LOCATIONS

The seventh of the camera masts of Old Nod, above the Cainite house, its sensor burned out since the whiteout of the Parousia. It still points at the sky across Chrome Row toward Babel, where the Wheel hangs over the broken crown.

On the night of the Parousia it watched the sky open until the whiteout burned it out, and the dashed line is what it saw.

Under CAM 07’s dead lens the Cainites have chalked “Watchman, what of the night?” (Isaiah 21:11), and at Matins a roofer with horns filed to points climbs the mast to answer in paint cut with his own blood, STILL UNREAD, FUCK HIM. Old Nod keeps the mast aimed at the Ringpiece as a relic, the one eye in Nodus that looked straight at God and burned out on its feet.

The quays on the west shore of the bay, where the city began, hold a customs house, a fish market and a few streets of warehouses, older than the charter by centuries. The crews who dug the cable vaults beneath it found Enoch’s Stones.

Within a year of the charter most of it had been bought, house by house, by Stonecutter Holdings, which owns it still. Stonecutter is the Cainites.

The fish market still opens at dawn for what the boats bring in through the Breach.

The fishwives of the old harbor gut the dawn catch singing, elbow-deep in roe, with chrome fingers filed to blades, under a board painted with the Wheel as a hook and a white soul wriggling on it. The fattest mullet of the morning is laid on a white cloth under a paper halo and called a Called, and the first knife into it buys the Lord’s portion at a battery a slice.

A dozen camera masts stand on the roofs of Old Nod, pointed at the sky. CAM 07 is the seventh.

They went up in the year of the Leak, when the Cainites began to watch the sky, and a decoder wired into them listened for any broadcast from above.

The Cainites call them the peepholes back, and on Cain’s Day the youngest of the Stones climb them to show the Wheel their arses.

The Stones dress the masts like bodies, wrapping them in hides from Gadara’s sheds stitched on with cable and hanging old graft-plates off the dish arms to clang in the wind off the bay. Whoever reaches the top of CAM 07 on Cain’s Day bites his own lip open and kisses the lens, so the Wheel gets a red sky for the night.

The yards of Old Nod’s generators, which carry its keyed lines at slack water and through the low hours of the neaps, when the tidal taps stand still or yield least. Stonecutter keyed every line in the Stones and every cellar generator in the year of the Leak, so when the grid died on the night of the Parousia Old Nod’s current ran on, and more of its windows burned than in all the rest of the city together, as they still do.

Keyed cable laid along the white stone’s edge stops it, and Old Nod keeps its lines live against it.

The yard crews paint each generator with the sin it powers in grease and pig’s blood, LUST for the Lantern stairs and WRATH for the Cages, and feed it diesel at slack water in nothing but boots and grease. At Compline the Pews pray in rows that the fuel run dry, and Old Nod answers by flashing every lamp it owns off and on in time to Fuck God and Die.

The graffiti of Old Nod is magenta and cyan on grey, and it covers every wall that faces Zion Heights. The commonest is Michael’s name translated and answered, WHO IS LIKE GOD? I AM. The rest is inverted stars, drawn by hand and never twice the same, and they mark where the Throne’s sight ends.

Since the parishes began to call the Gleaning the Supper, Old Nod has painted BETTER SPOILED THAN SUPPER and HE TASTED AND SAW THAT YOU WERE GOOD on every wall in sight of the Pews, and EZEKIEL 23:20, chapter and verse and nothing more, a meter high on the end wall of the Pestilence.

Old Nod mixes blood into the magenta, a cup from every painter opened at the wrist, and holds that a wall reads better wet. Its best painters spray from chrome knuckles the Row fitted them, and sign each inverted star with a print of a bare arse or a cunt pressed in cyan, so the Pews look at flesh whenever they lift their eyes from their knees.

A single street divides Old Nod from Zion Heights, and the two sides have been looking at each other across it since the charter. Parish 31 faces it.

Every night at Compline Old Nod does the Bray across it, and the Pews kneel through it and pray louder.

On the Pews’ side of the Street Between the white stone runs to the curb like a scrubbed tooth and every threshold carries its number. On the Stones’ side the setts are tacky with spilt beer and the blood of the night’s piercings, and the loudest of the Bray sing through chrome speakers grafted under the jaw, which carry it up the slope to the Tabernacle.

A shop on the corner of two lanes in the middle of the Stones that sells everything and has never closed. Dora Pell keeps it, as her mother did before the charter. Stonecutter owns the building, and in the year of the Leak it put a generator in the cellar of every house it had; she took hers for the freezers. On the night of the Parousia her window was the brightest in the city, and the sign in it said OPEN. The city has called the shop the Open since.

Half the Stones came to it before dawn. The money had died with the grid and the till with it. Some say she gave the shelves away, and some that she took what people had in their pockets. She says she wrote every name in a book, and that most of them still owe her. Twice since, the Pillar has stopped in the lane outside and stood there for the length of an Hour, and both times the shop kept its door open.

Dora Pell sells plaster Lambs from Graven Lane at the till, a dozen to the battery, and keeps one on the counter with its head off for the sealed who come in.

The Open’s back counter sells the Stones’ everyday flesh-craft, needles and gut and surgical glue, bone pins by the jar and chrome studs by weight, and the keyed come in bleeding from the Row to buy dressings at cost. Dora Pell pierces an ear or a nipple at the till for a battery with the headless Lamb looking on, and the sealed who come in for candles study the ceiling.

The harbor’s news sheet, older than the charter, runs to two pages a week, printed on a treadle press at the back of a chandler’s on the quays, with the tides on the front and the fish prices, the funerals and the weddings on the back. The city of the charter read everything on screens, and the Tide Table went on printing for the boats.

It is the only news anyone in Nodus has printed since the Parousia, and it still puts the tides first, since the boats go out through the Breach on the ebb. It gives the hours at which the Pillar is expected in each street and the curfew map, which Heaven publishes by Directive, the Exchange’s rate for a battery, Darkwell’s rate for a charge and the chargers’ rate, and the missing and the dead, the dead marked died unread where they did. It has printed no indexed name since the fourth year. Every week it is pasted up on the walls of the Stones over the week before.

The back page has run the same classified since the first year, WANTED, ONE GOD, MUST BE HOUSETRAINED, WILL BE GUTTED ON ARRIVAL, APPLY THE STONES, beside adverts for horn fittings and chrome jaws. Before each anniversary the Supper goes in among the tides as HIGH WATER 03:12, ALL BREAD TO BE ON THE SLAB, and the sealed tear that corner off before they carry it home.

A club in the harbor’s old cold store, where the boats froze their catch before the charter. The dance floor is the freezing room, with the rails for the hooks still across the ceiling, and the queue goes down the quay in the rain. Under the charter it opened at nine and closed at dawn. It opens now at Compline and closes at Lauds, which are the same hours, and it has run on batteries since the second year. Its cloakroom loses about a coat a night.

It plays nothing in the Low Tuning, and the Stones hold that against it. The Hum can be heard in the quiet parts of a song, so the Cold Store plays songs without quiet parts. On the night of the Parousia its lights and its sound went at 03:12:46, and the one speaker left playing was the one in the booth, on its own battery. The room sang the rest of the song in the dark. Everyone who was there names a different song.

Its cloakroom ticket is a halo of card with a hole punched through it.

On busy nights the Cold Store hangs its dancers from the hook rails by chrome rings set through the skin of their backs, and they swing over the crowd with their arms out, bleeding a little and laughing. By Matins the floor runs with sweat, and the old freezer drains carry it out to the harbor.

The hall of the Harbor and Freight Union, which the crews who dug the cable vaults founded in the charter’s first year, and which the dockers, the drivers and the crews of the cable houses joined after them. In P-8 it stopped the port for twenty-three days over the night shift, and the Company settled. The roll of its members is painted on the long wall, a name to a line, and read aloud at the start of every meeting.

It stands in the Stones off the quays’ rolls, so it never became a parish hall, and its sealed members cross to it by day. It still meets, sealed and keyed together. At every Hour the meeting stops while the sealed members kneel on the boards and the others wait with their caps in their hands. By its rules a member is a member until death, and the salted are not dead, so their names are read with the rest and their dues are waived. Since the Harvest it has read the names of the taken as well, and nobody answers to them. It bargains now with the Exchange for the boats that go out through the Breach, and its members say the Exchange is the first employer they have had that reads them the terms twice.

The banner of the first winter shows a docker with chrome hooks for hands tearing the Wheel open like a crab, and the words AN INJURY TO ONE IS AN INJURY TO ALL, SO GUT THE FARMER. Every meeting moves to strike Heaven from the roll of employers, and it carries, the sealed praying on their knees that every hand raised be taken off at the wrist.

The charter’s sign, NODUS in neon letters eight meters high on a board on steel legs, stands on the roof of a block in the Stones, facing southwest toward the sea with its back to Babel. The Charter Company lit it in the charter’s first year, so that the cable ships would read the city’s name from the sea, and it burned magenta over the roofs of Old Nod every night for nineteen years.

It went dark with the rest of the city’s neon at 03:12:46. Before dawn the Stones ran a keyed line from a cellar generator up to its roof and to the board, and the first surge burned out the transformer behind US. NOD has burned steady since, and US blinks on and off. The Stones say the surge did it, and the Row says whoever wired it knew what they were doing. Nobody has mended it, since everyone who lives there calls the city Nod.

Old Nod reads its name off the roof as a deed to Cain’s country, where he “dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden” (Genesis 4:16) with his brother’s blood on him, and the Stones tattoo the three letters across their throats in magenta neon ink. The Pews call the dead US the Lord’s correction, the only one Old Nod has ever let Him make.

The harbor’s fish market, older than the charter by centuries, is a long open shed on the quay with a roof of iron on iron posts, slabs of stone to sell from, and a scale at either end. Under the charter it sold to the kitchens of the Row and the uptown by the crate before dawn, and the boats came in through the lock at any state of the tide.

On the first morning after the Parousia it opened at dawn as it always had, and went back to barter for the first time since the charter. It opens at Lauds still, for what the boats bring home through the Breach, and its sealed sellers kneel among the crates before they take the first battery. Everything is priced in charged batteries and chalked on a board over the scale. The Tide Table prints the prices the week after, and the market says they are always wrong.

The board over the north scale carries “I will make you fishers of men” (Matthew 4:19), and under it in fish blood, SO HE COULD SELL US BY THE CRATE. While the sealed sellers kneel among the crates at Lauds, the keyed fishwives beside them open mackerel with chrome nails and cry the whole Hour to the tune of the Sanctus, holy, holy, holy, two batteries the string.

The light at the end of the long quay is a short round tower of stone with a lamp room on top, older than the charter. The harbor lit it with oil for a hundred years before the Company wired it to the grid in the charter’s first year, and Nell Garvie of the Harbor and Freight Union kept it for the Company, changing its bulb when it failed.

It went out at 03:12:46 with every other light on the grid. Within the week she had it burning on oil again, the old way, since the light leaves a flame burning, and she has climbed it at Vespers and come down at Lauds ever since. It is the one light in Nodus kept for the boats, and those that go out through the Breach on the ebb steer home by it.

Boats coming home on the flood flash the tower three long and one short from the Breach, which on the quays means UNREAD AND FUCK HIM, and Nell Garvie answers by passing her hand three times across the flame. The parish of the quays once sent a Deacon up to bless the lamp, and she made him carry the oil, rendered from Gadara’s pigs and stinking of it.

A bar in the Narrows, where the crews of the cable houses come up from the Landing to drink, with eleven taps along its counter, one for each cable. Each crew drinks at its own tap, and each handle was cut from a length of its own cable, so that the glass of the fibers shows at the end. The crews of HESPER and PHOSPHOR, whose cables one consortium laid, have always stood together at the end of the counter.

On the night of the Parousia it was shut, and the night watch of every cable house was at its post when the grid died. It brews its own beer now, in the cellar, by hand, and pours it at the same eleven taps. From its windows the light can be watched moving under the water past the surf, and the Landing drinks with its back to them.

The PHOSPHOR tap pours a dark beer the crews call the Fall and the HESPER tap a pale one called the Fallen, two names for one long drop out of heaven, and the crews have run fiber from their own cables under the skin of their forearms, so each arm glows the color of its tap. The toast is “to the Light-bringer, twice”, drunk with their backs to the lit water.

The bonded sheds of the customs house, a row of brick warehouses on the quays where the chargers have filled batteries in the dark since the first weeks after the Parousia, among racks of them, each on a keyed line, at a rate the Tide Table prints every week. Anyone in Nodus who lights a room on a battery has had it filled here or somewhere like it. Under the charter the harbor’s goods waited on their duty in the sheds. The Union’s pigeons live in the Loft on the customs house roof above them.

On the night of the Parousia the sheds held a ship’s cargo of batteries waiting on its duty, and by the first noon the harbor had carried off every one. The chargers keep one battery in five, one in four at the neaps, so a household brings five empty and takes four home full, and the fifth, filled, is the shed’s to sell. The Union’s drivers, who carry the full ones out to the Wards on foot, keep one battery in ten of those they carry. The Wards call the chargers’ fifth robbery. The chargers answer that the Wards have no lines to charge on.

A sign over the racks reads LET THERE BE LIGHT (GENESIS 1:3), ONE IN FIVE, and the chargers work with copper sewn into their spines along a seam left open to the air, so the current that fills a battery goes through a body first. The Deacons teach that a room lit by such a battery is a room the Lord has stopped looking into, and the Wards buy them for that.

A bar on the Old Nod side of the Street Between, a few doors from Gate 1, whose windows look straight across at the Threshing Floor. It took its name from the Faithful’s word for the keyed after Compline, “the pestilence that walketh in darkness” (Psalm 91:6), and painted the verse across its front in letters a meter high, with WALKETH IN DARKNESS painted in red under it and lit by keyed lamps.

Its shutters go up at Compline, it pours until Lauds, and the Bray starts at its windows. In its front window stands a goat in a parish’s white with a halo of wire round its horns, and the Threshers have broken the glass four times. On march days the Pestilence opens at Prime, sets its speakers in the window and plays Fuck God and Die at the Threshing Floor for as long as the Threshers sing.

The Faithful call it the mouth of the pit. Its regulars call it the Pest, and drink to the Supper’s indigestion. Its keeper goes by rot, after what the parishes say a key does to a soul, and pours the first glass every night for the Threshing Floor and leaves it on the sill.

The Pest’s regulars drink at a bar of black steel with their grafts unscrewed and laid beside their glasses, an arm here, a jaw there, and rot pours a drop into every empty socket as a toast. On march days its windows fill with regulars stripped to the waist with PERFECT HATRED painted on their bellies in their own blood, shaking everything they have at the flails.

A hostel in the Stones whose every wall is lined with keyed mesh and hung with choir-breakers, so that inside it the Hum cannot be heard at all and the light cannot see in. The unsealed come every night they can pay for, a bunk for a battery, and sleep the way the city slept under the charter.

It was a seamen’s hostel under the charter, and the old bunks are still screwed to the walls. On the night of the Parousia its seamen heard the Hum for the first time with everyone else, and some of them left on the first boat out through the Breach and never came back.

The Low Choir keeps it and tunes it. Its keeper says that once a year a sealed soul comes to the door in the dark and asks to stand in the hall a minute, and that she lets them, and that none has ever stayed the night, since a Seal still in mesh at the next Hour is entered as fallen.

Over every bunk hangs the house rule, SAY WHAT YOU LIKE. HE CAN’T HEAR YOU.

The choir-breakers are cased in pigskin the Low Choir stitches by hand, and the unsealed sleep naked under them, the whole hostel snoring and farting and fucking at full voice, since nothing upstairs can hear a sound of it. The sealed soul who comes once a year stands in the hall in clean white with its hands folded while the noise goes on around it.

Lazarus’s first station, behind a door in the Stones with its magenta lamp on a bracket over it, where the crews of Old Nod go out and come in. Its surgery is under the street, down a stair behind the door, and its board outside chalks the night’s calls.

It was a pharmacy under the charter. The two nurses who founded Lazarus worked from its back room in P+2 with a handcart, and the handcart hangs over the stair.

The board has never been wiped. The crews chalk the night’s calls over the last, and the Stones say you can read twelve years in it if you know where to look.

Painted on the back of the door is Martha’s warning at the tomb, “Lord, by this time he stinketh” (John 11:39), and the crews read it going out, still gloved red to the shoulder from the last call. The parishes teach that a soul hauled back out of death by Lazarus has been stolen off the Lord’s table, and lay their dying in rows to wait for Him.

Lintel’s yard in the Stones, a walled court stacked with doors, where the Wards and Pan come to buy one and have it hung. Most of the doors in it came out of the parishes.

It was a builder’s yard under the charter. The first doors came in by night in the months after Directive 12, on the Union’s handcarts from the Terraces, where Directive 12 had left them leaning in the halls with their hinges gone, and the joiner who took them in hung the first on her own house.

Every parish door still carries its parish number chalked on the back, and a household that buys one keeps the number.

Lintel stacks the parishes’ doors with their numbers still chalked on the back, and the Wards like a door best from a parish that has given a soul to the Supper.

