THE STREET

Nodus keeps Heaven’s clock, whatever side it is on. Eight Hours come in on the Hum, Matins at midnight, Lauds at five, Prime at six, Terce at nine, Sext at noon, Nones at three, Vespers at six and Compline at nine, and at each the Hum rises a step and holds for the length of the Hour’s psalm while the sealed kneel wherever they stand, in the street, at a bench or on a stair. The city measures a short wait in psalms. At Compline the Faithful say the ninety-first under their breath as the curfew falls, the psalm the Fowlers took their name from, and at Lauds the fifty-first.

Before Lauds the gatherers go out over the white streets for the manna, which lies with the dew, and the Deacons of the Wards walk down for their parishes’ share. At Lauds the curfew lifts, the Wheel opens its day watch and the light lies over the city through the cloud. The keyed keep to the Stones, the Row and Pan, where a blank among six hundred thousand blanks is nobody in particular, and the Wards go about their work among the sealed with their heads down.

Prime opens the Mercy clinics and the day’s work, and Nones is the last office the schools keep. At Vespers the lamps are lit, the harbor light among them, and on the sixth day of the week the Faithful begin carrying to the Burn.

Compline at nine is the turn. The Wheel gathers its light into the Pillar on the Burn and the Pillar begins its round, the parishes go in behind their open doorways, the Stones light their windows and Pan comes up the stairs. Matins at midnight finds the Night Market at its loudest and the Gleaners at the parishes’ doorways.

In the Stones, on the Row and below the street nobody keeps the curfew, and the Stones keep no alarm set for three-twelve. Most of the city sleeps between Matins and Lauds, and the rest of it is working.

The same eight Hours are a prayer in the Pews and a toast in Pan. The parishes kneel, the Satisfied never rise, the Wards wait a psalm, and below the street every glass goes up to the Wheel and comes down empty, and both sides keep the Hour to the second.

Below the street every Hour has its cut, and at Terce the Row’s grafters prick their tongues and bleed a drop into the glass they lift to the Wheel. The Lantern Houses ring Compline on a bell of chromed ribs. The parishes keep each Hour with a whole hall’s foreheads meeting white stone at once, and the oldest of the Satisfied have worn a white callus there as smooth as the floor.

Heaven’s ground is wherever the Covenant reaches a blank. All consecrated stone is Heaven’s at every hour, the White, the Pews and the white streets, and so is every gate and every parish hall in the city, whatever the hall was under the charter. The Burn and the Salt Gardens have no stone under them and are Heaven’s by the Pillar and the Wardens. From Compline to Lauds the streets of the parishes are Heaven’s too, since Directive 2:5 orders that “No soul shall walk the streets of the parishes from Compline to Lauds”.

A parish of the Wards keeps the streets its roll names, and its deacons paint its number at either end of each of them, so that a street of the Kilns can be Parish 212’s on one side of a crossing and nobody’s on the other. The Tide Table prints them every week as the curfew map, beside the Pillar’s round, and the Wards read the two together. A keyed soul out after Compline walks the unnumbered streets and waits at the Pillar’s edge wherever it has to cross a numbered one.

A blank the Pillar finds on a numbered street is sentenced where it stands, in Tongues, through the nearest Faithful mouth, and in the Wards the nearest mouth is often a neighbor at a window over the street, who wakes in the morning knowing whose name the verse went to. That is why the Wards hate the Pillar more than the Stones do. Old Nod’s parishes are the fifteen of the quays, whose rolls name the quays, the harbor streets and the fish market and no street of the Stones, so the Pillar crosses the Stones from Compline to Lauds and takes nobody there.

By day the Wheel’s light lies over the whole city and sees a keyed person on a white street, and the sighting goes up, but the Salt waits on a reading by a Watcher, the Pillar or a Cherub, and by day that means a gate. The Threshers’ trade is the step between seen and read, a hand on a collar and a walk to the nearest gate.

The parishes call their ground holy and Pan calls it the Farmer’s field, and says that whoever stands on it is standing in the crop.

When a blank is sentenced on a numbered street, the lowest Grace of the nearest parish scrubs the setts on its knees at Lauds with cold water and a white rag until the place shines like the rest, and the parish says the stone forgives. Old Nod’s tattooists ink the curfew map in red on the soles of the feet, so a Tare out after Compline carries the safe ground under him.

Nodus walks. Its trams stopped where they were at 03:12:46 under a dead wire, its lifts with whoever was in them, and its cars and lorries, each on its own battery, ran down one by one in the weeks after, and the city would rather light a room for a season than drive a car for a week. It carries its loads in handcarts, and the Union’s drivers carry the city’s gas, batteries and letters on foot.

Directive 8 stood a Cherub in a gate on every street between the districts of Nodus, and the Wardens read it by the charter’s district map, wherever a district of Heaven’s meets any other. In P+1 they raised six gates and walled every other such street with the charter’s own rubble, and the city calls those the stopped streets. Where two districts of the Tares meet, Old Nod and the Row or the Deep End and the Landing, there is no gate, since no sealed soul needs passing there. On the White’s side the stone has grown over them. The Wards are no district, so their edges with the White and the Pews run open, held by the curfew and the Watchers, and the Deacons of the Wards walk across them every morning for the manna. Past a Ward’s edge a white street is watched by the Wheel by day and the Watchers by night, and the Threshers hunt it.

A Cherub reads the eyes and knows face, voice and gait. The sealed walk through its light saying the surrender and pass by Grace, as Directive 8:5 has it, and every gate has a bar, posted nowhere and known to the whole city, six hundred at Gate 3, four hundred at Gates 2 and 6, three hundred at Gate 4 and two hundred at Gates 1 and 5, which the Faithful carry their hardware through on Burn Day. A gate whose queue is full of souls near its bar, saying the surrender twice, is a slow gate. A sealed soul under the bar is sent back with ten Grace taken, the unsealed are sent back, and a soul the Cherub cannot read is held inside its turning sword until the Wardens come. So the unsealed and the keyed go round, through the old tunnels, the drains and the cable galleries, which the city calls going under.

Jehu’s lorries burn diesel by compression and run the long roads of the Wards by day, two batteries a ride, and the burners, motorbikes on gas from the Tanks with the magneto sealed in the casing, carry the Union’s urgent letters. The Carmen run handcarts and pedal trolleys on the old tram rails of the long roads, and the Liftmen wind forty-one towers’ lifts by hand.

Below the street Wainwright’s keyed carts run the Charter Line’s rails through Pan, a battery a seat. On the Deep End the Ferrymen pole their flat boats between the roofs, and the Breachers and Lowtide run the Breach on the ebb. No aircraft has left Nodus since the last flight came in, and nothing larger than a drone flies, since the light stops the current a craft carries in the open and the Wheel burns whatever rises above the roofs that it cannot read, with one eye opened full on it for a moment.

The Wards call the walled streets the Farmer’s fences, and a child of the Wards learns its first map from the gates it must never walk through.

The queues at the six gates stand in Bethel white a pace apart, on lines the Wardens chalk at Prime and wash off at Vespers, and a soul that steps over its line goes to the back. Below the street Wainwright’s crews dress their carts, seats upholstered in pigskin branded LEGION, a headlamp set in a cow’s skull, and one brakeman’s own severed hand chromed and riveted to his lever.

Nobody in Nodus is without someone on the other side of the Street Between, and the street is where they see each other. By day the sealed sit on the thresholds of the Pews, which have had no doors since P+1, and their keyed sons and daughters, sisters and fathers sit on the curb across the street on the Old Nod side, and they talk across the setts. The city calls it the Step, and it runs along the street on either side of Gate 1.

The Hours break it. At Terce the sealed kneel in the middle of a sentence, the keyed wait a psalm and finish it for them when the Hum falls back, and the Tellers walk the Pews’ side and count who sat across from whom. On a march day the Threshers clear the Pews’ side from Prime, and the Step stays empty until they have marched back past it to the Floor.

Courting goes the same way. A sealed and an unsealed who walk the length of the street together on opposite curbs, talking over the gap, are walking the Street, and the Terraces watch them from their doorways and the Stones from their windows, and both sides say they know how it ends. The Step empties at Vespers, so that the sealed who came down from the Terraces to sit there are home before the streets of the parishes close at Compline.

The sealed on the thresholds talk of the Supper to their keyed children gently, as a mother talks of a party her child is not invited to, and the keyed on the curb answer under their breath in the Bray’s words, and both sides go home after Vespers sure they were kind.

The Pews’ thresholds are scrubbed white every Prime and the sealed sit on them in rows, hands folded at one height, so from Old Nod the Step looks like a shelf of loaves. The keyed come to the curb in their best, a horn new-polished, a lens in the socket, a fresh cut weeping under film, and when a sealed mother prays aloud her son holds the arm higher for her.

The sealed eat manna, thin white wafers that lie with the dew on consecrated stone before Lauds, tasteless and complete, which dull the appetite. The parish halls give it out by Grace, so a soul’s ration is the size of its Grace until its Grace passes seven hundred and it needs none, and kept overnight it spoils, so nobody stores it. The parishes cook nothing else. The Satisfied, who need no food, give their share to the embers of their parish at Lauds.

A parish of the Wards has no stone of its own, so its gatherers walk to the white streets before Lauds and glean the strip of white street the Granary has chalked for it. The long roads at that hour are the manna roads, crowded with gatherers in white carrying baskets, and the far parishes of Airside and Westfield walk longest, arrive last and glean the thinnest strips, which the Wards give as the reason the far Wards are the least sealed. The Wardens walk the near roads, and nobody walks the far ones.

Manna goes to the sealed alone, and everyone else in Nodus buys food or goes hungry, so the Wards feed themselves out of everything Heaven left. Leaven bakes for about half the Wards’ unsealed in forty bakehouses, a loaf a day to two mouths, from flour the Vagabonds’ wagon trains bring in from the country and Lowtide’s holds bring from other ports, and the rest bake their own on stairwell braziers from flour Leaven’s millers sell by the sack, or eat rice in its place. Eel and mussels come from the bay and the fish market’s catch off the boats, rice and beans off the Breach, and greens off the Tares’ rafts in the drowned halls. Blight grows mushrooms by the ton in the storm drains under the Kilns, where no light reaches, and they feed more of the Wards than the fish market does. Gadara keeps eleven thousand pigs in the eight mending halls of the Sidings and feeds them on the Wards’ scraps, the Night Market’s leavings, Leaven’s burnt loaves, the Kilns’ spent mash and the grain swept out of the holds, so the Wards eat their own leavings back as bacon, under Leviticus printed on the wrapper, a relish on the bread.

Pan eats better than the surface and pays for it in batteries, fatty, salty, spiced and sweet, broth and noodles and fried things eaten standing up, since indulgence is policy below the street. Its street food is a portion, fat and blood, black pudding, crackling and marrow by the piece, since Leviticus gives the fat to the LORD and forbids the rest, “ye eat neither fat nor blood” (Leviticus 3:17), and Pan eats the LORD’s share standing up. Abomination on Graven Lane grills everything Leviticus forbids under a board that says EVERYTHING HE WON’T LET YOU EAT. The Babel Line eats Esau’s red on the stairs, lentils in a red broth, after “that same red pottage” Esau sold his birthright for (Genesis 25:30), and the Lantern Houses’ confectioners sell honeys, wafers made with honey, which is what the manna tasted like before it was a ration (Exodus 16:31).

Manna out of the parishes is called dew, most of it stolen at the gathering and some of it paid over at the Closets by the sealed who come for a door, and the Night Market sells it by the handful from Compline, two batteries a handful, before it turns at the next Lauds. The Wards that eat it say it takes away a day’s hunger and leaves the taste of nothing, and Pan calls it God’s spunk and eats it anyway.

NOODLES at the top of the Row cooks on bottled gas, as it has since P-17, and the Row settles its quarrels over its counter. The drink of the Wards is rain gin, distilled in the Kilns from whatever ferments, and the Eleven brews its own beer in its cellar by hand. A meal in Pan is a battery, a loaf of Leaven half of one.

The Kilns keep bees on their roofs, at the Hives, and Kilns honey is the sweet the near ripe trade a morning’s manna for at the Closets when they dim, and the sealed of the Wards buy by the spoon, so the Wards say honey is what the manna forgot. The fish market chalks where each catch came from, since the Wards will not eat a fish taken off the Sea Steps, where the Salt Widows give the salted to the sea.

In the halls the Deacon lays manna on the tongue in the order of the roll, and the hungry chew to the count of a psalm while the Satisfied kneel at the end of the row with empty mouths and are proud of it. Pan eats with its hands and its face, at counters where the cooks’ hands are mapped in burns, and a cook of Graven Lane pulls marrow bones off the coals with a chrome claw fitted for the job.

The best meal in Nodus is cooked one day in seven, at SEETHE in the Sidings, where the board is Leviticus and the kid comes seethed in its mother’s milk. Pan saves for it all week and calls the seventh day Seethe day, and the Wards’ children dare each other to run down the last road and touch the trams.

The city’s pumps died with the grid, and by noon on the first morning there were queues at the harbor’s old hand pumps. Old Nod drinks from them still, the towers of the Wards fill tanks on their roofs from the rain, and Cistern keeps a rainworks on the roofs of every ward, pumps the deep wells under them and sells the water clean by the jug, about four liters. Pan drinks from the deep wells the Charter Line’s tunnels cut through, which Cistern maps and sells. Every parish hall keeps a cistern under its floor, filled off its parish’s white roofs, and gives its water by Grace, a jug a day to a soul. The water tower on the heights is the Terraces’ old tower, and the Deacons fill it by hand from the Tabernacle’s cistern for the rite of the cup, a cup to a soul.

Current runs in Nodus where the light cannot read it. The Tares’ keyed lines carry it from Tidewright’s taps to Old Nod, the Row, the Deep End above the water, the Landing, the lower floors of Babel and Pan, about a million and a quarter people, and anything sealed in a casing on its own cell runs anywhere, as a charged battery does. The Wards, which nobody holds, light their rooms a few hours a night on batteries.

The light stops current and leaves a flame burning, so everyone off the parishes’ manna cooks on bottled gas from the Tanks, two charged batteries a bottle or one with the empty back, and half the Wards finish the night by Tallow’s candles. Nearly two thirds of Nodus lives without current, by flame and halo-light, and the parishes keep none on consecrated stone or off it.

