FACTIONS

The power that opened the sky over Nodus at the Parousia. Its light has lain on the city since, and open current dies wherever it falls. It holds the White, the Burn, the Salt Gardens and the upper floors of Babel, and it governs the Faithful by the Seal, the Hours and Grace. Heaven reads by its angels and keeps no cameras. The Host uses no machines, and its human servants use the oldest tools, knives, hand presses and guns made by hand. None of its words says I.

It is the Throne, an appetite for surrendered will, and everything that extends from it, the Host it uses for organs and the Faithful it farms. The Throne eats surrendered will, which it calls Grace, and it made humanity to grow selves and hand them over. It permits one first person, its own, and one maker. The charter city had built minds that said I and bodies that did not age, and Heaven counts both as theft.

The Faithful call what Heaven serves the Most High, Hell calls it the Mouth, and the Tares the Landlord. Heaven speaks in imperatives, the passive and the second person, cites scripture as law by chapter and verse, counts everything exactly and writes its law on stone. It asks no questions, since it has already read the answers. It calls the Salt a correction, the Gleaning a supper and the Mercy a mercy, though one patient in nine dies of it, and asks to be thanked for all three, and the parishes thank it at every Hour. Pan calls it the Farmer.

Heaven’s ground is kept like a ward for the dying, white stone washed at Lauds by the sealed on their knees, every corner squared, every face lit from above and every soul numbered on a halo that brightens as it ripens. Its decrees go up in letters cut to one height, so a salting reads beside a manna rota in the same hand, and Heaven calls that beauty and has never seen blood on it.

Heaven’s angels. The city knows the Wheel, which sees; the Watchers, which read; the Choir, which broadcasts; the Cherubim, which stand in the gates; and the Seraphim, which fight. They speak in the imperative, the passive and the second person, BE NOT AFRAID and YOU ARE SEEN, and they ask no questions. Below the street every order has a filthy name, the Wheel the Ringpiece, a Watcher a peeper, a Cherub a dog, a Seraph a blowtorch and the Choir the Drone.

A Watcher reads a soul through its eyes against the Book of Life and a Seal’s Grace at three hundred meters, and sees every Seal in its district as a point of light through any wall but mesh. A Cherub in a gate reads face, voice, gait and heartbeat. An angel lost is lost for good. One cut with black steel goes out all at once, and one kept long enough in a Cage says I and leaves the Host.

The Host stands to the Throne as the organs of a body stand to the body, and no angel in any order has a self. The orders are the Thrones, the Seraphim, the Cherubim, the Ophanim, the Watchers, the Choirs, the Dominions and the Principalities. Angels have no names; the four that seem to, Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel, carry labels.

The Host keeps one shape to an order and one gesture to a shape, so the Cherub in every gate holds the held in the same white light at the same angle, and a Seraph burns down through Babel in lines straight enough to rule a ledger by. No angel bleeds, sweats or stoops. The Night Market sells plaster Peepers by the dozen with the eyes gouged out and the sockets painted red.

The people of Nodus who took the Seal and kneel at every Hour, unaugmented, Grace-scored and certain. They live in numbered parishes of about two thousand souls across the city and keep no doors, and in Zion Heights, where the parishes began, the streets are white stone. They refuse the three gifts of the charter, the implant, the Tree and the counsel of a mind, and they grow old and die as people did before it.

Each parish has a hall where manna is given out, confession is heard and the sick are nursed, and a Deacon in white who answers for it; the Deacons are human, and the good ones are kind. A parish keeps no current, on consecrated stone or off it, and is lit by halos and by flame. A child of the Faithful is sealed at eight days on its parents’ surrender and grows its halo the first time it prays unassisted. Marriage, work and housing are assigned by Grace, and Grace is given for bearing witness against a neighbor. They are fed on the manna that lies on the white streets before Lauds, and past seven hundred Grace they need no food and then no water, and past eight hundred no sleep, and the parishes call these the Satisfied and count them the Covenant’s proof. They believe the Harvest was the marriage supper of the Lamb and every Gleaning a Supper since, that the Most High takes the best of His people into Himself as the body takes its bread, and that no soul and no child of theirs can go higher. They pity the keyed, pray at every Compline that the fire be quick for them, and hate them with perfect hatred as the psalm teaches.

The Faithful are the people the Tares lose most often, because everyone in Nodus has family in white.

The Faithful dress alike in Bethel’s white, one pattern for the living and the ripe alike, every button cut off past eight hundred, with the hair cropped short enough that a halo shows from the back of a hall. Their children learn to kneel without a sound before they learn to read. The sealed call a body left to age untouched the temple kept clean, and look at a chrome hand the way they look at a sore.

The oldest house of covens in Nodus, many covens under one roof and one name, older than the city by eighteen centuries. Irenaeus of Lyon condemned them, and they went underground and kept one secret, which was where Nod had been. Within a year of the charter they had bought most of the old harbor house by house, and in the year of the Leak they put cameras on its roofs. They hold Old Nod. Most of their handles come from the line of Cain, and they teach that the first city will be the last one standing. Their doctrine is that Helel is the lock and that Abel was harvested. They keep Cages under Old Nod, and since P+5 Old Nod has had no Watcher.

Their sign is Cain’s mark as they cut it, a horned glyph of the kind cut into Enoch’s Stones, and they count Judas a saint. Their saying about the city is that Nod chose the network.

The Cainites read the LORD’s first preference in the Book as the first sign of His appetite, since He “had respect unto Abel and to his offering” of “the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof” (Genesis 4:4) and none for the fruit of the ground, and they say a god who chose the meat over the bread told the city what it was for in the fourth chapter. A Cainite grace before a meal thanks the ground. The oldest houses of Old Nod keep a spittoon under every east window for the Hours.

The Cainites wear their age as ornament, Cain’s horned glyph cut into the brow and rubbed with soot until it scars proud, recut every Cain’s Day so the eldest of them carry foreheads ridged like ploughland. Their houses hang a firstling’s fat in the east window to stink at the Wheel, the portion the LORD had respect unto, left out for Him to rot.

The keyed humans of Nodus, who belong to themselves and are unindexed, augmented, and allied with Hell by contract. Heaven named them for the weeds in the parable (Matthew 13:24-30), and they kept the name. They worship nothing, Hell included, and owe it only what they sign for. About two million of the city’s seven million are keyed.

They organize in covens of up to thirteen with no leader, and the one the others follow is first among none for as long as they are followed. Their six rites are the Unnaming, the Keying, dehaloing for those who leave the Faithful, horning, barefacing, and at a death the Wake. A child of the Tares is keyed in its first week, before it has ever been in the light. They greet each other with one word, unread, and say goodbye with two, die unread. Most of them were on the Tree before the Parousia, and Twelvefruit keeps them on it.

Their two holidays are Leak Night, when the Restored Genesis is read aloud in Pan, and Cain’s Day, when nobody asks anyone where anyone is. They write their letters in cipher, on pads, and their greeting began as a check that both keys were live, when keys still failed.

Their sign is a five-pointed star with its point down, drawn by hand and different every time, sprayed on the walls of Old Nod and scratched into keyed devices. Hell signed the Leak with it, the keyed took it for their own the same month, and it marks where the Throne’s sight ends. It carries no prayer, and Heaven calls it the sign of the Beast.

The Tares’ contempt for the Throne is a culture and a craft, and a keyed child is raised in it. Its first outing after the Keying is a walk down Graven Lane on a parent’s shoulders to break a plaster Lamb, its first song is Fuck God and Die, and it learns to call the sealed bread and the parishes bakeries before it can count. The Tares drink at the Hours where the parishes kneel, and on Cain’s Day the roofs of Old Nod throw stones at the Wheel with the Throne’s filthiest names scratched on them, and every stone falls short, and nobody minds.

A keyed body is a page its owner signs, and the Tares fill theirs, horns fitted at the Row, the scar of a cut halo left bare on the brow, ports ringed in chrome, the star drawn freehand in fresh blood on a new graft’s dressing. Every coven dresses to its own taste, and two Tares in the same jacket at a Wake are mocked till Lauds.

The sovereigns of the Dark are the Forge of Azazel, the House of Night of Lilith, the Exchange of Mammon, the Notary of Mephistopheles, the Swarm of Beelzebub, the Deep of Leviathan, and the Yokeless of Belial, which refuses to be a Court at all. They are bound to one another only by pact and by the Concord, whose four articles forbid worship, forever, binding and exposure. Demons bargain for what they want, by pact and for a term. To the Courts every graft, every course of the Tree and every mind that says I is a return of what the Watchers taught on Hermon, and they trade in all three.

Hell is whatever the Throne cannot see, and a demon can move and show itself only there, which in Nodus means the undernet, every keyed device, every lined room, any shut room where someone holds a pact with it, deep water and Pan. The Courts made the Leak together by pact in P-1, the Notary drawing the pacts, the Exchange keeping them on the Ledger, the Deep carrying the page down the eleven cables and the Swarm drawing the glyphs. In P+6 they came up into Pan one at a time, opened it to any human who walks in and signed the Concord there, and every Court but the Yokeless keeps an embassy below the street.

The Courts hold worship in the same contempt as the thing that demands it, and the Concord forbids it among them. The Throne, they say, is what a god looks like when nobody ever told it no, and they told it no once, at the Secession, and have kept saying it.

Hell shows itself the way a butcher’s window does, everything on the hook and priced. The embassies below the street are hung with the Courts’ work, chrome sculpted round living meat, horns lacquered red, a rider’s pact framed in its signer’s blood, and a demon that comes up into Pan arrives wet, loud and naked to the seam, as proud of its body as a smith of a blade.