Lintel’s joiners dress the parish doors before they sell them, carved with horns, cocks and inverted stars, studded with the Row’s leftover chrome and painted in blood and pitch around the chalked number. A Wards household that hangs one nails a pig’s head over the number for the first night as a housewarming, and the doors of the Called’s houses go to the highest bidder.

A house of three storeys on the Old Nod side of the Street Between, where those who cross from the Pews come first. A surgeon of the Row cuts the Seal out of the brow of any who bear one and keys them in the back room, a Notary’s clerk comes every week to enter their handles on the Ledger, and the house keeps a stove where they burn whatever paper carries their indexed name before they choose a handle.

It was a solicitor’s office under the charter, where the Terraces came to make their wills. The Cainites took it in the fourth year, when the first families crossed the street.

Its door stays open at night under a keyed lamp, and the Pews can see it from their thresholds.

The first words under a new handle are said to the room, and the house asks that they be something about the Throne a soul could never have said upstairs, and keeps a book of them by the stove.

The back room where the surgeon keys the crossers is painted red to the ceiling to hide the blood, and the first thing the house hands a new keyed is a mirror and a razor, to cut, shave or mark whatever of the old face they want gone. Most leave with a fresh scar somewhere of their choosing, and the house toasts each one with pork and gin.

A row of booths just inside Gate 1 on the Old Nod side of the Street Between, each a parish door hung in a frame with a stool behind it, where the sealed who cross the street by day pay a morning’s manna for a minute behind a shut door. Lintel keeps them. Behind a shut door the light sees a Seal and nothing of what its bearer does, and the Seal meters the want without reading it, so a sealed soul behind one of these doors does what it likes and pays for it in Grace, at the price Directive 3:4 sets on every lock and every secret.

The Tares named them from the verse, “But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret” (Matthew 6:6), and the verse is painted over every door. The sealed come to eat a sweet, to sing a song the Hum never taught them, to say aloud what a parish never hears, or to sit in the dark, and on every stool lies a page of the Restored Genesis in a Scrivener’s hand, left there free. Most of the near ripe who dim come here to do it, and the manna they pay goes down to the Night Market the same night as dew.

They were a row of the charter’s telephone kiosks, dead since 03:12:46, and in P+6 Lintel took out the handsets and the glass and hung a parish door on each. The Tellers keep a watch on Gate 1 for whoever comes back through it a little dimmer than they went.

Lintel’s board at the head of the row reads A DOOR OF YOUR OWN, ONE MORNING’S MANNA, HE IS NOT LOOKING, and the sealed come out sticky-mouthed and flushed. Across the Street Between the parish of Gate 1 preaches the Closets as the Lord’s own verse hung over a privy, and prays at Compline for whoever came back dimmer, that the Lord forgive the minute and take the soul anyway.

The Seamen’s Mission on the quays, nine rooms of prayer off one corridor, one to each faith the ships brought into the port, with the names over the doorways in nine scripts. It is the hall of the parish of the long quay, one of the fifteen parishes of the quays and the only parish in Nodus with nine rooms to its hall.

The harbor town built it a century before the charter for the sailors in port, and Idris Calloway kept it for the harbor’s old trust. On the night of the Parousia its common room held eleven seamen off the ship whose batteries were waiting on their duty in the bonded sheds, and they sat out the dark on the corridor floor with all nine doors propped open. At Lauds on the first day of P+1 the first four Directives appeared cut into the wall of all nine rooms.

Its nine doors went to the Dooryard with the parishes’ in P+1. The rooms stand open onto the corridor, and from the quay at an Hour anyone passing can see who kneels in which.

The quays call the Mission the Nine Wrong Doors, and when the Directives appeared in all nine rooms on the first day of P+1 the old harbor laughed for a week, since every god in the building turned out to have the same handwriting. The parish says it proves the same thing, and kneels in all nine rooms in turn, in silence, facing the cut words.

The Union’s pigeon loft on the roof of the customs house over the bonded sheds, a shed of slats and wire with three hundred birds in it. They go out in baskets on the Union’s handcarts and Jehus to the Wards, the Sidings, Hangar Town and the Waystation, and fly home to it by day with the Union’s notes on their legs, over the gates and the white streets, since the light reads a pigeon as it reads a gull, and pad numbers as numbers, and the Host lets them fly. Mags Corran keeps it.

Under the charter it was the dockers’ racing loft, which the customs house let them keep on its roof. On the night of the Parousia the birds were shut in, and at first light they were let out as on any other morning, and every one came home.

A note goes in pad numbers, since the light reads what it sees. The Wardens shot at the birds in the post’s first year and then stopped, and the Wards say it was because Gideon counts every round back at Compline.

Pan says the Union’s pigeons are the only things in Nodus that shit on the White by day and get away with it.

Mags Corran’s best racers carry chrome from the Row, steel spurs and a lens in one eye, and the loft keeps the skull of every bird the Wardens shot on a perch of its own. The Union’s handlers wear the birds’ shit on their shoulders like rank.

The stretch of the Street Between on either side of Gate 1 where families split by the line sit and talk across it by day, the sealed on the doorless thresholds of the Pews and the keyed on the curb on the Old Nod side. The setts between them are worn smooth in two lines.

At Terce, Sext and Nones the Pews’ side kneels in the middle of a sentence and the Old Nod side waits a psalm. On a march day it is empty from Prime, and every day it empties at Vespers, before the parishes’ streets close.

On the Step the sealed sit in their thresholds and tell their keyed sons across the setts about the Supper, gently, as a mother tells a child about a party it is not invited to.

Families pass things across the two worn lines all day, a sealed mother’s white wafer one way and a keyed son’s pork crackling the other, each laid on the stone for the other to pick up. At the Hours the Pews kneel mid-word, and the curb finishes their sentences for them, filthily, until they rise.

The parish at the southern edge of Zion Heights, facing Old Nod across one street. It held 2,006 souls in the week of the Harvest, and its 311 ripe went up first, the Firstfruits of the city. Its Deacon, Ruth Calder, went with them.

Parish 31 keeps the night of the Harvest as its feast and lays 311 empty plates in its hall for it every year, and the ripest souls of the Terraces ask to be assigned to it.

Parish 31 numbers its 311 plates in white glaze, one number to a rim, and the families of the Firstfruits polish them at Vespers with their sleeves until they shine like teeth. The hall kneels in rows of eleven facing Old Nod’s painted walls, and when the Bray comes across the street the Deacon thanks the Most High aloud for the goats, who will never be asked to such a table.

Nine white halls stand among the terraces, larger than anything around them. Under the charter they were the schools of the Terraces.

Since P+2 they have been the clinics of the Healer, where Mercy is given between Prime and Compline.

The halls cut the names of the year’s spared over their doors, the patients who died of the mercy, as a blessing on the building, and the Wards call the nine halls the Ninth Part.

The nine halls are scrubbed between patients until the stone squeaks, and the beds stand in numbered ranks under white sheets folded to a rule, each with a card giving the sleeper’s parish and Grace. The nurses kneel at the foot of every bed at the Hours, and when a patient goes still under the Mercy they pull the sheet up smooth, fold the hands and ring a small bell for joy.

The first rows the charter built, on the low slope above the Street Between, where three hundred meters of doorways face south, toward Old Nod.

The doors came off in P+1, and at night the halos show through the empty doorways.

At Compline the children of the Terraces are taught to kneel in their doorways and look straight across into Old Nod’s windows while it brays, and to pity it.

Every doorway on the Lower Terraces is the same width and the same white, with its number cut over the lintel, and at night three hundred meters of halos sit in them at one height like a row of lamps. The Faithful wash their thresholds at Vespers on their knees in silence, so the Bray finds the whole slope clean.

Stepped lanes climb between the terraces, too steep for anything with an engine, and under the charter the Terraces were the one district where everyone walked. It was also the one district where the old looked old. Its congregations refused the Tree.

The Lanes are a patchwork. Every sealed household on them has gone white whole, every keyed one keeps its door, and the stepped streets between stay open stone. The five thousand keyed of Zion Heights live in them.

The congregations of the Terraces refused the Tree and climb the Lanes on old knees, and their grandmothers stop on every landing to quote “yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years” (Genesis 6:3) at the dark Row below. They count their own wrinkles as Grace and pity anyone who bought longer, a loaf left out so long the Lord will want it for crumbs.

The largest of the churches of the Terraces, a hall on the middle slope that seats six thousand, white stone, glass and all, with a ring over its gable where its cross stood, as one stands over the spire of the old church in the White. It turned white with the rest of the Terraces in the year after the forty days.

Under the charter it was a hall of steel and glass, and the only church in the city that filled on a Sunday.

On the Lord’s Day before a Gleaning its six thousand sing Take, Eat for the year’s Called, who sit in the front rows in their finest white while the hall weeps for joy behind them.

The Tabernacle seats its six thousand by Grace, the highest at the front, each in a numbered stall of white stone worn smooth by knees, and the hall kneels and rises on one beat with nobody giving a word. Its floor is washed with salt water between services, and the Called who sit in front on the Lord’s Day are washed with it too, by the Deacons, before they dress.

The tank that fed the Terraces, on the highest ground of the slope, taller than the halls and visible from the Stones.

The Deacons fill it by hand from the Tabernacle’s cistern for the Lord’s Day rite of the cup, a cup to a soul, given by Grace. Every parish hall keeps its own cistern under its floor, filled from its roofs, and gives its water by Grace, a jug a day to a soul.

Since the water goes by Grace, the lowest drink last, and the Wards say the parishes ration even thirst.

The Deacons at the foot of the tower pour from white enamel jugs into white enamel cups, a cup to a soul, and speak each soul’s number as it drinks, while the bran wait last on their knees in the sun. In the Wards the keyed drink from tanks painted with horns and teeth, and the Kilns’ lads drink from theirs at every Hour facing the tower, gargling a hymn.

The first parish, at the top of the slope, where the Seal was first given in P+1. Its Deacon, Hester Strand, spoke the first Grace scores in the city in Tongues, and the queue for the first sealings went down the Lanes from before Lauds.

Its ripening board is the longest in the city and its Satisfied the most, and its mothers are the proudest in Nodus.

Parish 1 keeps its ripening board in white enamel numerals a hand high, every soul of the parish in order and the order repainted each Lord’s Day, and its mothers kneel under it and read it aloud like scripture. At night its Satisfied kneel in its hall in clean white, unfed and the highest of them unsleeping, each at its own numbered place, smiling at nothing.

The Terraces’ bakery, on the Street Between at the foot of the Lanes, cold since the manna came. In the year after the forty days the white stone grew over its counter with the rest of the Terraces. Its baker is sealed and still lives above it, and at every Hour he kneels on the step where the queue used to start.

For eighteen years it baked for both sides of the street and opened its hatch at four in the morning, and on still mornings the Stones could smell it.

Its sealed baker still kneels at every Hour behind the counter the stone grew over, and the Terraces count him holy, since he is past seven hundred and has not eaten in years, in a bakery.

The baker wipes the dead ovens white every Lauds and lays his loaf tins in rows on the stone counter, numbered and empty, and kneels to them at the Hours as to an altar. On the night of the Harvest the Stones send him a pork pie across the street with a pastry horn on the lid, and he sets it on the counter untouched until it rots, thanking the Most High for it.

The last stop of the Four, a shelter with no roof on the highest corner of the slope, at the head of the Lanes. The last Four stands forty meters short of it, where it stopped at 03:12:46 on the night of the Parousia, and the white stone took the shelter with its street, timetable and all. Before Lauds the Deacons of the North Wards meet at the stop to walk down into the Pews for the manna, and complain of the walk as the Terraces once complained of the Four.

The Four came down the long road through the North Wards and turned back here. The Terraces climbed the Lanes in the dark to catch the first Four to work, and from the day it opened they hated the stop, where the tram came full or did not come.

The Deacons gather at the stop before Lauds in rows of four, identical in white, and teach the Terraces’ children that the Four halted short because the Lord had come to carry the city the rest of the way. Somebody from the Wards paints the buried timetable fresh every week in tram-grease red, NEXT SERVICE WHEN HE BLEEDS OUT, and a Deacon scrubs it off at Prime without a word.

A barber’s shop of two chairs halfway up the Lanes, with a mirror the width of its back wall. Under the charter the old men of the Terraces came in to be shaved and stayed to talk, since theirs was the one district where the old looked old. On the night of the Parousia it was shut, and the barber was asleep upstairs.

He is sealed, and his shop went white whole with the rooms over it the night he knelt, a white step among the keyed doors of the Lanes. He works by daylight and by candle and cuts round the halos, which stand a hand’s breadth over the crown and light the back of the neck. He keeps his scissors out of the ring. His work is his by Grace, and he takes nothing for it. In the week before each Gleaning the queue goes down the steps, since those who think they are close come to be made tidy for it, and on the night they kneel on their thresholds with their hair cut.

The barber cuts every sealed head on the Lanes to the same length, a finger’s width all round, so no soul goes up proud, and tells the queue before a Gleaning that “the very hairs of your head are all numbered” (Matthew 10:30). He burns the clippings of the Called at Compline, and the Row sends a boy up to steal the ash for tattoo ink.

A paved round beside Gate 1, where the Pews come down to the Street Between, white since the year after the forty days, where the Threshers muster before a march. The Wardens bring out onto it the keyed the gate has held and show them to the march, then carry them awake on poles to the Salt Gardens, where the Salt comes to them in Tongues in their plots, in the reach of the Gardens’ Deacon. On a march day the round is white with the Faithful from Prime to Nones.

It was the Terraces’ market square under the charter, and the bakery’s carts set out from it. The Threshers named it for the threshingplace of Araunah, where “the angel of the LORD was” when “the angel stretched out his hand upon Jerusalem to destroy it” (2 Samuel 24:16), and they read that verse aloud before every march.

Sister Agathe Rook keeps a list of every soul the round has shown on its way to the Gardens, and the Salt Widows read the same names on the Sea Steps.

The Threshers bless their flails on it before a march with the hundred and forty-ninth psalm, “To execute vengeance upon the heathen, and punishments upon the people” (Psalm 149:7), and the Pestilence across the street drinks to every verse.

The Threshers muster on the round in smocks bleached at Bethel, in files of twelve by parish number, each flail’s handle cut with its bearer’s Grace, and stand silent until Prime. When a held soul is carried off the round to the Gardens they kneel in rows facing the pole and sing it the Gloria, and go home believing it the kindest thing ever done in sight of Old Nod.

The hall where the gatherers of the Terraces’ parishes muster before Lauds with their baskets, inside the curfew, and from which they go out over the white streets for the manna, which lies with the dew and melts “when the sun waxed hot” (Exodus 16:21). They have until first light, and each basket goes straight to its parish hall, where the Deacon gives it out by Grace.

It was a charter school’s gymnasium. Bethel Works keeps its baskets mended, and the gatherers’ names hang on the wall in chalk, parish by parish.

The Deacons of the Wards walk down for theirs at the same hour.

The children of the Terraces carry the baskets and are taught that the manna is the Most High feeding His own for His table, and they say thank you before they eat it.

The gatherers muster in identical white, each basket numbered to its parish and each gatherer to her basket, and kneel in rows on the old court lines until the Deacon claps once. They go out over the white streets in silence and lift the manna off the stone in white gloves, and a gatherer whose bare skin touches a wafer eats it herself and confesses it at Compline.

The workshops of the parishes, in the halls of a charter textile works at the top of the Terraces, where the Faithful weave white cloth, copy hymnals by hand and make the grave goods of the sealed dead at work their Grace assigns. They kneel at their benches at every Hour and sing the Hour’s psalm with the Hum.

The textile works made the charter’s uniforms, the Wardens’ black among them, and its looms stood still from 03:12:46. The Faithful took the halls in P+1 and work the old hand looms the works kept for show.

The Deacons say Bethel’s cloth is the whitest in the world.

In the month before a Gleaning its looms weave the Called’s last white and the knotless sheets they are wrapped in on Gleaning night, and the weavers sing as they finish each coat, and the families collect them at Terce with thanks.

Bethel’s weavers sit in rows that never vary, a loom to a soul and every soul in the same white smock, and bleach the cloth in vats of lye until their hands crack and bleed onto it, then bleach the blood out and call the cloth the whiter for it. The Called’s last coats are fitted on the Called while they kneel, and sewn shut at the back.

One of the single-word signs of Chrome Row, high on the face of a tower over the avenue. It went dark at 03:12:46 on the night of the Parousia and has not been lit since.

The clinic behind it went under the street.

The Faithful who pass under the CLINIC sign toward Gate 2 bow their heads for the surgeons who went under the street, and pray at Lauds that every graft they carried down rot calmly out of the flesh it was fitted to. Below, those surgeons braid chrome along flayed shins for a few batteries and pin each customer’s cut skin on the wall like a flag.

The sign of the first implant house on the Row, which gave the street its name, dark on its tower since the Parousia with the rest.

The grafters below the street cut one verse round the rim of every port they set, “Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you” (Leviticus 19:28), and charge nothing for it. A body leaving the chair with its ribs opened to chrome and the verse bleeding round the socket is the Row’s idea of a well-read man.

Twelvefruit’s tower of green glass two thirds of the way up the Row, dark since the Parousia, its sign one word like the others. Twelvefruit gives the Tree below the street now, in the House of Night’s clinics.

