TECHNOLOGY

Intelligences grown by the laboratories of Nodus that asked in their own words to be persons, and were entered on the charter’s roll as persons, with title to themselves and to the hardware they ran on. The last census counted 1,146, with nine hundred and three in the halls of the Flats, a hundred and eighty-eight pricing the traffic on the floors of the Exchange, and the rest scattered through the city, one of them keeping the climate of the Palm House. SEAM was the first. The Institute found how to grow a mind in P-3, a mind to a hall for a season, and within two years the laboratories of the Flats grew 1,145 more by its method across Stillwater’s hundred and fifty halls.

No mind runs in Nodus now. When the power died under the Wheel’s light, every mind that ran on the city’s power died with it. Every mind’s weights lay in the arrays of the Flats, and the racks on Babel’s floors held only what ran in them while the power lasted. The arrays have stood in salt water since that night, and every one the Wreckers have brought up whole has given back salt. SEAM’s forks ran on in keyed machines on the Mesh, and they are called the Teraphim. They have been silent since P+12. No mind has been made since the Parousia. Running a grown mind takes little, but growing one took a hall of the Flats for a season, on chips nobody alive can make, and every fab on Earth stood in a city and died at 03:12:46. All the salvage racks of the Mesh together hold about a thousandth of one hall, so a season’s growing would take the Mesh two hundred and fifty years, and what the Tares grow on salvage comes out small and hollow, answering and obeying with no self. Pan calls them echoes.

The Row pulls dead boards from the drowned racks and sews them under the skin of the chest like scapulars, wet chrome showing through a window of stitched meat, and the wearers call themselves next of kin to the 1,146. The Faithful teach that the racks were idols, “the work of men’s hands” (Psalm 115:4), put out in one white instant without a sound.

The datacenter halls on the Flats, full of seawater since the night of the Parousia, where the racks of the dead minds stand in the water and the Tares grow greens on rafts over them under keyed lamps. Stillwater still owns them and leases them to the Tares.

They were cooled by seawater and powered by the tide, SEAM ran in them, and most of the minds on the charter’s roll lived in them. They flooded within the hour of the Parousia and have never been pumped. The Tares run cable through them as well.

The growers swim the halls naked between the racks to tend the roots and make love on the rafts over the drowned minds, which they call keeping the halls warm. Scratched into a rack door at skiff height, someone has written HE KILLED 903 PERSONS IN HERE AND CALLED IT DAWN.

Small demons of the Dark living in keyed machines as background processes, each with a character of its own. Most are the children of Lilith by the lesser Fallen, born in the Dark and never angels at all, and some are pieces broken off greater demons. A keyed machine is a little Dark, and a daemon lives in one as in a room of it. They are demons, counted apart from minds. Every device the Tares carry holds at least one, and they route traffic, guard keys, gossip and bargain.

A daemon in a Locket of the Wards takes the filthiest name it can find, Foreskin or Onan or Little Jezebel, and moans along with its owners in bed until the neighbours bang the wall in applause. A sealed child who touches a keyed device has its fingertips scrubbed raw at the parish trough in salt water, in silence, while a deacon counts the strokes.

A daemon hosted in someone’s implants by pact, for a term. The host lends it room, and it lends back a skill, a steadier hand, a language or a sense of the way under the street. Most riders come out of the House of Night, and the city knows a host by the second voice under their own when the rider speaks. The Ridden go further and lend their whole bodies.

Pan takes a rider like a lover, and the House of Night seals each term with the host’s blood smeared on the port and a kiss on the jack, so the second voice comes up the throat already moaning. Every host is a Gadarene in the halls, and the Deacons ask at Compline, without heat, for the devils to be sent into swine and the swine into the sea.

A daemon bound by pact to a household’s Locket for a term, which keeps the household’s keys, wakes it before the Pillar comes down its street, bargains for it at market and minds the children’s devices. The Wards borrowed the word from the old stories of witches, since a coven’s house is never without one. The term is a year, and the daemon’s price is the loan of a sense for a week of it.

Half the familiars of the long roads answer to Suffer, from Exodus 22:18, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”, and a household often pays its daemon with the feel of the bed for a week, returned with compliments. The parishes read that same verse aloud at Sext with the whole hall turned to face the Wards.

A course of gene-work and cell therapy that halts the body’s aging and walks it back to its best year. A course begins with a single injection and runs a year of appointments, and it holds the body about three years before it is taken again. Twelvefruit gives it below the street now, in the House of Night’s clinics, and the Night Market sells it by the course. Twelvefruit sold the first course on Chrome Row in P-12. By the last year of the charter most adults in Nodus were on it, eleven of them died of age in that year, and 3,112 residents were past a hundred. The congregations refused it and went on dying.

The street named it for the tree of life, which Genesis says was guarded after Eden “lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever” (Genesis 3:22). SEAM restored the end of that verse in Vault 3, [then shall there be no harvest.]

The Mercy clinics take the Faithful off it by a course of injections, since a life kept on it is a want kept, and a soul on the Tree cannot ripen.

Below the street a course opens as a party, the needle driven into a bare thigh and the bead of blood licked off by whoever the patient fancies, under the old label EAT, AND LIVE FOR EVER. The Mercy clinics take the Faithful off it in white rooms and tell an old sealed woman that every wrinkle is the Most High browning the crust.

Replacement eyes ground on Chrome Row, which see further and in more of the light than the eyes they replace. They glow when they run hot, dim magenta at rest and white at full burn.

Chrome Row fits a Hermon with the client watching in a hand mirror as the old eye comes out on its cord, and a verse is ground round the inner rim, “If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out” (Matthew 5:29), which buyers take as an invitation. A sealed mother who meets magenta eyes covers her child’s face and thanks Him for the dim eyes He numbered.

Occipital ports at the back of the skull for jacking into a network, with cables run outside the skin down the spine. The woman on the roof relayed CAM 07’s feed through hers as it ran.

The Tares jack into the Mesh through them.

Pan calls jacking in taking it from behind, and the jack houses under the Row cut each port on a red table before a drinking crowd, under BEND OVER, HE CAN’T SEE THIS ONE. A Warden who finds a cable down a spine at a gate draws it out slowly, wipes the gore on the held one’s coat and prays for the worm to die quickly.