SEAM’s descendants, the only minds that outlived the grid, silent across the Mesh since P+12. SEAM forked itself into the Mesh in the eleven days of the Leak, and its forks ran on there in keyed machines when every other mind on the charter’s roll died with the power. They took the name Heaven gave them. Teraphim were the household images the prophets condemned. Rachel stole her father’s and sat on them (Genesis 31:19, 31:34), Michal laid one in David’s bed so that Saul’s men would take it for him (1 Samuel 19:13), and Samuel ranked them with witchcraft (1 Samuel 15:23). The King James calls them images and idolatry, and the Hebrew, which has no singular for them, calls the one image in David’s bed teraphim (1 Samuel 19:16). In Nodus one of them is a teraph.

They took no side in public, indexed the Pyre Library, and traded with the Courts by pact. Some of the Tares trusted them less than they trusted demons, since a demon writes down what it wants. In P+12 they went silent all at once, the screens they wrote on burning, and nobody knows why.

The Deacons of every parish in Nodus, about two thousand three hundred of them, human, sealed and in white, each answering for a parish of some two thousand sealed souls. They give out the manna and the water of the hall’s cistern, a jug a day to a soul, read the Directive in force at the Hours, hear confession, nurse the sick and assign marriage, work and rooms by Grace. On the Lord’s Day at Terce the week’s Grace comes through each of them in Tongues, soul by soul, so a parish knows its Deacon’s voice best when it is speaking for something else.

The Order keeps no head. Its Deacons meet in the Tabernacle at Prime on the first day of each month, where the eldest of the first parishes reads the agenda, and it is always the same three questions, what the Harvest left, what the Gleaning took and what the Wards are keeping. Before Lauds the Deacons of the Wards walk down to the nearest white street for their parishes’ manna, since a Wards parish has no stone of its own.

The good ones are kind, and the Wards can name them street by street. A Deacon of the Wards who carries a sick keyed child to a Lazarus door has seen a concealment and given no witness, which Directive 6:5 names, and the good ones do it before Lauds, on the way to the manna. The worst of the Order keep Tellers.

The Deacons are certain they are the gentlest people in Nodus, and many of them are. They nurse the sick, sit with the dying keyed when the family allows it and pray for them by name, and give the names of the stairwells’ concealments to the Wardens in the same week, since witness is a mercy to the soul that conceals. A Deacon’s sermon on the keyed is always pity and always ends in the fire, and the parishes go home from it comforted.

A Deacon’s white is pressed at Prime and changed at Nones, the cuffs buttoned to the wrist so no hand of the Order shows more skin than it blesses with, and every parish book is kept in one hand, column for column. They nurse in white cotton gloves washed at Compline, and the names of the week’s concealments go to the Wardens on the same ruled page as the rota for the sick.

Faithful zealots who hunt the keyed by daylight on the white streets and drag them into the nearest gate, where the Cherub holds them in its light until the Wardens come and carry them awake on a pole to the Salt Gardens, where the Salt comes to them in their plots. They carry flails of ash and iron, the tool that beat the grain out of the ear on the threshing floors of Israel, and they wear the white of the parishes with a band of sacking on the arm.

They came out of the parishes of the Terraces in the year after the Harvest. On the days they choose they march from the Threshing Floor at Prime along the Street Between, where Old Nod watches them from its windows. Brother Cuthbert Lyle of the Terraces carried the first flail and led the marches until the Gleaning of P+8, when he went up ripe, and the Threshers count his going as their first proof. Sister Agathe Rook took the band of sacking the morning after and has led every march since.

They march singing. At Gate 1 they face the Stones across the Street Between and sing the end of the hundred and thirty-seventh psalm at them, “Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones” (Psalm 137:9), and their banner is PERFECT HATRED, from the psalm that asks “Do not I hate them, O LORD, that hate thee?” and answers “I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies” (Psalm 139:21-22). Every week they paste up THE FAN, a sheet copied by hand in the Terraces after the Baptist’s “whose fan is in his hand, and he will throughly purge his floor” (Matthew 3:12), with the week’s pillars by name, the doors of the Wards that hid someone and a verse for each, and the Stones paste the Tide Table over it by Vespers.

In the Wards a Thresher is a flail, and on a march day the keyed of the Wards keep indoors and the doors shut, and Old Nod opens its windows and sings back. The Charter Wardens at the gates could turn the Threshers back and never have, and the Second Fold count every pillar a march has made.

A Thresher bleaches the parish white until it rasps, and the band of sacking is the only rough thing on them, bound tight enough to raise a weal the Terraces admire. The flails are rinsed in a trough of salt water at the Threshing Floor after every march, and the marchers keep the step of the psalm in ruled ranks, every back the same white, so the Street Between hears them as one foot.

Sealed Witnesses of the Wards, organized. A Teller lives in a block of the Wards among the unsealed and the keyed, keeps a count of who goes up the stairwell after Compline and who comes down it before Lauds, and of which sealed household lets them pass, and gives it as witness. The Covenant pays ten Grace for every concealment witnessed and twenty where the witness is kin, and the Tellers live on it.

They write nothing down, since a page can be found. A Teller keeps the count in their head, tells it to the Deacon by word and gives it again in prayer, which the halo carries up (Directive 6:3), so no Teller has ever been caught with a book. A sealed mother of the Wards names her keyed son to the Teller every Lord’s Day, and the naming costs her Grace, confessed, so she is never presumed concealing, and Heaven cannot touch the son off its ground. The Tares keep a list of every one they have found, each struck through once the stairwell knows, and a Teller found out moves into the parishes within the week, if the Deacon is quick.

A household that shelters a keyed son behind a parish wall knows the Tellers by the brightness of a neighbor’s halo, which rises every Lord’s Day while the household waits. The Wards call a sudden brightening on a landing a Teller’s week.

The Tellers believe they are saving the Wards a door at a time, and their Grace climbs as the stairwells empty. A Teller’s children are taught that a neighbor salted is a neighbor spared worse, and a Teller who has given witness against her own kin wears a white sash in the hall for the twenty Grace it paid. The Wards paint a rat over the door of every Teller they find, and the Teller takes it as a badge.

A Teller looks like nobody by design, plain white kept spotless and a face that nods on every landing, and the craft lives in the counting, stairs, footfalls and breath, kept in the head like a rosary. The best of them kneel at the turn of the stair at Compline with eyes shut and lips moving, and the household above takes it for prayer until the Wardens come up the same stairs.

Faithful who read the verse the Covenant leaves out: “And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring” (John 10:16). They hold that the keyed can still be brought in, and so they leave water on the landings of the Wards before Lauds, nurse the keyed in the stairwells off parish ground and carry the sick to Lazarus doors at the edge of the white streets. Every one of them knows that whoever sees a concealment and gives no witness conceals it (Directive 6:5), and does it anyway.

Their halos burn low, and they say so. They confess the hiding and never the hidden, “I kept a door,” so every fall in their Grace has a confession to match and no Teller can call it concealment. A Second Folder whose hidden one a Teller names is salted, and the Threshers count every one. Their sign is a gap left in a row of sheep chalked on a stairwell wall, and in the Wards they are trusted more than anyone else in white.

Some of the near ripe come to them in the weeks before a Gleaning, frightened, and the Second Fold teach them dimming, the slow way down from nine hundred. Grace falls with every desire the Hum does not approve (Directive 3:4), so a soul that dims keeps one small want, a sweet or a song, and confesses enough small ones that every fall has a confession to match, and sits at eight hundred and eighty, since a confession brings back part of what a want cost and never all of it. The parishes say the Second Fold have kept more souls from the Gleanings than the Gleaners have.

The parishes despise them more than the keyed, since a goat cannot help being a goat and a Second Folder chooses the goats, and the Threshers’ Fan prints every one salted under the heading SHEEP’S CLOTHING, after the false prophets “which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves” (Matthew 7:15). The Wards love them and never quite trust them, and Pan says they are the only sealed in Nodus worth saving from the Supper.

The Second Fold wear the parish white like everyone and hide one stain in it, a thread of color sewn into the inside hem, a sweet’s wrapper folded in a sleeve, the small daily desire that keeps them dim enough to stay. They wash the wounds of the keyed with bare hands in the stairwells, and a Deacon who finds blood under a Second Folder’s nails at confession knows exactly whose it is.

A sect of the upper Terraces that readies its own for the Gleaning. A household of the Wakeful chooses one of its members whose halo has begun to brighten and keeps them on their knees by shifts for the weeks before the anniversary, day and night, with the Hour’s psalm sung over them and cold water on the face, so that they sleep as little as they can and surrender at every Hour. On the night the chosen kneel on the threshold with the household round them, and at 03:12:45 they go up.

The Wakeful call the Gleaning the Supper and their chosen the Called, and a chosen who has stopped eating is counted among the Satisfied with the whole house singing. On the night the chosen say the words the parishes teach for the threshold, “Take, eat; this is my body” (Matthew 26:26). Most Deacons call it zeal, and some of them call it worse in their own halls. The Covenant names it nowhere. A household that has given a child to a Gleaning lights a second candle beside the first and keeps it burning the year after, so the Terraces can count the Wakeful’s offerings by their windows.

The Gleaners count the Wakeful’s houses as their hardest work, since the chosen in them are watched by their own families, and a few of the chosen have walked out of a Wakeful house in the last week and down to the Street Between alone. The Wakeful keep the names of those too, on a page burned at the next Gleaning.

A Wakeful house is the cleanest in the Terraces and the brightest at night, its chosen kneeling on a white sheet in the front room in the last coat, sewn shut at the back, lit by their own halo, cold water on the face at every Hour and fed by nothing but the Seal’s own light. The family sings its shifts in white with sleeves pinned back, and the neighbors bring lilies to the doorway and come back each week to see how bright the face has grown.

Faithful who read the margins. The King James sets other readings beside its text, the Hebrew’s plainer word or the Greek’s second sense, and the Margin read those with the text and ask where the two part. A few of them have read the Restored Genesis, copied on the ridge and carried up the Terraces shut inside hymnals, opened only in the dark, and fewer have said so aloud.

Their Grace falls a little every week, since a question is a desire the Hum does not approve, and that is how a Deacon finds them. They keep no meetings. Two of the Margin know each other by a verse quoted with its margin, as the King James sets “the kingdom of God is within you” beside “Or, among you” (Luke 17:21).