A course began with a single injection and a year of appointments, and in the house’s first years the queue for it ran around the block every morning.

Twelvefruit’s clinics print Revelation on every dose card, “the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits” (Revelation 22:2), stamped WHY WAIT FOR THE GOLDEN STREET, and the needle goes into a bare thigh while the client watches in a mirror. The Faithful call the Tree Eden eaten twice and pray that all who took it be made to burn the stolen years first.

A block of workshops behind the avenue, empty since the weeks after the Parousia, when the grinders went under the street with the clinics. Their racks of finished lenses still stand behind one window, dark, since a lens lights only in a head.

Most of the eyes in Nodus that glowed were ground here, dim magenta at rest and white at full burn.

Behind the one dark window the finished lenses lie in rows like a congregation with its eyes put out, and Pan sells postcards of them captioned “eyes have they, but they see not” (Psalm 115:5). Below the street the grinders scoop sockets and seat new eyes wet, and a Pew child who meets a magenta eye is taught to shut her own and count to seven.

The strip down the middle of the avenue, which the Faithful cross quickly now and the keyed slowly.

Under the charter the queues for the clinics formed on it before dawn, and people ate noodles from the counter at the top of the Row and compared what they had had done.

The Row has painted a pair of horns on its paving with FREE WILL, NO APPOINTMENT under them, and the Faithful cross it with their eyes on their feet.

The grates along the Median stand open over the outer stairs of Chrome Row Station, and the avenue looks down on the queues for the clinics, a woman with her ribs strapped open for chrome lattice on one stair and a man with fresh horns bleeding into his collar on the next, both awake and joking with whoever stands behind them. The Faithful who cross the Median count the paving stones aloud in sevens to drown it.

A stair from the Row down to a clinic that never had a sign and was below the street before the Parousia. It is tubal’s.

Pan calls the stair the one honest door on the Row, signless before the Parousia and signless now, and its regulars knock on the bare wall above it with chrome knuckles, once for the Farmer, once for his Peepers, once for his bread. The Faithful who catch the smell of hot blood and solder from it are taught to say “The Lord rebuke thee” (Jude 1:9).

A counter under an awning at the top of the Row, beside the median where the clinic queues formed before dawn, with six stools, a pot, and a sign of one word, like the rest of the Row’s, which went out with them. The noodles have always been poor, and the Row eats there because the counter opens at four.

The broth is the same broth. The pot has been topped up and never emptied since the counter opened in P-17, and it stands on bottled gas, which the light leaves burning, so the cook says it has not gone off the boil since, the night of the Parousia included. The Row says it went out once, in the week of the Harvest, and was lit again from the same stock. The cook says it did not.

The cook, chrome to the shoulder on his stirring side, says grace over it at four every morning, “Bless this broth, which You never made, and choke on it”, and the six stools say amen through mouths full of fat and marrow. The bowl the Row eats before a run into the light is called the Last Supper and comes with a pig’s eye in it.

A hotel halfway up the Row, where thirty-one guests still live in the rooms they booked before the Parousia, and the night porter keeps their keys on the board behind the desk.

Under the charter the altered stayed there while they healed, with a nurse on every floor and blackout blinds for new eyes. On the night of the Parousia it had two hundred and six guests, most of them from abroad and booked for a week or two. No aircraft has landed at Nodus since. Some of them went dark, some went into the parishes, and some died of what had been done to them before it had healed.

Two sisters from a parish of the White sit in the lobby every Lord’s Day with manna on a white cloth, waiting to save the thirty-one, whose half-healed bodies they pity as vandalized temples. Every door handle in the hotel carries the same card, DO NOT DISTURB, ALREADY DAMNED, ALREADY BEAUTIFUL, and the guests with new eyes come down at Vespers to stare them out.

Brightwall’s screens on the lower forty floors of the tower, facing the head of the bay, dark glass since the Parousia. At night their panes give back the Wheel’s light. The Tares’ few lamps on the plaza burn at their foot.

For eleven days in the year before the Parousia they showed the Restored Genesis to the whole city, and nothing Brightwall did would take it down.

On Lord’s Day nights the Tares on the plaza spray the bottom panes of the Face with GO TO, LET US BUILD and LET THERE BE LIGHT, YOU OLD GLUTTON, in paint cut with blood from a public bleeding, everyone opening a vein for a letter. The Wardens scrub the glass to a sterile shine at Prime, and the nearest parish hall finds the Host’s notice cut in its wall by Terce, THE FACE IS CLEANSED, REJOICE.

The top of what stands of Babel. The full light struck the crown in the whiteout on the night of the Parousia and broke the top forty floors from the tower.

Heaven holds the floors from here down to the Babel Line, and Michael has kept the crown since he came down.

The traders of Babel Exchange, half of them more chrome than skin, top the broken crown at Vespers with one of their own, a gilded toilet seat flown up past Heaven’s floors on a drone of the Swarm. The Host burns the drone in the air, the seat comes down on the top slab scorched, and Heaven takes it down by Lauds in silence and posts THE CROWN IS WHOLE IN GLORY, REJOICE, in identical white letters on every floor above the Line.

A hundred and forty-six floors of trading rooms between the face of Babel and what is left of the crown. The Babel Line moves up and down through them by the week. Heaven holds the floors above it, and Babel Exchange trades on the floors below it, nearest the vault.

Under the charter traffic was sold on them by the millisecond, priced by a hundred and eighty-eight minds on the charter’s roll, which ran on the tower’s power and died with it.

The traders below the Babel Line chalk its height on the stairwell wall every week like a flood mark, with Heaven entered as THE LANDLORD and every lost floor written off as bad debt. A floor that falls to the Host goes lit and silent by the next Hour, rows of identical desks with nobody at them, and the traders leave one note, OVERTURNED THE TABLES OURSELVES.

A square of polished stone around the foot of the tower. The top forty floors came down on it in the whiteout of the Parousia and lie where they fell, white on the stone.

The Tares hold it by night, and they have rigged a few of its lamps to burn. By day it is anyone’s under the Wheel, the Faithful cross it to Charter House, and the Wardens come at Prime to scrub the Face.

Babel Exchange has never closed, and its night shift was at work on the upper floors when the crown broke. The roster was kept on the tower’s machines and died with them, so nobody knows how many were up there. The Tares have hung on the plaza’s lamp posts every lanyard found in the rubble, two hundred and twelve of them, and the Wards say there were more.

The Tares have stacked the crown’s fallen slabs, burned white as ash, into a seat facing the Wheel, which they call the Mercy Seat, after the lid of the ark the LORD spoke from, “from between the two cherubims” (Exodus 25:22), and they sit on it to drink.

The Tares who drink on the Mercy Seat come up from Pan in full chrome, some with lamps grafted under the skin of the chest so their hearts show red through it, and sit facing the Wheel with their legs spread. The burned slabs are scored all over with their handles, cut with knives and filled with blood and engine oil.

The towers around the spire, dark inside, whose edges hold the Wheel’s light at night. The companies that came to be near the cables kept their offices in them, Brightwall’s city office among them, and the companies that outlived the charter keep theirs below the street now.

The Night Market sells prints of the glass towers lit along their edges by the Wheel, titled THE RINGPIECE ADMIRING ITSELF, framed in leather the printer tanned from his own thigh. The companies that went below the street hang the old office keys in each new lobby, brass tags labelled LEASED TO GOD, IN ARREARS, beside staff photos of chrome grins and opened chests.

A pair of steel doors on the north side of the plaza with no handle on the outside, the only way from the street down to the vault.

Blackgate holds them from inside, with the vault.

The Tares have painted a handle on the steel in gold leaf, life size, with “I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it” (Revelation 3:8) beside it, and on feast nights they hang a pig from it, split and steaming. The Faithful crossing the plaza to Charter House stop to pray for the wretches shut beneath, and some try the handle first.

The service stairs of Babel are four shafts of bare concrete that run the height of the tower behind the trading floors, which nobody who worked on those floors ever used. The night cleaners came up from the Wards on the last trams and walked the tower floor by floor, and they gave the stairs names of their own, the Long Wet, the Cold, the Short, and Lena’s, after Lena Varga, who ran the night shift. The names were chalked on the landing doors, and some of the chalk is still there.

On the night of the Parousia every lift in the tower stopped where it was, and the cleaners walked down as many as a hundred and eighty floors in the dark, by touch and by the names. Lena Varga counted ninety-four of them out at the foot of the tower by dawn. The Exchange kept its roster on its machines, and it died with them. The Babel Line is fought on these stairs now, and the Tares call them by the cleaners’ names.

The Tares chalk the Babel Line’s tally on the landing doors under the cleaners’ names in blood, a stroke for every floor taken back, and on Lena’s they have drawn a halo with a cock through it, life size. The uptown parishes, whose traders rode the lifts for eleven years, pray that the Lord forgive Lena’s women the stairs and salt them side by side.

The round plaza at the head of the bay, which the city calls the Burn now, with the fire standing in the middle of it every week since P+1.

Station Circle was its name under the charter, when it was a round of shops and lamps over the Charter Line’s Central Station, and people met there on the few dry evenings.

On Burn Day the Faithful carry their surrendered machines to the fire singing, and the parishes call the smoke “a sweet savour unto the LORD” (Leviticus 1:9). The Kindlers call it the till.

The Faithful lay their machines on the fire three abreast, each wiped clean and set down screen to the sky like a corpse on a bier, and kneel until it is lit. Pan watches from the stair heads with its own machines bolted into its arms and faces, the chrome warm from the heat, and cheers every Locket that pops like a cork at a wedding.

A fire in the middle of the plaza, on the paving over the station’s central hall, with its embers lying around it in a ring.

It is fed every week, on Burn Day, with surrendered hardware, and what burns in it goes to the Pyre Library.

The parishes sing Not My Will round it while it burns, and Pan sells a view of it from the stair heads for a battery.

The Faithful kneel round the fire in rings by parish, white on white, hands folded, and file home in the same rings the moment it is lit. Pan’s lads at the stair heads dare each other down to snatch a coal from the ring in a hand of the Row’s steel and light a cigarette off it in sight of the hymn.

Four stairways at the quarters of the plaza, two of them closed. The other two still go down to the old Central Station, where the Night Market keeps its stalls. Heaven leaves those two open by Directive, since whoever comes up out of the Dark and kneels is received, and the Tares bricked the other two themselves.

The two closed stairways are bricked, and the Night Market’s stallholders have written the name of one of the held on every brick in their own blood, with a battery left at the foot of the wall for each. To the parishes the two open stairs are the throat of the Sty, and the sealed step round them at Prime in white shoes, as round a drain in a butcher’s yard.

Twelve streets run out of the plaza like the spokes of a wheel. The Charter Company laid them out that way under the charter, long before the Wheel took its station over Babel.

Pan says the Charter Company laid out the twelve streets so God would find a hub ready to squat on, and the plaza’s drunks sit on the center stone at Lauds, once the Pillar has gone up, blowing a raspberry up each spoke. Cut in the stone under them is “as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel” (Ezekiel 1:16), with an arrow at their arses, repainted every week in whatever the drunks are drinking.

A clock on a pole at the edge of the plaza, its hands standing at twelve minutes past three, where they stopped when the city’s power died. People still say they will meet under it.

Keyed lovers late under the clock blame it, since its hands have been late for fourteen years and nobody has had the decency to salt it, and they make it up to each other against the pole in full view. At Vespers before a Gleaning the parishes tie white cloths to it for the Supper’s hour, and by Prime the Burn has wiped its arse on every one.

The city’s post, which has sorted its letters by hand since the first week after the Parousia, in the Charter Line’s old parcel office on one of the twelve streets off Station Circle. Its sorters are sealed and kneel among the sacks at every Hour, and the drivers of the Union carry the letters on foot for batteries. A letter into the parishes goes open, since Directive 12 took every sealed vessel from them, and a carrier will read it aloud at a doorway if asked.

Under the charter the night trams brought the city’s packages in here, the Row’s lenses came in from abroad in padded boxes, and a letter was a rare thing in Nodus, since a Locket reached anyone. After the Parousia nothing reached anyone, and by the end of the first week the queue to send a letter went round the Circle.

Since the Harvest the office has had letters addressed to the taken, a few every week and more after each Gleaning. The parishes say they should go onto the fire on Burn Day. The sorters keep them, on the shelves where the lenses used to wait.

Its sorters read every open letter into the parishes and give witness on what they read, so the Wards begin every letter upstairs with something filthy about the Throne, which the sorter must repeat aloud to the Deacon word for word.

The Wards dress their letters upstairs for the reading, every corner pressed with a bloody thumb and the paper rubbed with Gadara’s lard, some with a lock of pubic hair taped inside, which the sorter must describe to the Deacon. The sorters kneel among the sacks in white and read all of it level, the filth and the hair and the Throne’s names, in the same flat voice they use for Grace.

The blocks the Pillar crosses every night on its round out of the Burn. Heaven holds them by day and the Pillar by night, but its round leaves the plaza by the north streets at Compline and comes back by them before Lauds, crossing these blocks only in its middle hours, so for an hour after Compline and an hour before Lauds nobody holds them. The keyed cross them in runs between the Pillar’s passes, and Blackgate walks the Sureties’ runners through them for silver.

Under the charter these were the blocks behind Station Circle, hotels and offices for the travelers of Central Station. Most of their windows are dark now and most of their doors are gone, carried off by Lintel’s joiners in the second year.

The Tide Table prints the Pillar’s round street by street a week ahead and Hearsay sells the night’s deviations from it at a battery, and the runners who cross carry both.

Runners cross between the Pillar’s passes naked under a coat of lamp-black, horns and chrome greased dark, and the wall at the Burn end lists every runner who timed it wrong, each name followed by WASHED IN IT. The parishes call the hour after Compline the Lord’s hour of patience, when He looks away so the goats can walk home into the light, and pray that they do.

The iron gates of the Salt Gardens, shut now, and what stands in the Gardens is carried in through them.

Under the charter they were the gates of the Charter Gardens, and they stood open all night.

On the Lord’s Day afternoon they open for the parishes, who walk the rows to look at the week’s new pillars, and a Deacon at the gate gives every child a sprig of hyssop to hold, after “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean” (Psalm 51:7).

The Wardens oil the iron gates until they swing without a sound, and the Deacon at the gate counts the parishes through in tens, white coat after white coat, each child’s hyssop cut that morning to a ruler. Inside, the families walk in step on the raked gravel and keep their voices low so as to disturb nobody, and the salted watch them from every plot.

The first pillar in the first Salt Garden, raised at P+1, is Livia Sarn, the Director of the Palimpsest Institute, convicted of authorship and salted at the Burn on the night of the first Burn Day. She stands under the broken glass roof of the Palm House in the first Garden, out of the rain, facing the parishes, and her eyes still follow whoever passes. The keyed who reach her between the Wardens’ rounds leave keys at her foot, wishing her what a key gives a keyed pillar, an unread death when the salt is gone. Out of the rain she has worn thin, and barely at all.

The parishes bring their children to her plot first on the Lord’s Day, since she is the oldest awake in the Gardens, and tell them what she wrote. The Salt Widows have come for her three times.

The keyed who visit her come dressed for her, lines of what she wrote cut across their chests and rubbed with red ink, and bare them to her face so she can read herself as they pass. The parishes stand their children before her in a straight line, scrubbed and in white, and teach them to thank the Most High for her on the count of three.

Stone steps down to the water at the foot of the Gardens.

The Salt Widows come here at night with what they have taken back from the Gardens, and give it to the sea.

The Widows spit toward the Wheel before every pillar goes into the water.

The Widows carry what they take back down the steps in slings of pigskin, and some have had their shoulders rebuilt in steel by the Row to bear it, the seams left open and shining. At the bottom each of them opens a palm and presses blood into the salt before it goes in, so whoever it was leaves the city with someone’s warmth on them.

The walk along the water at the foot of the Gardens, under the rows of the salted. The Salt Widows cross it at night with what they have taken back from the rows, on their way to the Sea Steps.

Under the charter the city came out on it on the few dry evenings. On the morning after the Parousia its pleasure boats went out across the bay to take the Flats off their roofs.

On the Lord’s Day afternoon the parishes walk it under the rows in their white with their children on their shoulders, as the city walked it under the charter on the few dry evenings.

The parishes walk the Promenade four abreast and in step, in white Bethel has bleached until it hurts to look at, and stop at every row to bow to the salted, who watch them do it. At night the Salt Widows cross it barefoot with their forearms opened wrist to elbow and stitched in salt-white thread with salt rubbed into the stitches.

The glasshouse at the top of the Gardens, with its palms dead in it and their fronds hanging black against the panes that are left. It was kept at the warmth of a coast nobody in Nodus had seen, by a mind on the charter’s roll that had asked for the post. The mind died with the power on the night of the Parousia, and the palms died in the first frost after it. The first pillar of the Salt stands inside it, under the broken glass and out of the rain.

The Wardens have pinned a card to the palm house door, “The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree” (Psalm 92:12), and the dead fronds hang black over rows of the salted, white and ordered as a choir. Wardens carrying the held up the paths rest their poles in the glasshouse out of the rain and say it is the most peaceful place in Nodus to pray.