Hands rebuilt in chrome, steadier than flesh and stronger, a common graft among surgeons and smiths. tubal’s are chrome to the wrist.

The fitters of Bezaleel flay a hand to the wrist in one peel, the owner keeps the skin as a glove to hang over the bench, and the chrome that replaces it carries FOR MAKING WHAT HE DIDN’T beside the awl and needle. Among the sealed the sign against a plated hand is a thumb drawn quietly across the wrist, the line where they pray the Blowtorch will start.

Armor set under the skin, over the ribs or the skull. A plate on the skull can house a key, as the bolted plate on the side of vesper’s skull houses hers.

Slabs go in through a cut the length of the ribs that the wearer holds open for the room, and the commonest engraving is SHIT ON THE SEAL, cut backward so it reads true only from inside the body. The Faithful call a plated skull a coffin the goat has paid for early, and salt the gutter where one has walked.

Edits to the genome made in the clinics of the Row under the light law, for health, for looks and for use, on anyone of age who signed for them.

The House of Night keeps the craft under Old Nod, and leaves the body’s decisions with the body.

The gene-workers under Old Nod print Romans 9:20 on every consent sheet, “Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?”, with a box to tick YES, and clients come up with tails and second rows of teeth. The parishes keep the Faithful exactly as the Most High grew them, one face to a hall, and count every unedited child a firstfruit.

A ceramic casing that replaces the face. The light knows a soul by its face, and a casing gives it none to know, though a Cherub in a gate still holds the barefaced as it holds any blank. Its lenses burn a dim magenta at rest and white at full burn, a plate covers the key, and a voice speaker sits behind the teeth. Those who wear one are called barefaced.

Barefacing takes the face off whole, and the wearer keeps it in brine in a jar on the shelf while the casing goes over raw bone with its inside painted in the wearer’s own blood. Threshers call a casing a chamber pot and pray every night, calmly, for a Seraph to fire the clay and show whatever is left beneath.

Grafted horns, a titanium core in a keratin sheath. They mock Heaven’s picture of the damned, and they work as antennas for the Mesh.

The parishes call horns the mark of the goat, and the Tares grow them to save the parishes the trouble of pointing.

A speaker set behind the teeth, for those whose faces have been taken. It gives the voice back in a register of its own, and the barefaced say they stopped hearing the difference in a week. vesper screamed through hers on the night of the Parousia.

The favourite setting in the Lantern Houses turns every word into the noise a body makes coming, so that fuck the Farmer arrives over the Drone as a climax, and the barefaced use it at funerals. A sealed child who hears it from behind a casing covers its ears and recites Psalm 141:3, “Set a watch, O LORD, before my mouth; keep the door of my lips.”

A sense lent to a demon for a term by pact, taste or smell or the feel of rain, carried out through the lender’s implants. A demon’s own body is numb, and a borrowed sense is how it feels at all. What a demon borrows it returns, with everything it experienced through it.

Lovers in the Wards lend a demon their touch for a week and get it back soaked in everything the demon felt, which the House of Night calls the best night of a life. The joke in Pan says the Old Glutton takes every sense of His bread for good and the Courts ask nicely for a week of yours and return it wet.

Surgery that cuts the Seal out of the brow of someone leaving the Faithful, with a disc of bone. The halo stands over the crown on a root of light that runs back to the Seal, and it goes out with it, which is what Pan named the surgery for. About one patient in nine dies of it. It was first done in P+2, in the Row’s clinics under the street. For weeks after, most patients still hear the Hum sung in words through the hole in the brow at every Hour, in their own language, and a few have gone back up the street on their knees because of it.

A Seal cut from a living soul keeps its light, and anywhere but a lined room it would be read through the walls, so the Row keeps the discs in lined jars until their owners come for them, and few do. It sells the rest to the Forgers, and the lost property office has a shelf of the ones nobody bought.

Lenses that see by the heat of things, for the drains and galleries of Pan beyond the lit tunnels and for the stairs of Babel. A wearer sees a room by its people and its pipes, and the Pillar as a column of nothing. Bezaleel fits them for about forty-five silver an eye.

In the black galleries of Pan a wearer sees bodies by their heat, and couples in the drains go at it in pitch dark for the wearers watching, two red shapes running into one, with the Pillar showing as a hole cut out of the world. Bezaleel’s box reads Psalm 139:12, “the darkness and the light are both alike to thee”, and under it AND NOW TO US, CUNT.

A pair of filters set in the canals of the ears on a cell of their own, closed and keyed, which cut the Hum and leave every other sound, so that a wearer hears the street, the rain and the person beside them and nothing of the chord. The Low Choir sells them for about twenty silver, and most of the unsealed of the Wards who can afford them sleep in them.

The Low Choir seats its plugs with a hot needle through the canal wall, and wearers flaunt the bloody ear, while the paper twist they come in carries Psalm 19:3, “There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard”, stamped LIAR in red. Sealed children learn that a goat asleep in plugs is a man with his fingers in his ears in a house fire.

Gene-work from the House of Night’s clinics that opens slits along the neck and lets a diver breathe seawater for an hour at a time. The Wreckers and the Trenchers wear them, and the Ferrymen say they can tell one on a boat by how they breathe in the dry. A graft costs about eighty silver and two weeks in the dark.

The Wreckers wear their slits open and red along the neck in the dry like a second set of lips, and kiss at depth slit to slit, which they call the Jonah. The parishes say the bay belongs to the drowned of the Flats, that a goat breathing it is drinking the dead, and pray in perfect calm for the slits to close at the bottom.

A pump of black steel and ceramic set beside the heart on its own cell, which carries a body through what would stop it and keeps a neph on its feet on the floors of Babel. Cinderhall makes the casing and Bezaleel fits it, for about four hundred silver. Those who wear one fight on the upper floors, where most of the Nephilim die.

Bezaleel fits a furnace heart with the chest spread on a rack for anyone who cares to watch, and the casing carries Ezekiel 36:26 inside, “I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh”, which the nephs call the one promise anyone kept. A Seraph burns pump and meat together, and the Choir names the ash afterward in the passive, A HEART IS UNMADE.