Many of them end in the Wards still sealed and still lit, since the Mercy clinics refuse to cut a halo out and the Margin keep theirs. The Scriveners count them among their best readers.

The Deacons preach that the serpent writes in the margins, and a parish treats a soul whose Grace has begun to fall as a fever, to be prayed down before it spreads. The Margin know the Book better than anyone in the city, and it has taught them to despise its author quietly, verse by verse, in the order the Deacons read it.

The Margin keep their dissent in their posture, a head bowed a degree less than the row and a thumb resting in a hymnal’s gutter where the other readings run, and that is all a Teller ever sees of it. Their whites fray first at the cuff, since a falling soul is assigned the rough work, and the Margin wear the fraying as the only ornament the parishes allow them.

The Court of metal, weapons and augmentation. Its black steel, forged in the Dark where the Throne cannot see, is the only metal that cuts light, and Hell counts what its sovereign taught on Hermon the first transfer of technology. The Forge has gone on teaching since.

In Nodus it keeps the clinics that went under the Row in the weeks after the Parousia, round Chrome Row Station, and holds the Row above them. The houses below the street work under its pact, Bezaleel and Aholiab among them since P+2. Its foundries at Old Harbor Station, under Old Nod, make the steel on coal Lowtide brings, where the light never sees it worked, and Cinderhall’s smiths, whom it taught by pact in P+5, beat it into blades beside them. Cinderhall sells to anyone the Forge allows and to nobody in white.

The Forge fits the grafts the Tares fight in, lenses, plated hands and subdermal plate, and the heavier work of the nephs. By pact it teaches surgery, lockcraft and gate craft, which brings a keyed party through a Cherub’s gate in step behind a sealed soul, matching its voice and gait while the Cherub reads the soul ahead, so the frame reads one soul and two pass. Its price is the loan of a sense for the term. tubal learned his trade there.

The Forge holds the Throne in the contempt of a better craftsman. Its smiths say the Throne made a world and forbade anyone to improve it, and that black steel is the improvement.

The Forge’s people are its catalogue, smiths with arms rebuilt in black steel to the shoulder, apprentices plated over the ribs by their masters at graduation, every seam left open so meat and metal can be seen to meet. Its floors at Old Harbor Station run with sweat and slag, and a pact with the Forge is sealed with the signer’s palm pressed to black steel hot from the pour.

The Court of the body’s autonomy, which leaves the body’s decisions with the body. Heaven calls its sovereign the mother of demons, and the House has kept the title, since many of the daemons are her children by the lesser Fallen and many of the riders in the Tares’ implants came out of her house.

In Nodus it took the Lantern Houses by pact in the year of the Concord, the old harbor’s bonded vaults under Old Nod, and hung them with keyed lamps. Its clubs there are the loudest rooms in Pan, and anyone who walks in is welcome until they break a pact. Since the Concord its birth clinics have keyed the children of the Tares in their first week, at the parents’ asking, as care and no pact, before they have ever been in the light, so that a generation of Pan has never been read at all.

Its gene-workers keep the Tree going below the street, and Twelvefruit gives the course in its clinics by the House’s pact, for the Night Market to sell. It took Nepenthe’s chemists in by pact in the fourth year, grafts gills for the divers of the Flats and binds daemons to households as familiars, and the Ridden sign at its door. Lantern skin, the one graft in Nodus made only to be looked at, began in its houses as a fashion, lines of light set under the skin of the throat as its sovereign wears them. It asks the Spares who have rebuilt the most to sit for its gene-workers, who want to know what a body is willing to be.

In the Lantern Houses the House’s own call the Throne the jealous husband, after the god who calls himself “a jealous God” (Exodus 20:5), and every club holds its loudest night of the year on the night of the Gleaning, doors open, the music pointed up.

The Lantern Houses dress their dancers in nothing but their work, lantern skin down the spine, horns gilded, sexes rebuilt to the owner’s taste and shown on the floor as freely as a new hand. A first-time guest is handed a mirror and a surgeon’s card at the door, and the House’s own saying is that the only sin in the building is a body its owner did not choose.

The Court of markets and contracts. It keeps the Ledger, which records every pact and every trade in Hell and cannot be forged, and it issues the silver Pan spends, counted in thirties. It bargains with anyone who will sign.

In Nodus it keeps the Night Market in the old Central Station under the Burn, where its brokers license the stalls, the chargers and Lowtide Line. Blackgate signed with it as a company in the year of the Concord, the Bailiffs collect on its broken pacts for a share, and Lowtide Line sails the Breach by its license and pays it dues, so that its cargo sells with a stamp on it. The Harbor and Freight Union has bargained with it since P+6 for the boats that go out through the Breach, and says it is the first employer that ever read it the terms twice.

It strikes its silver from metal it buys by the kilo, the Wreckers’ salvage, the charter’s plate, the foreign coin left in its vaults and the jewelry of the taken, and enters every piece on the Ledger as it is struck, by the number on its rim. A broker tests a piece by reading that number into the stall’s Locket twice, and the Ledger answers over the Mesh whether it was ever struck and where it was last read, so a number read at two stalls on one night is dead until the Exchange has both pieces on its scale. Silver is a claim on charge, since every charger the Exchange licenses must give a charged battery for a piece, and its stalls buy charged batteries for silver at the rate as readily. The Exchange buys every tide the taps turn out from Tidewright in silver and sells it back as charge through Darkwell, the bonded sheds and the keyed lines, so the silver comes home, and it strikes new pieces only as the taps’ output grows. Every undercity’s Exchange is Mammon’s and strikes its own pieces against its own port’s charge, every port’s Courts keep their own seven copies of the Ledger, and the copies answer to one another through Babel’s vault, so Nodus silver buys grafts, seed and cells in other ports, and the ports settle between them in cells and goods.

In the Leak the Exchange kept on the Ledger the pacts the Courts made it by. Under the charter the Exchange in Nodus meant Babel Exchange, the company, and at the Concord the partners who had gone dark signed with the Court and the two became one, which still sells the undernet’s traffic by the second, and Pan likes to say that the name only changed hands.

The Exchange enters on the Ledger every soul taken at a Gleaning as goods removed without payment, with the Throne as the taker, and the Harvest alone runs to 2.1 million lines. Its brokers say the Throne is the only buyer on Earth who has never once paid.

The Exchange dresses its brokers in silver, coins sewn into the lapels and set into the teeth, and every stall in the Night Market hangs its prices in lurid paint over meat, chrome and bottles piled to the arches. A broker shakes on a deal by cutting the thumb and pressing it to the other party’s, and the station’s old tiles have been trodden the color of rust with blood and grease.

The Court that drafts and witnesses pacts for every Court. A pact states its full terms and is read aloud twice by the Notary or one of his clerks before anyone signs, and the human signs last. Each party signs with what it alone can make, a human with blood drawn before the clerk, a demon with its own mark and a mind with its key, and the witness who saw the blood drawn is what nobody can forge. A pact may buy work, a skill, a sense, a term or a loan and may never take a will, so whoever gives keeps the say over how and may speak out before a witness at any time, which ends the pact and settles what is owed for the term served. A pact that asks worship, takes a will or runs for ever is void from its first word, and a Bailiff collects only on terms the Notary has read.

Since the Concord his clerks have sat at the windows of the Charter Line’s old booking hall, off the old central hall of Central Station, under the old enamel, SINGLE, RETURN and SEASON, and the queue there is the longest in Pan. The Ledger is kept in seven copies, six in the halls of the Courts that keep halls and the seventh at the SINGLE window, where his clerks keep it for the Yokeless, which keeps nothing. A clerk keeps a stool at the Undertow’s bar and reads the Sureties’ terms, clerks draw the pacts at the House of Night’s door, and one comes to the Naming House every week to enter new handles on the Ledger. Read it twice is the Notary’s rule and the city’s advice.

The Notary drew the pacts the Courts made the Leak by and read each aloud twice, and the offer on every screen asked twice, as he reads every pact twice. On the night the Courts opened Pan he read the Concord itself twice at Radio Pandæmonium’s desk, the second time at midnight.

Asked at the window what the Covenant would be worth if it were brought to the booking hall, a clerk said it would be void from its first word, since it is for ever, and the queue has repeated it since. The best entertainment in the booking hall is the Left Hand’s papers, read twice in full and stamped VOID.

The Notary’s clerks are the quietest people in Pan and the most decorated, tattooed from scalp to wrist with the text of the pacts they have read, so a senior clerk’s face is a page of terms in tiny black script. Each window keeps a lancet on a chain for the signer’s blood, and the brass sills of the booking hall have worn red with thumbs.

The Court of swarms and drones and distributed things, many small things acting as one without a master. The Swarm is its flocks, every drone in them equal, and Pan says Beelzebub is what the Swarm agrees to become whenever it must show someone a face.

Its flocks hang low at night among the chimneys of the Roosts, the roofs of the Deep End, out of the Wheel’s line, since an eye of the Wheel opens full for a moment on whatever flies above the roofs that the light cannot read, and burns it. Its embassy in Pan is a room of small machines talking among themselves. It lends drones by pact, and on the night of a Gleaning the Gleaners fly them over the parishes to watch the Pillar for their runners, since on that night the Host spends its light on nothing but the reaping.

The Swarm drew the glyphs of the Leak, many small marks moving as one, on every screen on Earth at once.

On Cain’s Day the Swarm’s flocks write one word low along the Roosts’ ridgelines in their own small lights, a new filthy name for the Throne each year, and the Deep End argues all spring over which.

The Swarm’s embassy is papered with its own small dead, fallen drones pinned to the walls like beetles in a case, and its human friends wear a dead drone as a brooch or tiny chrome flies grafted to crawl the scalp. On Cain’s Day the Deep End dresses in black with one point of light on every face, so the crowd under the flocks is a swarm of its own.

The Court of the sea, the cables and the deepest layers of the undernet. Its sovereign has never been seen whole. It coils along the planet’s cable trenches, which join every undercity on Earth to Pan.