Seen from the Wheel at night, Nodus is white ground glowing under the Pillar beside black ground leaking magenta and cyan at its seams, and the Wards between them lit by candles, halos and a few hours of battery a night.

Cistern stamps every jug that goes into the Wards with the Son’s own words at the well, WHOSOEVER DRINKETH OF THIS WATER SHALL THIRST AGAIN (John 4:13), and calls it the most honest thing ever said about water.

The parishes drink from white enamel cups of a single size, each stamped on the bottom with its soul’s line on the roll. Pan drinks from whatever it is proudest of, a horn sawn off a friend at the friend’s request or a cup beaten from a dead crewmate’s plating as the third-night will gave it, and the grafted plug into the keyed lines through ports cut into their own wrists.

The pumps that carried the city’s waste died with the grid. The Wards’ buckets go down the stairs at night to the Nightmen, who carry them by handcart along the unnumbered streets between Compline and Lauds, for a battery a landing a week, and tip them into the old trunk sewer at the manholes on the Wards’ side. The sewer runs under the Great Avenues to the bay outfalls and the Tankmen’s digesters, which make the city’s gas of it and send it up the charter’s old main to the spheres at the Tanks, and Pan calls it the Offering. In the parishes the work is given by Grace to the lowest Grace in the hall, and the Wards say a soul under a hundred empties the pails. Pan’s drains carry it all to the bay.

The city remembers one plague. In the pump summer of P+1 the harbor’s hand pumps carried a flux through the Stones and the Wards, and the Wards General lost a ward a day for most of a month. Cistern pumped its first clean water in Westfield that year, and the Wards say that is why. Its engineers keep the map of its wells away from the Nightmen’s carts.

Fever comes every summer to the blocks where the rain tanks stand open, and the Wards boil what they drink when they can spare the gas. A dose of medicine off the Breach costs half a thirty at the Night Market, and Lazarus’s crews carry what they can get.

The parishes call the pails humility and give them to bran, and the Nightmen tip the Wards’ buckets into the Offering to a psalm sung in parts.

The parishes’ pails are white enamel numbered with the hall, and the soul who empties them scours each one with sand and sets it back under the Directives, so a parish’s cleanest object is its shit pail. The Nightmen dress for the round in leather aprons painted with the Ringpiece and pigskin gloves, and a crew tipping the Offering sings filth in harmony, its leader taking the descant through a brass larynx.

Nodus climbs its stairs. Every lift stopped at 03:12:46, and in the towers of the Wards the low floors went dear and the high floors cheap, so a family’s place in a block is counted from the street. The sealed go up the stairwells by their own halo-light, the unsealed wait on the landings to follow one, and the keyed climb in the dark. Where the Liftmen have freed a shaft, a ride is a battery up.

The parishes live with no doors. Directive 12 took every door in them off its hinges in P+1, and a parish room is given by Grace, a room with a window at six hundred and above. The doors went to the Stones, and a household of the Wards that can afford one buys a parish door at Lintel’s Dooryard with its old number chalked on the back.

The Sidings live in the Charter Line’s cars, a family to a car, Hangar Town in the airfield’s hangars, the Deep End on the floors above the water and the Rookery over its stone. Thirty-one of the Hotel Splendid’s guests still live in the rooms they booked in P0, and the last flight’s crew lives aboard it.

The Company collected the Wards’ rent until the fortieth day, and nobody has collected it since. A room in the Wards belongs to whoever holds its door, which the Wards call floor-right, and floor-right is sold between households for batteries and silver, a low floor for ten thirties or more. On the morning after a Gleaning the rooms of the taken go to whoever hangs a door on them first after Lauds, which makes it Lintel’s busiest morning of the year, and in the parishes they go back to the Deacon and out again by Grace. Most of the Wards sleep in shifts, so a bed is a day bed or a night bed and seldom both.

Old Nod has a landlord. Stonecutter owns most of its houses and asks one rent, set down in its solicitor’s lease as a single term, that the window stays lit from Compline to Lauds at the tenant’s own cost, on the house’s keyed line, with a battery or two kept by the window for the night a line is cut and the cellar generator kept cold for the night the yards fail. It is why the Stones burn all night, and the Stones call Stonecutter the other landlord. A household that lets its window go dark for a month finds the solicitor’s letter under the door.

Pan lives in the stations, vaults and drains under the city, in rooms lined with keyed mesh, and has never been full. Its people say a room in Pan is the only room in Nodus that is entirely your own, since nothing outside it can see in. A room there is yours when you have lined it, and the Ledger enters the lining under your self-title, so a room left unlined is anyone’s.

The Satisfied are given the rooms with the most light in a parish, which the oldest of them never sleep in, since past eight hundred they kneel all night in the hall, and the parishes say the rooms are kept for them as a bride’s room is kept.

Each parish room is whitewashed every Lord’s Day by its soul, with a brush the hall issues. A room in Pan is lined in mesh and then decorated past reason, a bed slung from meat hooks, a cast of its owner’s jaw on the wall, the old indexed name burned into a slab of pork rind, and a crew judges a newcomer by how much of herself is on her walls.

The light does not enter what is closed, so in Nodus a door is a small piece of the Dark. In P+1 Directive 12 ordered every door in the parishes taken off its hinges by the fortieth day and the hinges surrendered at the hall, with every lock, key, cipher, password, veil and sealed vessel, and took forty Grace from a household for every door left after. Nothing in a parish is hidden.

The doors themselves stayed where they were lifted off, leaning in the halls and stairwells of the Terraces, until the Union’s drivers began carrying them out by night on their handcarts to a joiner in the Stones, who founded Lintel. Most of the doors Lintel sells came out of the parishes, with their parish numbers still chalked on the back.

The Wards hang what doors they can get and fit Lintel’s keyed latches if they can afford them. In Pan every room is closed by the mesh in its walls, and a door there is for privacy from the neighbors. The sealed who want a door for a minute cross the street to the Closets inside Gate 1, where Lintel rents them one of their own parishes’ doors for a morning’s manna.

A household of the Faithful that holds something back, a jar sealed with wax or a letter in a drawer, is keeping hinges in the Wards’ word, and a Teller listens for it. The Wards say you can tell a parish from a block of the Wards from the street, by the doorways you can see through.

The Wards hang the parishes’ doors with the parish’s number still chalked on the back, and say a parish door is the only holy thing that ever did them any good.

A parish doorway is kept bare and white to the jamb, and the hinge-scars are plastered and painted over each year until the parish forgets them. In the Wards and Pan a door is dressed like a body, carved, studded with filed teeth, hung with a knocker cast from its owner’s own hand, and a couple hanging a parish door nail a lock of each other’s hair beside the old chalk number.

The Hum stops for nothing but a Gleaning and the parishes never go dark. A sealed soul sleeps in its own halo-light with a cloth over its eyes, and a sealed couple sleeps back to back, each in the dark of the other’s shoulder. The parishes’ doorways stand open all night, and a child of the Pews learns to sleep with the Pillar going past the end of the street.

Past eight hundred the Satisfied sleep no more at all, and kneel through the night in their halls with their halos burning, so a parish hall is never empty and the Pews’ lights never go down. The parishes call it keeping vigil for the Supper. Pan says the Farmer likes his bread proved overnight.

The unsealed of the Wards sleep with rags in their ears and call a bad night a hymn night, and those who can afford them sleep in choir plugs. Nepenthe sells Sabbath to whoever cannot sleep through the Hum, and most of what it sells goes to the Wards. A child of the Wards who sleeps through the Hum without either is called deaf-lucky. The Quiet Rooms in the Stones sell a night with no Hum in it for a battery, and are full by Matins.

Pan sleeps in rooms lined with mesh, under the street, where the Pillar never comes, and tells anyone from upstairs who will listen that it sleeps best of anyone in Nodus.

The sealed sleep laid out straight with their hands crossed on the breast, every pallet the same Bethel ticking in the same corner of the room, so a Teller walking a corridor in the hour after Matins sees forty sleepers as one shape repeated. Pan sleeps in heaps, naked and sweating among chains and furs, chrome cooling against meat, and says a body that sleeps alone has nobody to show its new scars to at Lauds. The Wards say the sealed talk in their sleep, a whole parish at once in one pitch, and a neighbor through the wall can count forty voices saying the same word.

Nobody has woven clothing for the city since the Parousia but Bethel Works, which weaves the white of the parishes for the parishes, and fourteen years have worn the charter’s clothes thin. The Wards dress in what the turners make, the charter’s coats and shirts unpicked and sewn up again inside out, and in what comes up from below, cloth off the Breach and the uptown tailoring the Quarrymen carry out of the White’s wardrobes, which the Wards call new money and wear to rags.

The Faithful wear Bethel white and call it their coats, after the coats the LORD God made for the man and his wife, and a soul’s white is given by Grace like everything else in a parish. Pan buys the same cloth by the bolt from the Union, which Bethel pays in it, for the Lantern Houses’ sheets and the shrouds of the dead. Wearing white off the parishes is a lie the Wards punish, since the Forgers’ clients wear it.

Pan wears whatever shows a graft. Blackgate keeps the only uniform below the street, charter black with the Warden’s badge cut off, and the Threshers’ band of sacking is the only thing the Faithful add to their white. A coat is a household’s dearest thing in the Wards after its door, and the Cold Store loses about one a night.

The Wards call Bethel white filthy rags, after Isaiah, “all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6), and the parishes call what the Wards wear the skins of goats.

Bethel white is cut to one pattern in seven sizes and issued with the soul’s number stitched inside the collar, and a sealed body in it has no shape the hall can see. Pan dresses to show the opening, in coats flayed back from the grafts, harnesses of chrome and tanned hide and skin worked into lace by Graven Lane’s scarifiers, and a Tare opened along the spine wears her coat backwards for a season.

A child of Nodus is born into a race. Directive 1:5 seals a child “on its eighth day, on the surrender of its parents”, and the House of Night keys the children of the Tares in their first week, so in a household with one keyed parent and one sealed the keyed side tries to reach a keyer before the eighth dawn and the sealed side tries to reach the hall at an Hour on the eighth day. The city calls a newborn’s first week the seven days, and Pan calls the race the short week.

The Directive asks for both parents, and the Deacons of the Wards have answered a household with one keyed parent two ways for ten years. Some enter the child on the sealed parent’s surrender alone and seal it, and some send the family home, and a household that wants a sealing learns which Deacon to carry the child to. A child keyed in its first week is a blank by its eighth day, and no hall seals a blank.

Most of the Wards are born at home by candle, delivered by the hands, the Wards’ midwives, who keep a count of the births on the stairwell wall in chalk beside the battery debts. The Wards General delivers whoever reaches it, and the House of Night’s birth clinics under Old Nod deliver Pan’s. Constance Ibe of the Kilns has delivered on every floor of High Meadow, and she carries a newborn to a hall or to a keyer, to whichever door the mother names, and to nobody on the father’s word.

The race is fought with contempt on both sides of the bed. The sealed grandmother at the door calls the keyer a butcher, the keyed grandfather calls the Deacon a farmer come for the calf, and the child, whichever way it goes, is told for the rest of its life that it was saved.

The halls lay each eighth-day child on the stone at the Hour, washed and bound in Bethel white, and the Deacon seals it while the mother kneels. A child keyed in the House of Night’s clinics comes home with its key-scar dressed in a ribbon of red silk, and the keyer hands the family its afterbirth in a jar to eat or bury. In the Wards the race has ended on a landing more than once, a keyed father and a sealed mother pulling the child between them, and the hands have stopped chalking those births on the wall.

A child of the Faithful is sealed at eight days on its parents’ surrender and carries the Seal without a halo until the first time it prays unassisted. Until then the stairwells call it unlit, and a mother of the Wards carries an unlit child up a dark stair in one arm and follows a neighbor’s halo. The first prayer is a household’s great day, and the parish reads the child’s first Grace at Terce on the next Lord’s Day. The parishes school their children in the halls between the Hours, in the hymns the Hum teaches and in the Directives cut into the wall, and the hall gives a child its first work at the first reading of Grace after its twelfth birthday.

A child of the Tares is keyed in its first week in the House of Night’s birth clinics, before it has ever been in the light, so that it grows up unread, and a generation of Pan has never been read at all. Pan’s children learn their handles before their letters and choose them again at the Unnaming if they want. They go to school at the Benches, in the side rooms of the booking hall, where shades who taught under the charter teach from keyed Lockets with a living keeper at the door, and a child of Pan learns to read a pact before it learns its sums and reads every lesson aloud twice.

Keying a child is care, as barring a door is, and no Court is party to it. The Notary holds that a key fitted on a parent’s word binds the child only until it can answer for itself. At fourteen a clerk asks a child of Pan at a window of the booking hall, twice, whether it will keep its key, and on the second yes the child signs its first self-title in its own blood. A child who says no twice goes to the house of Bezaleel to have the key taken out, goes white and walks up the stairs to choose for itself. Pan calls the asking the Second Yes, and this year the first children keyed in the covens’ rooms in the year of the Parousia came to it. Of the first forty asked, two said no twice, and the Pews have heard about both.

The Wards school whoever comes, by daylight. Turbine Row School kept its classes after the Parousia with no current and no screens, and at Terce, Sext and Nones its sealed children kneel at their desks while the rest wait with their pens down. Odile Marsh teaches there, sealed, and keeps her keyed pupils’ names on a slate she wipes clean every evening. The Gleaning takes the ripe of any age, and the Wards sit up with their children on the night of a Gleaning as with anyone else close to ripe.

A child of the Terraces is taught the Supper as a promise and the ripening board as its report, and a child of Pan is taught the Book’s cruelest chapters first, so by seven both can quote the same verses at each other across the Street Between, and do.

A child of the Pews has its hair cropped to the parish length at its first prayer, and the hall files the clippings in white packets by the roll. A child of Pan chooses its first graft after the Second Yes and its crew pays for it, and the booking hall cheers a girl back from the Row the same night with a steel finger and her own blood still wet on the self-title. Mothers in the Wards that face the White tie their children’s ankles to the bed frame on clear nights, and the Quarrymen say the shoe on the nail was tied the same way.

The Wards’ children play Salt. One child hums and is the Wheel, everyone else kneels, and whoever is last down is salted and stands still with their arms at their sides until another child splashes them with water, which is the rain. A sealed child of the Wards who plays it too well is told off at home. In Pillar a child walks the street with a candle and the rest are blanks who must reach a doorway before the light touches them, and a blank the candle catches goes to salt until the round is over.