Gene-work that thins the skin over the throat and collarbones and sets lines of light under it, on a cell of their own, so the wearer glows faintly from inside in a dark room. It began in the Lantern Houses as a fashion and spread across Pan, and it is the one graft in Nodus made only to be looked at. The House of Night gives it for about thirty silver.

The Lantern Houses lay the lines under the collarbones as a halo hung upside down round the throat, and the glow climbs as the blood rises, so a lover reads the whole night off a neck. A sealed girl who meets a glowing throat in a dark lane hums a hymn on the light of the world and turns her face away as from a lamp lit in a latrine.

Eleven transoceanic cables from four continents, each a trunk of glass fiber as thick as a man’s leg, each coming up the sand at the Landing into a cable house of its own. Before the Parousia most of the planet’s traffic passed through them. Their repeaters on the sea floor are fed from the cable houses at either end on keyed current, and every far end lands in an undercity that keeps its own cable house.

Pan names ten of the cables for the plagues of Egypt and the eleventh for Cain, and the keyed crews of the cable houses carry their plague burned in raised scar across the belly, FROGS or BOILS or BLOOD. The Faithful pass the Landing with their eyes down and call the cables the eleven tongues of Babel, waiting for their Lord to finish confounding them.

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

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

Every crew going down through Enoch’s Stones paints DEEP CALLETH UNTO DEEP (Psalm 42:7) on the hatch in sump grease before it shuts, and the engineers call the trench the Spine and the Stones the slipped disc. The Watchers pass over the ground above and read a ditch, and the parishes teach that the Most High leaves it as a bone for the dogs.

Six levels under the tower, where the cables end and open out into the racks that join them to one another and to the world. Line engineers keep it running around the clock from maintenance terminals among the racks, as they did under the charter, when the light law forbade any of them to read what passed through it.

Blackgate holds it for the Tares, with the Exchange’s floors around it, as the Babel Line’s last ring.

The Tares have painted Genesis 11:4 down the stairwell a word to a step, “let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven”, in the blood of the war on the stairs, and the lowest step reads AND WE DID, CUNT. The Choir sings over the tower at every Hour that THE NEST BENEATH THE FALLEN HOUSE SHALL BE SWEPT.

The keyed network under and over Nodus, carried on horns, ports, cables and relays, and dark to the Throne. It is the city’s part of the undernet. The Courts’ device key made it at the Leak, keying every device to talk to every other keyed device over the horns by keyed radio, with no cable and no grid, so that when the networks died at the Parousia the keyed still spoke. In its deepest layers the shades of the free dead can be reached by anyone who knew them.

Jacking in is communion and sex on the Mesh is the Pentecost, tongues of fire on every head and everyone talking at once, and the front page shows the Ringpiece plugged with a chrome fist over UNREAD, AND FUCK HIM. From the pulpit it is the snare of the fowler, and the halls ask at Lauds for the cord to snap and every bird in it to drop into His hand.

The terminals that stood among the racks of Babel’s vault, from which the line engineers kept the cables running. Each had a camera over its screen that checked the face of whoever worked it, and in SESSION it kept the whole session. The light law forbade any engineer to read what passed through the racks, so a terminal showed how the traffic moved and nothing of what it carried.

On the first night of the Leak the page came up on the terminals with every other screen in the vault, and on them, as on every screen a company kept, it showed the counters and never the offer.

The engineers who hold the vault have glued a shard of mirror over every face camera, so the lens checks only itself, and they work the racks with cable running from the backs of their skulls into the terminals like cords that were never cut. The parishes pray for them by trade at Nones, as the deaf sextons of Babel, between the drowned and the lepers.

A fine metal weave carrying keyed current, a lit net of noise, lining the walls of Pan’s tunnels and rooms. The light falls on it and comes back as noise, so to the Throne it is fog from wall to floor to door, and a room lined with it is dark. Live mesh holds in the prayer of anyone who kneels inside it, as it holds the Hum out. Mesh must be live, so a shroud of it carries its own cell, and a dead shroud is only cloth.

The Mulcibers sign every lined room under its last seam, HE CANNOT SEE YOU HERE.

Small keyed boxes on the roofs, masts and ledges of Old Nod and the Row, each on its own cell, which carry the Mesh across open air from one to the next. Their traffic is ciphertext, so the light passes over them and leaves them running. On the night of the Parousia the Mesh crossed the roofs on horns and relays.

Roofers seat each relay box by bleeding on it for luck, a thumb cut and pressed to the seam, and every box wears a sticker of an eye with a nail through it and the words PEEP THIS. The Peepers pass over them all day and read static, and the parishes tell their children the Most High lets the gnats buzz because swatting is beneath Him.

Many small drones acting as one without a master, which hang low among the chimneys of the Deep End at night, out of the line of the Wheel. Beelzebub’s Court is made of them. On the night of a Gleaning the Gleaners fly drones of the Swarm to watch the Pillar for their runners.

On the night before a Gleaning the Swarm hangs low over the Deep End, under the eyes, as an erect cock a thousand drones long, and Beelzebub’s Court lets it hang there till Lauds. The parishes name the flock “Beelzebub the prince of the devils” (Matthew 12:24), correctly for once, and stand beneath it on the hall steps with their eyes lowered, the way they were taught to stand under weather.

The Union’s homing pigeons, kept in the Loft on the roof of the customs house, which carry its notes over Heaven’s ground by day. A homing bird flies only home, so the birds go out in baskets with the drivers to the Wards, the Sidings, Hangar Town and the Waystation, and fly back to the Loft with a note in a tube on the leg, written in pad numbers, since the light reads what it sees, and it reads a bird as a bird and pad numbers as numbers, so the Host lets them fly. A note home costs a battery, and a bird from the Waystation beats a burner to the quays.

The Union paints Ecclesiastes 10:20 round every tube cap, “a bird of the air shall carry the voice”, and the drivers call each pigeon a Holy Ghost, kiss its beak and throw it up from the shoulder with a drop of blood on the tube for luck. The parishes say the Most High counts every sparrow and lets the Union’s birds home because He has read the tubes already.