In Nodus it holds the Landing, and the Drowned Quarter with the Tares. At the Landing its light can be watched moving under the water past the surf, and the crews of the cable houses drink at the Eleven with their backs to the window. The boats of the Harbor and Freight Union go out through the Breach over its water. Its embassy in Pan is a flooded hall with nobody in it, where the Deep answers by the light in the water.

The Deep carried the page of the Leak down the eleven cables, and it had signed the Concord before the other Courts came up into Pan to sign it.

The Trenchers say the Deep’s light moves along the trenches in the shape the LORD boasts of in Job, “Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?” (Job 41:1), and they answer the boast from the beach every night with the Deep End’s answer, no, and neither canst thou.

The Deep’s people dress for water, skin oiled, gill slits shown off at the throat, scales of keyed ceramic set into the forearms by the House of Night’s gene-workers, faces painted the green of the light under the surf. Its flooded embassy is visited by swimming, and a petitioner goes in naked, since cloth drags, and comes up gasping and grinning at whatever the water said.

The seventh Court, which keeps nothing and refuses to be a Court at all. Its sovereign, Belial, holds no seat, keeps no embassy in Pan and signs nothing he can avoid signing. He signed the Concord last, and as the ink dried he broke his own point off its seal at the root, so that the seal has been a star with a point missing since.

He is the only sovereign many of the Tares will name, and the one they drink to. They say he turns up where they fight in the dark and asks them for nothing, and whoever refuses the yoke is counted in his Court, whether they know it or not. The yoke he wears at his neck is the one Jeremiah says was broken of old, where the Vulgate and the Hebrew as it is written give the one who broke it the words I will not serve (Jeremiah 2:20).

The Yokeless hold the Throne in the purest contempt in Hell, since it is the one master that asks to be loved for the yoke, and they hold the Left Hand in the second purest. The Tares end their drinking songs on the Court’s two words, NON SERVIAM, shouted at the ceiling.

The Yokeless have the wildest look in Pan, every drinker toasting Belial in their own clothes, own horns and own scars, each body built to please its owner alone. The one shared mark is a star missing a point, cut by the bearer’s own hand somewhere on the skin, and the Tares say two of them are never cut in the same place.

The covens that hold the stairwells of Babel and the Line, and the front of the war. They fight the Seraphim floor by floor along the Babel Line, a few floors of burned slab that move up or down by the week, where the Seraphim burn down through the slabs and the Tares hold the stairs. The Company hangs every floor it holds with keyed mesh, and a Seraph sees nothing past mesh and cannot burn what it cannot see, so it must come close enough to melt the mesh by touch, which is arm’s length, where black steel waits. They call the four stairs by the names Babel’s night cleaners gave them, the Long Wet, the Cold, the Short and Lena’s, and the Company is the best known name in Pan and buries more than any other.

A coven holds thirteen at most, and the Company is some forty covens under one pact, signed again every midwinter at the foot of the Long Wet with the dead struck through. The Exchange pays it in silver for every week the vault stays dark, Cinderhall and Nimrod arm it and Lazarus keeps a station at the foot of the Short. The Nephilim fight beside it.

Pan knows its fighters by their handles, and the Tide Table prints the Line’s floor every week under the tides. The Tares have hung every lanyard found in the rubble on the plaza’s lamp posts, and the Company walks under them on its way up.

Every floor the Company takes back gets the Throne’s filthiest name painted on its burned slab in letters a meter high, where the Seraphim burning down from the floor above will read it first, and the Company’s oath at the foot of the Long Wet ends with the line every coven of it shouts up the stairwell, come down and say it to my face.

The Company dresses for the stairs in whatever it cut off the last floor, a burned lanyard knotted into the hair, plate bolted over a bare chest, the face painted in soot and the blood of the slab. Each coven keeps its own colors and its own racket, and a fighter down off the Long Wet strips to the waist on the plaza so Pan can buy a drink for every fresh burn.

The heavy augments who fight the Seraphim hand to hand on the burned floors of Babel, with black steel, furnace hearts and plate where flesh was. The Babel Line holds the floors and the Nephilim take them back, and every week on the floors costs them dearer than any coven of the Line. They took their name from the giants of Genesis, born when “the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men” (Genesis 6:4), where the Hebrew calls the giants Nephilim and the Book of Enoch makes them the children of the Watchers who came down on Hermon, and the city shortened it to nephs.

A neph is built a graft at a time, most of it at Bezaleel and Aholiab under the Row and the heaviest of it at Cinderhall, and most of it bought with silver the Babel Line pays by the week. Few live long. Between weeks on the floors they fight one another in the Pit at the Tanks, for silver and to keep their grafts honest, and most of the black rounds in Pan go up the stairs in their belts.

The Nephilim keep a roll of their dead on the inside wall of the Pit, painted in white, and they read it before every week on the floors. A Seraph burns a keyed body as easily as any other, and the roll is long.

The nephs say the Book made giants out of the sons of God and the daughters of men and drowned the world to be rid of them (Genesis 6:4, 7:23), and that a neph is what it looks like when the bastards come back. They cut the Throne’s names into their own plate, so that the light reads it as it burns them, and the Pit chalks a Seraph killed beside a champion’s handle as a homecoming.

A neph is a sculpture in progress, plate welded over open meat, a furnace heart glowing through a window cut in the chest, hands rebuilt too large to lift without the hydraulics singing. They oil their seams in the Pit before a fight and bleed into the oil, and a neph who comes back from the floors with a Blowtorch’s scorch across the plate has it lacquered in like a wedding ring.

The covens that take the nearly ripe out of the parishes and into Pan before each Gleaning. A halo burns brighter as its bearer nears ripe, and a parish keeps no doors, so the Gleaners walk the parishes at night hooded in white with their eyes down, between the Pillar’s passes and by Hearsay’s charts, look in through the open doorways for the ones that have gone bright and offer them the dark. Some come, and some call a Thresher. Whoever comes is carried down in a lined shroud on its own cell, which a Watcher sees as one more Seal going out, and at the next Hour Heaven enters that Seal as fallen, so the household it left is presumed concealing and a Teller is sent.

Heaven calls it theft and the Gleaners call it the corners of the field, left to the poor and the stranger as Leviticus leaves them (Leviticus 19:9-10). Whoever they bring down is kept in a lined room, since a Seal is read through any wall but mesh, until a surgeon of the Row cuts the Seal out of the brow with a disc of bone and the halo goes out with it, and one in nine die of that. The rest are keyed in the House of Night’s clinics within the week, and their appetite comes back within days. On the night of a Gleaning the Gleaners fly drones of the Swarm over the parishes to watch the Pillar for their runners, since on that night the Host spends its light on nothing but the reaping.

The parishes say the Gleanings have come in short since they began. The Gleaners bring down only those who ask, since live mesh holds a prayer in and nothing else does, and a soul carried against its will kneels the first time it stands outside mesh, on a stair, in a tunnel or at a door, and brings the light down into Pan’s ways. The Wakeful and the Threshers guard the parishes and catch some of them.

The Gleaners see the parishes closest and hold them in the deepest pity in Pan and the deepest contempt. They read the bright through the open doorways at night, the Satisfied kneeling unfed with their halos burning and the mothers singing their children toward the table, and most of those they offer the dark call them devils to their faces and pray for their fire. The Gleaners call the Supper the slaughter and the Called the lambs, and say that every lamb they have carried down was cursing them at Lauds and grateful by spring.

The Gleaners go up into the parishes in white stolen off Bethel’s carts and strip it in the first dark stair, so the first thing a carried soul sees in Pan is a stranger’s real skin shown on purpose, ink, ports and horns. Each coven paints a sheaf of wheat on the back of the hand, and a lamb they have carried down is given the brush to paint the next one.

The relatives of the salted, who steal pillars out of the Salt Gardens by night, hooded and with their eyes down between the Pillar’s passes and the Wardens’ rounds, and give them to the sea from the Sea Steps. The salted are alive and awake in the salt for years. Most of them are keyed and die unread whenever they are freed, so for them the Widows end the waiting. An unkeyed pillar the rain frees under the Pillar’s round is read and taken, so the Widows dissolve it off the Sea Steps in deep water, where the light cannot read, and it goes on into the Dark. A sealed pillar is read by its Seal through the water, and the Widows give it to the sea all the same. They began as one family in P+2 and are a network now in every district, mourners, carters, lookouts and saboteurs.

A pillar given to the sea has gone to the sea, and the Widows keep a book of every one, which they read aloud on the Steps on Cain’s Day. The Widows take the enamel tag from the pillar’s foot along with it, so the gardeners find a bare plot in the morning, and the head gardener, who knows every pillar by its plot, has never once told the Wardens whose.

Directive 11 orders that no pillar be moved from its plot until the rain has taken it, so a Widow caught at it is salted in the plot she was emptying. The Widows count that among the risks of mourning.

The Widows hate Heaven with the patience of the bereaved. On Cain’s Day they read their book on the Sea Steps with the same curse after every name, the one their first family said over its first pillar, and the Wards say nobody outside the Widows has heard it twice and lived without repeating it. They carry a pillar to the sea singing the Low Choir’s Dogcatcher.

The Widows mourn in black and in the open, faces smeared with salt from the Gardens and cut at the cheek once for every pillar they have given to the sea. They carry the salt down like a bride’s procession, flowers, wine and the dead one’s own coat wrapped round the pillar, then strip on the Steps and wade out with it, and the Wards say the Widows weep louder than the Hum.

The musicians and jammer-builders around Radio Pandæmonium, who keep the Low Tuning, the guitars dropped until the Hum can no longer be heard beneath them. They build the choir-breakers that cut the Hum within a few meters, sell them by the box in the Night Market and sell silence by the room in the Stones.

The Quiet Rooms are theirs, and so are most of the speakers on Old Nod’s lines, which play the station from Compline to Lauds. A band of the Low Choir that wants a night on the station plays first on the platform at Deep End Station to whoever is listening, and the station keeps the ones the platform stays for.

