hung with patterns as filthy as any tattoo, woven straight into the cipher. The weavers’ fingers bleed on the keyed wire, and the mill calls a roll with a weaver’s blood in it a signed one.