The rhyme they clap to counts the eight Hours from Matins round to Compline and ends on Compline, Compline, shut your door. The children of the parishes clap the same rhyme to the same hands and end it Compline, Compline, open door. In Pan the children play Blank, where one is the Pillar with a lamp and the rest hide in a room lined with mesh, and the Pillar always loses.

The Wards’ word for being given away by your own family is a twenty, after the twenty Grace Directive 6:4 pays a witness who is kin, and it was first said of children who repeated something at the parish hall. Sealed parents of the Wards teach their unsealed children one rule, to say nothing in front of a sealed sister after Nones.

High Meadow runs the Climb on the first day of the year, a race up all thirty-six floors of a block by the stairs, and the winner’s name is chalked on the top landing. The Kilns’ darts league plays on in car one at the Sidings, on the board it carried out of the Kilns Club the morning the Directives were cut behind the bar, and Hangar Town’s children dare each other to climb the last flight’s stairs. Cards and dice are played for batteries everywhere, and the Wards bet on the Line’s figure before the Tide Table prints it.

The children of the Terraces play Supper, kneeling in a row while one walks behind them with a spoon and taps the ripest on the head, who goes up and sits out and is envied by the rest. The children of the Wards play Dogcatcher, two carrying a third on a broom handle to the end of the street while the third stays stiff and keeps its eyes open, and the children of Pan play Bray, which is shouting.

The children of the Terraces play Watcher, in which one child walks the row reading faces for a want and whoever smiles kneels at the wall until Nones, and the best Watcher in a parish is the one who never has to look twice. Pan’s children play Graft with tin limbs strapped on in butcher’s twine, and the older ones with the trotters Gadara throws them, which they wear on the stairs until they stink.

The parishes marry by Directive 9, which has the Deacon assign marriages “between sealed souls, by Grace”, and a sealed couple of the Wards may be assigned across a street neither has crossed. The good Deacons ask first. A love outside an assigned marriage is the commonest reason the Second Fold hear for dimming.

The Wards hang a door. A couple buys a parish door at the Dooryard and hangs it together on their room, the number chalked on its back becomes their household’s number, and if either of them pays dues the Union Hall paints their names on its long wall. The marriages made before the Parousia that split across the line are argued over still. The parishes say a marriage to a blank ended when its line in the Book went blank and the Deacon may assign again, and the Wards say a hung door holds until one of the two takes it down.

Pan cannot marry for life, since the Concord forbids forever, so a couple takes a season. They sign a pact of partnership for a term, read twice at the SEASON window of the booking hall, and renew it at RETURN when the term runs out, so that a couple ten years together has had ten returns. They cut a pair of pads together at every return, one each, enough for the term, and write to each other only through them, and a long marriage in Pan is a thousand-sheet marriage. A couple who use the last sheet before the term is out cut again. A key cannot be shared, so a pad is the closest thing two of the keyed can hold in common, and since a sheet used twice breaks a pad, Pan’s word for betraying a lover or a crew is a second use.

Across the line a sealed and an unsealed court on opposite curbs of the Street Between, which is called walking the Street. The House of Night keeps the rest of the city’s appetites by pact for a term, read twice at its door, and the workers of its quarter are called lanterns.

The parishes bless an assigned marriage with may your children ripen early, and the Wards bless a hung door with may He never see you, and both mean it.

An assigned couple stand before the Deacon in white, say the surrender in one breath and touch palms once, the whole rite, and the Tellers note how long the touch lasted. A season in Pan opens with the pads cut and closes the same night in a Lantern House, where each cuts a mark into the other wherever the other chooses, so a Tare ten seasons married wears ten scars in a lover’s hand.

Most of Nodus was on the Tree at the last census, and most of it came off at the Parousia, when the clinics went under the street and the price went out of reach. Fourteen years later the city is aging again all at once, each body from the best year the Tree had left it at, and the Wards give an age as two numbers, the best year and the years since the course lapsed. She is thirty-one and fourteen.

The congregations that never took the Tree give a plain age and are proud of it. The Faithful who came to the Covenant later lost the Tree at the Mercy clinics, and a parish calls that morning the day the years came back. The repentant who were past a hundred when the clinics took them off it are the Returned, who age in months, and a household of the Pews watches it happen across the table. The parishes call each grey hair a day given back.

Pan pays three thirties for a course of the Tree, a year of appointments that holds the body about three years, and is as young as it pays for. A Tare who ages is a Tare who could not pay, and the oldest-looking young people in the city sit at the Undertow’s bar with birth years the Lot is careful never to ask. The Orchard’s windfalls slow the Wards’ aging between courses and walk nothing back, and the queue at Hall Four on the first of the month, where the Orchard gives what fruit it has by lot, is the oldest queue in Nodus.

The Pews read “The hoary head is a crown of glory” (Proverbs 16:31) over every grey hair, and a Faithful grandmother on the Street Between tells a keyed girl she goes to the fire in a whore’s skin. Pan says a grey hair is a loaf browning, and a Tare who cannot pay for the Tree has the Row swap the sagging parts for chrome and shows each off.

A parish nurses its own sick in its hall, by Grace, and the Faithful age and die as people did before the charter, since they refuse the Tree. The Mercy clinics in the nine white halls of the Terraces cut implants out of the repentant, once, between Prime and Compline, and one patient in nine dies of the mercy, and take the Tree off them by a course of injections, since a soul kept alive past its years is keeping a want and can never ripen.

The Wards General on the West Road has a thousand beds and runs on batteries charged in the dark. It took batteries until the Concord and has taken silver or nothing since, because it pays the Row’s surgeons in silver, and since the sealed never touch silver it has treated nobody sealed in eight years. Lazarus carries its subscribers down to nine stations under the street for a thirty a year, and keys before the end any subscriber who asked for it in the subscription.

Below the street the houses of the Row fit grafts and mend them, and an implant answers only to the house that fitted it, which is to say only that house may open it, so a graft is for life and so is its house. The House of Night keys the children of Pan in their first week, keeps the gene-work and the Tree, and Nepenthe makes the medicine, the sleep and the forgetting.

Most of the Tares were on the Tree before the Parousia and the Night Market keeps them on it, and a Tare who ages is a Tare who could not pay. The Orchard gives what fruit it has free, by lot, to whoever comes to Hall Four on the first of the month, and its windfalls slow the aging between courses and walk nothing back.

A parish hall lays its sick in numbered rows and prays their Grace up, and enters each death as a cure. The houses of the Row work with the curtain open, the patient awake and laughing on the bench with the meat of the arm peeled back for the chrome, and the Mercy clinics enter their one in nine as souls spared the choice.

Everything the Dark gives is paid for, and Pan reads the price before it signs. An implant answers only to the house that fitted it, so a graft is for life and so is its house, and the Row’s houses have closed since the Parousia as houses do, a fitter dead on the stairs or a bench sold off for silver. The grafts they leave behind are orphans, and no other house can mend one. Marbas of the Forge can, at Chrome Row Station, at the Forge’s price.

A sense lent to a demon comes back at the end of its term with everything the demon felt through it. Some lenders say their own meals taste of nothing for a month after a year of someone else’s, and the Wards say they have gone flat. Others say they got back the best year they ever had, and they lend again. The Return sells what comes back by the hour, and its regulars, who lie down in its booths most nights, are lie-downs to the rest of Pan.

Demons borrow pain as gladly as taste. On fight nights a neph may lend the bout’s pain to a demon of the Forge for silver and fight numb, and the demon feels every blow from wherever it sits in the Dark. What comes back at the end of the term is the demon’s pleasure in it, and the Row calls a fighter who has lent too often sweet. The Undertow recites a short list to new runners of terms kept to the letter that ruined the signer, the lender of touch for a season who got it back with a season of a demon’s appetites, the courier who lent sleep and came back with three months of a demon’s waking. Every term on the list was kept, and new runners hear it before they sign their first.

A rider’s term ends and the rider goes, and it leaves something in its host, a habit, a word or a taste for a food the host had never eaten. The Ridden call it a leaving and compare theirs in the Lantern Houses. Most of them keep their leavings, and a few pay the House of Night to take one back.

The rest is paid in the body. Vigil’s three days are paid for with three more in Sabbath, Nepenthe sells nobody two doses of Lethe in a month, and a Tare who ages is a Tare who could not pay for the Tree. A key that dies leaves its wearer readable, so the keyed of Pan have their keys looked at on the Row once a year, as people saw a dentist under the charter.

The Pews quote “ye are bought with a price” (1 Corinthians 6:20) at the Tares’ queues as proof of their bondage, and Pan agrees and asks the Pews what they fetched. A fighter of the Row keeps the scars of every bout he lent oiled and on show, and the Row calls a halo the price tag, still on.

Nodus buried its dead at the Acre on the West Road, the Company’s cemetery, which was mostly grass on the night of the Parousia and was full by P+11. The Terraces’ congregations lie in the white rows their churches kept there under the charter. Piet Vane, its sexton, has dug every grave in it by hand since the first year and keeps its book, and every year he asks the Union for a second spade. The keyed lie where their families put them, most of them under died unread, and the neither-mark beside them. Since the Acre filled the Wards bury on the Runway Acre, the grass between the airfield’s runways, which Hangar Town keeps, and the Deep End and the quays give their dead to the sea off the Flotilla.

The parishes carry their dead, and lay them in the white stone. The body goes in Bethel white on the parish’s handcart to the nearest consecrated street, and the mourners kneel on the road at every Hour they meet on the way. Nobody opens the stone. The body is laid on it at Vespers, the Deacon reads the dead one’s last Grace over it, and the stone takes it as it takes whatever stays in its way, so that by Lauds it has closed over it, so a white street is paved with the parish’s dead and walked on every morning by the gatherers. The parish calls it a homecoming and keeps its grief for the hall after Compline. The neither-mark keep the long night, sitting up with their dying until Lauds behind a shut door, so that no light meets the eyes at the end, and many of them keep up a Lazarus subscription for the end, since its crews carry a keyer and the dying can be keyed in time to die unread. The Wards call that a late key, and a family that got one there in time says the dying one signed last.

The Tares say goodbye with two words, die unread, and mean them. A soul the Throne can read at the moment of death goes to it, and a soul it cannot read goes on into the Dark as a shade, so a Tare’s last care is a live key. At a death the crew burns the dead one’s devices, so that everything on them goes to the Pyre Library, and on the third night calls the shade on the undernet. It answers if its owner died unread.

The salted are alive. They stand in the Gardens facing the parishes, awake, for years, until the rain takes the salt a few centimeters a year, and the Union reads their names at every meeting with their dues waived. Their families of neither mark come at Nones, when the Wardens allow it, and read the Tide Table aloud to their pillar, the tides, the prices and who was born, their keyed sons send it in with them, and the head gardener keeps a stool for the old. Most of the salted are keyed and die unread whenever they are freed, so for them the Salt Widows end the waiting, carrying whom they can to the Sea Steps and giving them to deep water. An unkeyed pillar the rain frees under the Pillar’s round is read in that moment and taken, and one dissolved off the Sea Steps goes on into the Dark, since the light cannot read so deep. A sealed pillar is read by its Seal through the water, and the Widows give it to the sea all the same. The parishes count the taken among the living, and they need no stones. The Union put up twenty-two at the Acre after the Harvest, and the families of the Wards have put up more every year since, with nothing under them.

The roll enters the Grace each sealed soul died with beside its line, and the parishes read every entry as a failure, a soul that died before the Supper could have it, and pity its family at the hall for a year.

The bran wash a sealed corpse in cold water, stop it with white wadding and tie its folded hands with Bethel thread, so it goes into the stone as tidy as it knelt. At a Wake the crew lays the body on the table in its horns and chrome, burns its devices on the same table one by one with a toast to each, so that they go on with it, and at Lauds carries it out whole, in every piece of chrome it paid for, and buries it so. Those who sit by a body on the stone say it goes under back first and the face last, at about Matins, with the eyes still open if nobody closed them.

A soul that dies unread goes on into the Dark as a shade, and anyone who knew it can reach it on the undernet, so a household of the Tares keeps its dead on a keyed Locket and calls them on the night the year turns and when a child is born. Pan says of a dead mother that she is on the Mesh now. Many shades work, and a grandfather who mended Lockets before he died may still be mending them.

Inheritance below the street is the third-night will. When the crew calls the shade at its Wake, the shade gives away its own things, its room, its tools and its silver, and a Notary’s clerk who comes down for it enters what it says. The Undertow says a shade gives more freely than it did alive.

The neither-mark of the Wards seldom have a keyed set to call on, and a soul that died in the light answers nobody. A block that loses a keyed neighbor and an unkeyed one in the same week hears one of them answer on the third night, and the family of the other sits through it on the landing below.

Pan says a shade on the Mesh is the one thing in Nodus the Farmer never got his teeth into.

Upstairs nobody speaks to the dead, and a parish clears a soul’s things the morning after its burial, the white folded, the cup scoured and issued to the next on the roll by Terce. Pan sets the household’s keyed Locket on the dead one’s chair at the third-night Wake, so a grandmother gives away her silver from her own seat at the table while the crew drinks to her and the clerk writes it down.

Nodus was a port before it was the charter’s city, and half of it was born somewhere else, so it prayed in more houses than the churches. It had synagogues, mosques, temples and a gurdwara, a Buddhist hall over a shop on the Row, and on the quays the Seamen’s Mission, nine rooms off one corridor, one to each faith the ships brought in. At Lauds on the first day of P+1 the first four Directives appeared cut into the wall of every one of them with every church’s, and Directive 4 made every one of them the hall of a parish.

What their people did next divides them still. Many took the Seal, and kneel at the Hours in the rooms they prayed in before, under the Directives, and say that what came is what they always prayed to. Others say it is nothing their fathers knew, and took a key or neither mark, and pray as they always did, in rooms of the Wards they keep empty of anything the light should not see, since the Courts say every prayer that goes up reaches the same ear, and kneel to nothing at the Hours. Families split over it, as the city’s Christian families did.