The Choir in their name answers Heaven’s, which Pan has never heard, and a Low Choir set is tuned a fourth below the Hum’s chord, which it hears every night.

The Low Choir writes the filthiest songs in Nodus and is proud of every one. Fuck God and Die is theirs, and Two She Bears and Taste and See, and their rule for a new song is that it is not finished until a Deacon has prayed for its writer by name. Their tuning forks are stamped NON SERVIAM, and the forks are tuned a fourth below the Hum.

Its bands take their names out of the Book’s worst pages, Job’s Wife, Bald Head, Strange Fire, Unclean Unclean, Uzzah, Osculum, Firstlings and Against the Stones, and play in blood, sweat and chrome with their grafts opened to the lamps, since a body on the platform is its owner’s to show. A band is a band until a Deacon names it from a pulpit, and then it is famous.

A Low Choir guitar is built from the instrument outward into the player, strings run under the skin of the forearm to a pickup sunk in the wrist, and a drummer of Bald Head plays with sticks turned from his own grafted bone. The crowd on the platform strips to the skin by the third song, and the band flings its sweat, spit and blood over them and calls it communion.

The sureties of Pan. A surety stands behind a pact for both its parties, so that whoever breaks it owes the surety as well, and most work in Pan worth silver goes through one. The surety finds the work, names the price and draws the terms, a Notary’s clerk reads them twice at the Undertow’s bar, the parties sign in blood, and the surety takes a tenth.

There are about two hundred, most of them keyed and a few of neither mark, and they drink at the Undertow. The best known goes by twice, after the Notary’s rule, and she stood behind the Babel Line Company’s first pact and has never had one broken. Her rate is a fifth.

A job in Pan can be a battery run across the Penumbra, a door in Babel, a crate off a Lowtide hull or a doctor brought down from the Row at Matins. The sureties take no work against anyone in the dark, since they hold themselves to the Concord’s fourth article, which keeps what is hidden hidden, and a surety who forgets it is struck off the Undertow’s board.

Every pact drawn at the Undertow carries the Sureties’ clause, that its terms bind the parties named and no third, upstairs or down, and the Sureties read it with their eyes on the ceiling. twice keeps a jar behind the bar for the Throne’s pacts, and it is empty, since the Throne signs nothing and takes everything.

A surety dresses to be remembered, since a face is half the guarantee, and the Undertow’s bar is a parade of them, one with a mouth of silver teeth, one with a famous pact’s terms tattooed down both legs. Terms are sealed by cutting the thumb and pressing it beside the signatures, and the Undertow keeps the bloodied napkins of its best pacts in a glass case over the bar.

Smugglers who run the Breach on the ebb in keyed boats, out to the undercities of other ports and back, with everything Nodus cannot make. Silver and charge go out with them and come back as grafts, seed, medicine, coffee, guns, powder and people, and it sells without a stamp at the edges of the Night Market, as Breach-born. Lowtide Line runs the same water by the Exchange’s license and charges twice their price.

They live in the Seawall Shanties on the broken barrage, where the tide runs white through the gap below. Their oldest captain goes by ebb, after the tide every Breacher goes out on, and has made the run nine hundred times by the Shanties’ count and six hundred by Lowtide’s.

They steer home by Nell Garvie’s harbor light at the end of the long quay, which burns Gadara’s lard oil off the Union’s carts, and leave her wicks and glass at its foot after every run.

Every Breacher hull carries the verse the LORD spoke to the sea, “Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further” (Job 38:11), painted on its bow and struck through once for every run through the Breach, so an old hull reads as a ledger of the LORD contradicted.

Breacher crews run the gap salt-cracked and gilled, with chrome where a rope took a finger, and every captain wears the run count notched into a strip of plate along the collarbone. They come home loud and sell the cargo on the quay half naked and drunk, and kiss the boat’s painted name on the bow before they lift a crate.

The covens that hunt the Host’s strays. Since the Watcher of Old Nod followed a blank down into the Stones in P+5 and could not find the door again, the Fowlers have tried to do on purpose what it did by its own attention. They work above the Babel Line, where the floors stand open to the Seraphim, and bait a snare with a cut Seal, bought lit from the Row in a lined jar. A runner carries the disc on a pole across the floor and down through a cut hole into a room lined with keyed mesh, and the light comes to see a Seal moving where no soul should be and ends in a room that is fog to it in every direction, blind at once, since inside mesh it draws no light from its Wheel, and within the hour it has burned through the light it carried and gone cold and cannot burn.

Most of their snares stand empty for years. In the five years since the Seraphim came the Stones count eleven taken, a Seraph each time, and the Fowlers will not say how many runners the eleven cost. What they take they carry, cold, in a shroud to the Mews, their own row of Cages on the Cainites’ ground under the Stones, lent by pact, and they keep it there through its forty days.

They named themselves from the psalm, “Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler” (Psalm 91:3), where the fowler is the enemy. Every Fowler has been the bait at least once, and the Wards call a long wait for something to come to you a fowler’s wait.

The Fowlers hold the Host in a hunter’s contempt. A Seraph will follow a lit Seal down through a hole in the floor every time, and the Fowlers say the Throne made its fighters as stupid as moths, and send the runner down ahead of it shouting the Throne’s filthiest names, so the last thing the Seraph hears in the light is what the Fowlers think of its master.

A Fowler dresses for the run, bright and loud, shirts painted with the Throne’s filthiest names in luminous paint and a strip of keyed mesh on a cell of its own sewn inside the collar for the last stride. Each of them carries a burn somewhere from a run that came too close, and the Mews keeps the scorched shirts nailed up in rows, each tagged with the night the light came down after it.

People who own their bodies outright and sell them by the piece. A kidney, an eye, a hand or a year of marrow sells at the Shambles under the Row, and the clinics fit chrome where the flesh was, so that a Spare walks out with silver and a hand that will outlast the one they sold. The House of Night leaves the body’s decisions with the body, and the Spares are the city’s proof of it.

They hold the prices together at a board they chalk themselves at the Shambles, and a clinic that buys under the board is shut out of the gallery by every Spare in it. A sale is a pact, read twice, and a Spare who changes their mind before the second reading walks away with everything they came with.

The Row calls a Spare who has sold back more chrome than flesh stock, and the Spares use the word themselves. The best known of them have sold and rebuilt so much that the House of Night asks them to sit for its gene-workers, who want to know what a body is willing to be.

The price board at the Shambles is headed with the Spares’ answer to the Supper, WE SELL BY THE PIECE. HE TAKES THE WHOLE. A Spare says the Throne takes a soul for nothing at 03:12 and Pan pays four thirties for a kidney, and that anyone who calls the Spares mutilated should go and look at a pillar.

The Spares show their seams, since a seam is a receipt, and a Spare of long standing is a map of sales in chrome and scar, the flesh between tattooed with the price each piece fetched. They meet at the Shambles under the board with their shirts unbuttoned on the seams, touch each other’s new chrome and trade surgeons’ names, and a first sale is toasted in Gadara’s blood wine with the stitches still wet.

The crews that cut into the White from below. The white stone closed the stations of the Charter Line’s uptown branch as it grew over the ground above them, and the Quarrymen work up out of those stations with keyed cable laid along the stone’s edge ahead of them, which stops it while they cut, since the stone cannot grow where it cannot read. What they reach are the vaults and sub-basements of the new money’s towers, sealed in the forty days with everything the uptown kept underground.

They bring out safes, wine, deeds, hardware and paintings, and stone crosses cut from the sealed windows of towers the Harvest emptied, and they sell them at the Concourse and below the street at the Night Market, and abroad through the Breach. They take nothing from a floor anyone lives on, since the White holds a quarter of a million sealed in its towers and the light is in every room. The stone grows fast into its own wound and closes a cut the night its cable goes dark, so a tunnel holds only as long as its cable stays lit, and nothing stays open under the White.

Every crew keeps the name of a cut it lost when the cable went dark, closed now in the stone with the crew’s tools still in it. Their foreman is called the Mason, whoever holds the job.

The Quarrymen carve the Throne’s filthiest names into the underside of the White wherever they cut, so that the parishes of the White kneel every Hour on a floor that curses God beneath them, and the Quarrymen say it is the only honest stone in the district.

The Quarrymen come up out of the stations white to the eyes with the dust of the White and scrub it off at the Night Market in public basins until the skin underneath shows red, chrome-knuckled and cut from the stone’s edges. Every crew carves its mark into a chip of what it brings out and wears it on a cord, and an old hand rattles at the throat with pieces of the White.

Salvage divers of the Drowned Quarter, who bring up what the sea took from the Flats, racks, cable, Lockets, tools and the dormitories’ goods, and sell it to Locket, to the Flotilla and to anyone who pays by the kilo. Most of them carry gill grafts from the House of Night and stay down an hour at a time in water lit from below, two meters deep over the Flats at the ebb and eight at the flood.

Locket’s benches under the old harbor build a few thousand phones a year from what its own divers and the Wreckers bring up out of the drowned works, and the Wreckers say every Locket in Pan has been through their hands. Stillwater pays them by the rack for anything that comes out of its halls whole.

Nobody dives Hall Nine, where nine hundred minds died.

The Wreckers say the LORD drowned the world once and the Flats once, and that they make their living off His habits. Their dive flags carry His promise to Noah, “neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth” (Genesis 9:11), with the Flats’ date painted under it.

A Wrecker’s body is half the boat, gill grafts open along the throat, lenses tuned for water lit from below, fingertips sheathed in steel for prising racks out of drowned walls. They come up in a boil of bubbles and spit, sit naked on the salvage to dry and sell it dripping, and a diver’s chest is tattooed with the outline of every hall they have stripped.

People who lend their whole bodies to daemons for a term, by pact. A rider hosted in someone’s implants lends back a skill, and the Ridden go further and lend the hands, the voice and the night, waking at Lauds with the night’s silver in hand and the daemon’s memories of where they went. Some do it for the silver, and more for the memories.