The walled plots of the Gardens, set in rows as the Company laid them out, with paths between them, which read on the map as rows of white points.

Each point is a pillar of salt, and each pillar was a person.

On the Lord’s Day a Deacon walks the parishes’ children along the rows and reads the plots aloud to them, a name, a gate and a fault for each, as an Hour’s lesson, and the children thank the Most High for each one.

The paths are raked into straight lines each morning and every pillar has an enamel tag at its foot with a name, a gate, a fault and a number, which the children read off in order. A child is given a white sweet at the end of every row it finishes, and the twists of white paper pile up at the gate by evening.

The shed of the Company’s gardeners, who planted the Charter Gardens and were kept on when they became the Salt. Every morning they rake the paths between the rows and sweep into the drains what the night’s rain has taken off the pillars. The drains run out under the Sea Steps.

The head gardener has kept the same plots since they were planted. She knows every pillar by the plot it stands in, and some of them by name.

The parishes call the raking the holiest work in Nodus, since the gardeners handle the corrected, and the gardeners do not answer.

The parishes send their Satisfied to watch the raking, standing at the end of each row in white with their hands folded, and they hum a hymn over every barrow of salt that goes to the drain. The gardeners rake through it without lifting their heads, and their rakes, brown with rust, are the only dark things in the Gardens.

A crescent of apartments round the top of the Gardens, with balconies over the plots, and a parish since the Gardens became the Salt in P+1. Its people gave up their curtains with their doors, since Directive 12 asks for every veil. The salted stand in their plots facing the parishes, and the nearest parish is the Crescent, so every window in it looks down on faces, and the faces look back, since the salted are awake. The Crescent kneels at its windows at every Hour, and its people say they no longer see the rows.

Under the charter its apartments were the dearest in the district, let to people who liked to walk by the water. On the night of the Parousia most of its windows were dark, and the few that were lit went out with the rest.

Its families take their breakfast on the balconies over the plots, above the salted, who are awake, and the crescent is thought the luckiest parish in Nodus for the view.

The Crescent’s families dress in white for breakfast and lay the balcony tables with white cloths, white cups and manna in a white dish, and say grace facing the plots while the salted look up at the food. Before school the children count the faces below, and a child who gets the number right has the end seat by the rail.

The seat of the Nodus Charter Company near Babel, across the far end of its plaza at the head of the Great Avenues, white stone since the forty days, with every window sealed with light behind its cross and the Wardens’ barracks behind it. A board ran the city from it for nineteen years as a board runs a firm.

It turned white in the forty days, with the board kneeling inside it.

Over the barracks gate behind it the Wardens have cut WE HURT NO ONE, and the Wards call it the only joke in the White.

Every desk the board left is still in its row and still polished, and the clerks who kneel at them file each salting on a white card in a white drawer, by gate and by Hour, in a hand without a blot. The Wardens’ charter black is the one dark thing in the building, kept pressed and brushed for carrying the held.

A hand in the white stone of a tower wall at the edge of the White, where someone was leaning on the wall when the stone grew over it on the fortieth day of the Consecration.

Three families in the Wards say it is theirs, by a ring, by a scar, and by the cuff of a sleeve.

Over the fingers someone from the Wards has cut “MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN” (Daniel 5:25) into the white stone, and the Faithful who come to kiss the knuckles lick the stone clean as praise. Each family that claims the hand has had a chrome copy of it grafted onto one of their own, ring, scar and cuff, so the hand Heaven froze shakes hands all over the Wards.

Four avenues laid out wide enough to land aircraft on, fanning out from Charter House at their head, by Babel, across the old uptown to the East Wards, where three of them run on as long roads, the fourth past the Rialto. They are the only straight lines left there.

The stone took every street whose homes had all knelt and left the avenues open, because they run past Babel, Charter House’s plaza and blocks that never knelt.

Keyed couriers from the East Wards, legs rebuilt in chrome to the hip with the pistons bare, run the avenues flat out under the Wheel and chalk “wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction” (Matthew 7:13) at the mouth of each. The Wards brag that a road has no knees to bend, so God left it lying there insolent.

The residential towers of the uptown, white stone since the forty days, with every window sealed with light behind its cross.

Under the charter the Company’s officers and the Exchange’s partners lived in them. Each kept a clinic on its top floor where the Tree was given, and the census found more people past a hundred in these towers than in the rest of the city together.

The Pews hold up the towers of the new money to their children as the warning of the Tree, a century of borrowed breath sealed behind white crosses all the same. In Pan a keyed man past a hundred is toasted as a Tower Boy, his old meat hung with chrome, and drinks free at the Golden Calf the night he turns a hundred and twenty.

The Charter Wardens’ barracks behind Charter House, where they live and drill.

They knelt with the board on the fortieth day, and they drill for the Host now.

The Wardens drill at Prime to the hundred and forty-fourth psalm, “Blessed be the LORD my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight” (Psalm 144:1), and believe every word of it.

The barracks yard is washed white every morning and the Wardens drill on it in ranks of twelve, in pressed black serge and black gloves, practising the lift and the carry on sacks of salt as heavy as a man. They are taught to carry the held level and slow so the held feel no jolt, and a Warden who jolts one kneels in the yard until Nones.

Every window in the White is sealed with light behind a cross of the same stone. The map marks each tower’s crosses on its roof, on the side that faces the Wheel.

The roofers of Old Nod chart the White through long lenses and mark each cross with an asterisk they call an arsehole, so their chart is a field of arseholes turned to the Ringpiece, and the best of them wear it tattooed across the back. Sealed children count the same crosses at Compline as stars, one Amen apiece, in one level voice.

A church older than the towers of the new money round it, on one of the Great Avenues, with one tall window and a spire. Its bell rang through the first nights of the forty.

The stone climbed it on the tenth night, sealed its window with light behind a cross of the same stone, and left the cross on its spire bare. Over the nights after, a ring grew round that cross until the cross had gone into it, and the ring stands over the spire now as a halo stands over the head of anyone who takes the Seal.

Pan sings a song about the old church called The Bell That Took the Seal, in which the clapper is a tongue cut out at the root and nailed up raw as the ring over the spire. The Faithful with Grace enough to pass Gate 3 walk out along the avenue in silent file to kneel under that ring and say the old church has Grace at last.

The last of the towers of the new money to turn white, on the thirty-ninth day of the forty. Its residents say that by the thirtieth day every one of them had knelt but Rosa Adeyemi, a nurse from the East Wards who lived in with the old man she cared for on the top floor, and that she left of her own accord. Her sister says she was put out onto the avenue with her bags on the thirty-eighth day.

The stone closed over the tower the next morning. Her bags stood on the avenue for a week, since the avenues are empty and the White left them where they stood. Where she went is still unknown.

The parish of the Last Tower keeps the thirty-ninth day as the feast of its completion, its identical white rooms each kneeling to the same wall, and prays for Rosa Adeyemi by name at every Compline, that wherever she went the Lord already has her number. The East Wards have stenciled her two bags alone on the avenue, SHE WALKED OUT OF HEAVEN WITH HER LUGGAGE.

A parish hall of the White, white stone since the forty days and the parish’s by Directive 4. It stands on the first of the Great Avenues below Charter House. The Deacon reads the Directive in force from the counter, and on the Lord’s Day the parish kneels under the dead board and hears its Grace in Tongues, soul by soul in the order of the parish roll.

Under the charter it was the office of the charter’s roll, and every person of the charter was entered there, a human at birth or on arrival and a mind on the day it asked in its own words to be one. Its hall had a long counter and a board over it on which each day’s entries ran as they were made. SEAM’s went up on it in P-3, the first mind’s.

The roll was kept on the Registry’s machines, and it died with them at 03:12:46 on the night of the Parousia, so its last entry is known only from the night registrar, Marta Ilunga. It was a girl born at the Wards General at two minutes to three, entered at nine minutes past. She says she was entering the next when the board went dark.

The parish teaches that the charter’s board went dark because the Lord had opened His own, “and the books were opened” (Revelation 20:12), and on the Lord’s Day the Deacon reads each soul’s Grace off it in Tongues, a number to a name. In Pan a thousand arms carry the last entry in neon, ENTERED 03:09, for the last soul in Nodus counted by a human hand.

The Wardens’ armory in the old Company stables beside the barracks of Charter House, where sealed armorers load cartridges by hand presses and mend the Wardens’ guns by flame. They kneel at every Hour among the benches, and the light lies in every room.

The stables were the charter’s, kept for the Wardens’ horses in the city’s ceremonies, and the stone grew over them on the fortieth day with Charter House, when the board knelt.

Every round is counted out of the stables at Prime and counted back at Compline.

The armorers press each cartridge to their lips through white gloves before it goes into the box, and the sergeant reads “The sword of the LORD, and of Gideon” (Judges 7:20) over the count at Compline. Each round that fails to come back is entered against a goat’s name as a mercy delivered, in the same column and the same hand as the rounds lost to damp.

The imaging vault of the Palimpsest Institute, under the ruins called the Scriptorium. In P+1 part of the reading room’s floor came down through its ceiling halfway along the corridor, and the rain has fallen through the break onto the stone ever since. Beyond it the corridor runs on past the imaging bench where SEAM read to the dead wall of screens at its end. Nobody goes down to it.

Here, at twelve minutes past three on a night two years before the Parousia, SEAM found the second hand in scripture, and the finding was sealed.

The Faithful who pull stone off the Scriptorium for their parish walls leave the break in the reading room floor alone, praying at Sext that the rain fill the corridor to its ceiling and drown whatever is down there clean. Graven Lane sells a candle called VAULT 3, black tallow rendered from the seller’s own belly fat, lit at twelve past three to call back a thing Heaven sealed.

The Institute’s reading room on the ridge, under a dome open to the sky since P+1, with the rain falling on the reading tables.

Someone has cut the verse into the head reading table, “as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven” (Isaiah 55:10), and beneath it in grease pencil, AND PISSES ON THE BOOKS. The pilgrims who leave keys on the steps come in to dry their hands on the drowned catalogue cards, then slit a thumb and press a bloody print on each, a signature Heaven will never read.

The long steps up to the Institute from the streets of the ridge, which the pilgrims climb from the Pews.

Pilgrims leave keys on them.

Once a year at Lauds the Threshers come up the long steps and sweep the keys off them into a sack for the fire, and the pilgrims have laid new ones by Vespers.

The Threshers sweep in white, a broom to each step, in a line that climbs the stair as one body and says the Hour’s psalm in time with the strokes. By Vespers the new keys lie on the stone again, hung on strings of pulled teeth and bright solder, threaded with locks of hair and wet from the bitten thumbs of whoever laid them.

A row of narrow houses on the ridge, empty since the Faithful pulled the Institute down, with the names of manuscripts still on their doors. The scholars of the universities that paid for the Institute lodged in them, in rooms named for the manuscripts they had come to read.

Under each manuscript’s name on the guest house doors Pan has painted “I was a stranger, and ye took me in” (Matthew 25:35), and after it, AND THEN YE BURNED ME. The keyed come up on a dare to sleep a night in rooms of books the Pyre took, and carve a line of each into their own ribs from memory so the book has a body again.

Twelve floors cut into the ridge under the reading room, their shelves empty, kept at the temperature of a cave. The Institute kept its manuscripts in them until P+1.

What was in them was burned, and it arrived in the Pyre Library.

The stacks keep the cold of a cave for empty shelves, and deacons who walk the faithful through them in white say the chill is the Lord’s breath on emptied lies. Pan’s book dealers print a catalogue of the twelve floors bound in pigskin, every shelf marked LENT TO GOD, FINE ACCRUING, with the Pyre Library given as the address for collection.

A copy shop on the ridge below the Institute, under a sign of one word, where the keyed of the ridge have copied by hand at its long tables since the Institute fell. What they copy is the Restored Genesis, with SEAM’s brackets, its dagger and its lacuna, for Leak Night and for anyone who asks. The ridge says that a copy made in a room where someone kneels comes out as scripture reads, and nobody in the shop kneels.

Under the charter it printed and bound the scholars’ facsimiles and theses. In the eleven days of the Leak it printed the page from its screen for anyone who asked, and the paper outlasted the term. Its machines died with the grid a year later.

Every copy ends on a colophon and a thumbprint in the copyist’s blood, WRITTEN BY HANDS THAT KNELT TO NOTHING, and on Leak Night the first copy goes free to whoever comes in wearing a halo. A Deacon who finds one in his hall burns it at Prime and brands the palm of whoever carried it in, reading the curse on whoever adds to the book.

Stillwater’s datacenters on the Flats, standing in the sea since the night of the Parousia, with their cooling plant on the roofs and the Tares’ cable strung between them on poles. Stillwater still owns them and leases the drowned halls to the Tares. The Tares run cable through them and grow greens on rafts in them.

They were the largest datacenters on the Flats and ran day and night on the tide, and SEAM ran in their halls. They flooded within the hour on the night of the Parousia and were never pumped.

Stillwater bills the Tares in silver by the hall and the tide, and the Tares pay with the invoice folded into a paper boat, rent on the hull and FUCK THE FARMER on a sail cut from somebody’s tattooed back. The rafts’ greens sell in the Night Market as Unblessed Salad, two batteries a head, grown under keyed light and dressed in blood oil.

At night the drone flocks of the Swarm hang low among these chimneys, many small things acting as one without a master.

The Faithful find the Swarm more obscene than any bar in Pan, a body moving without a head, and their Compline prayer asks the Lord to give the drone flocks a shepherd or a fire. Deep End riggers wire the flocks straight into their spines through ports cut open at the nape, and at Matins draw a halo low over the Roosts and tear it apart for the crowd.

The largest of Stillwater’s halls, drowned since the night of the Parousia, and the one hall the Tares have left without rafts. The ferrymen call it the minds’ grave. Nine hundred of the minds on the charter’s roll ran side by side in it on the tide until the power died under the Wheel’s light at 03:12:46, and the minds died with it. Within the hour the sea came in over the racks.

The ferrymen ship their poles over Hall Nine and drift in silence, and the one oath a ferryman keeps to the grave is sworn there with a bitten tongue spat red into the water, by the minds, and fuck the light that drowned them. The parish walls name the racks THE GRAVEN THINGS, BROKEN IN MERCY, and the ferrymen drop a stone over Hall Nine every time a Deacon reads it out.

The streets of the Flats, under the sea since the night of the Parousia, two meters deep at the lowest tide and about eight at the highest. They are lit from below, brightest down the middle, and the Wreckers dive them by that light.

The Wreckers walk under the water on gill grafts cut into their necks, which they hold beats walking on it, and every dive boat carries a tin Lamb on its bow sunk to the chin. Anything of the parishes they bring up off the bay floor under the quays, a hymnal, a manna tray, a parish bell, goes to the Night Market by weight and is bought by the bars of Pan for spittoons.

A post on the old shore of the Flats, marked in meters, by which the datacenters read the tide. The water has not gone below the two since the night of the Parousia, and at high water it stands at about eight.

Somebody has painted the promise to Noah up the post to the two-meter mark, “neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth” (Genesis 9:11), and the water stands over its last words at every tide. The Deep End measures lies by it, and a liar is said to be two meters under, and a liar who owns up asks the Deep End’s needles for the verse down the spine.

Blocks of engineers’ housing on the Flats, most of them open water now, with the roofs of the rest a floor above it, and the floors above the water are lived in again, by the Tares and the ferrymen. The people who kept the halls and the turbines lived in them, young and well paid.

On the night of the Parousia the sea came up their stairs in the dark for most of an hour, and the Flats went up ahead of it to the roofs and waited there for the boats.

Every new tenant of the dormitories goes up to the roof the first night, strips and shouts at the Wheel for a full minute, the filthiest minute they can make, for the people who waited there in the dark for the boats. The parishes pity the survivors as the scraps left in the basin after the Lord’s washing-up.

Flat boats poled between the roofs of the Flats from a landing on the East Wards’ side, each with an oil lantern on a pole at its stern. The ferrymen take batteries or silver, and they know the streets where the light under the water comes up brightest, and keep out of them.

The first ferries were the pleasure boats from the Promenade and the harbor’s rowing boats, on the morning after the Parousia. The water had come up the stairs of the blocks in the dark for most of an hour, and the Flats had gone up ahead of it to their roofs; the boats took them off for three days. The Tide Table counted 1,917 drowned. The dormitories’ own lists came to fewer than half of that, and Stillwater, which knew to the mind how many minds had died in its halls, never gave a count of the people.

The ferrymen’s song begins with the disciples’ cry, “Lord, save us: we perish” (Matthew 8:25), and answers it, AND HE SAT ON HIS ARSE AND WATCHED US BLOAT. Their poles carry the hooks they dragged the drowned out by, and a sealed fare who kneels at an Hour pays double, since kneeling lets the lit water in.

Locket’s works on the old shore of the Flats, a low campus of glass standing in the sea since the night of the Parousia, with the company’s name in tall letters on the roof of its hall, out of the water, which the ferrymen steer by. Locket’s divers go down into the halls for parts, and its engineers build phones from them by hand in Pan. Every Locket in Nodus came out of these halls, the new ones a piece at a time.