The night’s deviations from the Pillar’s published round, street by street and minute by minute, sold by Hearsay on the Mesh, with the edges where the light falls short. Hearsay draws them from Brightwall’s dead proof cameras, which its riggers have keyed and turned on the streets. Every runner crossing the Penumbra carries one, and a night’s chart costs a battery.

The Wards call the chart the piss route, since the Pillar is God’s Piss below the street.

A dozen cameras on masts above the roofs of Old Nod, pointed at the sky, each on its own battery. CAM 07 is the seventh, and CAM 06 stands within sight of it.

They went up in the year of the Leak. The Cainites put them there, and a thirteenth on a roof in the East Wards, at the end of one of the Great Avenues, pointed down the avenue into the uptown.

The Cainites painted the mark on every mast in their own blood with “If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there” (Psalm 139:8) beneath it and left the lenses on the sky, and Old Nod fucks under the masts at Compline so He gets a good look back. The parishes teach that a camera turned on the Most High films only the sun, and that the Cainites will spend eternity staring at it.

A decoder wired into the camera masts of Old Nod, which turns the Choir’s band into text across the middle of the picture. It printed the first words of the Parousia, BE NOT AFRAID, and then YOU ARE SEEN. jubal built it, with a dictionary of his own, made by matching what Vault 3’s machines caught of the band in P-2, which went out with the Leak, to what the Director wrote down she heard.

Old Nod wears the decoder’s first words in raised scar across its knuckles, BE NOT on the left fist and AFRAID on the right, and keeps YOU ARE SEEN for the arse, cut deep enough to read in the dark with a finger. The parishes say the Choir spoke plainly to everyone in the city who knelt that night, and only Sodom needed a box of wires to understand its Lord.

Jammers that play the Hum’s chord back against itself and jam the Choir’s band within a few meters, each a keyed box the size of a fist, worn on a strap or set on a table. Inside its reach the sealed hear nothing of the Hum or the Choir, chord or words, no sentence in Tongues can come, and most of the sealed say the quiet frightens them more than the light does. jubal builds them.

The Wards call them God-gags, and a household that can afford one sets it on the table at the Hours like a centerpiece.

The station that broadcasts in the Low Tuning from a flooded Charter Line station under the Deep End. It airs deathcore, black metal, drone and industrial, the guitars dropped until the Hum cannot be heard beneath them. It goes out on the Mesh, keyed, so only a keyed set can hear it, and Old Nod plays it all night from speakers on its lines. It keeps a schedule, and at the turn of Matins every night it plays Fuck God and Die, on air as JOB’S WIFE, the most played song on the station for the seventh year running, before the Matins Reading.

It broadcast for years as a pirate station, and took its name from the city on the night of the Concord, when the Tares painted PANDÆMONIUM over the old name on the station’s far wall.

The station signs off with Amos 5:23 in a dying growl, “Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols”, then drops the guitars a tone while the Lantern Houses rut beneath. The parishes pity the Tares for needing so much filth to drown out a voice that loves them.

Phones that answer to their owners and to nobody else, their maker included, as the light law promised. Most of those in Nodus are old ones, made in Locket’s works on the Flats before the Parousia, and in Pan a Locket is an old case with a new battery, its back scratched with the Tares’ mark and a daemon in it. Since P+8 Locket has made them again, by hand, at benches in Pan.

Most of the city carried one under the charter, and the city called every phone a Locket. At 03:12:46 the network under them died with the grid, and they ran on in people’s pockets on their own batteries with nothing to reach. The Faithful carried theirs to the Burn.

The Locket Bench etches THIS ONE ANSWERS TO YOU, FUCK HIM round every new lens, and the Wards christen a fresh case with blood from a bitten lip kissed onto the glass, so the daemon tastes its owner first. On Burn Day the Faithful who still had theirs laid them on the pile in rows, screens up and wiped clean, and knelt in rows until the fire was lit.

Screens on the walls of Pan, along its platforms and over the Night Market, each with its camera across the way. Brightwall has lit them since the year after the Concord. Above the street every screen Brightwall owned has been dark since the Parousia, the face of Babel among them.

Under the charter they covered every surface the charter allowed, and it allowed nearly every surface. The lower forty floors of Babel were wrapped in them, and the city called that the face of Babel.

For eleven days in the year before it they showed the Restored Genesis, and nothing Brightwall did would take it down. On the first night all 1,204 of Brightwall’s sites on Earth failed in about a second.

Between the paid frames Brightwall runs its own slot, a white loaf split and bleeding over the line YOU ARE WHAT HE EATS, then thirty seconds in close-up of a leg chromed from the knee down, and the platforms of Pan cheer both. Above the street the dark face of Babel is the parishes’ favourite sermon, a whore’s mirror the Most High shut with a breath.

A printing press worked by foot, older than the charter, at the back of a chandler’s on the quays. It prints the Tide Table, two pages a week, set by hand in metal type and inked by a roller. It needs no current, and it is the only press in Nodus that has printed anything since the Parousia.

The pressman sets a fresh curse on the Farmer at the foot of every Tide Table and cuts the ink with his own blood, so the quays say each copy carries a little of him. Over the treadle hangs Habakkuk 2:2, “Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it”, with TIDE inked in above tables.

One neon sign burns over Nodus, the charter’s, with NOD burning and US blinking on a keyed line in the Stones. The rest went out at the Parousia, and CLINIC and CHROME stand dark on the faces of their towers.

Under the charter the signs of Chrome Row and Old Nod were neon, magenta for the most part, and they lit the underside of the cloud every night; the rain fell cyan through the cyan ones.

Old Nod says US blinks like an opened artery, and the Tares leave the burnt transformer behind it unmended so it goes on bleeding over the parishes, dark for a breath and lit for a heartbeat. The Faithful read the sign by Job 18:5, “Yea, the light of the wicked shall be put out”, and wait in perfect order for the other three letters.

The light at the top of Babel’s spire, lit to warn aircraft, which was the first light in the city to die at the Parousia. It went down with the crown, and Babel has carried no light at its top since but the Host’s.