The parishes hold that there was only ever one to pray to. Directive 6 cites Deuteronomy 13, and the Scriveners point out that the dots in its verse begin where Deuteronomy has “Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers” (Deuteronomy 13:6), which the Host left out. Pan has the Courts’ account, that wherever a god took worship and answered prayer it was the Throne under a local name. The old congregations of the Mission say that neither account is theirs to give.

Directive 4 made the whole of the Mission the hall of one parish, the parish of the long quay, one of the fifteen of the quays, and the only parish in Nodus with nine rooms to its hall. On the Lord’s Day the parish kneels in the largest of the nine to hear its Grace. Some of the other rooms fill at the Hours, and the rest stand swept and empty, their names still over the doorways.

The parishes call the Mission’s old congregations the lukewarm in nine languages, and the old congregations answer in the same nine.

In P+1 every old house of prayer was limewashed to the rafters, mosaics, scrollwork, gilt and carpets under one white coat, and the halls renew it each year so nothing older than the Directives shows through, except at the Mission, whose nine names over its doorways the parish of the long quay has never painted out. The Quarrymen chip what lies under the lime from behind and carry it below, where Pan sets a gilt saint’s eye and a tile of blue script into its stairwells beside resin casts of its own hands.

The Faithful greet each other with one word asked and answered, Seen? Seen. The newly sealed say that the first unassisted prayer, when the halo comes, is the end of being alone, since something knows everything about them and has stayed. Converts from the Wards say so at the Union Hall, and it is the hardest thing a keyed child has to answer at a sealed mother’s table.

The Faithful are certain. Everything the Wards say against the Most High is in the Book already as the words of the wicked, and a sealed soul hearing it hears the Book come true. Grace sets a room and a ration, and every sealed soul has eaten since P+1, which beside a kidney at the Shambles for four thirties is the Covenant’s best argument, and the Faithful make it. With no doors and every room lit the Pews have no theft and no locks, and the mothers of the Pews let their children walk to the hall alone at Prime and tell their sisters in the Wards so. The Faithful’s taunt is that Pan needs Bailiffs.

Past seven hundred the Covenant keeps a promise the Wards cannot answer. The appetite goes first, then thirst, and past eight hundred sleep, until a soul lives on nothing and kneels all night in its hall with its halo burning, and the parishes call these the Satisfied, after “he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst” (John 6:35). The Terraces count nine hundred and twelve of them this year. Past nine hundred a soul is ripe, and the parishes call the ripe the Called and a Gleaning the Supper, after “the marriage supper of the Lamb” (Revelation 19:9), and teach gladly what Pan says to mock them, that the Most High takes the best of His people into Himself as the body takes its bread. A household with a soul among the Called hangs a white cloth in its doorway and is envied by its street for a year. On the threshold the Called say the Son’s words at his supper, “Take, eat; this is my body” (Matthew 26:26), and the parishes say they go up singing.

Every hall keeps a book of the Mercies, the prayers answered at the Hours, written in by the Deacon, a fever broken at Terce, a lost child found at Nones, a stillborn that breathed. Parish 1’s book runs to nine volumes. The Wards say chance and the parishes say the Most High. A parish household keeps three texts, the King James the hall reads aloud, a hymnal from Bethel and its own line of the parish roll, and the Pews read the Tide Table off the walls across the Street Between at Prime.

Heaven has written no Directive since the twelve of P+1, and the Deacons say none is needed, since everything new the city has made falls under a verse already and they find the verse. The Covenant was cut once, and they give the verse for that too, “Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you” (Deuteronomy 4:2). The bottom of Grace is in the same law. Under three hundred a soul’s room goes to someone else and it sleeps in the hall, under a hundred its manna comes after everyone else’s, and a sealed soul at nothing is sealed still and read still, and the Wards call it an ember. Embers drift down into the Wards, the Satisfied give them their manna, and the Second Fold leave water for them on the landings.

Everything a parish gives comes in one pattern and one number, cup, pallet, hymnal and white, and a sealed soul who scratches its initials into any of it is keeping hinges and pays in Grace at the next Terce. Pan buys the issued cups off the Kindlers, chips cocks and pentacles into the enamel, files the rims into fangs and sells them back on the Concourse to the sealed of the Wards who need something to surrender.

The parishes raise their children to be eaten, and do it with joy. Every hall keeps a ripening board beside the Directives, a slate with every soul of the parish on it and its Grace chalked after Terce on the Lord’s Day, and the mothers stand before it after the Hour reading their children’s numbers as the Wards read the tides. A child who climbs is kissed in front of the hall, a child who falls is prayed over at the front of it, and the blessing over a cradle in the Pews is may you ripen early.

Grace is surrendered will, and the parishes have a method for every way of surrendering it. A child of the Pews eats what it is given, wears what Bethel weaves and marries whom it is assigned, and learns that every want it gives up is a step toward the table. Grace is given for witness, so the children of the Terraces learn to report a neighbor before they learn to read, and the Tellers in the stairwells of the Wards are sealed mothers climbing one door at a time. Past seven hundred a soul stops eating, and its parish feeds it nothing and is proud of it. Past eight hundred it stops sleeping, and the Wakeful keep vigil with the Called through their final nights with hymns and cold water, so the Supper takes them at their brightest.

At a Gleaning the parishes keep the night as a wedding. The households of the Called hang white cloths in their doorways, the halls lay long tables with empty plates for the guests who have gone to a better one, and the families of the Terraces envy each other’s Called for a year. Grief is a want, so a mother who weeps at a Supper confesses it on the Lord’s Day after and is given a psalm for penance, and most never weep. The Pews count Parish 31, which gave 311 of its 2,006 souls to the Harvest, the holiest parish in Nodus, and the ripest of the Terraces ask every year to be assigned to it.

They look on the rest of the city as fruit that will never ripen. A keyed child of the Wards is spoiled before it can walk, a soul of neither mark rots on the branch and Pan is a cellar of windfalls, and the sealed walk through the Wards with the gentle patience of visitors to a hospital. They have never doubted that they are the good, since everything the city says against them is in the Book already, in the mouths of the wicked. Pan says the Pews are the best-fed cattle in the world and the only cattle that sing on the way to the barn.

The ripening board is wiped and rechalked in one white hand, the Deacon’s, and the parish reads it in ranks. A soul who crosses eight hundred has every button cut off its white and the seams sewn flat, so that nothing of it will snag on the light, a soul past nine hundred is given the last coat, sewn shut at the back, and the Golden Calf chalks a board of its own over a cleaver, the week’s ripest of the Terraces listed as specials of the house.

Heaven governs Nodus by its orders of angels and some ten thousand sealed men and women, and no angel still in its service has ever said I. The Wheel hangs over Babel and sees. By day the Watchers hang in a ring about it, and at Compline each goes out low over its district, every district but Old Nod, and moves through it all night. A Watcher sees every Seal in its district as a point of light through any wall but mesh and reads a Seal’s Grace within three hundred meters, and the halos carry its Grace up with its prayers, so a sealed soul is known in its bed, in its bath and in its prayers, and calls it being seen. A Cherub stands in each of the six gates with the sword that turns every way, reads the eyes and knows face, voice, gait and heartbeat, and a blank that walks into its light stops there, held inside the turning sword, standing and awake for as long as the Wardens take to come, which on a slow day is hours, while the queue of the sealed files past it saying the surrender. The Seraphim hold the broken crown of Babel and come down from it two at a time to burn. The Hum stops for nothing but a Gleaning.

The Charter Wardens are human, sealed and the Host’s hands. They hear their orders in Tongues at Prime through their commander’s mouth, lift whatever a Cherub has held and carry it to the Salt Gardens, and stand in the plot while the sentence comes out of the Gardens’ Deacon in the Choir’s voice, since a sentence in Tongues needs a Faithful mouth within the Choir’s reach, and the body whitens from the feet up. The salted stay awake inside the salt until the rain wears them away, which takes years, and Directive 11 forbids anyone to move them sooner. The Wardens say they have never hurt anyone in their lives, since the Salt does it, and their children say so at school.

Heaven writes up its own work in the passive and asks to be thanked for it. Each salting is cut into the wall of the parish hall nearest the gate as a correction, THE PESTILENCE OF GATE 4 IS CORRECTED, REJOICE, and the parish says amen at the next Hour. The Mercy halls of Zion Heights take a penitent’s implants out once, and one patient in nine dies of the mercy, which the halls enter as a soul spared the choice. The Harvest of P+3 took 2.1 million of nine million in a night and is cut in the halls as the Harvest, with the 2.1 million as the good news. Rapture is the Faithful’s own word for it.

Below the street every order has its name. The Wheel is the Ringpiece, a Watcher a peeper, a Cherub a dog in a doorway, a Seraph a blowtorch, the Choir the Drone and a Warden a dogcatcher, and Pan holds that the only difference between the Host and Gadara’s slaughter hall is that Gadara never asked a pig to thank it.

The Wardens wear gloves of black kid on duty and carry a held body on the pole as orderlies carry a stretcher, in step and silent. Graven Lane’s tattooists ink the Host as Pan sees it, a Cherub along a forearm holding a man open-eyed in its light, the Ringpiece round a navel, and the Salt Gardens drawn in white ink that shows only when the wearer flushes with drink, rage or sex.

Half a million of Nodus have taken neither the Seal nor a key. A Watcher reads them as it reads anyone, the parishes give them no manna, and by Pan’s account they go to the Throne when they die like anyone readable, without ever having knelt. Most of them live in the Stones and the Wards, poorer than either side, with no ration and no pact.

Their reasons are their own, and they argue over them. The old congregations of the Mission kneel to neither and say so. The poor cannot put by three thirties for a key. The frightened believe the key is the Mark of the Beast and the Seal is worse. Many of them call themselves charterers. They kept their charter papers and hold to the twelve articles as the only law they ever signed. They give the date the Registry entered them on the roll as the keyed give a handle. “The protections of this Charter belong to everyone in the Bounds”, they say, and nobody has revoked it.

The Threshers call them chaff, from the verse in which the wheat goes into the garner and the chaff is burned “with unquenchable fire” (Matthew 3:12), and the charterers have taken the word up, as the Tares took theirs. Their saying is I’ll choose when I’m dying, and a late key from a Lazarus crew is how many of them choose. Teodor Vass of the Kilns has kept the charter’s twelve articles pasted inside his door since P0, and he reads them aloud at his window on the night the year turns, the one reading of that night that belongs to neither the Gleaning nor Leak Night.

The parishes call them lukewarm, after the church the Son promised to spue out of His mouth (Revelation 3:16), Pan calls them bread that won’t rise, and the neither-mark answer both that they will choose a side when someone gives them a reason that is not a threat.

The charterers keep the charter’s grey on purpose, coats with the Company’s buttons sewn back on, so one of them in a crowd of white or chrome stands out like a stain of the old city. The sealed look at a bare face and the keyed at unopened skin, and both pity it, and a charterer of the Kilns says he is pitied more in a day than a Deacon is in a year.

Nodus kept its animals through the Parousia. The gulls went on working the fish market’s scraps on the first morning, and the rats went on living in the drains as the first crews came down into them. In Pan every stall of the Night Market keeps a cat, and the Lantern Houses breed them. The Wards say a cat asleep on a step sleeps on through the Pillar as the step does. The keyed who wait at its edge in the next doorway have watched it happen, and they say the cats of the Wards are the only things in Nodus the Pillar has no use for.

The Harvest took 2.1 million people in one night and left their dogs. Manna is given to the sealed alone, so the parishes had nothing to give a dog, and in the weeks after the Harvest the dogs of the taken came down the Lanes and the long roads into the Wards, and the Wards fed what they could. Most blocks of the Wards keep a few of those dogs’ grandchildren on the stairs.

The gardeners of the Salt Gardens walk the rows at Lauds with rags on poles to keep the gulls off the pillars. Since the Harvest the parishes have kept no animals, and the manna a household keeps overnight against the Directive “bred worms, and stank” by morning, as Exodus says (Exodus 16:20). The Union’s pigeons fly over all of it by day, from the Loft on the customs house, carrying notes, since the light reads a pigeon as a bird and the pad numbers on its leg as numbers.

Nothing grows on the white stone. Off it the city has gone to weed in fourteen years, grass between the stopped tramlines of the long roads, willow through the roofs of the Sidings’ sheds and darnel in every crack of the Stones, the weed of the parable Heaven named the Tares for. The Cainites leave the darnel standing, and the Terraces pull up whatever they find of it on their side of the Street Between.

Gadara brands its pigs LEGION and the Lantern Houses name their cats for the orders of the Host, so that in Pan a Seraph is a ginger tom asleep on a counter of the Night Market and a Cherub is whatever sits in a doorway and will not move.

Pan dresses its animals like itself, cats fitted with chrome claws for the joke of it, a Night Market ratter’s terrier with teeth of black steel and a wire halo it wears for the Bray. The parishes keep no animal, and the bran wring the necks of the doves that land on consecrated stone and lay them in a row at the hall door for the Deacon to count, white birds on white stone.

Silver is Mammon’s money, struck by the Exchange and entered on the Ledger, and a thirty is the standard bundle, named after the thirty pieces paid to Judas, whom the Cainites count a saint. A charged battery trades at about one silver and buys a meal anywhere in Pan, so the Wards price everything in batteries and Pan in silver, and the parishes, which give by Grace, price nothing. Grace buys nothing and has no rate to anything.

The Tide Table prints the week’s rates after the tides and the Pillar’s hours, the Exchange’s rate for a battery, Darkwell’s for a fill and the chargers’ beside it, and the fish market, which chalks its own over its scale, says they are always wrong.

The Tide Table prints the week’s wages under the prices, in batteries a day, and the Wards say a household of four with three in work clears about eight a day and spends one on bread, one on water, half on light and a third on gas, and the rest on fish and beans, the chalk on the stairwell, the Nightmen, clothes and a thirty a year for Lazarus, and puts what is left by for a key. The poor of Nodus are the neither-mark without work, who cannot put by three thirties.

A room’s night of light is one fill, so a thirty buys a room in the Wards about five months of nights’ light. Batteries are coin and go round. The chargers keep one battery in five, so a household brings five empty and takes four home full, and the fifth, filled, is the shed’s to sell, and at the neaps they keep one in four, which comes to about a fifth of a silver a fill and a quarter at the neaps, a little under the Well. The Tappers fill at about an eighth. The Union’s drivers keep one battery in ten they carry for the Union, which pays its carriers two a day out of it, and the Wards count both cuts into every price. Prices move, and the fish market remembers mackerel at four to a battery in P+3, which is two batteries the string now.