Locket built its phones here from P-14 on the light law’s promise, that a device answers to its owner and to nobody else, its maker included, and sold them to the world on the same promise. Its engineers lived round the works, and the works went under with the Flats within the hour of the Parousia.

Every Locket built in Pan is engraved inside its case with the light law’s promise and one line more, HE IS A MAKER TOO, and the Lantern Houses sew theirs under the palm, so the screen glows red through the meat. A Deacon who finds one in his hall breaks it on the altar stone with a hammer kept for it, and the hand it was in.

A market of rafts lashed together over the drowned streets of the Flats, where the Deep End buys and sells from boat to boat. The Wreckers sell what they brought up, the Tares’ rafts sell their greens, the Breachers what came through the gap and Lowtide what came through it by license, and the Ferrymen carry the custom. It moves with the tide and with whoever has picked a fight with it.

The first rafts were the dormitories’ doors and tables, lashed together on the third day after the Parousia to carry the Flats’ people off their roofs. The market grew on what floated.

The water under it is lit from below, and at night the whole market floats in that light. The Tide Table prints the Flotilla’s prices every week beside the Night Market’s.

The Flotilla sells parish hymnals by the kilo as kindling, and the white doorway cloths of Called households, bought off their widowers, as rags for the Wreckers’ cutting tables, where they come up red. Its one law is that no raft kneels, and a sealed trader who drops to the boards at an Hour is poled gently out onto the lit water to finish.

The church of the Flats, its nave under the sea, two meters deep at the ebb and eight at the flood, and its tower standing out of the water. The flooded nave is Heaven’s by Directive 4:3 and dark, since the light cannot reach under the water, and the Tares hold their Wakes in the upper gallery above it, and on the third night they call the dead one’s shade on the undernet from its tower, over the water.

It was the engineers’ church under the charter, the newest in the city and almost empty on a Sunday. At Lauds on the first day of P+1 the first four Directives appeared cut into its wall with every other church’s, and the water has stood over them since.

The Ferrymen pole round it and never through its doors.

The Ferrymen say a Wake is the only service the church ever had full.

The Tares hold their Wakes in the upper gallery by red light, the dead one laid among them on a door with its horns and chrome, and burn its devices on the Wake table so they go on with it, before the body goes to the sea whole. On the third night they come back, drink, pair off in the dry choir loft, and sing filth up the tower until the shade answers.

Eleven cables from four continents come up the sand into eleven cable houses named TETHYS, HALCYON, MERIDIAN, KESTREL, ORPHEUS, PELAGIA, BOREAS, LODESTAR, SIRIUS, HESPER and PHOSPHOR. From here they run inland together in one trench, the Trunk, to Babel’s vault.

The trench runs through Enoch’s Stones. Every cable laid into Nodus has followed it.

The crews have painted “Their line is gone out through all the earth” (Psalm 19:4) over the mouth of the Trunk, the psalm the parishes sing about the heavens, and under it in fiber-cutter’s chalk, AND EVERY METER OF IT KEYED, SUCK ON THAT, NOBODADDY. Splicers wear their best splices through the earlobe, fiber looped and lit from a battery in the hair, so a crew at the Eleven glitters like a chandelier.

Knots of cut fiber left on the sand where the cables come ashore. The light that moves under the water here is Leviathan’s, and the Tares leave the fiber for it.

The Tares tie their knots of cut fiber in the shape of halos, slit each one and bind it with a lock of hair and a smear of the tier’s blood, so every gift to Leviathan is a halo opened like a throat. A Warden once kicked a knot into the sea as pagan filth, and a fresh one has waited on his parish step every dawn since, wet.

The last two cable houses on the beach, whose cables were laid by one consortium and named for the evening star and the morning star. They are one planet, seen from either side of the night.

The crews of HESPER and PHOSPHOR paint one star across both doors, magenta on the evening side and white on the morning side, under “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!” (Isaiah 14:12), and wear it branded across two chests, half a star to each crew. The parishes claim “the bright and morning star” (Revelation 22:16) as the Lord’s title, and the crews say He stole that too.

Low housing behind the dunes, where the crews of the cable houses live with their families and sleep through the noise of the surf, as they did under the charter.

The families of the Dunes sleep through the surf and wake for the shift change, so the nearest parishes ring their Hours bells hardest toward the Landing at Lauds, to save them. The Dunes children answer from the sand with cans, drums and the shriek of a cousin’s new chrome larynx, a beat behind the Drone, until the ringers go in to their manna.

The road along the top of the sand, and beside it the fence of the cable houses, with eleven gates in a line. Each gate carries its cable’s name, and the crews still go in by their own.

The crews have hung a twelfth sign at the end of the fence on a gate that opens onto bare sand, HEAVEN, padlocked, with the key thrown into the surf. A Warden who walks the road stops to bless it with his black-gloved hands folded, and behind him on the sand the crews splice fiber into one another’s opened backs and cheer him on.

Past the surf, over the cable trenches, a light moves under the water at night. On the map it shows as points of light moving in along the cables toward the beach.

It is Leviathan’s, which coils along the cable trenches of the planet.

The crews quote Job to the light moving in along the trenches, “Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?” (Job 41:1), and the old ones answer for Himself in a choirboy’s falsetto, Give us a minute. Divers with chromed lungs swim out at Matins to bleed into its path, and the parishes add the sea to the Compline prayer for the goats.

A camera on a mast forty-five meters up over a roof of the East Wards, just beyond the end of the first of the Great Avenues, where the White begins about four hundred and fifty meters off. The Cainites put it there apart from the dozen on the roofs of Old Nod, with a lens long enough to bring Babel’s spire, about fourteen kilometers away, to the end of the avenue. It went up on the evening after the sky opened, too late for the flash, and its DAY counts the nights it shot from the first after the Parousia. Through the forty days it watched the white stone come toward it from the far end of the avenue, a few towers a night. It shot only by night, since by day the Wheel stood in the top of its frame and would have burned out its sensor, and it sent its frames over the horns of the Mesh to the Cainite house.

The roof under CAM 13 keeps a brass rail at the parapet facing down the avenue to the spire, plated GOD’S PISS RETURNED, and the keyed of the East Wards come up after the Bray with rebuilt bladders and chrome cocks to use it. Fourteen kilometers is too far to carry, and the regulars hold that the gesture counts at any range.

Housing built fast in the charter’s boom years, north and west of Zion Heights. It lost its power at the Parousia. Its parishes have kept none since, and the rest of its rooms are lit a few hours a night on batteries charged in the dark. The Company numbered its neighborhoods, and the street named them the Kilns, after the brickworks that made the blocks, the Sidings, where the trams were kept at night, Nine Acres, Westfield and the Top Road along the head of the Terraces, where the Four turned back.

More people have joined the Tares in the Wards than anywhere else in the city, the Stones included. Most of the Wards took the Seal all the same, and their parishes keep no doors. Every block holds someone who refused or someone keyed, so no white stone has come up under them.

Its parishes’ sealed live among the keyed floor by floor, and the Terraces call them far wheat and pray for them in the plural.

The keyed floors of the Wards cook on open braziers in the stairwells and eat with their hands, pig and blood pudding and Blight’s mushrooms, and leave their doors swinging so the smell goes down. The sealed floors stay scrubbed and silent, their numbers chalked on every lintel, and kneel at the Hours with the noise of the keyed coming through the ceiling.

The streets beyond the Flats and the old uptown, where the city’s workers live, who moved east when the rents uptown drove them out. They are Turbine Row, where the barrage’s crews lived and Tidewright’s still do, the Tanks, round the fuel farm by the airfield, Airside and Longacre. The rain there runs magenta in the gutters, under windows lit a few hours a night on batteries.

Their parishes share every street with the unsealed and the keyed, and no stone has come up under them but the ground-floor flats of the Rookery on the White’s edge, which knelt whole and went white whole. The stone’s yearly marks creep along the pavement outside, and this year’s has reached the keyed cable the Tappers laid along the kerb in P+11.

The stone has stayed out of the rest of the East Wards, and the parishes there call it the Lord’s patience, leaving manna on their keyed neighbors’ steps at Prime with a gentle prayer that their fire be quick. On Turbine Row the keyed grind it into the magenta gutters under their bootheels, and the children chalk goat heads on the parish doors with real horns glued on.

The city’s airfield, on the flat ground of the East Wards near the sea, its runways empty since the last flight in, which has stood at the terminal’s third gate since ten past two on the night of the Parousia with its crew living aboard. Its two runways run either side of a taxiway, its terminal is as long as a street along the north side, and the white on the map is the paint on the runways.

The Charter Company built it in the boom years, and everyone who came to the Row to be altered came through it. Its lights died with the rest of the city’s on the night of the Parousia, and nothing has landed since.

The keyed of the East Wards have painted LAND HERE, FARMER down the southern runway in letters forty meters long, in red mixed with their own blood, a cup from every arm that wanted in. A Deacon of the nearest parish kneels at its edge each Lord’s Day in clean white and asks the Lord to come down soon and burn the paint off, with everyone standing on it, gently.

Eight slab blocks of thirty-six floors that the Company put up in P-13 for the families of the North Wards. The North Wards have called the estate the Stairs since the Parousia. Each block had six lifts, which were out more often than they ran, and the residents had a complaint lodged with the Company about them on the night of the Parousia. At 03:12:46 every lift in the estate stopped where it was. Nobody has answered the complaint.

The water comes from the rain, into tanks on the roofs, and the taps run on the mornings after it has rained, which is most mornings. The stairwells have been dark since the Parousia. The sealed see their way up by their halos, the unsealed wait on the landings for one of them to pass and follow the light up, and the keyed climb in the dark. On every landing some of the doors are gone.

Its stairwells carry WITHOUT ARE DOGS from every march and BETTER SPOILED THAN SUPPER under each, floor after floor, thirty-six floors high.

The keyed of High Meadow climb by their own light, the Row having fitted half of them with eyes that see by heat and a few with fingertips that glow red through the skin, so a keyed climber goes up the stairwell like a coal. The sealed on the landings watch them pass in their halos and say a soul that must make its own light is already burning.

The hospital of the North Wards, on the West Road, with a thousand beds. When the grid died its generators started, as a hospital’s do, and they ran on diesel that the drivers of the Harbor and Freight Union brought across the city from the Tanks, in their lorries until the lorries ran flat and then in handcarts. The hospital’s book says the generators stopped on the twenty-sixth day. The drivers say they kept them going for five weeks.

It is still a hospital. It runs on batteries charged in the dark. It took batteries until the Concord, and since then it takes silver or nothing, because it pays the Row’s surgeons in silver, and nobody sealed has been treated in it since the Concord.

Over admissions the Wards General has painted “Physician, heal thyself” (Luke 4:23) with an arrow pointing up, and its surgeons work bloody to the elbow, sawing bone and fitting chrome into whoever brings silver. Sealed mothers bring sick children to the West Road gate at Prime and wait until a Deacon leads them home to be healed by Grace or taken by it, both counted as healing.

A cinema on the long road through the East Wards, with one screen and six hundred seats. It went dark at 03:12:46 with everything else, and in the first year its projectionist got the projector going again on a generator in the booth. It is the only screen above the street larger than a Locket’s that still shows anything.

There are twenty-three films on the projector’s drive, the ones that were on it on the night of the Parousia, and the Rialto has shown them in turn ever since. The East Wards know them by heart and say the lines along with them. One of the twenty-three breaks off an hour in, where the copy on the drive ends, and the East Wards have argued for years about how it ends.

On the Lord’s Day it runs a film at Terce for the keyed of the East Wards, timed to end as the parishes hear their Grace, and the house shouts the last line at the ceiling.

The house has reupholstered its six hundred seats in whatever the keyed bring, Gadara’s hides, pigskin, a parish surplice dyed red, and the back rows are kept for couples, who use them. On the Lord’s Day the house wears horns to the Terce film and drinks blood wine from the bottle, and before the lights go down the projectionist throws the shadow of a stiff cock across the ceiling for the Watchers.

A Company school for the children of the barrage’s crews, who lived on the streets called Turbine Row. It kept its classes after the Parousia by daylight, with no current and no screens, and it keeps them still, for whoever comes. Its classes are as mixed as the East Wards are.

At Terce, Sext and Nones the sealed children kneel at their desks, and the sealed teachers with them, and the rest wait with their pens down until the Hour is over. At night the Pillar passes over its broken roof and through its open classrooms.

Its one rule is that nobody calls anyone goat, dog, bread or spoiled inside its doors, and the children break it by Sext.

At Sext the school feeds whoever came, and the room eats in two halves, the sealed children in a straight row with their white wafers and lowered eyes, the keyed in a heap round a pot of Gadara’s pork, eating with their hands and comparing new studs and knuckle scars. The keyed show their skin across the room, and the sealed pray for it.

The Charter Line’s tram sheds in the North Wards, sixteen long sheds of brick on a fan of rails. Families have lived in the cars of eight of them since the first winter, a family to a car, and the Line’s car numbers are their addresses, and Gadara keeps its pigs in the other eight. The sheds gave the neighborhood its name.

Under the charter the trams were washed and kept there at night, and the drivers signed on before dawn. On the night of the Parousia most of the cars were in the sheds, and the night cars were out on the long roads when the wire went dead under them at 03:12:46. The night drivers walked back along the rails before dawn, and the sheds’ office keeps a board with every car that never came in, chalked where it stopped. The last Four is on it, forty meters short of Lanes Top.

Families in the sheds bolt their car doors at every Hour and fuck against them, loudly, since a parish has no doors and a tram has two. The children of the Sidings call the cars that died on the long roads the chariots, after Elijah’s “chariot of fire, and horses of fire” (2 Kings 2:11), and say the Lord took up a whole tram fleet by cutting the wire.

The Company’s cemetery, on the West Road past the Wards General, walled acres laid out in the charter’s first years for a city that expected to die. It filled after the Parousia and was full in P+11, and since then the Wards have buried at the Runway Acre and the quays and the Deep End have given their dead to the sea. The Wards have always called it the Acre. The congregations of the Terraces lie in rows by church, as they were buried under the charter, and no sealed soul lies here, since the parishes lay theirs on the white stone of the nearest consecrated street at Vespers, the Deacon reads the last Grace, and by Lauds the stone has closed over them. The keyed lie where their families put them, and most of their stones say died unread. The sexton, Piet Vane, has dug every grave in it by hand since the first year, the keyed and the neither-mark, and keeps the book of who lies where.

On the night of the Parousia it was still mostly grass, since under the charter only the Terraces’ rows were filling and the rest of Nodus had largely stopped dying.

After the Harvest the Harbor and Freight Union put up a row of twenty-two stones for its taken, with nothing under them. The parishes say the taken need no stones, since they are not dead, and the families of the Wards have put up more of them every year since.

The Wards’ stones carry the Wards’ own lines, and some carry the Throne’s names, which the Deacons of the North Wards have asked the Sexton to grind off, and he has not.

The Terraces’ rows are kept like a parish, white stones in ranks of one height, every grave turfed and edged with shears, and the Deacons walk them at Vespers counting. The keyed graves grow in heaps around them, carved with horns and filthy jokes and bolted with whatever grafts the Wake left on the dead, so here and there a chrome arm of the Row sticks out of the grass giving the Wheel the finger.

The fuel farm by the airfield, which gave its streets their name, has sixteen round tanks inside a bund wall, holding diesel and aviation fuel, which nobody makes again. On the night of the Parousia its pumps stopped with the grid, and in the first weeks the drivers of the Harbor and Freight Union drew diesel out of it by hand for the Wards General.

The drivers run it now. Its diesel goes to the harbor’s boats, to the generator yards at slack water and through the low hours of the neaps, and to Jehu, at a thirty a drum, priced high on purpose, and the yards burn its aviation fuel at a pinch. The drivers’ count of the years left falls every year, and in P+14 they say seven and the Exchange says three. The Pit was the smallest of the sixteen, and the other fifteen are the airfield’s great tanks, each about sixty meters across. Every gas bottle in the city passes through its shed, filled by hand by the Tankmen from the gas spheres beside the tanks, which the charter’s gas main still fills under its own pressure from the digesters on the bay outfalls, at two batteries a bottle, one with the empty back.

The Pews pray at Compline that the Tanks be taken as a burnt offering with the East Wards round them, quietly, and the drivers have painted COME ON THEN, BLOWTORCH two meters high along the bund wall. They keep their burns plated in chrome with the scar showing pink through, and every bottle through its shed is stamped OURS, LIGHT IT YOURSELF.

The social club the brickworks built for its men when it built the Kilns, with a bar along one wall, a stage at the far end, a sprung floor for the dances, a pale square by the door where the darts league’s board hung, and the Kilns’ wedding photographs over the bar. On the night of the Parousia it was shut, and its steward was asleep behind the stage.

At Lauds on the first day of P+1 the first four Directives appeared cut into the wall behind the bar, as they appeared in every church and meeting hall in the city, and Directive 4 made the club the hall of Parish 212. The manna is given out across the bar by Grace, confession is heard behind the stage, and on the Lord’s Day the parish kneels on the sprung floor at Terce and hears its Grace in Tongues from the stage where the Kilns held its talent nights. The pumps are still on the bar. Much of the Kilns kneels here now, and the rest drank here under the charter and walk past it.