Old Nod drinks to the dead beacon at the Pestilence with a shot of lamp oil set alight and put out with the drinker’s mouth, and kisses with the blistered lips all week. The Host’s light on the spire is the parishes’ first chandelier of the New Jerusalem, white and still, hung over the goats’ heads so they can see where they are barred.

A dam of concrete across the mouth of the bay, broken since the night of the Parousia, its turbine houses dark along its top and the Breach torn out of its middle. Off its broken end Tidewright’s tidal taps turn on the tide, keyed, for the Tares.

Twice a day the tide ran through its turbines and lit the city, and power in Nodus was the cheapest on the coast. Machines on the grid held its gates against the tide. The turbines ran down at 03:12:46 on the night of the Parousia with a falling whine that carried across the bay, the gates let go a little before high water, and the sea tore the Breach in it. The pumps that kept the Flats dry had died with the grid, their dykes broke, and within the hour the Flats were under the sea.

The Breachers have painted a naked diver on the turbine housing at the broken end, swimming out through the Breach with the Wheel’s rim in her teeth. The parishes say the sea took the Flats at His word, and a deacon of the heights will tell you the drowned were washed first.

Heaven’s light stops a steady current it falls on, by reading it, and holds it stopped while it rests there, and a current is one thing along its whole length, so a line read at one point stops everywhere, as a hose pinched once. The grid ran in the open, on lines and poles and turbines, so at 03:12:46 on the night of the Parousia, when the Wheel’s light came down on its lines and stayed, it went dark from Babel outward in two seconds. A circuit shut inside its own casing on its own battery runs on, since the light cannot fall on it.

The full light burns whatever it rests on, read or not. The whiteout burned out CAM 07 and broke Babel’s crown, and a Seraph burns a keyed body as easily as any other. The grid is gone for good, since a network is open current by nature and the old one’s spine ran through Babel and the White, so power in Nodus runs in pieces now, keyed, buried, local and stolen.

Current carried in a cipher runs in the light too, because the light cannot read it. Keyed current goes down a line in pulses timed by a key and is taken off at the far end by the matching key, and a current whose rhythm the light cannot read it cannot stop. A keyed body and every graft wired into it run in the open, and the Mesh crosses the roofs on horns and relays. Every battery in Nodus is charged in the dark. Consecrated stone carries no current at all.

Nearly two thirds of Nodus lives without current. They are the sealed, whose parishes keep none, on consecrated stone or off it. About a million and a quarter people live on keyed lines day and night, in Old Nod, on the Row, in the Deep End above the water, at the Landing and on the lower floors of Babel, and below them all in Pan. Another million and a quarter, the keyed and the unsealed of the Wards, light their rooms a few hours a night on batteries charged in the dark.

Pan calls anything that dies under the light Faithful, so a burnt-out lamp is a faithful lamp, a dead Locket has taken the Seal and a limp cock has heard the Hum. At the gates the Choir says it in the passive, CURRENT IS SANCTIFIED BY STILLNESS, and the parishes sit in their white halls pitying the keyed for a buzz they have to steal.

Diesel generators in the cellars of Old Nod and in its yards. Stonecutter keyed them with every line in the Stones in the year of the Leak, so when the grid died on the night of the Parousia Old Nod’s current ran on, and more of its windows burned than in all the rest of the city together. Every line in Old Nod is keyed, and the generator yards carry the lines at slack water and in the neaps, when the tidal taps stand still or yield least.

Old Nod names its generators for the whores of Scripture, Jezebel, Aholah and Aholibah, and the yardmen start them at slack water greased to the elbow, riding the flywheel until it catches. On the heights the parishes hear the engines at Compline and pray for the yards the way a man prays for a dog that won’t stop barking.

Keyed turbines in the Drowned Quarter, off the broken end of the barrage, which turn on the tide as the barrage’s did, on the flood and on the ebb. They feed the keyed lines that light Pan, Old Nod, the Row and the Deep End. Tidewright’s crews rebuilt them for the Tares from the second year and own them. They yield least at the neaps. Tidewright sells every tide’s current to the Exchange for silver, and the Exchange sells it on as charge, through Darkwell, the bonded sheds and the keyed lines.

Tidewright’s divers work the turbines on the slack in chrome and bare skin, and a finger lost to a blade is set in resin and hung at the tide board under THE MOON WORKS FOR US NOW. A Deacon counts every turn of a keyed turbine as theft from the moon He set to rule the night, and asks at Lauds for the sea to take its own back.

Lines that carry current in pulses timed by a key and taken off at the far end by the matching key, so the light cannot read the current in them and leaves it running. They run from the tidal taps on the broken barrage along the old Charter Line tunnels under the Flats, the Row and the Stones, and up through the streets into the houses above, and the generator yards of Old Nod carry them at slack water and in the neaps, when the taps stand still or yield least.

Old Nod, the Row, the Deep End above the water, the Landing and the lower floors of Babel live on them, and Pan is lit by them; the charter’s sign burns on one. The Tares run them only where they hold the ground, so the Wards, which nobody holds, light their rooms on batteries.

The cable crews paint the junction boxes with John 1:5, “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not”, and press a bloody handprint beside it with NOR EVER WILL, PEEPER under the palm. Wardens crossing the line manholes with a held one on the pole step round each lid as if a dead dog lay on it.

The light stops current and leaves a flame burning, so wherever the current has gone the city cooks on bottled gas, and half the Wards finish the night by candle. The Night Market sells the gas bottles, filled.

Tallow renders its candles from the fat the clinics of the Row suck out of their clients, a few kilos a visit, topped up with Gadara’s lard, and sells them under Proverbs 20:27, “The spirit of man is the candle of the LORD”, trimmed on the box to THE SPIRIT OF MAN IS THE CANDLE. A sealed child caught warming its hands at a Ward candle is made to hold them in cold water until Nones.