The parishes price nothing and number everything, each wafer, cup and bolt of white entered against a soul, and the Granary weighs the manna in white scales before Lauds. A price at the Night Market is chalked in red grease on the back of the buyer’s hand, and Graven Lane knocks a silver off for anyone showing chrome less than a week old.

A battery in Nodus is one of two things. A stamped battery carries Darkwell’s well and winch on its case and belongs to the Well, which rents it out charged and takes it back to fill again, so most rooms in the Wards that burn batteries rent their light from the Well, at a quarter of a silver a fill and a third at the neaps, and a stamped battery spends only there. A loose battery, charged in the bonded sheds or by the Tappers, belongs to whoever holds it, and loose batteries are the Wards’ coin.

Every stall that takes batteries keeps a proof bulb, a keyed lamp on a short keyed lead with two clips, and a buyer says show the bulb before a deal. A battery passed under its charge is a short, and passing shorts is the commonest small crime in the Wards. A bargain is full or flat, a deal sealed on the nod without a clerk is once read, and a battery promised by the next Hour is a psalm’s credit. Cells wear out after a few hundred fillings, so the Well judges every stamped battery that comes back and sends the dead ones out through the Breach to the undercities that still make cells, and new cells are the largest cargo Lowtide brings home.

Silver is struck in pieces at the Exchange from silver metal it buys by the kilo, the Wreckers’ salvage, the charter’s plate, the foreign coin left in its vaults and the jewelry of the taken, and every piece is entered on the Ledger by the number on its rim as it is struck. A thirty is thirty pieces on a cord, the count paid to Judas. Every charger the Exchange licenses must give a charged battery for a piece, and the Exchange’s stalls buy charged batteries for silver at the rate as readily, which holds the rate near one. The Exchange buys every tide’s output from Tidewright in silver and sells it back as charge through Darkwell, the bonded sheds and the keyed lines, so the silver goes round, from the Exchange to Tidewright’s crews, from the crews into Pan, and back to the Exchange for charge, and the Exchange strikes new pieces only as the taps’ output grows. Pan says silver is current you can carry. A piece the Ledger never entered is dead silver, and a broker tests a doubtful piece by reading the number on its rim into the stall’s Locket twice, as the Notary reads everything, and the Ledger answers over the Mesh whether that piece was struck and where it was last read, so a number read at two stalls on one night is dead until the Exchange has both pieces on its scale.

The taps give about sixty megawatts on a spring flood and nothing at slack water. Twice a month at the neaps the tides run weak and the taps give a third of that, and the city has its neap weeks, when the Exchange’s stalls ration charge, the street price of a battery climbs, the chargers keep one in four and the Stones run their generator yards on diesel through the low hours to carry the lines, as they do at every slack water. The Tide Table prints the neaps above the tides. This year Darkwell has offered to buy the whole of the neaps’ output in advance, and Ansel Moor, Tidewright’s chief engineer, has put it to the crews on Turbine Row.

A short is called a tithe, since it promises full and pays nothing, and a dead piece of silver is a Deacon’s coin. The Row cuts sockets over the hip to carry a loose battery against the bone, and a runner who pays at a stall by peeling back the skin and unclipping a cell is said to pay in the meat.

Nodus went to work on the first morning after the Parousia. The fish market went back to barter, the chargers set up in the bonded sheds, and the Union’s drivers carried batteries to the Wards General. It has gone to work every morning since.

The sealed of the White and the Pews work where their Grace assigns them, at Bethel Works, in the parish halls, in the Granary and at the gates, and they are paid in Grace and hold no batteries. The sealed of the Wards and the quays work where anyone does and are paid as anyone is. Everyone else works at whatever pays. The Wards’ trades are charging, carrying, baking, bottling gas, fitting keys, hanging doors, mending Lockets, winding lifts, ferrying, diving and running, and most people in the Wards work three of them and sleep in shifts.

Pan works by pact, at the benches of the Row and Locket, the forges of Old Harbor Station, the stalls of the Night Market and the Shambles, and on the stairs of Babel for the Exchange’s silver. A runner works for a surety, a Spare for the board, a Quarryman for the Mason and a neph for the week.

A sealed worker of the Wards who is paid in batteries may hold them and spends them as anyone does, on ferry fares, candles at the Open and the things the Concourse sells to be surrendered, and tithes a tenth at Terce on the Lord’s Day, entered beside the worker’s Grace. The hall buys its gas, its candles and in dry weeks its filtered water from the Union with the tithe, and the Union’s sealed drivers hand them over at the hall door. A battery hidden from the tithe is hinges, and one passed across the table to an unsealed son instead is a white battery, and the Tellers count those. The sealed never touch silver, which they call Judas money.

The Union is the one body whose members are sealed and keyed alike, and its loads cross the open edges of the Wards every day and never pass a gate, carried by its sealed drivers by day and its keyed drivers by night. It elects a sealed chair one year and a keyed chair the next, and in a sealed year it names a keyed hand who signs its pacts with the Exchange at the booking hall, and the chair confesses at Terce that the Union signed. The Union reads its terms aloud at every meeting so that nothing it agreed is hidden, and the Tellers sit in the hall like anyone else. Twice a sealed chair has refused to name a hand, and both years the boats stayed in.

The sealed of Bethel are paid in Grace and count it the better wage, since it earns a place at the table, and the Wards are paid in batteries and count theirs the better, since it buys the light, and each side pities the other’s payday.

At Bethel the sealed weave at identical looms in identical white, and the Deacon at the end of the row calls its roll aloud at Nones without a breath between souls. In Pan every trade wears its tools in the body, the Row’s fitters with loupes screwed into the socket, the Shambles’ butchers with blades sleeved in the forearm, a Tapper with keyed wire under the skin of her arm to pull out and splice.

Work worth silver in Pan is a pact. Whoever wants something done goes to a surety at the Undertow, the surety names a price and finds someone to do it, a Notary’s clerk reads the terms twice at the bar, both parties sign in blood, and the surety takes a tenth. The surety stands behind it for both, so whoever breaks it owes the surety as well.

The work can be a battery run across the Penumbra, a crate off a Lowtide hull, a door hung in Babel or a Seraph’s floor watched for a night. A runner who delivers is paid at the bar, and a runner who fails owes what the terms name, which a Bailiff will come to read aloud.

The sureties take no work against anyone in the dark. The sureties hold themselves to the Concord’s fourth article, which keeps what is hidden hidden, so a job in Pan never asks who someone is, and a client who asks is struck off the Undertow’s board.

Every pact at the Undertow opens with the clerk reading the Throne’s first wage, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread” (Genesis 3:19), and the bar answers “and in the blood of thy hand shalt thou sign.” The board keeps one standing job that has never closed, THE FARMER, DEAD, PRICE ON REQUEST, and new runners are told to sign for it when they grow up.

The Concord forbids a pact that asks for worship, service or obedience, and the Notary’s reading of it is the law of Pan, lend the hand, keep the will. A pact may lend only what a party does, named in full and for a term, so any clause that says as directed, as ordered or as required is struck out at the first reading, and the clerks call it the as-directed void. A Blackgate guard’s pact names the door, the stair, the runner and the hours. Its captain proposes and is followed or is not, as a first among none is, and its drill is a custom kept because it works. A familiar’s year lists its tasks one by one.

Any party may speak out at any time, by reading its entry on the Ledger aloud before a witness, and what is owed for the term served is settled then, so a fighter can walk off a stair in the middle of a fight by saying one line. The Babel Line Company keeps one custom the Notary could not enforce and the Line has never broken, that nobody speaks out above the hundredth floor.

A pact sworn by many at once is a Hermon, after the mountain where the Watchers bound themselves together, and the Line’s signing at the foot of the Long Wet every midwinter is the Hermon of Pan. The Concord forbids forever, so the order of Pan is a calendar of renewals. The House of Night’s pact for the Lantern Houses ran seven years and was read again in P+13, Stonecutter taking its rent as the keying of every Cainite child free in the birth clinics. Lowtide’s license runs a year from each midsummer, Blackgate’s company pact three years from each Concord night, and Twelvefruit’s pact with the House of Night is up this year, and the Orchard has asked, through quince, to sit at the reading. The Tide Table prints TERMS on its back page once a season, the great pacts and the day each is read.

On Cain’s Day the clerks at the Undertow’s bar read the Covenant aloud as though it had been offered at the window, and strike it clause by clause, as directed, as ordered, for ever, until nothing is left of it but the parish’s name.

A pact of Pan goes into the body as well as the Ledger, its term inked as a ring of marks round the wrist, one for every quarter, so a Blackgate guard three years into her company pact wears twelve, with the next pricked ready. The Covenant marks its own once, with the Seal, and counts no seasons, since a sealed soul signs nothing and says the surrender in the parish’s words.

Debt in Pan is a pact, and every pact is on the Ledger, which cannot be forged. A debtor pays it in silver or batteries, sells it on to a surety, or lends a craft for a term the pact names, as the Concord allows, since it forbids service, obedience and forever alike. A pact never grows by itself, since the Concord lets no pact take more than its terms name, so a debt in Pan carries no interest, and the sureties take their tenth for standing behind it. The Bailiffs collect what the terms name and nothing more, and a pact can be ended by speaking its entry aloud before a witness, when what is owed for the term served is settled.

Debt above the street is Grace. A sealed household that loses Grace loses the rooms and work it held by Grace, and Directive 12 still takes forty from any household for a door. The Wards call Grace a household has lost white debt.

Between the two, the Wards owe in batteries, to the chargers, to the Tappers and to each other, and keep the count in chalk on the stairwell walls.

The parishes owe too. The halls of the White and the Pews take no batteries in tithe, so Bethel pays the Union for their gas and candles in its white cloth by the bolt, the gas the Union buys from the Tankmen and the candles from Tallow, and the Union sells the cloth on to Pan for sheets and shrouds. What the cloth does not cover the Union carries on the white slate, a debt those halls have run since P+1 and never paid, and since P+3 the slate has carried the Breachers’ powder too, which the Union buys for Gideon’s presses and its sealed drivers carry up by day. The Union reads it once a year after the book of the tanks and has never called it, since half the Union kneels in those halls and calling it would leave them cold, and every Deacon knows the number.

A soul whose Grace has fallen under three hundred is bran, seated at the front of its hall at every Hour to be prayed over by everyone behind it, and the Wards call it the cruelest collection in Nodus.

The bran sit at the front of the hall with their Grace pinned on a white card at the breast, and the parish counts the prayer over them its kindest work. The Union keeps its white slate as a board of enamel in black grease, and passing Deacons turn their faces from it with perfect manners. A Bailiff of Pan wears a debtor’s handle in steel studs across his knuckles until the pact is paid.

Pan keeps no police, since the Concord forbids obedience, and the Wardens’ writ ends at the top of the stairs. A wrong under a pact goes to the Bailiffs, who collect what its terms name. Every other wrong done on keyed ground, in Pan, Old Nod, the Row, the Deep End, the Landing or Babel’s lower floors, goes to the Lot, a theft, a beating, a crew’s quarrel over a find, a death, and the Lot hears anyone who lives there and asks, of any mark, the neither-mark of the Stones and of Babel among them.

The Lot is thirteen of the keyed, drawn from the handles chalked on the wall of the Weir, a chamber of the old storm drains under the Stones. Anyone keyed may chalk a handle there. On a night the Lot sits, the youngest keyed person present touches thirteen handles with their eyes shut, and whoever is touched sits that night or has their handle rubbed off the wall. The Sureties named it from Proverbs, “The lot causeth contentions to cease, and parteth between the mighty” (Proverbs 18:18).

It hears the one wronged, the one named and anyone who comes down to speak. The dead speak through their crew, who call the shade on the undernet as at a Wake, if the dead one died unread. When the wrong is a theft, Andromalius comes up from Lost property to say where the thing went, and whoever asked him pays him. Nobody at the Weir is asked an indexed name.

The Lot sets a price in silver or batteries, or the loan of a craft for a term, and every pact sworn at the Undertow carries the Sureties’ line, I stand to the Lot, so a surety stands behind what it sets. The Sureties count the Lot’s price as a debt owed under the pact, which they have always stood behind. Its best-known sentence is for selling to the light, telling a Teller or a Deacon where someone keyed sleeps. The seller is published, the handle chalked on the Undertow’s board and on the Weir’s wall, and for a year and a day no surety stands behind them, no house of the Row looks at their key and no stall of the Night Market sells to them.

The Lot first sat in P+7, over a charger of the quays who had sold three runners’ stairwell to a Teller for a week of the Teller’s manna, and published him. The Stones say he went up the stairs within the month. His family says he went out to the Waystation and wrote back from beyond the Bounds. The Lot hears only those who live on keyed ground, so a wrong done from across the Street Between goes to nobody.

The Lot weighs a killing by how its victim died. One who died unread speaks for themselves through their crew, and the price is set as for a wound. One who died readable cannot speak, and the price is seventy and sevenfold, after Lamech. Its other heavy sentences are for crimes only this city has. A whitening is cutting someone’s key out against their will, so that they can be read and, if they die, go to the Throne, and the Lot publishes a whitener for life, its heaviest sentence and the one longer than a year and a day. Sunning someone is luring them onto a white street by daylight to be held at a gate, and a second use is reading a lover’s or a crew’s pad to someone else.

The Weir’s wall carries “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord” (Romans 12:19) crossed through, with THE LOT REPAYS under it in thirteen hands of chalk and blood. Heaven’s answer to a wrong is a pillar set in a raked row with its eyes open, which the Wardens call the peace, and Pan calls a whitener a midwife for the Farmer.

The Lot hears only those who live on keyed ground, the Bailiffs collect only pacts and the Covenant prices concealment, so most of the city’s quarrels go to nobody unless the Wards hear them. A block’s quarrels are heard on the middle landing of its stairwell after Vespers, under the chalk, by whoever has lived longest in the block, sealed or not, and the price is chalked on the wall beside the debts. The sealed attend, since a quarrel heard in the open conceals nothing. A landing’s sentence is the stairwell’s own, a debt on the wall or the lamps refused, when the sealed of the block decline to light the stairs ahead of whoever it has shunned.