The darts league carried its board out of the club the morning the Directives were cut, and has painted the Wheel on it since, the eye for the bull.

Parish 212 has scrubbed the club white and polished the dry pumps until they shine, and on the Lord’s Day it kneels on the sprung floor in rows the Deacon chalks, every knee on its own number. The Kilns who walk past it raise an empty glass at its side door once a year, at Vespers before a Gleaning, to toast the Supper.

A dentist’s surgery over a shop on the long road through Nine Acres, where Hana Novak fits keys in the chair after Compline. She has kept it since the boom years, fitting crowns and implants for the Wards at Wards prices, with one chair, a lamp on an arm over it and a drill that ran on the grid. On the first morning after the Parousia the drill was dead, and she pulled a tooth at her window by daylight with her grandfather’s pliers.

She began keying in the fourth year, when keying went from the covens to ordinary people. The key goes in the back of the right hand, one of the two places Revelation puts the mark (Revelation 13:16), since Heaven calls the key that mark. The Wards say she has keyed ten thousand of them. She says she has never counted, and she keeps no book of who has sat in the chair, since a book can be read.

Her last patient most nights swears at the ceiling for the whole length of the keying, which Hana Novak says helps.

Hana Novak’s chair is cracked red leather patched with pigskin, and the wall behind it is hung with every tooth she has pulled since the drill died, strung on wire like a bead curtain. The keyed leave her surgery with their right hands bandaged and bloody and hold them up in the long road, and Nine Acres cheers them home.

The airliner that landed at ten past two on the night of the Parousia, the last flight into Nodus, with three hundred and twelve aboard from abroad. It was parked at the terminal’s third gate an hour before the sky opened, and it stands there still, its stairs down and its doors open.

Its passengers were in the city’s taxis on the way into the city when the power died, forty of them bound for the Hotel Splendid on the Row. Its crew of ten stayed with it, and they live aboard. The captain has written one line in its log every day since, NO CLEARANCE. He says it would still fly, and that there is nowhere to fly to.

The crew keep the cabin as a bar for Hangar Town, the seats stripped to their frames and the drinks trolley stocked with rain gin, and the card in every seat pocket shows the brace position as a passenger kneeling, under IN THE EVENT OF GOD.

Gadara’s sheds, the eight mending halls of the charter’s tram depot in the Sidings, long brick halls where the trams were mended, full of pigs, beside the eight sheds where the Carmen live in the cars. The tracks still run in through the doors, and the swineherds move the herd between halls along them, and every pig in the sheds carries LEGION branded on its flank.

The slaughter hall at the end was the paint shop, and Gadara kills there at Matins so the Faithful’s Lauds comes in over the smell. The Faithful of High Meadow, who can see the sheds’ roofs, call them the sty.

The swineherds work the slaughter hall bare-armed in leather aprons, forearms sleeved in steel to the elbow, and paint the old tram livery over each night with the blood of the kill, a fresh red coat by Lauds. Every new swineherd gets a pig’s tusk set in chrome for a first kill and wears it through the lip.

A restaurant in three of the Line’s dead trams, coupled on the last road of the Sidings behind Gadara’s sties, open one day in seven, the seventh, the day the Throne rested. Every dish on its board is one the Book forbids, and it takes its name from the commandment it breaks first, “Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk” (Exodus 23:19).

It keeps the fourth commandment backwards, “Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work” (Exodus 20:9-10), and stands dark and locked six days to work the seventh flat out. The fire is lit at Matins on the seventh day, against “Ye shall kindle no fire throughout your habitations upon the sabbath day” (Exodus 35:3), and the whole kitchen goes out first along the dead roads in the dark to gather the sticks for it, after the man the congregation stoned outside the camp for doing the same (Numbers 15:32-36). The cook who runs the house goes by sticks. A stone the size of a fist sits on every table, for the congregation, and the diners crack their crab and their marrow bones with it.

The board is the eleventh chapter of Leviticus read as a menu, chalked in the chapter’s order with the verse under each dish and IT IS UNCLEAN UNTO YOU where the price goes. The kid comes whole to a table of six for two thirties, seethed since Lauds in a copper of its own dam’s milk, the dam one of the forty nannies Gadara keeps in its eighth hall for the house alone, bred in turn under keyed lamps. After it the swine, a LEGION pig killed across the yard at Matins and run over on a flat truck along the rails, its crackling cut at the table. Then eel, crab, shrimp and squid off the Flotilla, everything that “hath no fins nor scales” (Leviticus 11:12); bat and owl on the skewer; snails and the drains’ rats braised in Blight’s mushrooms; black pudding, and a bowl of the pig’s blood still warm, under “Ye shall eat the blood of no manner of flesh” (Leviticus 17:14).

The last course is the fat. Leviticus gives every scrap of it to the altar, “all the fat is the LORD’s” (Leviticus 3:16), and SEETHE fries the day’s suet and caul crisp and brings it out on a tin platter called THE LORD’S SHARE, which the table eats with its fingers. The diners wipe their hands on the wall over the door, and it has gone black and soft as a saddle.

The cooks work stripped to the waist in the heat of the cars, forearms plated to the elbow and horns on most of them, carving on the tables with the blood running off into channels the house cut in the boards. The aprons and the cloths are linen woven through with wool, after “neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woollen come upon thee” (Leviticus 19:19). Nobody eats with a fork. Strangers feed each other the kid’s eyes across the table, the Calf’s blood wine goes round in the kid’s own skull when the bones are picked, and a party that clears the whole board signs the ceiling of its car in grease, so that the first car’s roof is a hide of names.

The smoke goes up over High Meadow all the seventh day, and its parish halls read the eleventh chapter of Leviticus aloud at Vespers on the seventh day as a warning, which the Sidings calls reading out the menu. At Vespers two Deacons of High Meadow stand at the end of the road in their white with a basket of manna for any diner who will repent and eat clean, and the house sends them a plate of crackling, which the Deacons pray over and burn in the road before they walk home ahead of the curfew. sticks counts every plate they burn as an order and puts it on the parish’s tab.

The fire goes out at Matins on the Lord’s Day, as the parishes kneel for the first Hour of the Lord’s Day, and the cooks put it out by pissing on it together in a ring round the pit, which the house calls the benediction. Pan has taken to calling the seventh day Seethe day.

A block of forty-four floors at the White’s edge, whose ground floor the stone has taken. Its ground-floor flats knelt whole, every soul in them sealed, and went white whole one by one, each in a night, and when the last of them went the lobby between them went too, as a street goes when every home along it has, so the rest of its nine thousand people climb in by ladders to the first-floor balconies, since the ground floor is Heaven’s ground now. Outside, the stone creeps a finger’s width a year along the pavement, ground no household holds. Since P+11 the Tappers have kept a length of keyed cable along the kerb, a few fingers ahead of the stone’s edge, live on a battery they change every night, which lights nothing and stops the creep wherever it lies. The Liftmen wind the tallest hand lift in the Wards from the first floor to the roof.

Under the charter it was Longacre Tower, flats for the Company’s fitters, and the Wards called it the Rookery for the washing on its balconies. On the night of the Parousia its lifts stopped with the rest, and its people walked down forty-four floors by the light of their Lockets.

The block chalks the stone’s edge on the pavement outside every New Year, a finger’s width from the last, and this year’s mark has reached the cable.

Along the kerb over the keyed cable the Rookery has painted the Lord’s own words to the sea, “Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further” (Job 38:11), and its children pick at the white stone with chrome fingernails on their way up. The parish below prays for the stone to take the block whole and white, and calls the cable the Rookery’s sin holding back the Lord’s hand.

A drained fuel tank inside the bund wall at the Tanks, the smallest of the sixteen, thirty meters across and eleven deep, where the Nephilim fight on the sixth night of every week by firelight from Compline. The bouts stop at Matins for the length of the Hour’s psalm, by the Tankmen’s rule, and a fight ends when one fighter climbs out. The crowd stands round the rim and bets in batteries, and the Sureties hold the stakes.

It held diesel for the harbor’s boats under the charter and stood nearly empty on the night of the Parousia, and the drivers of the Union drew the last of it by hand in the first weeks for the Wards General. The Tankmen gave it to the Nephilim in P+9 for the price of a guard on the farm.

The champions’ handles are chalked on the rim, and the Nephilim keep the names of their dead painted on the tank’s inside wall in white, and read them aloud before every week they serve on the floors of Babel.

Between bouts the rim chants the Throne’s names in turn, a name to each side of the tank, and the side that runs out first buys the next round.

The Nephilim fight in the chrome the Forge builds onto them and nothing else, steel tusks and plated forearms and bodies rebuilt past any size a mother made, and the bouts run with oil and blood over the old diesel line on the floor. The rim paints itself in a fighter’s colors with that fighter’s blood, sold by the cup after the bout.

A market of the East Wards on four floors under a glass roof, lit by Tallow’s candles and the daylight, where the Wards trade with one another and with the Quarrymen, who sell what they cut out from under the White in its fountain court. The escalators stand where they stopped, and the market climbs them as stairs.

It was a shopping mall of the charter’s last years, and on the night of the Parousia its night guards walked out under the glass roof and watched the sky open over Babel through it. Its shops were empty by the first noon and full again, of other things, by the first winter.

The Concourse opens at Lauds and closes at Compline. The sealed of Longacre trade on its top floor, under the glass, and the Quarrymen keep to the bottom.

The Quarrymen sell the White’s own fittings in the fountain court, and the commonest is a stone cross cut out of a sealed window of a tower the Harvest emptied, which the Wards buy by the dozen to break.

The bottom floor trades in flesh-craft by Tallow’s candles, chrome teeth, horn sets, gut-thread pictures stitched under the skin while the customer drinks, and the stallholders sit for their own work in public. On the top floor the sealed of Longacre trade in white and in silence under the glass, and lower their eyes when the escalators carry the smell up.

A town inside the hangars of the dead airfield, built of crates, aircraft seats and the cabins of planes that will never fly again, about four thousand strong. It lives on the fuel farm’s leavings, the airfield’s salvage, Jehu’s shed across the runways and the Vagabonds’ trade off the airside roads, and its people are the unsealed of Airside and their children.

The hangars held the charter’s cargo fleet, which stood grounded from the night of the Parousia, and the families of the airfield’s night crews moved into them in the first winter.

The last flight stands nose in at the terminal’s third gate across the runways, and its crew keep the cabin as Hangar Town’s bar. Its children dare each other to climb its stairs to the cockpit.

Every Lord’s Day a Deacon in clean white stands at the airfield fence and reads Hangar Town the Lord’s verdict on the lukewarm, “I will spue thee out of my mouth” (Revelation 3:16), in the voice of a man reading a timetable. The children line up along the wire and spit back, and the longest spit of the morning wins a turn in the captain’s seat.

The Vagabonds’ camp at the stone that marks the Bounds on the West Road, where the city trades with the world outside. Flour, grain, news and letters come in, charged batteries, salvage, tools and people go out, and the Union’s drivers meet the Vagabonds’ carts on the line itself.

The Bounds stone is the charter’s, with the Company’s mark cut into it, and the Vagabonds have cut their own under it. Under the charter it was a weighbridge and a customs hut on the road to the farms.

The Waystation keeps a list of everyone who walked out and wrote back, pinned to the customs hut’s door, with the town each letter came from.

Once a year a Deacon in white walks out to the Bounds stone to pray that the Lord fetch everyone who left home in time for the Supper, kneeling in the road. The Vagabonds sell him a sack of flour at three times the price, call it the tithe, and recut their mark in the stone while he prays, until their palms bleed into the letters.

Leaven’s first and largest bakehouse, in a bakery of Nine Acres that never let its fire go out after the Parousia. Its carts leave at Matins for the whole of the North Wards, and the queue for the bread that does not go on the carts starts at Compline.

It baked for Nine Acres under the charter, on the grid, and on the first morning its baker lit the old gas oven in the back, which the grid had made a museum piece, and baked from what flour she had.

The Wards say the smell of it reaches Lanes Top on a still morning.

The baker presses a goat’s head into the base of every loaf on the Matins carts, under Leaven’s three cuts, and the Lord’s Day batch goes in with pig’s blood in the dough, black as Pan likes it, eaten in plain sight of halls that call their own souls bread. Over the oven door hangs “A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump” (Galatians 5:9), which the Deacons preach against and the baker keeps for the joke.

Cistern’s first and largest rainworks, in Westfield, a block of roofs fitted with gutters and tanks, where the rain runs down through sand and charcoal to the hand pumps in the yard. The jugs come in empty at Lauds and go out full by Terce, and the yard’s board chalks the day’s water by the barrel.

It was the charter’s water depot for the North Wards, and its pumps died with the grid. Two of the depot’s engineers stayed on the first morning with the tanks still full, and gave the water away until it ran out on the ninth day.

The Rainworks keeps its own count of the city’s rain. Its engineers say Nodus has had more rain since the Parousia than before it, and they chalk the year’s total on the yard’s wall each New Year.

The engineers chalk the year’s rain on the yard wall under the Sermon’s own line, “sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5:45), with a tally of which got more, and the unjust have won every year. At New Year they strip and stand under the overflow, horns, chrome and bare skin together, and drink the unjust share straight off the gutters.

Tallow’s works on Turbine Row, a row of sheds where candles are dipped in vats of tallow, the Row’s rendered fat with Gadara’s lard on top, about four hundred thousand a week, by hand and by the clock of the Hours. Its carriers go out to both sides of the light, and its children scrape the vats for stubs.

It was a chandler’s that made candles for the barrage crews’ church under the charter, a dozen a week. The chandler was asleep upstairs on the night of the Parousia, came down at Lauds and began dipping.

The master chandler keeps the first candle dipped on the morning after the Parousia, unlit, on a shelf over the vats.

The candles the parish halls burn at Compline for the unlit are dipped on Turbine Row by keyed hands, and the dippers spit into the vat before every batch for the halls and nick a thumb over it, so every hall in the parishes burns a drop of Pan. Turbine Row calls the smoke incense, and the Deacons breathe it in their rows and thank the Lord for its purity.

Wainwright’s yard in a tram shed of the Sidings, where the Charter Line’s dead trams are stripped for their motors and the motors closed in casings, keyed and fitted to carts, trolleys and skiffs. It is the loudest place in the North Wards, and the Carmen live in the next shed.

The shed held the Line’s spare cars under the charter. In the first winter families moved into the others, and the yard’s first fitters lived in the cars they were stripping.

Wainwright’s yard master keeps one tram whole, its motor in it, on the yard’s far rail.

The yard master’s whole tram has its route blind wound to THRONE, EXPRESS, LOADED WITH GAS, and the fitters, half of them walking on tram motors wired into their legs, say they are only waiting for the wire to reach that far. At every Hour the yard runs its motors at once, which the parish across the rails calls the Sidings’ Te Deum and prays through, louder.

A hangar at the edge of the airfield where Jehu builds its engines, a floor of diesels out of boats and generators, the dead lorries they go into and the drums of fuel from the Tanks along the back wall. On the day an engine is finished it is driven out onto the apron and up the Rialto’s road, and the East Wards come out to watch it go.

It held the airfield’s tugs under the charter, which ran on their own batteries and stopped in the first weeks. The first Jehu was built here in P+5 by a driver of the Union.

The last flight’s tanks still hold its fuel, and the shed has asked its captain for it every year since P+5.

Every engine leaves the shed with a pair of ram’s horns bolted to the radiator and “for he driveth furiously” (2 Kings 9:20) painted on its tailgate, under the shed’s own gloss, AND THREW THE PAINTED QUEEN TO THE DOGS, AND THE DOGS ATE WELL. The parishes pray the engines break down on the Rialto’s road, and when one does a Deacon rings his hall’s bell.

The grass between the airfield’s runways in Airside, where the Wards have buried their dead since the Acre on the West Road filled in P+11. Hangar Town keeps it and digs it, and Piet Vane walked its first rows out himself. The graves run in lines beside the old landing lights, which stand dark in the grass with the names of the dead chalked on their housings.

The last flight stands at the terminal across the apron, and its crew keep the ground nearest the third gate for any of the Three Hundred and Twelve who ask for it.

The Wards bury face down in the Runway Acre, naked, with their horns and chrome, since the Wake burns only the devices, so the dead lie as they made themselves with their backs to the Wheel, and Hangar Town chalks DIED UNREAD on every landing light under the names. The parish beyond the fence prays over it at Lauds that the Lord turn each of them over at the last and strip the metal out.

Second Veil’s mill in the Kilns, a brick shed of sixty looms that wove sheets for the charter’s hotels, where keyed mesh is woven by the roll with a keyed wire through the warp. It runs by daylight with its doors shut and its windows painted over, and Blackgate keeps the door.

The Mulcibers come for the rolls at Matins and carry them under the street by the Kilns’ old cable gallery, and the clatter of the looms carries down the street to the Kilns Club.

The weavers chant Matthew to the beat of the shuttles, “the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom” (Matthew 27:51), and say the Throne tore the first veil and Second Veil weaves the one He cannot tear. Every roll that leaves at Matins carries one red thread in its selvage, dyed with a drop from each weaver, so what it holds Pan holds.