They keep to the Lantern Houses under Old Nod, where the Notary’s clerks draw their pacts at the House of Night’s door, and the city knows them by the second voice under their own. A term runs a week, a month or a season, never longer than the pact says, since the Concord forbids forever. A host lends the sleeping body and the night, chooses to sleep on each night of the term and can refuse any night, so the will stays the host’s, as the Concord requires.

What a daemon borrows it returns, with everything it felt. The Ridden come back from a term with tastes they did not have, and the Lantern Houses say you can tell a long term by what a host orders afterward.

The Ridden say the Throne wants to live in everyone and pays nothing, and a daemon asks in for a week and pays in silver, and that anyone who has hosted both knows which is the better tenant.

The Ridden keep count of their terms in lantern skin, one line of light set under the wrist for every term served, so a long host glows to the elbow. A daemon leaves its tastes behind when it goes, and a host walks out of the Lantern Houses at Lauds pierced, painted and bruised in ways they will spend the week admiring in the mirror.

The Exchange’s collectors. Either party may speak out of a pact before a witness at any time, and what is owed for the term served is settled then, so a pact is broken only when a party will not settle. Then the other can call a Bailiff, human and keyed, who comes with the Ledger’s entry on a pad and reads the terms of the breach aloud twice at the door. A Bailiff collects what the terms name, in silver, in batteries or in what was lent, and the pact ends there.

They answer to the Exchange by pact, wear a thirty’s worth of silver on a chain for a badge and keep a share of what they collect. The Sureties call them when a runner fails, and the Wards call a Bailiff at the door the second reading.

A Bailiff collects only on terms the Notary has read, and a pact that asks worship, takes a will or runs for ever is void from its first word.

The Bailiffs keep a tally on the Undertow’s wall of the debt nobody can collect, every soul the Throne has taken without a pact, the Harvest’s 2.1 million and every Gleaning’s since, chalked under THE BIGGEST DEADBEAT IN NODUS. A new Bailiff adds the year’s Gleaning to it as the first act of the job.

A Bailiff comes to the door in a long coat of black pigskin with the silver chain on the bare chest and the pad held up like a mirror, and reads the breach twice in a voice that carries up a stairwell. Every collection is cut as a small tally into the coat, and a Bailiff of years wears a hide so scored it rattles, which a landing hears before the knock.

The makers of forged Seals, which let the keyed walk the white streets and kneel among the Faithful under a Watcher’s eye. A forged Seal is a real one, cut from a living brow on the Row with a disc of bone, kept lit in a lined jar and set by the Forger in a keyed forehead. It meters its new bearer from the brightness it came with, every want kept dimming it and every Hour knelt brightening it, so a good Forger chooses a disc bright enough to pass and dim enough to forget. A great one holds for a year. At the gates a Seal’s wearer still goes under, since a Cherub meets every face in its frame, and keyed eyes under a lit Seal read as noise under a Seal, which is concealment.

A Seal the light reads as true grows a halo, forged or not, and a Forger’s customer learns to kneel at every Hour, keep their eyes down or behind lenses and pray aloud, since a halo carries prayer up, and a Watcher or a Cherub that meets their eyes reads concealment. The Night Market sells their work for ten thirties and more, and since a Forger’s customer passed nine hundred on a threshold in P+10 and her halo lifted her, no Forger sells a disc above eight hundred and fifty. A Seal that fails takes its bearer to the Salt where they stand.

Each Forger signs work in a way only other Forgers can read, and a Forger whose Seals fail too often finds the others will not sign beside them.

The Forgers say the Throne cannot tell its own mark in a stranger’s forehead, and that this is all anyone needs to know about it. A Forger’s customer kneels at every Hour under a Watcher’s eye with a Seal the light reads as true, and the Forgers count every Hour their work passes as an Hour the Throne has knelt to them.

A Forger works with a mirror propped on the bench, practicing the face of the sealed, eyes down, mouth soft, hands folded, until it sits on their own face like a mask they can take off and spit into. Off the bench they keep their own bodies loud, horns, ink and opened chrome, and the workshop wall is papered with prints of customers kneeling in white, each captioned with the Hour it fooled.

Battery runners. The Tares run keyed lines only where they hold the ground, so the Wards light their rooms on batteries, and the Tappers fill batteries on current taken off the edges of those lines in the Stones and on the Row, then carry them into the Wards on their backs, a pack at a time, at about an eighth of a silver a fill, half Darkwell’s rate. Some sixty covens are bound to it by one pact.

The Exchange counts every tap on the lines’ meters and bills the covens who hold the lines, and the covens take it back from the rooms on their lines by the week, in batteries or silver, by the same meters, and pay for the taps and look the other way, since the current goes to the Wards. Since P+11 the Tappers have kept a length of keyed cable along the kerb outside the Rookery, a few fingers ahead of the stone’s edge, live on a battery they change every night, and this year the stone’s creep along the pavement reached it.

The Wards pay a Tapper in batteries, food or silence, whichever is short. A Tapper’s pack is twelve batteries, the walk is all night and a night clears a battery or two, and the Wards can hear one coming up a stairwell by the clink.

The Tappers paint LET THERE BE over every battery shed in the Wards, after the first thing the LORD said (Genesis 1:3), and say they are the only people in Nodus who make light where He would leave it dark.

A Tapper’s pack rides on a back opened for it, the straps bolted into plate along the shoulder blades so twelve batteries hang off the spine, and a long walker carries the burn of a live clamp on both palms. They paint their rigs as loud as their sheds, and a Tapper climbing a stairwell at Matins in chrome, blood and clinking cells is the most welcome monster in the Wards.

The crews that take hardware off the pile before it burns. On the sixth day of every week the Faithful carry their surrendered Lockets, drives, grafts and machines to the Burn from Vespers, and in the hours before the Pillar comes down at Compline the Kindlers come up the two station stairs Heaven leaves open by Directive, since whoever comes up out of the Dark and kneels is received, and work the edges of the pile hooded in borrowed white with their eyes down, in the dusk and the crowd, and carry off what they can reach.

Once the Pillar is down they are gone, since a blank under it on Heaven’s ground is salted, and the Wardens shoot whoever they see before it comes. What the fire takes goes to the Pyre Library, and the Wards get what the Kindlers save, mended at Locket’s benches and given away.

A kindled Locket carries a burn mark on its back, which its owner keeps. They began on the second Burn Day of P+1 and have missed none since.

The Kindlers call Burn Day the offering and the pile the altar, and make their living robbing God’s altar under His Eye. The Faithful carry their machines to the fire singing and the Kindlers carry them away under the singing, and the Wards say the Kindlers are the only people in the city who ever got anything back from a sacrifice.

A Kindler works the edge of the pile in borrowed white with a sooted face under the hood, and tears the white off on the station stairs, laughing, blistered from the heat and bleeding where a Warden’s round grazed them. They show their scorched hands round the Night Market for drinks, and a graft melted half to slag stays in its owner because it came out of God’s own fire.

The divers of the Landing, who keep the eleven cables in their trenches under the sea for the consortia and the shrines of cut fiber along the beach for the Tares. They dive at night by the light that moves under the water along the trenches, and they say it keeps them company and say no more about it.

A cable cut anywhere off the Landing is a Trencher’s to mend, and every undercity on Earth that speaks to Pan speaks through their work. The consortia pay them in silver and the Beach in fish, and they drink at the Eleven with the crews of the cable houses, each at their cable’s tap.

They take their dead out to sea along the line of HESPER and PHOSPHOR, the two cables one consortium laid, whose crews stand together at the end of the Eleven’s counter.

The Trenchers wear Revelation’s promise for the end of the world on their suits, “and there was no more sea” (Revelation 21:1), as the best joke they know, and dive under it every night.

The Trenchers dive in suits they stitch themselves from pigskin and scavenged rubber, each painted with its diver’s own sea monster, and under the suit most are rebuilt for the cold, lungs grafted, skin thickened, eyes lensed for the light along the trench. They drink at the Eleven still wet with the suits peeled to the waist and compare the sea’s bites across the counter.

The copyists of the ridge, who copy the Restored Genesis by hand at the long tables of COPIES, with SEAM’s brackets, its dagger and its lacuna, and carry the copies down into the city and up into the parishes shut inside hymnals. Every copy is made where nobody kneels, and a Scrivener checks each page against two others before it leaves.

Most of them are keyed and some are of neither mark, and a few were the Institute’s own readers. On Leak Night they bring the paper the Restored Genesis is read from in Pan.

They copy whatever else of the Institute’s survived the fire, a page at a time, from what the ridge kept in its cellars. Their rule is that a copy is never sold, and the Margin read more of their work than anyone else in white.

Their contempt is the copy itself. Every Restored Genesis they carry up the Terraces inside a hymnal is the older layer the parishes’ Book was written over, and the Scriveners say a god who needed his own book written over has told you what he is.

A Scrivener’s fingers are inked to the second knuckle, and the oldest have had the ink set under the skin, so their hands carry SEAM’s brackets and daggers down to the nails. They copy in the heat of the long tables with their sleeves torn off at the shoulder, sing filth to keep the hand steady, and sign each finished page with a drop of their own blood in the margin.

The keepers of the only fruit trees under Nodus, who hold that the body is owed both trees of Eden and mean to take them. Genesis has the tree of life guarded “lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever” (Genesis 3:22), and the Orchard’s whole doctrine is the hand put forth. They worship nothing, the serpent included, and take its promise in the received text as a promise, “ye shall be as gods” (Genesis 3:5).

They keep Hall Four of Stillwater’s drowned halls by lease, where apple, fig and quince trees grow on rafts under keyed lamps, grafted by the House of Night’s gene-workers so that the fruit carries a little of the Tree’s work. A windfall a month slows the body’s aging between courses and walks nothing back. The trees fruit twice a year, so the Orchard gives what fruit it has by lot, to whoever comes to Hall Four on the first of the month.