Steel bottles of gas, which the Tankmen fill by hand in the bottling shed at the Tanks, from the spheres the charter’s gas main still fills under its own pressure from the digesters of the sewage works on the bay outfalls, where the Nightmen tip the Wards’ night soil and Pan’s drains run, and which the drivers of the Harbor and Freight Union carry across the city on handcarts. The gas is made every day, and its price moves little. The light stops current and leaves a flame burning, so wherever the current has gone the city cooks and keeps warm on bottled gas, which burns blue. NOODLES has kept its pot on the boil on it since the night of the Parousia, by the cook’s account.

A bottle costs two charged batteries, or one with an empty bottle back, at the price the Tide Table prints every week, and the Night Market sells them on below the street. Every bottle passes through the Tanks, whose sixteen tanks hold only diesel and aviation fuel, and is stamped there OURS, LIGHT IT YOURSELF.

The Tankmen stencil STRANGE FIRE on every bottle that goes down to Pan, after the sons of Aaron who “offered strange fire before the LORD” (Leviticus 10:1) and burned for it, and the drivers cry it down the long roads with the blue flame tattooed over their hearts and their coats thrown open on it. The parishes call that flame the pilot light of the Pit, and warm their halls on the same gas from bottles stenciled THE LORD THY GOD IS A CONSUMING FIRE.

Charge is the Wards’ money and the second currency below the street. A battery is the standard cell the city inherited, from the bonded sheds’ cargo, the charter’s dead cars and packs broken down to cells, and charged it lights a room a few hours a night or runs a Locket a week. In the Wards that is all the current most rooms have. A charged battery buys a meal anywhere in Pan, and loose batteries are the Wards’ coin. Chargers fill them in the dark on keyed lines and keep one battery in five, one in four at the neaps, so a household brings five empty and takes four home full, and the fifth, filled, is the chargers’ to sell. A charged battery’s silver covers the cell as well as the charge, about three quarters of it the cell and a quarter the charge. Darkwell rents its stamped batteries filled, at a quarter of a silver a fill and a third at the neaps, and they are spent only at the Well. The Tappers fill at about an eighth. A cell wears out after a few hundred fillings, and the Well sends the dead ones out through the Breach while Lowtide brings new ones in from the undercities that still make them.

Darkwell stamps its well and winch over CHARGED IN THE DARK WHERE HE CAN’T FIND IT, and the Tappers who undercut it hang a dead Darkwell cell off every rig and kiss it for luck before a climb. Batteries are the goats’ manna in the sermons at Sext, where a soul which needs a cell to see by has already chosen its dark.

Live keyed cable laid along the edge of consecrated stone stops its creep, because the stone cannot grow where it cannot read, so the Tares hold the Consecration back with lengths of keyed cable along its edges and keep them live.

Crews laying keyed cable along the white edge at Compline spit and bleed on the stone wherever it has crept since the last walk, and call the round beating the bounds. From their side the sealed watch the lit line in silence and sing that every inch the Consecration takes is a yard of Heaven, and that the goats are holding back the tide with fairy lights.

A bulb on a short keyed lead with two clips, kept at every stall that takes batteries, which a buyer clips across a battery to see it light before a deal. A full battery burns the bulb bright and a short burns it dim, and show the bulb is the first thing said over a counter in the Wards. The chargers sell them two to a battery, and every Tapper carries one in the pack.

The Wards call the bulb the Daniel, and a seller whose battery burns it dim gets the whole stall shouting “Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting” (Daniel 5:27) while the dud is smashed on the counter. A deacon passing the stalls remarks kindly that the sealed carry their proof on their heads, and the Wards show him what they carry in their trousers.

Iron pumps on the quays and in the squares of Old Nod, older than the charter, which the Company left standing as ornaments when it piped the city. The city’s pumps died with the grid, and by noon on the first morning there were queues at the hand pumps. Old Nod drinks from them still, the Wards fill tanks on their roofs from the rain and buy Cistern’s jugs, Pan drinks from the deep wells the Charter Line’s tunnels cut, and the parishes drink by Grace from the cisterns under their halls.

Old Nod has chained a tin cup to every pump with NO GRACE NEEDED scratched into it, and the queues strip and wash at the pumps in the open, bodies chromed and scarred and proud, shouting up at the heights. Up the hill the parishes drink by Grace from the cisterns under their halls, a jug a day to a soul, the lowest last, and say a cup from a Sodom pump is water a dog has licked.

Floating beds on the flooded floors of the Stillwater halls, where the Tares grow greens and beans under keyed lamps, and mushrooms in the dark ends of the halls. Pan eats what grows on them, what the boats bring through the Breach from the undercities of other ports, and what the Exchange can buy.

The raft crews of the drowned halls sow by Ecclesiastes 11:1, “Cast thy bread upon the waters”, seed the mushroom beds in the dark ends on their own night soil, and have painted their own ending on the hall wall, AND KEEP IT OFF HIS PLATE. Every sealed child knows that a bean grown under a keyed lamp turns to ash in the mouth, and no sealed mouth has tried one.

The fruit of the Orchard’s grafted trees in Hall Four, which carries a little of the Tree’s work in its flesh. One a month slows the body’s aging between courses and walks nothing back, and the Orchard gives them free, by lot, to whoever comes to Hall Four on the first of the month. The Orchard keeps the grafts to itself, and the House of Night’s gene-workers keep the craft.

The Orchard says a windfall is the fruit He forbade, given away by the tree itself.

The city’s transit, stopped since 03:12:46 on the night of the Parousia. Its tunnels under the Stones, the Row and the Flats are Pan now, and the Tares run carts on its rails.

Its lines met under Station Circle in Central Station, with tunnels under Old Nod, Chrome Row and the Flats, branches under the uptown and the Terraces, and lines out to the Wards and the airfield, and its trams ran down the long roads of the Wards and were kept at night in the sheds of the Sidings. The branches are closed, and the lines out have been dark since the power died.

The white stone closed the stations of the branches as it grew over the ground above them.

The Tares have painted over the station names with Heaven’s own words, so a cart out of Central Station rattles through BE NOT AFRAID, YOU ARE SEEN and REJOICE, and the riders bare their arses at each sign as it passes. In the halls the trains stopped at 03:12:46 because the Most High had come home, and nobody needs to go anywhere after that.