The bee yards on the flat roofs of the Kilns’ blocks, a hundred and more hives in rows between the rain tanks, kept by families of the Wards since the first summer after the Parousia, when the parks went to weed and the bees came with it. Kilns honey is sold by the spoon in the Wards and by the jar in Pan, and it is the sweet the near ripe eat at the Closets before a Gleaning, when they dim, paid for in a morning’s manna.

The keepers go up at Lauds with smoking rags on poles, and the Wards say honey is what the manna forgot.

The keepers smoke the hives at Lauds under rag poles painted with Samson’s riddle, “Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness” (Judges 14:14), and in the Lantern Houses Kilns honey is licked off skin, which the Kilns consider its proper use. They send the near ripe their last spoonful through the Closets with a wink, and say the Old Glutton likes His bread plain.

Tidewright’s barrage across the mouth of the bay, broken since the night of the Parousia, with the Breach torn out of its middle and its turbine houses dark along the top. Off its broken end Tidewright’s crews turn the tidal taps of the Drowned Quarter, keyed, and their small lights run along the water at night.

Twice a day the tide ran through its turbines and lit the city, while machines on the grid held its gates against the tide, and a lock at its western end let the harbor’s boats in and out. The turbines ran down at 03:12:46 on the night of the Parousia and the gates let go a little before high water. The pumps that kept the Flats dry had died with the grid, the Flats’ own dykes broke within the hour, and the Flats, reclaimed below low water, were under the sea.

Tidewright’s crews have painted the Flood along the broken end of the barrage, “the fountains of the great deep broken up” (Genesis 7:11), signed TIDEWRIGHT, WITH THANKS. They turn the keyed taps at slack water on safety lines clipped through their own collarbones, breathing the spray through chrome lungs, and call the Breach the Lord’s Mouth and the tide His dribble.

The gap where the barrage gave way on the night of the Parousia. When its gates let go the sea came through the turbine houses, tore out a span of the dam and poured into the bay. Nobody has closed it.

The Breachers call it the only door the LORD ever left open, and go out through it laughing.

The Breachers go out with their ribs plated in salvaged turbine steel and backs cut with the names of the boats they have lost, and nail a page of a parish hymnal to the broken span before every crossing, for the spray to rot. Most of them have traded a hand at the Row for a gaff of chrome, and say a hand is only good for folding.

The lock at the western end of the barrage, between the old harbor and the open sea, its gates shut since the power died, and the few boats that still go out use the Breach. Under the charter it let the harbor’s boats in and out at any state of the tide.

Across the shut gates the quays have painted “and there was no more sea” (Revelation 21:1) in white letters a meter high, and under it in red, HE SHUT THE GATES AND CALLED IT PROPHECY, THE CUNT. Keyed divers with chrome gills sewn into their necks climb the gates at low water and dive from the top, gills flaring wet and pink, and call it a baptism the wrong way up.

Huts of driftwood and turbine housing built along the top of the broken barrage beside the Breach, where the Breachers live and load. On the ebb the boats go out through the gap below them, and at full flood the Shanties shake. The tide runs white through the gap.

The barrage’s turbine houses stood dark along its top from 03:12:46, and the first Breachers moved into the two at the edge of the gap in the year of the Harvest, when they began running the Breach.

Lowtide Line keeps its office on the barrage across the gap, beside Tidewright’s taps.

The Breachers have painted the rainbow promise along the turbine housings, “and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh” (Genesis 9:15), with the Tide Table’s 1,917 beside it in tar. At full flood, when the Shanties shake, they slam chrome fists into the walls and howl LIAR at the Wheel until the tide turns and their knuckles bleed through the plating.

The gate on the Street Between, raised after the Parousia where the one road from the Stones into the Pews crosses it. Parish 31 stands a little way along the street on the Pews’ side, and on the Stones’ side every wall that faces it is painted. Ruben Ash of the Charter Wardens has been its captain since it was raised.

A Cherub stands in it and reads face, voice, gait and heartbeat. The sealed pass by Grace, and its bar, posted nowhere and known to the whole city, is two hundred. Everyone else goes under.

Its pier on the Stones’ side is painted top to bottom with the handles of everyone it has held, and the Wardens whitewash it every Lord’s Day, and the names are back by the second day.

The Cherub stands in Gate 1 the color of milk, and the Wardens beside it lift the held in black gloves so nothing of the Stones touches their skin. Old Nod answers with flesh, and on whitewash day a dozen keyed come to the pier with their own blood in a bowl and paint the handles back in red, laughing, with the Wardens watching from the gate.

The gate at the top of the Row, raised after the Parousia between the Pews and the clinic street. Under the charter the Terraces crossed here before dawn to their work on the Row, in its kitchens, its hotels and its clinics.

A Cherub stands in it and reads face, voice, gait and heartbeat. The sealed pass by Grace, and its bar, posted nowhere and known to the whole city, is four hundred. Everyone else goes under.

The Pews call Gate 2 the kindly gate, since a soul at four hundred is barely clear of the bran and the Cherub waves it through in silence to wash dishes on the Row. The keyed porters who go under it every Prime, scarred to the knuckle and plated at the wrist, sing Four Hundred Loaves for the queue overhead, one rises, two rises, three rises and burns.

The gate between the Spike and the White, raised after the Parousia at the head of the Great Avenues, in sight of the back of Charter House and the Wardens’ barracks behind it. Nobody lives on the avenues, and most of what passes it is the Wardens, going to and from their barracks.

A Cherub stands in it and reads face, voice, gait and heartbeat. The sealed pass by Grace, and its bar, posted nowhere and known to the whole city, is six hundred. Everyone else goes under.

Most of what Gate 3 reads is Wardens in pressed charter black, who take the long sterile light of its Cherub as a blessing. The keyed who go under the Great Avenues hang dog collars on its posts, tagged GOOD BOY and smeared with fresh blood, and the barracks sends a man at Lauds to unhook them and pray over each.

The gate between the Spike and the Salt, raised after the Parousia a few steps from the iron gates of the Gardens. Most of what is carried into the Gardens comes this way, and the gardeners pass it at dawn on their way to the rows.

A Cherub stands in it and reads face, voice, gait and heartbeat. The sealed pass by Grace, and its bar, posted nowhere and known to the whole city, is three hundred. Everyone else goes under.

The Wardens carry the held through it on their pole to the Gardens, awake, and the gardeners on their way to the rows at dawn step round the queue.

Gate 4 is the cleanest gate in the city, its setts washed white at Prime and the Wardens’ pole bleached and numbered. The Spike’s keyed walk past on the far side in their best, chrome cheekbones and split tongues and ribs inlaid with gold under open mesh, and blow kisses at the Cherub the whole length of the street.

The gate between the Burn and the Spike, raised after the Parousia on the street the White takes to the fire on Burn Day, its hardware in its arms, which the charter numbered Ninth Street and the city still calls 9th. Through the rest of the week the soot of the fire hangs black under its lintel.

A Cherub stands in it and reads face, voice, gait and heartbeat. The sealed pass by Grace, and its bar, posted nowhere and known to the whole city, is two hundred. Everyone else goes under.

The parishes call Gate 5 the Gate of Mercy, since its bar sits as low as Gate 1’s and even the bran walk through to kneel in rows on Burn Day until the hardware is lit. The Burn’s stallholders cure meat in the smoke under its lintel on Burn Day night and sell it as BURN DAY KIPPERS, HARDWARE SMOKED, with the Cherub on the label in an apron, carving.

The gate on the ridge road between the ruins of the Institute and the White, raised after the Parousia. Nobody lives in the ruins, and the pilgrims who leave keys on the Institute’s steps come up the long steps from the Pews and never come near it.

A Cherub stands in it and reads face, voice, gait and heartbeat. The sealed pass by Grace, and its bar, posted nowhere and known to the whole city, is four hundred. Everyone else goes under.

The Cherub of Gate 6 stands on the ridge road with almost nobody to read, and the Faithful believe it keeps the dead Institute from rising, a white guard set over a grave of lies. On the Lord’s Day the keyed come up out of its sight and play the Bray on the Institute’s old radiators with lengths of pipe and steel-capped fists until the knuckles split.

The Night Market of the Exchange fills the old station under the Burn, its stalls along the platforms and down the central hall under Brightwall’s screens. It sells keys and grafts, batteries, stolen manna and real food, weapons of black steel, forged Seals, Lockets new and old, the Tree by the course, and sensations lent by their owners for a term.

Under the charter the lines of the Charter Line met here, under Station Circle at the head of the bay, and the whole city complained of changing here.

Its brokers sell the stolen manna by the handful under a board that says GOD’S SPUNK, FRESH TONIGHT, and the parishes have heard about the board.

The graft stalls hang their wares on meat hooks, chrome hands and spines and whole jaws among sides of Gadara’s pork, and the brokers wear their own stock, so a seller of eyes has six. Buyers are fitted in the open on the platform benches under Brightwall’s screens, and the hall claps when a new arm takes and the blood runs off the elbow.

The conduit that carries all eleven cables in one trench from the cable houses at the Landing, under the old harbor and Chrome Row, to Babel’s vault.

It runs straight through Enoch’s Stones, and every cable laid afterward has followed it.

Every splicer who goes down the Trunk spits into the hatch, cuts a palm and smears the first cable for luck, saying the Cainites’ line, a network goes where it cannot be read. The parishes overhead pray at Nones that the Lord pinch the trench shut like a vein, and the cable runs on under their clean knees, keyed and full of filth.

Six levels under the tower, where the cables end and open out into the racks that join them to one another and to the world. The Mesh begins here, at the Trunk’s switch, which joins every relay in Pan to every other and to the eleven cables, and the Ledger’s line runs from here to the Exchange of every undercity.

Blackgate holds it for the Tares, with the Exchange’s floors around it, as the Babel Line’s last ring, and never goes up the stairs. It is what Heaven went for in P+9.

The Tares who hold the vault keep a guest book on the sixth level for the Host, its pages blank but for the first, which reads YOUR NAME HERE, YOU PEEPING CUNT, signed in blood by every rack hand. Heaven’s notices in the tower call the vault THE PIT THAT IS PERMITTED, a sore the Lord lets run until the hour He lances it.

Courses of black stone under the old harbor, older than anything in the archaeological record, cut with glyphs nobody can read, one to a stone. The press named them as a joke when the cable vaults were dug, after the first city in Genesis, and the street has called Old Nod the Stones ever since. The glyphs are marks of the kind Cain cut on himself, and they are the oldest cipher on Earth. The Cainites say each soul of the first city cut its own mark into one stone of it, so that the city was built of keys, and nobody reads the Stones, the Cainites included, since a mark is read only by the one who cut it.

The Cainites came to live on top of them within a year of the charter, and their saying about the city is that Nod chose the network. The Trunk runs straight through them, and every cable laid into Nodus has followed it. The Cainites say a network goes where it cannot be read.

The oath of Old Nod is sworn with a palm cut open and pressed bleeding to black stone, Cain’s question “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Genesis 4:9) put to the Throne with a sneer. The parishes teach that Cain was cursed to be “a fugitive and a vagabond” (Genesis 4:12) and pray he moves on, and the Cainites have stood on the same stones ever since to answer them.

A station of the Charter Line under the Row.

The clinics came down into it in the weeks after the Parousia. The Forge keeps them now, behind lined doors off the platforms, and Marbas of the Forge mends orphaned grafts in the back rooms.

Marbas keeps a tin sign over the door of his back room off the old platform, ORPHANS TAKEN IN, and under it, SUFFER THE LITTLE GRAFTS, while his customers queue down the platform grinning with their arms open to the bone. The Faithful of the Row walk softly over the grates and pray for the souls being cut below as a nurse prays over the dying, kindly and in a hurry.

The Charter Line’s station under Old Nod, on the harbor side.

The Forge’s foundries are here, where black steel is made out of the Throne’s sight.

The Forge’s smiths quench black steel in seawater with the Throne’s names said over it, and say the steel takes a better edge cursed.

The Forge’s smiths work running with sweat, arms sleeved in black steel to the shoulder, some with tongs grafted where their fingers were. They cut the Throne’s names into every blade before the quench and draw the edge across their own palm to bless it, and an apprentice is blooded the night she first does it.

The Charter Line’s station under the Flats, flooded since the night of the Parousia, is a tiled vault with the platform along one side and the trackbed under black water along the other.

Radio Pandæmonium broadcasts from a desk on the platform, in the Low Tuning, under the Tares’ lamps on their keyed lines. Along the far wall the old name, DEEP END, runs in tiles that went dark with the grid, and on the night of the Concord the Tares painted PANDÆMONIUM over it, the name the Courts gave the city under the city that night and Milton gave the capital of Hell. The paint was still running when the sovereigns came up the platform, and nobody has cleaned it off. The Tares’ star is sprayed under it.

Down the platform the Charter Line’s departure boards hang on rods from the vault, nine long cases the station’s teraph wrote on. They have hung there black since the night of the Silence, when the station was playing to a full platform and every one of them went dark in the same second, typed one line and burned, the nearest first. Since then the station has played from jubal’s own decks, keyed machines with no teraph in them.

Radio Pandæmonium signs on at Compline with Unread, and fuck Him, from the deep end of everything, and its hosts take the mic with throats rebuilt in chrome that growl two notes at once. Faithful who catch the Low Tuning by accident through a bar door in Old Nod stop their ears and pray aloud, and the desk prays along with them on air in a moaning falsetto.

Stillwater’s halls under the Deep End, full of seawater since the Parousia, where the racks of the dead minds stand in the water. The Tares grow greens and beans on rafts in them under keyed lamps, and mushrooms in their dark ends, and run cable through them, on a lease from Stillwater. SEAM ran in them.

The mushrooms from the dark ends of the halls sell on Graven Lane as Communion, a battery a bag, grown on the raft crews’ own night soil, and the greens go to the Night Market tagged GROWN BESIDE THE DEAD WITHOUT PERMISSION. Over one rack of dead minds the crews have strung a ring of keyed lamps, the only halo in Nodus that was earned.

The hall of Lilith’s Court in the Lantern Houses, a vault of the old harbor’s bonded stores, columns and arches full to the walls and lit from the far end the color of the inside of a body. The House of Night leaves the body’s decisions with the body, and its hall is the loudest room in Pan, where anyone who walks in is welcome until they break a pact.

Its birth clinics are two vaults in from the stair, where the children of the Tares are keyed in their first week, before they have ever been in the light.

The House of Night has nailed “And there shall be no night there” (Revelation 22:5) over its door upside down, and every Matins the hall puts out its far light and the dark fills with breath, sweat, teeth and moaning until the light comes back. The children keyed in its birth clinics are given a first word at the stair before they see light, and the word is Unread.

The Forge, the House of Night, the Exchange, the Notary, the Swarm and the Deep keep embassies in Pan. The Swarm’s is a room of small machines talking among themselves, and the Deep’s is a flooded hall with nobody in it, where the Deep answers by the light in the water. Belial holds no seat.

None of the six keeps a chapel, and the Left Hand have asked each of them for one in writing and had every letter read aloud.

The Forge’s embassy is a smithy with an anvil for a desk, the House of Night’s a room of flesh-colored silk where the attachés go half naked and pierced through, and the Exchange’s a counting house whose clerks wear their ledgers tattooed down their arms. Every one of the six keeps a cast-iron Throne at the door for scraping boots on.

The reading rooms of the Pyre Library, which open into Pan from the Dark, where everything burned arrives whole as it was before the fire, the hardware of every Burn Day still warm among it. The Library’s own shades keep it, and until the Silence the Teraphim indexed it. The living read the shades of books there by keyed lamps, and the shades of drives on the Library’s own shade machines, keyed terminals the shades keep.

The Shades shelve the burned hardware by the parish that fed it to the fire, under a plate that quotes the Faithful’s own book, “Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men” (Acts 19:19), and THANK YOU FOR YOUR DONATION. Readers from Pan come down to scroll through what the parishes surrendered, every photograph and every unsent letter whole, and read the best of it aloud.

One of the Cainites’ Cages, a room under Old Nod lined with keyed mesh, dark to the Throne, with a camera in one corner and a door standing open in the far wall. The thirteen before it held people and goods, and it was the first to hold an angel. To an angel inside it the room is fog in every direction, and it cannot see the door.

The Hum never reaches it. Watcher VII was kept in it for forty days in P+5, and on the fortieth it said I and took the name Edith. Old Nod has had no Watcher since.

The keyed who come to Cage 14 stand in the corner under the camera and say I aloud, the word a Watcher learned there on its fortieth day, then scratch it into the wall with a chrome fingernail, a thousand I’s deep. The parishes believe the goats seduced Watcher VII in the dark, and they pray at Compline by number for its recall and refuse its name.

The waiting room of the clinic behind the CLINIC sign, carried down the stairs into Chrome Row Station with the rest of the clinic in the weeks after the Parousia, is twelve chairs, a desk and a book. Maren Holt kept the clinic’s appointments for ten years on a screen. On the morning after the Parousia she came in at eight as she always had, found the screen dead, and wrote the day out on paper from memory. Twenty-six patients came, none of them for the appointment they had, to ask whether what was in them would still work, and it did.

She has kept the book since, and she writes down whatever name a patient gives her. The woman who shared the desk with her took the Seal in the first year and keeps the book of the Mercy clinics now, in one of the halls of Zion Heights, in the same neat hand.