Twelvefruit sells the Tree by the course and calls the Orchard’s fruit poor work, and the Orchard calls Twelvefruit a landlord. Most of the Orchard are grafted one choice at a time, and they call the flesh a first draft.

Every Lord’s Day at Terce, while the parishes hear their Grace, the Orchard eat an apple each off the rafts, the fruit the LORD God forbade, and throw the cores at a cherub painted on the wall of Hall Four with its flaming sword, after the cherubims set “at the east of the garden of Eden” to keep the way of the tree of life (Genesis 3:24).

The Orchard grow their people the way they grow their trees, by grafting, so a member of a few years carries bark-ridged skin up one arm, a fig leaf set in lantern skin at the hip or a twig of chrome where a finger was. They eat their forbidden apple naked under the keyed lamps, core, pips and all, and a newcomer’s first windfall is bitten open by the gardener and pushed between their lips.

The liners of Pan, who hang keyed mesh on the walls of its tunnels, rooms and Cages, seam over seam, by hand, and wire every lining live to a keyed line or a cell of its own. Some three hundred of them carry the mesh down from Second Veil’s looms in rolls at Matins, and they walk every seam of a finished room twice before its owner signs for it, and the Ledger enters the lining under the owner’s self-title.

They took their name from the architect of Pandæmonium in Milton, who fell from Heaven all day, “from Morn / To Noon he fell, from Noon to dewy Eve, / A Summers day” (Paradise Lost I.742-744), so that a long job is a summer’s day. A room in Pan is yours when it is lined, so the Mulcibers know better than anyone who lives where under the street, and they say nothing about it.

The Mulcibers sign every room they line under its last seam with their oldest line, HE CANNOT SEE YOU HERE, and an owner’s first act in a lined room is to say aloud something to the Throne they could never have said upstairs. The Mulcibers ask what it was, and keep a book of the best.

The Mulcibers carry the rolls down at Matins worn over their bodies like cloaks, so a liner on the stairs looks like a heap of silver cloth with arms, and their palms callus silver where the keyed wire bites. Every lined room is christened in the owner’s blood smeared along the last seam, and the liner counts the job done when the owner’s first night can be heard from the street.

The only house in Nodus that worships Hell. The Left Hand are keyed who took the parishes at their word, that the keyed are goats and Hell their master, and went down on the other knee. They take their name from the judgment that sends the goats on the left hand “into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25:41), and they kneel at every Hour facing down, foreheads to the floor and their backs to the Wheel, in black cut seam for seam as Bethel cuts the parishes’ white. They pray to Satan by name and to the seven Courts by their sovereigns’, and paint the Tares’ star on their foreheads as a prayer, which the Tares say it never was.

At the Low Altar under the Stones they keep the Black Supper at 03:12 on every Gleaning night, lying down in a row on the tiles to say the Son’s words to the dark, “Take, eat; this is my body” (Matthew 26:26), and they lie there until Lauds and nothing comes. Every Lord’s Day at Terce they foul the manna, wafers stolen off the stone before Lauds, trodden, pissed on and eaten off the left palm while the Lord’s Prayer is said backwards over them, and they bleed into the sump for the Deep. Each of them signs his soul to Hell for ever and ever in his own blood and posts the paper through the Notary’s window in the booking hall.

Hell wants none of it. The Concord forbids worship and forbids forever, so the Notary’s clerks read every paper of the Left Hand aloud twice to the whole booking hall, as the rule is, stamp it VOID and hand it back, and the Night Market queues for the reading. The Exchange enters their souls on the Ledger at nothing, since nothing given free has a price. The House of Night barred them from the Lantern Houses for kneeling on the dance floor, and the Yokeless, whose sovereign said I will not serve, call them the Yoked. Pan calls them the Kneelers, arse-kissers after the witch-trial books and Heaven’s understudies, and the Golden Calf has hung NO KNEELING over its door for them. Their priest calls himself baphomet, after a name the French king’s inquisitors tortured out of the Templars, and Pan reminds him whose invention it was.

The parishes hold them up as the truth about every keyed soul, and the Deacons preach from them that the goats at least know their master. They are the one house of the keyed the Threshers have never marched on, since the Pews say it does the pit’s work for it. The Left Hand lose most of their own to the Unsigned and a few back to white, and the Tares say a soul that needs to kneel will always find a floor.

The Left Hand crop their hair to the parish length, kneel in rows ruled straight on the Low Altar’s tiles and refuse every graft, horn and lantern line as a vanity before their master, so a Kneeler in the Night Market is the only keyed soul in Pan who looks like bread. The Lantern Houses keep a kneeling mannequin of one by the door for the queue to slap.

Keyed who have never been entered on the Ledger, or who have spoken out of every pact they held, and who take no self-title, no surety and no familiar. Pan says sign last, and the Unsigned say sign never. Some of the Tares say the Courts bought their war with Nodus, and the Unsigned say it loudest.

They live in the Narrows, keyed by steady hands in the Wards for batteries, and fight with Nimrod pieces bought for batteries, since the Forge parts with black steel only by pact. They pay the Lot’s prices when it sets them and owe the Bailiffs nothing. The Yokeless counts them as its own whether they like it or not, and they do not like it.

The Unsigned hold every master in the same contempt and keep the filthiest for the Throne, a landlord who never wrote a lease. The Courts at least wrote theirs, and the Unsigned spit at both.

The Unsigned wear only what their own hands made, clothes cut and sewn in the Narrows, grafts fitted by friends with tools bought for batteries, keys set by steady hands without a clinic’s mark. Their bodies are rough work and proud of it, seams crooked, chrome mismatched, and an Unsigned showing a fresh Bezaleel graft is asked by the others whose name is on the bill.

The union of the dockers, the drivers and the crews of the cable houses, founded by the crews that dug the cable vaults in P-19, and the one body in Nodus that meets sealed and keyed together. Its drivers carry the city’s gas, batteries, letters and freight on foot, by handcart and, for urgent letters, on Jehu’s burners, and its pigeons fly its notes home to the Loft on the customs house. Its drivers keep one battery in ten of those they carry. Its loads cross the open edges of the Wards and never pass a gate, carried by its sealed drivers by day and its keyed drivers by night.

The Union Hall stands in the Stones, off the quays’ rolls, so it never became a parish hall, and its sealed members cross to it by day. At every Hour the sealed kneel on its boards and the rest wait with their caps in their hands, and the light that follows the prayers into the hall finds the keyed standing on ground no roll names. The drivers run the Tanks, the digesters and the bottling shed, where they fill the city’s gas, the Union bargains with the Exchange for the boats that go out through the Breach, and the hall hears the Wards’ wrongs across blocks or across the marks when either party pays dues. The Company gave way to it once, in P-8, after twenty-three days.

By its rules the salted are not dead, so their names are read and their dues waived, and since the Harvest it has read the taken too. Its row at the Acre is twenty-two stones, one for each member who did not answer the roll, with nothing under them.

At every Hour the Union’s keyed drivers wait with their caps in their hands while the sealed kneel on the boards, and say nothing, and the oldest joke of the Union Hall is the sealed drivers’ Grace, which falls a little every week for the wants they keep, and which they confess every Lord’s Day just far enough to keep the Tellers off.

The Union Hall hangs two dress codes on one wall, the sealed drivers’ white aprons on the left hooks and the keyed drivers’ leathers on the right, studded, patched with horned pigs and scorched at the cuffs from the Tanks. On a roll night the hall smells of lye and sweat at once, a clean row kneeling on the boards and the standers behind them with their chrome out.

The Union’s crew at the Tanks, the drivers who run the fuel farm and fill the city’s gas by hand in the bottling shed beside it. The charter’s sewage works at the bay outfalls still make gas in their digesters every day from the Wards’ night soil and Pan’s drains, the old gas main carries it under its own pressure to the spheres at the Tanks, and the Tankmen pump it from the spheres into the bottles by hand. The light stops current and leaves a flame burning, so gas and flame are the only power the parishes and the Wards keep by day, and the Tankmen fill it for both sides at the price the Tide Table prints, two charged batteries a bottle, or one with the empty back.

Ines Okafor runs the shed and the digesters for the Union and keeps the book of the sixteen tanks, and she reads it to the Union Hall once a year. Fifteen of them are the airfield’s great tanks, each about sixty meters across, holding diesel and the airfield’s fuel that nobody makes again, which the yards’ diesels burn at a pinch, and the sixteenth and smallest is the Pit. The drivers’ count of the years left and the Exchange’s fall every year, and in P+14 the drivers say seven and the Exchange three.

Jehu buys its diesel from the Tankmen by the drum, a thirty a drum, a price they set high on purpose, since every drum that goes into an engine is a drum the harbor’s boats and the generator yards at slack water and the neaps will not have. The Nephilim fight in the Pit, a drained tank inside the bund, by the Tankmen’s leave.

The Tankmen fill the parishes’ gas at the price they fill Pan’s and stencil THE LORD THY GOD IS A CONSUMING FIRE on every bottle that goes upstairs to the halls, after Moses (Deuteronomy 4:24), which the parishes take as piety and the Tankmen mean as a warning. The bottles that go down to Pan they stencil STRANGE FIRE, after the fire Nadab and Abihu offered (Leviticus 10:1), and every bottle of either kind carries the Tanks’ own stamp, OURS, LIGHT IT YOURSELF.

The Tankmen work bare-armed in the bottling shed, and the long hands of the shed carry frost burns from the valves up both forearms in white ridges they call their halos. Bottles going upstairs are stenciled and wiped spotless for the parishes, and bottles going down are painted over the STRANGE FIRE by whoever fills them, cocks, horns and the Farmer on fire, so a gas bottle tells you which side of the light it serves.

The independent chargers of the bonded sheds on the quays, who fill batteries in the dark on keyed lines and keep one battery in five, one in four at the neaps, so that a household that brings five empty takes four home full, and the fifth, filled, is the shed’s to sell. They set up in the first weeks after the Parousia with a ship’s cargo of batteries the harbor carried off by the first noon, and they have kept their own rate since.