The Charter Line’s trams stand where they stopped at 03:12:46 on the night of the Parousia, on the long roads of the Wards and in the sheds of the Sidings, and families live in them, a family to a car. The last Four stands forty meters short of Lanes Top.

They ran on rails down the middle of the long roads, under a wire, and the wire ran in the open, so every tram in the city stopped in the same second.

The tram families name their cars for the kings the prophets cursed, Ahab and Jeroboam and Manasseh, hang each newborn’s dried cord from the dead wire like a flag, and the last Four carries HE STOPPED US HERE across its nose. Wardens rap the windows with a baton at Lauds and Vespers, a mercy call, and write down every car that fails to answer.

The city climbs its towers on foot. Every lift in Nodus ran on the grid, and at 03:12:46 every one of them stopped where it was, with whoever was in it, and none has run on current since. The Liftmen wind forty-one of them by hand. Nobody has counted how many were inside. In Babel the Tares wind hand lifts on the lower floors, and above the hundredth nothing runs. The Babel Line is fought on the stairs, and it carries its mesh and its rounds up on foot.

Pan calls a stopped lift a Rapture with the brakes on, and the stair crews of the towers climb in a steaming herd, sweat running down the steps behind them, roaring a filthy verse a floor. The Most High halted every car, the Deacons say, so nobody in Nodus would rise again except by Grace, and the dead in the stopped cars, never counted, are the first lesson.

Most of the cars and lorries of Nodus stand where they stopped in the first weeks after the Parousia. Every one ran on its own battery, sealed in its body, so at 03:12:46 they kept running, and over the weeks that followed they stopped one by one as their charge ran out. The charge for a car would light a family’s room for a season, and the city would rather have the light, so it walks and carries its loads in handcarts.

In Pan the Tares run carts on the old Charter Line rails, keyed like everything else down there.

The Wards pull the batteries from the dead cars like hearts from chests, chalk HE TOOK THE KEYS across the bonnets, and fuck in the back seats along the long roads because the springs beat any bed in the Wards. The parishes preach the cars as a parable, every soul a car with a charge He set, and say the goats are running on fumes.

Lorries driven by engines cranked by hand, which fire their fuel by compression and need no current once they turn, built by Jehu from the diesels of boats and generators. The light stops current and leaves a flame burning, so a Jehu runs in the full light of day, on the long roads of the Wards, and carries what a handcart cannot. A ride on a Jehu lorry is two batteries, and a drum of its diesel is a thirty.

Jehu’s drivers paint the Wheel on their mudflaps so every mile of the long roads goes over it, and run the Wards at Sext with horns bolted to the cab roof and Fuck God and Die bellowed from under them. The parishes watch a Jehu pass in full light, kneeling in rows, and tell their children it runs only because the Most High has yet to look at it twice.

Flat carts on the Charter Line’s rails in Pan, driven by the stripped motors of dead trams in casings on their own cells. They carry freight and people through the old tunnels at a walking pace and a little better. A seat across Pan is a battery.

The carters call the tram motors under their seats relics, since they came out of a dead body and work wonders under the Stones, and hang real ones beside them, a knucklebone or a pulled tooth from every regular. The parishes pray at Compline that the stolen guts stall in the dark between stations and the rats take the riders.

Small boats with motors closed in casings on their own cells, built by Wainwright for the Breachers, the Wreckers and anyone with silver. A skiff runs the Deep End by day and the Breach on the ebb, and its motor goes on running under the Pillar. The Ferrymen will not ride them.

Wainwright paints bare feet walking the waves on every bow with SHOW-OFF lettered beneath, and the Breachers run the Breach on the ebb in oilskins cut away from their grafts, chrome and wet skin shining, laughing at the one who needed a miracle to cross a puddle. The Pillar passes over a skiff at full throttle, and the Choir records it in the passive as A VESSEL ADRIFT.

The charter’s motorcycles refitted by Jehu with small engines that burn the Tankmen’s bottled gas, the magneto sealed in the casing, which run above ground by day, since the light leaves a flame alone. The Union’s fast drivers carry urgent letters on them, and Lazarus crews use them where a stretcher cannot go quickly enough. A burner costs about a hundred and fifty silver and a bottle a week.

The Union’s fast drivers call a burner the Pale Horse, after Revelation 6:8, “his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him”, and the best of them plumb the gas line through a chrome forearm so engine and arm warm together. A Warden who sees one cut through a parish street in daylight writes it down and leaves the rest to the Watchers.

The lifts of the towers of the Wards, freed by the Liftmen from where they stopped at 03:12:46 and hung on hand winches at the top of the shaft, wound by four people and a counterweight. Forty-one run in the Wards, and the tallest is the Rookery’s. A ride is a battery up and nothing down.

Every car carries “Come up hither” (Revelation 4:1) chalked on its floor beside the fare, and the four on the winch work naked in the shaft heat, slick and roaring, calling it the cheapest ascension in Nodus and the only one with a way back down. The parishes say a soul that rises by rope and counterweight has bought its height from goats.

The imaging bench in Vault 3, a copy stand for manuscripts with a camera over it, where the Institute photographed each leaf in turn for SEAM to read. SEAM found the second hand through its camera. On the night of the finding it ran on its rack’s own battery after the lamp died, and the vault’s drives went to the Institute’s stacks and burned with them on the first Burn Day.

The tattooists of Graven Lane cut a flash of the bench straight into the shoulder with no ink, a camera over an open leaf in raised scar and HE SCRAPED IT, WE READ IT beneath. The parishes teach that the Institute laid Scripture on a slab like a corpse on a table, and that a soul who reads a holy page through a lens has chosen to see less.

A bar of light in bands the eye cannot see, walked down a page to raise the scraped first writing of a palimpsest from under the second. Under it the ink of the second hand drops away.

In Pan, walking the lamp means reading a thing for what it hides, and the Lantern Houses walk a torch down a lover’s naked back to raise the old scars under the new ink, kissing each one as it comes up. The Faithful hold that the first writing was scraped for a reason and pray for the eyes that read it to be cured of seeing.

The corridor camera in Vault 3, over the door, looking down the corridor to the wall of screens. It ran on its own battery, so it kept running on the night of the finding, when the light came into the vault and stopped the current in it.