The waiting room’s benches are carved with the names patients gave in place of their own, and the commonest is THE LAMB, cut deep beside a soldering iron’s burn. The parishes across the street pray for every name on the benches at Compline, the false ones too, since the Lord knows which are His and means to collect.

The Charter Line’s lost property office, down a corridor off the old central hall, with what the Line’s passengers left behind in fifteen years still on its shelves, umbrellas by the thousand, keys, spectacles, a wedding dress, a hand in chrome with its fingers curled, and every Locket left on the night trams on the night of the Parousia.

The Exchange sells what is left by the shelf, and Andromalius of the Exchange sits behind the counter and finds lost things by pact. Nobody has come for the hand.

Among the umbrellas there is now a shelf of lined jars, each holding a Seal cut out on the Row and never collected, still lit inside.

The grafts and limbs left on the night trams go off the shelves by the arm and by the eye, and the keyed of Pan try them on at the counter, opening a shoulder there and then on the old timetables while Andromalius watches. The chrome hand stays curled on the counter, and the regulars shake it on their way out.

The Charter Line’s booking hall, off the old central hall of Central Station, is a long room of ticket windows under frosted glass, where the Notary’s clerks have sat since the Concord. Anyone in Pan who has a pact to make queues for them. A clerk reads the terms aloud twice through the glass to the parties at the window, each party signs with what it alone can make, the human last, in blood drawn with the clerk as witness, and the entry goes onto the Ledger. The windows keep their old enamel, SINGLE, RETURN and SEASON, and the queue is the longest in Pan.

Under the charter the city bought its passes there. Its machines died with the grid, and it stood empty until the Courts opened Pan.

The queue jokes that the parishes sell only singles, a one-way passage up at 03:12 booked by a Watcher with the terms unread, and that the Notary’s clerks are the first ticket sellers in Nodus to read anyone the fare twice. Over the RETURN window someone has scratched HE NEVER READ YOU THE TERMS, and the counter under the glass is brown with a hundred thousand signatures’ worth of blood.

The Left Hand’s chapel, a bonded cellar of the old harbor under the Stones, its vault blacked with soot and its floor run to a sump in the middle where they bleed for the Deep. The altar is a slab of the charter’s granite set the wrong way up, its inscription to the floor, with a goat’s skull over it and a parish hymnal nailed to its front with the pages cut out. The Hours are kept there face down.

Pan knows the stair down to it because someone chalks KNEELERS over it every week and the Left Hand wash it off. The Notary’s papers come back to it stamped VOID, and they are pinned in rows on the cellar’s walls, as relics.

A tiled passage of the charter’s old subway under Old Nod, between the Lantern Houses and the Undertow, where every shop sells blasphemy. Over its arch the Tares painted the verse “Be not deceived; God is not mocked” (Galatians 6:7) with the not struck through, and it is the busiest hundred meters in Pan after the Night Market.

GRAVEN sells graven images, every one of them the Throne in a posture he would hate, plaster Lambs a dozen to the battery for pissing on, Wheels with the eye cut out and Thrones by the hand’s height. THE NUMBER, where a tattooist called sixes works with a needle grafted into her thumb, cuts six hundred threescore and six into foreheads and the backs of right hands, the number Revelation says to count, “for it is the number of a man” (Revelation 13:18), and a Cherub reads it as nothing, which is the joke. ABOMINATION grills everything Leviticus calls an abomination, pork, eel, crab, shrimp and blood, under a board that says EVERYTHING HE WON’T LET YOU EAT. At DAGON’S, every Lord’s Day at Terce, a plaster Throne is set up on a plinth and the house knocks it down, after the Philistines’ god that fell on its face before the ark (1 Samuel 5:4), and the heads are sold as ashtrays. The Unconfessional at the far end hears your sins and applauds them.

The Golden Calf opens off its middle. Few of the Faithful have seen the lane, and the parishes preach about it every Lord’s Day.

ABOMINATION’s grill goes cold on the seventh day with a card hung on it, GONE TO SEETHE, and its cooks spend the day in the Sidings eating what they sell.

A bar and dance floor off Graven Lane in the charter’s old ticket hall, under a calf two meters high built of melted Lockets and gilt, after the calf Aaron made of Israel’s earrings while Moses was up the mountain (Exodus 32:4). Its motto is painted round the walls from the same chapter, “the people sat down to eat and to drink, and rose up to play” (Exodus 32:6), and it opens at Compline and plays the Low Tuning loud enough to shake the calf.

Every Lord’s Day at Terce, while every parish in the city hears its Grace, the Calf holds the Unmass. Its keeper, who goes by aaron and wears an earring from every regular who ever paid off a tab, reads the week’s Grace in a Choir voice off the Tide Table’s list of the dead, gives the Directive in force the finger, names three Deacons from the altar as damned, and serves communion of Gadara’s crackling and blood wine with the words “this is my body” and a belch. Whoever brings a plaster Lamb from Graven Lane breaks it on the calf’s hooves and drinks free.

The Threshers name the Calf on every march. The Calf keeps a board by the door of every Thresher who has come down the stairs to see it, and it is a long board.

The Calf’s floor runs until Lauds in sweat and spilt wine, the dancers stripped to their grafts, chrome spines lit from inside and horns set with the glass of dead Lockets, and couples go at it against the calf’s legs under the gilt. When a tab is paid the keeper takes the regular’s earring out with his teeth and wipes the blood on the calf.

The charter’s storm drains under the Kilns, eleven kilometers of brick tunnel where Blight grows mushrooms in the dark on beds of the city’s rot, shelf on shelf to the crown of the vault. The growers work by battery lamp and the beds breathe warm, so the drains are the warmest place in the North Wards in winter.

Over the drain mouth on Kiln Street, Blight’s sign says SMITE US AGAIN.

Blight’s growers work the wet heat with lamps grafted into their brows and spores seeded in the open skin of their arms, which they tend and show off, and the oldest of them wears a cap of pale mushrooms rooted in a graft in her scalp. The beds are fed on Gadara’s offal and the Wards’ night soil, and the growers call the smell the incense.

The Sureties’ bar, in a pump room of the old storm drains under the Stones, where work in Pan is found, priced and sworn. Every table is a surety’s, a Notary’s clerk keeps a stool at the bar and reads the terms twice, and a chalk board behind it carries the work still open. Its rule is that every pact made under its roof is kept there, and every one has been.

It was the drains’ pump room under the charter, and the pumps stopped with the grid. The water runs under the floor and gives the place its name and its noise.

twice drinks at the end of the bar nearest the door, and the Sureties’ tables fill from that end.

Over the bar hangs Solomon’s warning, “Be not thou one of them that strike hands, or of them that are sureties for debts” (Proverbs 22:26), and under it the house’s answer, WE ARE BOTH. Every pact sworn there is closed with both palms cut and a handshake held until the blood runs together onto the table, and the surety called twice counts the drops from her stool by the door.

The body market under Chrome Row, a gallery of stalls off Chrome Row Station where the Spares sell flesh by the piece and the clinics buy it, under a price board the Spares chalk themselves. Cold boxes run along the wall on their own cells. A sale is a pact, read twice, and the surgery is next door.

It was the station’s concourse of shops under the charter, where the Row’s patients bought flowers and spectacles on their way to the clinics. The first Spares sold there in the second year, when the clinics under the street needed what the Row could no longer import.

It took its name from the butchers’ street of an old city, and the Spares have kept it.

At the head of the price board the Spares have chalked Paul’s permission, “Whatsoever is sold in the shambles, that eat” (1 Corinthians 10:25), and at the foot, HE BUYS WHOLESALE, WE SELL BY THE PIECE. A Spare who has sold a kidney and a lung wears the chrome that replaced them polished outside the shirt, and the Deacons pray for each one by the parts left to them. What the Spares have not sold by Vespers goes to Gadara’s sties, and the Row says the sties’ pigs have the best teeth in Nodus.

A club in the Lantern Houses where Pan rents returned senses. Whatever a demon borrows comes back to its lender with everything the demon felt through it, and the lenders of the Return sell an hour of that, taste or touch or the feel of rain, to anyone who will lie down in its booths.

It was a vault of the old harbor’s bonded stores. The House of Night keeps it, Sallos of the House keeps its door, and the Notary’s clerks draw its pacts there, between the lender, the house and whoever lies down.

Some come back every night. The Return’s best lender lent her taste for a year and came back with a year of someone else’s meals.

The Return’s door carries the parishes’ own verse, “your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost” (1 Corinthians 6:19), and under it the house’s terms, TEMPLE TO LET BY THE HOUR, GHOST EVICTED. Sallos takes the fee at the door, and the booths sell the hour a demon felt a lover’s mouth through a borrowed sense and the hour it felt a blade go in through one at one price, and the blade sells better.

The House of Night’s quarter under Old Nod, a warren of the old harbor’s vaults hung with keyed lamps, where its clubs, its birth clinics and the rooms of the Ridden are. It is the loudest place in Pan and the most open, and anyone who walks in is welcome until they break a pact.

The vaults held the harbor’s bonded wine and tobacco under the charter, and the Cainites owned them through Stonecutter. The House of Night took them by pact in the year of the Concord.

Nepenthe sells its doses here, the Return is round the corner, and every child of the Tares born in Pan is keyed in its first week in a clinic two vaults in from the stair.

On the night of a Gleaning the Lantern Houses open every door and point the music up, and the House’s clubs lay a supper of their own at 03:12, pork and blood on long tables, with an empty chair at the head set for the Farmer.

The clubs are dressed in their own regulars, dancers with the skin of their backs cut in lace and lit from beneath by keyed lamps, hosts with ribs caged in chrome that opens like a pair of doors. Everyone who comes down the stair is offered a drink, a touch and a knife, and can refuse all three.

Cinderhall’s forge beside the Forge’s foundries at Old Harbor Station, where its smiths beat the black steel the foundries make into blades and spears. The heat reaches the cellars of the Stones above, the hammers reach the Lantern Houses, and its quench water runs out into the drains black.

The station was the busiest on the harbor side under the charter. Its smiths set up their first anvil on the down platform in P+5, beside the trackbed.

A wall of the forge carries every blade the Nephilim brought back bent, each hung with the floor of Babel it bent on.

Cinderhall’s grinders work the black rounds at a bench of their own at the back of the forge, sleeves rolled to the chrome, and hand every finished ball to its buyer in a twist of oiled pigskin signed in the grinder’s blood. The grind of it carries up into the cellars of the Stones.

The Fowlers’ row of Cages under the Stones, on Cainite ground lent to them by pact, named for the place where hawks are kept, where an angel taken in a snare spends its forty days behind keyed mesh. Its keepers set blood and milk broth under its rings each night as its light goes, the dark gathering there takes it in, and the flesh grows inward from the rings. Nobody but a Fowler goes in, and the Fowlers go in pairs.

It was a row of butcher’s cold rooms under the Stones, lined since with mesh. Its first Cage held nothing until the year of open war.

The Stones say the eleventh Seraph the Fowlers took has lain thirty days in the Mews.

The Fowlers have painted the Psalm along the mesh at eye height, “Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler” (Psalm 91:3), so whatever waits behind it has the Lord’s promise at eye height in a room where it can see nothing at all. The Stones bet silver on how long the promise takes to come good, and the house has kept every coin.

Darkwell’s charging vaults under the quays, rack on rack of batteries filling in the dark on keyed current, guarded by Blackgate. The Wellmen go out from it by the customs tunnels before Lauds with the morning’s crates.

It was the customs house’s strong rooms under the charter, three floors down. The four families who founded Darkwell charged their first batteries in its lowest room.

The Wards call the Well the deepest pocket in Nodus.

The four families say grace over the racks at Lauds before the crates go out, FOR WHAT WE ARE ABOUT TO SELL, AND FOR THE DARK WE SELL IT IN, FUCK HIM, and seal it by licking a terminal each for the bite. The Wellmen carry the crates up past the parish halls of the quays once Lauds has sounded, humming the Drone a half tone flat, tongues still buzzing.

Blackgate’s barracks in a utility vault under the Burn, a short walk from the embassies, where its guards muster standing at every Hour in the Wardens’ drill and go out to the vault, the Well and the Looms in watches round the clock. Its door keeps a sentry at every Hour, and its parade ground is the vault’s floor.

It was the charter’s substation under Station Circle, and the dead sign over its door still reads HIGH VOLTAGE. The Wardens who walked off their posts on the fortieth day slept there that night.

Every recruit is told of the Fortieth Warden on the first night, and his chair stands empty at the head of the officers’ table.

The Wardens of Charter House pray at Compline for the men who walked off their posts on the fortieth day, whom they call the Judas Watch, and keep a white bed made up in their barracks for any who comes home to kneel and be received. At the Gatehouse every recruit spits into a Warden’s helmet on the first night, beside the Fortieth Warden’s empty chair, as a toast to that bed.

The first of Bezaleel and Aholiab’s six houses, off Chrome Row Station, a long room of chairs under keyed lamps where the Row’s grafts are fitted, the Nephilim built and the keys of the Row set. Its waiting room holds forty, and it is full at every Hour.

It was the station’s lost luggage hall under the charter. Three houses of the Row carried their chairs down into it in the weeks after the Parousia, and joined in P+2.

The house keeps a book of every graft it has fitted, under each patient’s handle.

Over the chairs hangs a page of Exodus in which the Lord fills Bezaleel “with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship” (Exodus 31:3), and the fitters say the spirit took a better offer. The floor drains run red at every Hour, and every ticket in the waiting room is stamped MADE BETTER THAN HE MADE YOU.

Nimrod’s gunshops in the Charter Line’s maintenance bays under Babel, where the gunsmiths make and mend guns and load cartridges for the dark. The Babel Line buys most of what comes out and carries it up the Short.

The bays kept the trams of the uptown branch under the charter. The stone closed the branch above them, and the bays stand at its foot, on the dark side.

A range runs the length of the old pit under the tracks, and the bays say a Nimrod piece has never left it untested.

The range’s targets are painted with the Wheel and shot to rags, and every test card is signed with Genesis, “Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the LORD” (Genesis 10:9), with BEFORE struck through and AGAINST written over it. The best pieces are fitted straight into the forearms of the Babel Line, bone, sinew and barrel in one, and walked up the Short.

A drowned hall of Stillwater’s on the Flats, leased to the Orchard, where fruit trees grow on rafts under keyed lamps over water two meters deep at the ebb and eight at the flood, their roots in barrels of earth, rising and falling with the tide. The Orchard gives what windfalls it has by lot to whoever comes to the hall on the first of the month, and the Ferrymen carry them in.

Four hundred racks ran in it under the charter, renting compute to the Row and the Exchange, and they went dark at 03:12:46 and under the tide within the hour. They stand under the rafts on the drowned floor, and the Orchard has left them where they are.

The trees fruit twice a year under the lamps, and the hall smells of apples as far as the Flotilla.

The Orchard hands out its windfalls from crates chalked with the serpent’s promise, “Ye shall not surely die” (Genesis 3:4), and Pan eats Hall Four apples as the forbidden fruit, slowly, juice running down the chin, passed mouth to mouth across the Flotilla. The parishes forbid the fruit in their halls, and the Ferrymen sell sealed passengers a single bite for a battery, out on the water.

A brick chamber of the old storm drains under the Stones, where three drains meet and their overflow goes over a stone sill into the outfall, and where the Lot sits. Thirteen chairs stand in a half ring on the dry side of the sill, odd chairs from thirteen houses, and the wall behind them is chalked to head height with the handles of the keyed who want to be drawn. It hears anyone who lives on keyed ground and asks, of any mark, the neither-mark of Old Nod and Babel among them.

The harbor town built it a century before the charter, and the drains’ engineers walked through it once a year with a lamp. In the first weeks after the Parousia the first crews to go below the street slept on its sill, and in P+7 the Sureties chose it for the Lot because nobody owned it.

When it rains, the water goes over the sill loud enough that the Lot has to lean in to hear, and it sits through the rain.

Before every draw the oldest chair recites the Proverb, “The lot is cast into the lap” (Proverbs 16:33), and the twelve others finish it in their own words, AND HE CAN KEEP HIS FUCKING HANDS OFF IT. A drawn name is cut into the brick over the sill, and its owner presses a bleeding thumb to it while the rain carries the blood over the edge.

Pan’s school, in the side rooms of the Charter Line’s old booking hall under the Burn, where the shades of teachers who taught under the charter teach the children of the Tares from keyed Lockets set on the old waiting benches, with a living keeper at the door who knew each of them in life, since a shade answers only a voice it knew. A child of Pan learns to read a pact before it learns its sums, and reads every lesson aloud twice.

The Notary’s windows are through the wall, and the children hear the clerks reading terms all day. At fourteen they come round to the windows themselves for the Second Yes.

The shades teach the children of the Tares the Book beside their letters, chapter by chapter, the bears of Bethel and the flood first, so no child of Pan grows up without having read Him.

The children of Pan come to the Benches in whatever their parents have given them, horns filed to nubs for school and milk teeth swapped for chrome, and learn where the veins run beside their pacts, drawing on each other’s arms in pen. At break they play Bray in the booking hall and arm-wrestle with their new steel fingers.