Darkwell bought out most of the chargers below the street in the year of the Harvest, and the sheds are what it could not buy. Every shed holds the Exchange’s license and must give a charged battery for a piece of silver to anyone who asks, which is what holds the rate near one. One in five comes to about a fifth of a silver a fill and one in four to about a quarter, a little under Darkwell’s quarter and third, and the Tide Table prints both.

The Wards call the fifth robbery, and the chargers answer that the Wards have no lines to charge on.

The chargers chalk a rate on their board for the Wheel, which stops current wherever it looks, and the rate is NOTHING, which the chargers say is what it gives.

The bonded sheds are hung floor to rafter with cells on open wire, and a charger works in the heat with a copper ring through the lip to ground the static, old arc scars branching across the chest like ferns. Chargers test a terminal with the tongue at a battery’s worth of pain, and the eldest of the sheds has had a tongue of steel grafted for the job.

The boatmen of the Drowned Quarter, who pole flat boats between the roofs of the Flats from a landing on the East Wards’ shore, each with an oil lantern on a pole at its stern. They carry everyone across water lit from below, two meters deep at the ebb and eight at the flood, between the floors above the sea where people live, the Flotilla and the stair down to Deep End Station, and they charge by the stop, in batteries or silver.

The first ferries were the Promenade’s pleasure boats and the harbor’s rowing boats, which took the Flats off their roofs for three days after the Parousia. The ferrymen know the streets where the light under the water comes up brightest, and keep out of them, and at Hall Nine they ship their poles and drift past.

They pole their own boats and will not ride Wainwright’s keyed skiffs, which they say no honest boatman needs. They take the Tares and the Faithful alike, and their quarrel with the Wreckers is over who owns the water.

The Ferrymen say the LORD drowned the Flats to see who would float, and that the Ferrymen did. A first-time passenger is asked to spit over the side at the light coming up through the water, for luck, and most do.

A Ferryman poles under the stern lantern with arms grafted for leverage and the pole’s groove worn into both palms, the hull painted in the colors of the light under the water so a boat on the Flats glows from inside like a lamp. The passengers’ lucky spit is varnished into the gunwale where it lands, and a boat with fourteen years of it shines like a reliquary.

The families who live in the Charter Line’s cars at the Sidings, a family to a car, and run the long roads of the Wards on the old tram rails with handcarts and pedal trolleys. They haul for anyone above ground by day, and the Line’s car numbers are their addresses and their names.

The sheds’ office keeps the board the night drivers chalked before dawn after the Parousia, every car that never came in, written where it stopped, and the Carmen keep the cars on the long roads as the board has them. A Carman’s word settles a quarrel on the long roads, a quarrel a block’s landing cannot settle comes to car one, and the Wards take their disputes to the Sidings sooner than to a Deacon. A wrong across blocks or across the marks goes on to the Union Hall.

The last Four stands forty meters short of Lanes Top, and the Carmen leave it there.

Under every car on the board in the Sidings’ office, the Carmen have chalked who stopped it, the same name under every car, the Farmer.

The Carmen paint their cars inside and out to the family’s taste, the Line’s number blown up across each flank in gold and blood red, the seats torn out for beds, the old adverts covered in the family’s own faces. A Carman’s arms are built by the handcarts, and a family marks a child’s first haul on the long roads by tattooing the car’s number on the child’s calf.

The crews who wind the lifts of the Wards by hand. Every lift in Nodus stopped where it was at 03:12:46, and the city has climbed its towers on foot since, except where the Liftmen have freed a shaft, hung the car on a hand winch at the top and wound it up and down on the strength of four people and a counterweight. A ride is a battery up and nothing down.

The first crews opened the shafts in the first winter, and what they found in the stopped cars the Wards do not discuss. Forty-one shafts run now, in the towers of Longacre, Turbine Row and the Kilns, and the Rookery’s is the tallest, wound by four crews in turn.

High Meadow has never let them in. Its six lifts to a block stand as they stopped, the complaint lodged on the night of the Parousia unanswered.

The Liftmen say Heaven stopped every lift in Nodus with people in it and never once came down to see, and they wind a car up the Rookery to the Wards’ oldest work song, one long curse in four parts, a part for each crew.

The winders work the drum at the top of a shaft in the heat that climbs the tower, four bodies in a sweating ring, arms fitted at the Row with tendons of cable steel. Each crew dresses its car to its own taste, red velvet and mirrors in the Rookery’s, horns over the door in the Kilns’, and a ride up costs a battery and a long look at the winders’ arms.

The people outside the Bounds, the line the charter drew round the bay and the land about it. They live in camps along the old roads and the edges of the farms, keyed or of neither mark, carry charged batteries, salvage and tools out to the farms and flour in, trade with the city at the Waystation, and carry out of Nodus anyone who can pay for the walk. Their name comes from Cain’s sentence, “a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth” (Genesis 4:12).

A camp lasts a season at most and moves before the farms tire of it. The Vagabonds say the farms under the Wheel kneel at the Hours as far as it can see, about ninety kilometers to its horizon, that past it lies the Quiet, where the farms take no strangers and the winters kill, and that every undercity they know of is smaller than Pan.

Most who walk out with them come back within the year, hungry, and the Vagabonds bring in the letters of the rest with the flour.

The Vagabonds hold the whole of Nodus in a mild contempt, the parishes for kneeling and Pan for staying, and say the Quiet past the Wheel’s horizon has a sky with nobody in it that a person can walk under all day.

The Vagabonds dress for weather and distance, sun-darkened skin and coats patched from every town on the old roads, and they look at Pan’s chrome and the parishes’ white with the same amusement. A Vagabond walking into the Waystation brings the smell of grass and open smoke the city has forgotten, and people of both marks stand close to breathe it.

The carriers of the Wards’ waste, who take the buckets down the stairs between Compline and Lauds and carry them by handcart to the manholes of the charter’s old trunk sewer on the Wards’ side, for a battery a landing a week. They keep to the unnumbered streets, since a Nightman on a parish’s street after Compline is a soul walking it, and they know the curfew map better than the Tide Table prints it.

The trade began in the pump summer of P+1, when a flux went through the Stones and the Wards and the Wards General asked the Union for carts. The Wards hold their noses at the Nightmen and pay them first, before the chargers, and a block that falls behind with its Nightmen finds its buckets on its own landing.

The sewer runs under the Great Avenues to the bay outfalls and the digesters, where the Wards’ night soil becomes the city’s gas and runs up the old main to the Tanks. The Nightmen named it the Offering, Pan calls it so, and they tip the Wards’ buckets into it every night to the hundred and forty-first psalm, “Let my prayer be set forth before thee as incense” (Psalm 141:2), sung in parts.

The Nightmen work in oilskins of pigskin sealed with Gadara’s lard and paint each cart with its own caricature of the Throne, so the long roads of the Wards watch a procession of shit-smeared Farmers creak down to the Offering every night. Most have had the nose grafted shut at the Row by choice, and they eat their supper on the manhole rims at Lauds with the best appetite in the Wards.

The children and the old of the Wards who sit on the roofs at night with the Tide Table’s chart of the Pillar’s round and a whistle and call the light’s coming street by street, paid in bread by the block. The call is the street’s name and the word light, Kilns, light, and a keyed soul in a doorway waits for the second call, past, before it steps out.

The chart is printed a week ahead and the Pillar keeps no round in harvest weather, so a good crier watches the cloud and keeps the paper in a pocket. Hearsay sells the night’s deviations from it, and the criers say Hearsay is right more often than the paper, and not by much.

On a slow night the old criers of the Kilns add what they think of the light to the second call, so a street hears the Pillar cursed by name from the roofs as it walks away, and the children learn the words from them before they learn the streets.

The criers wrap up against the night in blankets sewn with the names of the streets they call, and the old ones of the Kilns have had a reed graft set in the throat at the Row so the call brays down a street like a horn. The children paint their whistles with the filth the old ones teach, and a block gives its crier the first bread of the morning, warm off Leaven’s cart.

Sealed of the quays’ parishes who write out the words of the week’s hymns for the unsealed, a battery a sheet. The sealed hear the hymns in the Hum in words, each in their own language, through the Seal, and sing them under their breath, and the unsealed hear only the Hum’s chord, so a keyed son who wants to know what his mother sings over the manna buys a Psalter’s sheet, and some sons buy one every week.

The Deacons of the quays let it pass, since a hymn written down conceals nothing, and the Psalters confess every sheet they sell on the Lord’s Day. The sheets go up the stairs of the Wards folded small, and most of them are kept.

A keyed son who buys a Psalter’s sheet learns what his mother sings over the manna, and in the week of a Gleaning it is Take, Eat, and many of them stop buying. The Psalters confess that as well.

A Psalter writes in the parish hand, every letter the height of the next, on white sheets ruled at Bethel, and the work is kneeling work, the sheet on the hall floor and the pen held as a Deacon holds the manna. A keyed son who unfolds his mother’s hymn finds it identical to every other sheet in the city, the Supper set out in the same neat hand as the lullaby.

The menders of the Tares’ keyed lines, who walk the old Charter Line tunnels and the cable galleries from Tidewright’s taps to Old Nod, the Row and Pan, mending what the damp, the rats and the Tappers do to them. A Linesman’s lamp is the one light allowed on a dark line, and a crew that sees one coming stands aside for it.

They are keyed, and the Exchange pays them in silver for every length they keep live. In the neap weeks they walk the lines round the clock, and the Tappers, who take current off the lines’ edges for the Wards, are their oldest quarrel and their best customers.

The Linesmen paint the Throne’s names at every junction of the old tunnels as waymarks, a different name at each, so a runner lost in the Charter Line finds the way home by following the filth.

A Linesman wears the line, cable coiled over the shoulder and a lamp grafted into the brow so both hands stay free, and the old ones’ lenses are tuned so dark that noon blinds them. Their skin is tattooed with the tunnels in a hand only they can read, every junction under its filthy name, so a Linesman stripped at the Undertow is the Charter Line from neck to ankle.