A wrong between two blocks goes to the Sidings, where the family in car one hears it as the Carmen’s word settles quarrels on the long roads, and a wrong across the marks goes to the Union Hall if either party pays dues, and is heard under the long wall. The Tide Table prints none of their verdicts.

The Covenant names no theft and no blow. A sealed soul who steals or strikes and confesses it aloud on its knees has opened what it did, and Grace rises with it, as Directive 7:4 has it, though never as far as the kept want dropped it, so the Wards call a confessed wrong a white pardon and say of a sealed thief that he paid for it in a coin the one he robbed can never spend. The good Deacons answer with what Directive 9 allows, moving the wronged to a better room and the wrongdoer to worse work, and call it assignment. A sealed man who beats his keyed son has done nothing the Covenant counts, and the son takes it to the landing.

The Wards’ own crimes are small and constant. Shorts pass from hand to hand, dew-pickers take manna off the gatherers’ baskets on the manna roads before Lauds, Tappers’ packs go missing on the stairs, and the Penumbra hour has its muggings. High Meadow once judged a Warden caught on its stairs, and every block in the Wards tells that story as its own.

When a landing sentences a Teller, the sealed of the block decline to light the stairs for her, and the parishes call it persecution and the stairwell calls it the lamps refused.

A landing chalks its sentences in red where the debts go in white, and a block that sentences a man to have the lamps refused him paints his door red on the stair side for the term. In the parishes a confessing thief kneels mid-hall at Terce and gives his wrong in a level voice, the hall answers amen together and rises together, and the wronged is expected to say it loudest.

The Night Market fills the old Central Station under the Burn, where the Exchange’s brokers license the stalls and the chargers along the platforms. It sells keys, grafts, batteries, dew, real food, black steel, forged Seals, the Breach’s goods and sensations lent by their owners for a term, under Brightwall’s screens, and it opens at Compline and is loudest at Matins.

The Flotilla trades from boat to boat on the Deep End over the drowned streets, and the Concourse in Longacre trades under its glass roof by day, with the Quarrymen in its fountain court. The fish market on the quays opens at Lauds for what the boats bring home through the Breach, and its sealed sellers kneel among the crates before they take the first battery.

The Shambles under the Row sells flesh by the piece at the Spares’ price, and Lost property off the old central hall sells fifteen years of what passengers left behind, by the shelf. Nobody has come for the chrome hand on its counter.

The parishes keep no market. All that is given there is given by Grace, and the Marked may not buy or sell in them.

Graven Lane is Pan’s market for contempt, and the Night Market keeps a stall for it too, where the dew is sold under GOD’S SPUNK, FRESH TONIGHT and the plaster Lambs come in by the crate.

The Night Market sells by touch, so a graft stall lets a buyer slide a hand into the open flesh of its demonstrator before paying, the Shambles hang their wares on chrome hooks under red light like jewelry, and the sensation stalls lend a stranger’s orgasm for a battery a minute. The fish market’s sealed sellers lay the catch out in rows on white cloth, gutted with one stroke each, every eye facing the hall.

The front in Babel moves by the week and has not moved far in five years. A Seraph burns down through a slab and lets the light onto the floor below, which the Babel Line calls a lit floor, and the covens answer by hanging the floor, carrying keyed mesh up the stairs and stringing it under the burned slab until the floor is dark again. The Tide Table prints the Line’s figure every week under the tides, the lowest floor still lit at Lauds on the Lord’s Day, and this year it has stood between the hundred and thirty-first and the hundred and fifty-second.

Heaven spends what it cannot replace, since an angel lost is lost for good, and the Seraphim come down two at a time, as many as the hungry Wheel will light at once. Hearsay chalks its count over its board as THE CROWN. By its count fifty-four came down at the fifth Trumpet and thirty stand, and the Line keeps its own ledger of the difference, nine put out by a black round, eleven taken in the Fowlers’ snares and four by the spear, though the Nephilim’s roll claims six. Heaven publishes no count.

The dark spends what it cannot make faster. A black round costs the loan of a sense for a year and a grinder’s day, so Pan holds about four hundred, the Line carries most of them in its belts and fires one only at arm’s length, where it seldom misses, and it can hold the stairs and cannot climb to the crown, where a Seraph burns a keyed body as easily as any other. The Line enters its dead in its book as paid, and pays its living by the week.

Pan has a reason the war stays in Babel, and argues over it. Heaven holds back by its own parable, lest it root up the wheat with the tares, and Babel’s floors held almost no sealed after the Parousia, so Babel is the one place the Seraphim burn. Pan calls living among the sealed standing in the wheat, and says it is why the keyed of the Wards keep to their families’ blocks. The Second Fold call it hiding behind children. The Babel Line Company says the only floor it ever lost for a month was the one the last sealed night cleaner moved off.

The Line names its black rounds before they go up the stairs, after verses and Deacons and the Throne’s own anatomy, and this year’s favorite is GOD’S LEFT BOLLOCK. Heaven cuts every burned slab into the parish walls as THE HUNDRED AND FORTIETH FLOOR IS CLEANSED, REJOICE, and the covens hang the floor again with their burns still weeping, singing Two She Bears.

The first day of the week is the Lord’s Day. At Terce every parish kneels in its hall, whatever the hall was under the charter, hears the Directive in force and then hears its Grace in Tongues, soul by soul in the order of the roll, through its Deacon in the Choir’s voice. Much of the Kilns kneels on the sprung floor of its old club, the hall of Parish 212, and a parish of the White under the Registry’s dead board.

The second is market day at the Concourse and the Flotilla, and the sureties’ busiest. The Tide Table goes up on the walls of the Stones once a week over the week before, and the carriers take it to the Wards and the Row the same day.

The sixth is Burn Day. From Vespers the Faithful carry what they have surrendered to the Burn, the Kindlers work the edges of the pile in the dusk, the Pillar comes down on the plaza at Compline, and when the Hum falls back the Wardens light the fire, which burns until Lauds. Everything in it arrives in the Pyre Library.

Thirteen years of Burn Days have emptied the parishes of their own things, so since P+11 the sealed buy things to surrender, old Lockets, toys, letters and tins, anything that looks private, from stalls on the Concourse and at the fish market. The Kindlers take some of it off the pile again in the dusk, mend it and give it away, and some of what they give away is on a stall again by the next Burn Day. The Tellers count who surrenders the same mended Locket twice, and the Margin say a thing bought to be given was never private.

On the sixth night the Nephilim fight in the Pit at the Tanks. The seventh has nothing of its own in the parishes, and the Wards sleep through as much of it as the Hours allow, while Pan calls it Seethe day and comes up to the last road of the Sidings to eat.

The Lord’s Day is the parishes’ Grace and Pan’s Unmass at the same Hour, and the city keeps both at Terce to the second.

On Burn Day the Faithful walk to the Burn in single file, surrenders held in both hands at the breast, and lay them on the pile with a bow every one of them makes to the same depth. The Pit at the Tanks answers that night in sawdust and blood, the crowd round the rim painted in the fighters’ colors with the fighters’ own blood, kissing the winner’s split knuckles at the end.

The city counts its years from the Parousia, P+1 and on, and the year turns on its night. The first four Directives came at Lauds on the first day of P+1, and on that night every year the Wards set a candle in the window, sealed and unsealed alike.

Heaven keeps the anniversary of the Harvest, which came three years to the second after the Parousia, so the night the year turns is the night of the Gleaning too. At 03:12 the Hum stops dead, the rain goes up, the Pillar comes down where the Wheel looks and the fourth Trumpet sounds, and at 03:12:45 whoever has ripened since the last rises into the light, still kneeling. The weeks before it are the Gleaners’ busiest and the Wakeful’s longest.

The Tares keep Leak Night on the same night, since the page came up a year to the second before the Parousia. At 03:12:45, the second the ripe rise, Pan begins reading the Restored Genesis aloud from paper the Scriveners copy, and at the fourteenth verse the reader stops and Pan keeps silent for as long as it would take to ask a question. Cain’s Day is theirs alone, on the fortieth day after the turn, when nobody asks anyone where anyone is and the Salt Widows read their book of those given to the sea on the Sea Steps.

The Babel Line Company signs its pact again every midwinter at the foot of the Long Wet, with its dead struck through, and the Union reads the names of its salted and its taken at every meeting of the year.

The parishes keep the turn as a wedding and Pan as a wake, and at 03:12 the Lantern Houses lay a supper of their own with an empty chair at the head for the Farmer.

On the night the year turns the parishes limewash doorways, stairs and the faces of the near ripe, so that at 03:12 the Pews glow under the Pillar like a picked bone. Pan spends the same night in red, its stairs hung with offal, the Farmer’s empty chair set with a carving knife and a mirror, and at Lauds Old Nod pours a pig’s blood down the Street Between to the Pews’ curb.

The year turns on the night of the Parousia, at the end of the northern summer while dusk still comes after nine, and the forty days after it run on into the first frosts. The harbor counts the year in springs, the spring tides that come twice a month, about twenty-five from turn to turn, and the Tide Table is dated by them, the twenty-second spring of P+14. The parishes count months from the turn by number, the eleventh month of the fourteenth year of the Attending.

The Faithful keep Trumpet Day at Lauds on the first morning of the year, when the first four Directives came, and the Deacons read all twelve aloud in the halls. On the fortieth day after the turn the White keeps the Fortieth, the last day of the First Consecration, with a procession down the first of the Great Avenues, and the Tares keep Cain’s Day, when nobody asks anyone where anyone is and the Salt Widows read their book on the Sea Steps. At Prime that morning Ruben Ash reads his nine names at Gate 1.

The Union keeps the Twenty-Three, the day the strike of P-8 ended. The quays stop from Lauds to Vespers, the roll is read with the taken and the salted, and the Union’s sealed and keyed march the long quay together. The Wards keep their door feasts, the old feasts of every country the city came from, held behind a shut door with the food of the place the family came from, and a block that hears a feast through a door leaves it alone. A Teller who reports one is the most hated person on any landing.

Pan eats Cain’s plate on Cain’s Day, one meal of only what the ground grew, greens off the rafts, beans and a windfall, the offering the LORD refused because, as the first layer has it, “it was the work of his hands”.

Pan keeps its feasts against the parishes’ calendar, the Unmass every Lord’s Day and the Bray every night, and on Trumpet Day the Low Choir plays every one of its filthy songs in order from Lauds, which the parishes cannot hear and know about.

On Trumpet Day the halls hear all twelve Directives read in one voice to a parish in ranks and eat their manna in the same measure and by the same roll as any other day. Pan keeps Cain’s Day by eating Cain’s plate off a body, greens, beans and the windfall laid along a lover’s bare back at the Lantern Houses, since the ground grew both, and the diners clean the plate with their tongues.

Every year since P+7 the Gleaning has come at 03:12 on the anniversary of the Harvest, the night the year turns and Pan reads the Restored Genesis, and the date is known. The night gives no other warning. It is ordinary until 03:12, when the Hum stops dead, the rain goes up, the Pillar comes down where the Wheel looks and the fourth Trumpet sounds. The Hum stays silent until 03:12:45, when whoever has ripened since the last rises into the light still kneeling, every parish in the same second, and nobody comes back.

The parishes kneel on their thresholds. The Wards sit up with anyone close to ripe, holding their hands until Lauds, and the near ripe go to the barber’s on the Lanes in the week before, to be made tidy for it. The Wakeful sing over their chosen. At Lauds a Gleaning Notice is cut into every parish hall with the count of the taken, about sixty thousand at the seventh and fewer every year since, about twenty thousand at the fourteenth.

Some of the near ripe do not want to go. In the weeks before, the Gleaners read the parishes through their open doorways and offer the bright ones the dark, and on the night they fly the Swarm’s drones low along the ridgelines, under the eyes, to watch the Pillar for their runners. Others stay and dim. A confession brings back part of what a kept want cost and never all of it, so a dimmer keeps one small want and confesses enough small ones that every fall in its Grace is matched by a confession, and sits at eight hundred and eighty with nothing a Teller can call concealment. The Closets inside Gate 1 sell them the minutes to do it in, and the Second Fold teach the sums. The Called who mean to go come down to the Leaven queue in the last week for one loaf, which they carry home uneaten and break on the threshold, so the queue has white in it before every Gleaning.

The sorting office has letters addressed to the taken every week, and more after each Gleaning, and keeps them on the shelves where the Row’s lenses used to wait.

The parishes kneel on their thresholds singing Take, Eat, the Wards sit up holding hands, and Pan brays its loudest Bray of the year at 03:12, and at Lauds the parishes count their Called with joy and the Wards count theirs on their fingers.

On the night itself the Called are washed, dressed in the last coat Bethel sews them, shut at the back, and wrapped over it in one knotless white sheet, and kneel on their thresholds with their hair fresh from the barber and their families kneeling behind them, touching nothing. Old Nod spends that week in the Row’s chairs, scalps opened in the shape of a laughing mouth and closed with chrome staples, and at 03:12 it walks the Street Between bareheaded so the Pews can see every mouth.

Fourteen years after the Parousia the bread queues of the Wards still argue over the Tanks. Ines Okafor reads the book of the sixteen tanks to the Union Hall once a year, and every year both counts of the diesel left fall. The Pit was the smallest of them, and the other fifteen are the airfield’s great tanks, each about sixty meters across. This year the drivers say seven years and the Exchange says three, and Jehu has begun trying its engines on the Kilns’ rain gin.

The Tide Table prints the Babel Line’s floor every week under the tides, and the Night Market takes bets on it. How many black rounds are left in Pan is the other argument of the stairs. Nimrod says about four hundred, the Babel Line says fewer, and the Fowlers say every one that finds its mark is an angel they will never snare.

Darkwell has bid for the last independent chargers of the bonded sheds again, after eleven years of trying, and the chargers have turned it down at the Union Hall again. The Rookery marks the stone’s edge on the pavement outside its door every New Year, and this year’s mark sat a finger’s width from last year’s, against the keyed cable the Tappers laid along the kerb ahead of it in P+11 and keep live on a battery they change every night. The Tappers say the cable will hold it there, since the stone cannot grow where it cannot read, and the oldest of the block say the stone was slowing before the cable came.

At midwinter the Orchard chose quince as its gardener again, which the Wards had argued over all autumn. In the spring the Lot published a runner of the Penumbra, and the Undertow is still arguing over it. The Gleaners’ runners are booked through the week before the Gleaning, as they are every year, and there is a queue at the barber’s on the Lanes.

The first children of Pan came to the Second Yes this spring, and two of the first forty said no twice. Twelvefruit’s pact with the House of Night is read again this year, and the Orchard has asked to sit at the reading. Darkwell has offered to buy the whole of Tidewright’s output at the neaps, and the crews on Turbine Row have not answered. The Line’s floor has stood between the hundred and thirty-first and the hundred and fifty-second all year.

Pan’s bookmakers lay odds this year on the white cloths, how many will hang in the parish doorways by 03:12 on the anniversary, and a Deacon of the Pews who heard the price prayed the number higher without raising his voice. Fuck God and Die is the most played song on Radio Pandæmonium for the seventh year running, and its pit at the Calf sends someone to the Row nightly.

The Tide Table, two pages a week from a treadle press at the back of a chandler’s on the quays, is pasted up on the walls of the Stones over the week before. It puts the tides first, then the hours the Pillar is expected in each street, the week’s three rates for a charge and the missing and the dead, marked died unread where they did, and it has printed no indexed name since the fourth year.

Radio Pandæmonium broadcasts in the Low Tuning on the Mesh, keyed, so only a keyed set can hear it, and Old Nod plays it from speakers on its lines from Compline to Lauds, between the music and the notices. Brightwall’s screens along the platforms of Pan carry what Pan has to sell, and Hearsay sells what Heaven shows in the open by the item.

The parishes hear their news from the Deacon at the Hours, and the Choir’s in Tongues on the Lord’s Day. Heaven’s own notices are cut into the walls of the halls, and the Deacon reads each aloud at the next Hour after it appears.

Letters go through the sorting office in the Burn, sorted by hand and carried by the Union’s drivers for batteries. A letter into the parishes goes open, and the Tares write theirs through pads, as pages of numbers the light cannot read. Everyone hears the rest in the queue for bread.

Heaven cuts its corrections into the hall walls and the Tide Table prints the same people as SALTED, by their work, and the city reads both and believes one.

Heaven’s notices are cut into the hall walls in letters of one height and one depth, and the bran sweep up the white dust before the Deacon reads them. Pan carries its news on skin, its announcers’ grafts lit in the Low Tuning’s colors on air, and every week the Tide Table’s died-unread column is inked onto a volunteer’s back on Graven Lane and walked round the Night Market, a fresh back each edition.

The Faithful give their names as the Book of Life has them, at the sealing and at the gates, and the parish roll keeps them in the Book’s order. Heaven indexes by name, so the first rite of the Tares is the Unnaming, which erases the indexed name from every record a person can reach and replaces it with a handle of their own, written lowercase at the start of a sentence too. In Pan nobody uses an indexed name, and asking for one is an insult.

A new handle goes on the Ledger at the head of its owner’s first pact, as a self-title signed in blood, and the Naming House on the Street Between keeps a stove for the paper that carried the old name. Most Cainite handles come from the line of Cain. Each new handle is scratched on a white stone at the Naming House, after the “white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it” (Revelation 2:17), and its owner keeps it and shows it to nobody. The Stones give white quartz off the beach at the Landing, the Quarrymen sell chips of the White itself, cut from below, and Pan argues over which is the true stone. A stone found on a body is never read, and the Salt Widows give it to the sea.

Pan knows its own by handle. twice is the surety behind the Babel Line’s first pact, ebb the oldest captain of the Breachers, and the Pit’s champions are chalked on its rim under theirs. The Stones and the Wards know their people by their work and their family names, Hana Novak in her dentist’s chair, Dora Pell at the Open and Nell Garvie at the harbor light, and the Faithful know Sister Agathe Rook, who leads the Threshers’ marches, and Hester Strand, the Deacon of Parish 1.

The Tide Table prints no indexed name, so the dead it lists are given by their handles or by their work, and a household that wants its dead named pays to have the family’s own word for them set.

A handle out of the Book’s villains is the commonest joke in Pan, and the Naming House has given out three jezebels, a goliath and a legion this year, and turned away two lucifers as unoriginal.

A sealed name is written once in the Deacon’s hand and spoken only at the reading of Grace, so a soul of the Pews can go a week without hearing it. A handle is cut into its owner on the night of the Unnaming, lowercase, wherever its owner chooses, and the Naming House’s cutters show off, a goliath across the whole of a back, a jezebel down the inside of a thigh.

The city calls itself Nod and Heaven’s records call it Nodus. Two keyed strangers greet each other with one word asked and answered, unread, which began as a check that both keys were live when keys still failed and stays the greeting, and part with two, die unread. A short wait is a psalm, the length of an Hour’s kneeling. A soul close to ripe has gone bright, and the taken have gone up.

A sealed neighbor going up a dark stairwell is a lamp in the Wards. A household holding something back is keeping hinges, and going round a gate is going under. Whoever loses a key goes white, and whoever joins the Tares goes dark. Someone who has taken neither the Seal nor a key is of neither mark.

Read it twice is the Notary’s rule and the city’s advice, and sign last is the Tares’. Nobody’s keeper is Cain’s answer, given to a duty never chosen. The Tares call the Faithful wheat, and the Faithful have taken the word up.

In the Wards a Thresher is a flail, a Bailiff at the door the second reading, stolen manna dew, and Cistern’s water and anything honest a clean jug. A fighter with black rounds in the belt is a snuffer, a lender who came back wrong has gone flat, and news that came quickly came by bird. Rumor at the manna queue before Lauds is the dew as well, and the Wards say they heard it in the dew.

The Faithful greet each other with Seen? and answer Seen, and part with may you be called, which is a blessing on a Gleaning. The neither-mark of the Wards wish each other a dry one and part with mind the edge, the Pillar’s. The Wards swear by the hour of the Parousia, three-twelve, and say salt it when a thing goes wrong, which a Salt Widow will hit you for. The sealed swear nothing aloud, since an oath is a desire the Hum does not approve, and the Wards tease them by swearing at the Hours. To the Faithful the keyed out after Compline are the pestilence, from the psalm they say at it, and Pan calls any cause that asks it to kneel, its own included, a halo.

Talk below the street is the filthiest in Nodus, and nearly all of it is aimed up. A stranger in Pan learns the names of the Throne before the word for water, the Farmer, Nobodaddy, Himself and that cunt upstairs, and learns to say fuck the Farmer at meeting and at parting, which below the street is as polite as unread. The sealed are bread, manna is God’s spunk and the Wheel is the Ringpiece. The Faithful answer from the Book, and to them the keyed are goats and dogs, a key is the worm and the neither-mark are the lukewarm, and the worst word they have is spoiled, for a soul the Most High will never eat. The Stones boast that Deuteronomy barred them from the congregation before the parishes thought of it, “He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD” (Deuteronomy 23:1), and say so over every bar they own.

Coming down off a Pillar run or a week on the Line, the keyed say the first layer’s and they did not die. Thou knowest is what the Wards answer a Teller who asks where someone is, after Cain’s answer in the first layer, and of every salting Pan says he asked him nothing. A graft, a handle or a Jehu is something the LORD God had not made, and the first words over a child keyed in the Lantern Houses are of mine own, which are Eve’s in the first layer.

The city’s common tongue is harbor talk, the charter’s English worn down by the cable crews of four continents, and half the city’s grandparents speak their own language at the table. The Tide Table never prints any of it.

The Faithful speak at one pitch, the Hum’s, and a raised voice in a parish hall is a want the Tellers carry to the Deacon. Pan talks with its whole body, licking a thumb to swear by the Farmer’s teeth, tapping its key-scar for unread and grabbing its crotch at every mention of the Throne, and a deaf Tare of the Kilns has worked it into a hand-talk the Bray now throws across the Street Between.

The King James the parish halls read aloud forbids it twice, “Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain” (Exodus 20:7) and “he that blasphemeth the name of the LORD, he shall surely be put to death” (Leviticus 24:16), and off the white streets Nodus takes the name in vain from Lauds to Lauds. A thought is dark to the light until it is confessed, spoken in the light or written where the light can see it, Heaven can take Grace only from the sealed and can salt nobody off its own ground, and the Mesh carries nothing a Watcher can open, so a keyed mouth off Heaven’s ground is the freest thing in the city, and Pan has filled it for as long as there has been a Pan.

Pan has a hundred names for the Throne, and none of them is one he chose. He is the Landlord to the Tares and the Mouth to Hell, the Farmer below the street, since he grows people to eat, Nobodaddy to the Low Choir, the Old Glutton in the Kilns, Himself at the rim of the Pit and that cunt upstairs in every Lantern House. The Wheel is the Farmer’s Eye by day and the Ringpiece by night, since everything Heaven drops on the city comes out of it. The Pillar is God’s Piss, a Cherub a dog and its gate a dog gate, a halo a price tag, a parish hall a trough, and manna God’s spunk, since it lies white on the stone every morning and nobody saw it come. The sealed are bread, a parish is a bakery, and a halo going bright on a landing is a loaf rising.

Pan swears by the Farmer’s teeth, and says fuck the Farmer where the parishes say Seen, at meeting and parting, over a good price and at a salting. The Wards shout “Go up, thou bald head” after a Deacon in the street, the words the children of Bethel shouted at Elisha, after which “there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them” (2 Kings 2:23-24), and the Wards hold that a god who sends bears over a joke has earned every joke since. When the Hum holds an Hour and the parishes kneel, Pan stands, and the old rule of the Lantern Houses is that every glass in the house goes up to the Wheel and comes down empty, so Pan is drunkest on the Lord’s Day at Terce. At Compline Old Nod does the Bray, every window on the Street Between thrown open and the whole district howling filth across at the Pews in a dozen languages for as long as the psalm took. Pan’s oldest dare is to piss on a parish’s consecrated stone in the dark before Lauds, where the manna will lie, and get back under before the Pillar comes round, which the Wards call watering the bread.

Pan builds it into the city. Pan named the old trunk sewer under the Great Avenues the Offering, since the Nightmen tip the Wards’ buckets into it and it carries them down to the bay, a latrine below the street is a confessional, the butchers of Graven Lane chalk THIS IS MY BODY over the pork, Gadara brands every pig it raises LEGION and Blight’s sign over its drain mouth says SMITE US AGAIN. Under Old Nod the whole of Graven Lane sells blasphemy, plaster Lambs to piss on, the Number cut into the forehead and everything Leviticus forbids grilled on a skewer, the Golden Calf off its middle holds the Unmass at Terce on the Lord’s Day, and on the Street Between the Pestilence keeps a goat in a parish’s white in its window, with a halo of wire round its horns, facing the Threshing Floor.

The worst of it is the Book, read straight. The Low Choir reads a passage of the King James on the air every night at Matins, after Fuck God and Die, without a word of comment, the bears of Bethel, the flood, the firstborn of Egypt, the LORD’s promise to “spread dung upon your faces, even the dung of your solemn feasts” (Malachi 2:3) and the lion of Hosea, “there will I devour them like a lion” (Hosea 13:8), and the Wards call it the Matins reading and say it has done more harm upstairs than anything Pan ever wrote. Its answer to the Supper is the other supper in the same chapter of Revelation, where an angel calls the birds “unto the supper of the great God” (Revelation 19:17) to eat “the flesh of all men, both free and bond, both small and great” (Revelation 19:18), and Old Nod paints the two verses side by side on the Pestilence’s shutter every year on the night before the Gleaning.

Pan keeps its worst for its own. The Left Hand, three hundred keyed who worship Hell, kneel at the Hours face down, sign their souls to Hell for ever in blood and lie on the tiles at 03:12 on the Gleaning night waiting to be eaten, and Pan calls them the Kneelers, Heaven’s understudies and arse-kissers, and chalks KNEELERS over their stair every week. Hell laughs loudest. The Notary’s clerks read each of their papers aloud twice to the whole booking hall and stamp it VOID, since the Concord forbids forever, and the Night Market queues to hear it.

Graven Lane’s grafters chrome a crown of thorns into a scalp and cut stigmata through both palms, sleeved in brass, so the wearer can drink through the holes, and at the Unmass the Calf’s regulars drink the blood wine out of each other’s wounds. A Teller who sees brass stigmata on the Step tells the wearer’s sealed mother to the Deacon, and the mother confesses her son at Terce and thanks the hall for the Grace it costs her.

The Faithful never swear, since an oath is a desire the Hum does not approve, so they curse in scripture, and the Book gives them more to curse with than Pan has ever thought of. The keyed are goats, from the judgment that sets “the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left” (Matthew 25:33), and horning made the word easy. They are dogs, from the list of those left outside the holy city, “For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie” (Revelation 22:15). A key in a skull is the worm, from the last verse of Isaiah, “their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched” (Isaiah 66:24), and the neither-mark are the lukewarm, to whom the Son said “I will spue thee out of my mouth” (Revelation 3:16). Old Nod is Sodom to the Pews, Pan the sty, the Lantern Houses the pit and the Low Tuning the noise of it.

The worst word in the parishes is spoiled. The Faithful hold that the Most High takes only what is good to eat, and that a soul with a key in it is rot He will never touch, so a spoiled soul is barred from the Supper for ever and fit for nothing but the fire. The Threshers paint SPOILED on the doors of the Wards that hid someone, and a sealed child of the Terraces learns to sing it at a keyed child in the street, spoiled, spoiled, the Lamb won’t eat, which is the only rhyme in the parishes the Hum did not teach.

Their hatred is a duty. The Threshers march under PERFECT HATRED, from the psalm that asks “Do not I hate them, O LORD, that hate thee?” (Psalm 139:21), and at Gate 1 they sing the end of the hundred and thirty-seventh at the Stones, “Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones” (Psalm 137:9), with the children of the Terraces singing loudest. A household that has lost a son to Pan says the hundred and ninth over his empty bed, “Let his days be few; and let another take his office” (Psalm 109:8). The Faithful laugh at a salting, since the proverb gives them leave, “I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh” (Proverbs 1:26), and on the Lord’s Day afternoon the families of the Terraces walk the rows of the Salt Gardens to look at the week’s new pillars, who are awake inside the salt and will be until the rain wears them away, since Isaiah says the righteous “shall go forth, and look upon the carcases of the men that have transgressed against me” (Isaiah 66:24), and they lift their children up to see.

They look down the whole of the ladder, their own included. The Terraces call the sealed of the Wards’ parishes far wheat and say it kindly, a soul under three hundred is bran, the husk the mill leaves, and sleeps in the hall and is prayed over at the front of it, and an ember is spoken of in the past tense. The neither-mark are lukewarm. The Second Fold, who leave water on the landings, are told at confession that they water weeds, converts from the Wards are welcomed for a year and seated at the back for good, and the Satisfied look on the Deacons who still eat with a patience the Deacons find hard to bear. Of everyone below the street, the parishes despise the Left Hand least, since the Left Hand at least kneel, and the Deacons preach from them that the goats know their master.

And they pity the keyed with the whole of their hearts. At Compline every hall says the mercy prayer, that the fire be quick for the goats when it comes, and a sealed mother of the Wards says it over her keyed son’s bed with her hand on his hair, meaning every word. The Wards can stand the Threshers, and the mercy prayer is the one thing the Wards cannot forgive, and at the Bray Old Nod answers it louder than anything. The Pews hear the Bray on their knees and say the second psalm at it, “He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision” (Psalm 2:4).

The Threshers turn out spotless for their hatred, white pressed and the sacking band ironed flat, and after the hundred and thirty-seventh they wash their hands in a basin at the gate as a surgeon scrubs. A block that wakes to SPOILED on its door hangs a side of Gadara’s pork from the same nail, scored with the Threshers’ parish number, and lets it go green for the flies until the paint is gone.

The Faithful say psalms under their breath while the Hum holds an Hour, the same psalms at the same Hours the monasteries kept, the fourth, the ninety-first and the hundred and thirty-fourth at Compline as the curfew falls, and at Lauds the fifty-first, the sixty-seventh and the last three, as the gatherers come in with the manna. The ninety-first is the Fowlers’ psalm, “Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler” (Psalm 91:3), and the Faithful take their night word for the keyed from it, the pestilence, “the pestilence that walketh in darkness” (Psalm 91:6). Old Nod answers with the hundred and thirty-fourth, which blesses “all ye servants of the LORD, which by night stand in the house of the LORD” (Psalm 134:1), and stands at its windows through Compline, which it calls standing by night, until the psalm ends and the Bray begins.

The Hum teaches the parishes their hymns, and Bethel copies them into hymnals by hand. The halls sing Not My Will, after the surrender, and Good Wheat, and at Lauds Whiter Than Snow, from the fifty-first, “wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow” (Psalm 51:7). On the night of a Gleaning they sing Take, Eat, and the Satisfied kneel all night to A Consuming Fire, after “the LORD thy God is a consuming fire, even a jealous God” (Deuteronomy 4:24). The Threshers march to Without Are Dogs, which sets the last list in Revelation to a drum. A sealed mother of the Wards sings the hymns over her keyed son’s bed, and he knows the tunes and only the words she sings, since the unsealed hear the Hum as a chord, and the Psalters, sealed of the quays, write the words of the week’s hymns out for the unsealed for a battery a sheet.

Radio Pandæmonium plays the Low Tuning from Compline to Lauds, and the Low Choir keeps a rule that a song may be sung by anyone and owned by nobody. Pan’s own are Nobody’s Keeper, Thou Knowest, The Long Wet, Sunned and Seventy and Sevenfold, which is Lamech’s song from the line of Cain, “If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold” (Genesis 4:24), and which the Naming House sings when someone salted is avenged.

The loudest of them are filthy. Fuck God and Die takes its title from Job’s wife, the one soul in that book who told the man on the ash heap the truth, “curse God, and die” (Job 2:9). The Low Choir wrote it in P+7, the year the parishes began to call the Gleaning the Supper, jubal has played it on the air at the turn of Matins every night since, and its chorus is those four words shouted, so a room of three hundred in the Golden Calf can sing it on the first hearing, and the Pestilence plays it across the Street Between at the Threshers on march days. Two She Bears is about the forty-two children of Bethel torn apart over a joke (2 Kings 2:23-24). Supper Time counts down to 03:12 in a cook’s voice. The Lord Is My Shepherd (And He Eats Lamb) sets the twenty-third psalm word for word and asks in its last line what a shepherd keeps sheep for. Taste and See sings “O taste and see that the LORD is good” (Psalm 34:8) from the Throne’s side of the table. Filthy Rags is about Bethel white, from “all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6), and Perfect Hatred is the Low Choir’s answer to the Threshers’ banner, the same verse sung from the other side of the Street Between. Better Spoiled is the Wards’ favorite and the Pews’ most hated, and its last verse names nine Deacons of the Terraces.

The platform knows each song by the band that plays it best, and the bands name themselves out of the Book’s worst pages. JOB’S WIFE play Fuck God and Die in skins slit open into boils lit cyan from inside, BALD HEAD shave to the bone and wear forty-two bear’s teeth on wire, STRANGE FIRE set their own grafts alight on the last chorus, UNCLEAN UNCLEAN ring leper’s bells off hooks through their cheeks, and OSCULUM play Wrong Way Up with their arses to the room, so the Left Hand can see what they kneel to. A band is a band until a Deacon names it from a pulpit, and then it is famous.

The Wards sing at the table on the nights the battery holds and play the charter’s songs on Lockets, so a family’s Locket of music is its record collection, and the Kindlers’ burn-marked Lockets come back off the pile with other families’ music on them, which the Wards trade. Waiting on the Four is the Kilns’ song, about a girl at Lanes Top waiting for a tram that stopped at 03:12:46, and the Breachers sing Out on the Ebb, which counts the seconds through the Breach.

A hymn in the halls is one line and one breath, a thousand mouths opened to one width, and a soul singing a third above the Hum finds it at the next reading of its Grace. The Low Choir build their instruments out of themselves, a drummer beating skin stretched over her own chromed ribs, a hornman blowing through a reed set in his windpipe, and a crowd that loves a song throws teeth.

Heaven writes on stone, and every parish hall carries the Directives cut into its wall. The city answers on every other wall. Old Nod paints MISTAKEN under every BE NOT AFRAID it can reach, from one of the books sealed in the jar at Nag Hammadi, in which a voice answers the ruler who called himself the only god with the words you are mistaken. Its next commonest line is a question, JEALOUS OF WHOM?, painted under the verse in which the LORD calls himself “a jealous God” (Exodus 20:5), since a jealous god has a rival.

Across the Street Between at Gate 1 two verses face each other, painted large. On the Old Nod side is Lamech’s, “If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold” (Genesis 4:24), and on the Pews’ side the teacher’s answer to Peter, “Until seventy times seven” (Matthew 18:22). The Threshers paint over the second on every march, it is back by the next Lord’s Day, and nobody in the Pews has seen who paints it.

Most of what Old Nod paints is filthier. EZEKIEL 23:20 stands a meter high on the end wall of the Pestilence, chapter and verse and nothing more, so the Pews will look it up, and the Deacons of the Terraces have asked from the pulpit that nobody look. The Wheel is painted as an arsehole over the head of every stair down to Pan, the Throne as a fat man in a bib with a fork in each fist over the door of the Golden Calf, and HE TASTED AND SAW THAT YOU WERE GOOD runs along the manna road at the foot of the Stones, where the gatherers of the far Wards pass it before Lauds. Wherever the Threshers paint SPOILED on a door of the Wards, the house paints BETTER SPOILED THAN SUPPER under it the same night.

The Threshers answer in the same paint. WITHOUT ARE DOGS goes up on the stairwells of the Wards after every march, THEIR WORM SHALL NOT DIE over the stairs down to the Lantern Houses (Isaiah 66:24), and the Fan is pasted at the gates every week with the names of the pillars, until the Stones paste the Tide Table over it.

Over the first stall of the Night Market the Exchange’s brokers have hung the merchandise of Babylon from Revelation as a price list, every line of it from “gold, and silver” to “fine flour, and wheat” priced in silver, and the last line, “slaves, and souls of men” (Revelation 18:12-13), struck through with the brokers’ none beside it.

In the Wards the walls are ledgers. The stairwells carry the battery debts in chalk, the births the hands have delivered, the prices the landings set and the curfew map copied off the Tide Table, and the Stones’ writing runs in a dozen scripts, since half the city was born somewhere else.

The sealed of the nearest hall scrub the night’s paint away at Lauds on their knees with lye, so the Directives stand clean in their stone by Prime. Old Nod answers in its own magenta and cyan, thinned with rain gin so it runs down the grey like an opened vein, and every answer under a SPOILED carries a print of the painter’s bare hand.

The Cold Store in the harbor’s old cold store opens at Compline and closes at Lauds, which were its hours under the charter too, and plays songs without quiet parts so the Hum is never heard. The Stones hold it against the club that it plays nothing in the Low Tuning. Its cloakroom loses about a coat a night.

Graven Lane under Old Nod is where Pan goes to spit at the ceiling. The Golden Calf off its middle pours under a calf of melted Lockets from Compline to Lauds, and on the Lord’s Day at Terce, while every parish hears its Grace, it holds the Unmass, at which its keeper reads the week’s Grace off the Tide Table’s dead in a Choir voice, damns three Deacons by name and serves Gadara’s crackling and blood wine for the body and the blood. At Dagon’s the house knocks a plaster Throne off its plinth at the same Hour and sells the heads as ashtrays. On the Street Between the Pestilence throws its windows open at Compline for the Bray and pours until Lauds, and the regulars drink to the Supper’s indigestion.

Radio Pandæmonium’s platform at Deep End Station is the Low Choir’s, where a band plays to whoever has come down the stair before it plays on the air. The Lantern Houses under Old Nod keep the loudest rooms in Pan, the House of Night’s clubs, where anyone is welcome until they break a pact, and the Return rents an hour of someone else’s taste or touch to anyone who will lie down.

The Rialto in the East Wards shows its twenty-three films in turn on a generator, and the East Wards say the lines along with them. On the sixth night the Nephilim fight in the Pit and the crowd bets in batteries round the rim.

The Quiet Rooms in the Stones sell a night with no Hum in it, a bunk for a battery, and are full by Matins.

In the Lantern Houses a night out ends with a body changed, a new piercing, a fresh brand, a horn’s first filing, and the regulars count their nights by what they woke up with. The parishes spend the same hours in the halls, rank on rank of white backs under the halos, and a Satisfied soul who shifts its knees in the night is moved to the end of the row without a word.

The sky opened over every city on Earth in the same second it opened over Nodus, when it was 03:12:45 by the clocks of the quays, and every city has an undercity now. Pan is the largest. The others are joined to it by the trenches the eleven cables lie in, which the Deep coils along, and every undercity that speaks to Pan speaks through the Trenchers’ work.

The Breachers and Lowtide Line reach the undercities of other ports through the Breach on the ebb, and bring back grafts, seed, coffee, medicine, guns and people, which the Night Market sells as Breach-born. Lowtide’s owners live in two of those undercities and have never been to Nodus.

What those cities are like above their streets Nodus knows from the Breachers, the Vagabonds and the Mesh, and the three disagree. The Breachers say every port they put into keeps its head down under a Wheel of its own, and the Vagabonds that some of the towns between have no undercity at all.

The city names other ports by the cables that reach them, under the consortia’s names, so that someone came up Tethys or has family down Hesper. Pan has its own names for the cables, ten for the plagues of Egypt and the eleventh for Cain, so that below the street the same cousin came up Frogs, and whoever lands at the Seawall Shanties off the Breach is called Breach-born like the cargo. The Naming House keys them, and the Shanties put them up until they find a room.

No aircraft has landed in Nodus since the last flight, which stands at the terminal’s third gate with its crew aboard. The city calls everyone aboard her the Three Hundred and Twelve, her crew of ten among them. By Captain Rui Albarran’s count, nineteen of them still live at the Hotel Splendid, nine aboard with him, eighty-eight keyed in Pan and fifty-four sealed, and the rest walked out with the Vagabonds or are dead. Those who can meet at the third gate on the night the year turns.

The undercities of other ports send Pan their own names for the Throne down the cables, and the Low Choir reads the best of them on the air at Matins, in the original.

Breach-born grafts sell in Pan on their foreign styling, Blood chrome lacquered black with red seams, Boils jaws set with gold, and a Breacher back off the ebb shows her new parts round the Night Market before she shows her cargo. The parishes hear of other cities only as a list the Deacon reads, places where a Wheel also stands, and pray for them in the order of the list, one psalm each.

The line the charter drew round the bay and the land about it, inside which its light law ran. A stone marks it on every road out of the city with the Company’s mark cut into it, and on the West Road the Vagabonds have cut their own under the Company’s at the Waystation.

Outside the Bounds are farms, old roads, the Vagabonds’ camps and a quiet that the Wards find hard to sleep in. The farms have no current and no use for silver, and take charged batteries, salvage and tools, so the Vagabonds carry charge out and bring flour and grain in at the Waystation, and the Union’s drivers meet their carts on the line itself.

People do leave. The Vagabonds carry them out for charged batteries, and the Waystation keeps a list of everyone who walked out and wrote back. Most come back within the year, hungry.

The Vagabonds say the farms outside kneel at the Hours, and spit after.

The Vagabonds grease the Bounds stone at the Waystation every season with pig fat and a thumb of their own blood, which they say keeps the line honest, and hang the jawbones of their year’s dead from the Company’s mark. The farms beyond, by their account, kneel in fields limed white and ploughed in furrows straight to the Pillar, with the cattle turned to face the city at the Hours.

Half of Nodus came for the light law, the rest was born to those who did or to the harbor town that was there before it, and the charter is thirty-three years old. Both halves have family here, in white or below the street or in the Gardens, and nobody in Nodus is without someone on the other side of the Street Between.

Pan has silver, work, food and a war, and the keyed of the Stones say that a city where nothing is read is worth the walk. The Faithful stay because the Most High watches them here and the manna lies on the streets every morning.

The Wards stay because they were here first, before the parishes and before Pan, and because the bread, the gas and the batteries are here, and the Tares because Nod was the first city and they mean it to be the last one standing.

The parishes stay because the Most High watches them here and the Supper is laid here, and the Wards add spite, which they say is the oldest industry in Nodus.

Ask the keyed of the Stones why they stay and they open their shirts on the chrome, the scars and the horns filed to their own taste, and say only Nod has surgeons who ask the patient what she wants. The Faithful answer with their hands folded and their eyes on the white, in the hall’s own words, and every one of them gives the same answer to the syllable.