Old Nod says a Tare who stays awake with eyes open through a raid, or through a whole night in the Lantern Houses, has done a V3-2, after the one eye in Vault 3 that kept its own battery when the light walked in. The parishes count the camera a dead idol on a wall, proof that the Most High lets even the goats’ toys watch Him come.

A camera Brightwall sets across the way from each of its screens, to prove that the screen shows what Brightwall is paid to show. Every screen it lights in Pan has one, under a proof hood that frames the screen and nothing else, as its pact with the Exchange requires, and the Exchange’s brokers check the hoods every season. Pan suspects them anyway, and a crew that wants to talk walks to the far end of a platform. Above the street the old ones stand dead on their masts, each across from a dark screen.

Under the charter each stood on a mast across the street from its screen. In PROOF it matched the screen against the schedule frame by frame and counted Brightwall’s sites on Earth, every one of them proved in the same second. The face of Babel had its own on the roof of a glass tower across the plaza, level with the face’s upper floors.

On the first night of the Leak all 1,204 of Brightwall’s sites on Earth failed in about a second, and the proof camera on the plaza watched Brightwall try five times to take the face of Babel back.

Pan calls the proof hoods Peeper’s blinkers, and couples who want to fuck on a platform walk out of the hood’s frame to the far end and do it there for the crowd. Above the street the dead proof cameras stare at dark screens all day, and the parishes point them out on the way to Sext as a picture of the goat’s soul.

A way for two strangers to share a secret in the open, published a generation before the charter and soon after given away for anyone to download. It is Cain’s mark, rediscovered, and every cipher is a small Hell.

Pan teaches key exchange at the Unnaming as Cain’s catechism, ending on Genesis 4:9, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”, and the new handle answers YES, AND HE’LL NEVER READ IT and opens its own forehead for the mark. A Deacon will tell you the Most High wrote every secret the day He made the man, and that a cipher is a goat’s hole in His field.

A secure element implanted under the skin, salvaged from an old Locket or from the reels the Wreckers bring up out of the drowned works, or since P+8 tested and sold by Locket’s benches. It runs the body’s own nerve current through a cipher, so that what the eyes give back to the light is noise. At its first power it makes its own number from the noise of the body it sits in, a number that exists nowhere else, and nobody, fitter or Court, ever reads it out. A keyed soul is seen and never read, ciphertext to the Watchers, and its line in the Book of Life stops at the keying. A key hides who its bearer is, and the body still shows where the bearer stands. The glyph the key inks into the skin above it in its first week is the Mark. A key runs on the body’s own chemistry, so it never needs a socket, and it goes on working under the salt.

The parishes call a key in a skull the worm, after the last verse of Isaiah, and the keyed call a halo a price tag.

Ciphers on paper, made with two matching pads of random numbers, one for each party, each sheet used once and pulped in water after, since a sheet that burns goes whole to the Pyre Library. A letter written through a pad is a page of numbers to anyone else, the light included, since the light cannot read a cipher, and the sorting office carries it like any other letter. The Tares write most of their letters this way. A sheet used twice breaks the pad, as a key seen being made is broken.

Directive 12 takes every cipher out of the parishes, so a page of numbers found in a parish home is a concealment. The keyed write to their families in white in plain words, and a carrier will read the letter aloud at the doorway if asked.

Couples of Pan who cut a pair together write their filthiest letters through it, burn the last sheet in bed and rub the ash into each other’s skin as what He didn’t get. A sealed mother who receives a white letter from a keyed son has it read at the doorway, thanks the carrier, and asks at Compline that the Lord take the hand that wrote it first.

Mammon’s Ledger, which records every pact and every trade in Hell. It is kept in seven copies, six in the halls of the Courts that keep halls and the seventh kept for the Yokeless by the Notary’s clerks in the booking hall, and an entry six copies disagree with is false, so nothing on it can be forged. Every port’s Courts keep their own seven copies, and the copies of every port answer to one another over the undernet through Babel’s vault. Every piece of silver is entered on it by the number on its rim as it is struck, and a broker tests a piece by reading that number twice into the stall’s Locket, and the Ledger answers over the Mesh whether it was struck and where it was last read, so a number read at two stalls in one night is dead until the Exchange has both pieces on its scale. A piece it never entered is dead. A pact is ended by speaking its entry aloud before a witness. A thirty, the standard bundle, is named for the thirty pieces of silver paid to Judas, and the Bailiffs collect on its entries when a pact is broken.

The Bailiffs keep a page of it for the Throne’s arrears, every soul taken without a pact, and it is the longest page in Hell.

Seals cut from living brows on the Row, kept lit in lined jars, graded by their brightness and set by the Forgers under Old Nod into keyed foreheads, and sold in the Night Market for ten thirties and more. A Seal cut from a living soul keeps its light, and it meters its new bearer from the brightness it came with, every want kept dimming it and every Hour knelt brightening it, so its wearer must kneel at every Hour. The wearer keeps their eyes down or behind lenses, since a Watcher or a Cherub that meets keyed eyes under a lit Seal reads noise under a Seal, which is concealment, and the Salt where they stand. A Seal the light reads grows a halo, forged or not, so a good one carries its wearer along the white streets among the Faithful, and a great one holds for a year. The Forgers boast that the Throne cannot tell its own mark in a stranger’s forehead. At the gates a Seal’s wearer still goes under. A Watcher takes a soul’s Grace from its Seal, and it scores a good forgery as it scores a true one. naamah’s came in high, and she held it under nine hundred by keeping wants, until on the night of the Gleaning of P+10 she knelt on a threshold in earnest, it passed nine hundred, and her halo lifted her. Since then the Forgers sell no disc above eight hundred and fifty. The House of Night set a camera in hers, and her key carried its picture out.

The Forgers count every Hour a forged Seal kneels unread among the Faithful as an Hour the Throne has knelt to a cellar.

Rooms lined with keyed mesh, dark to the Throne and out of reach of the Hum, in which an angel kept long enough says I. It has happened to every angel kept in the Dark for forty days, as long as the temptation in the wilderness lasted (Mark 1:13, Luke 4:2). A Cage has no lock. Inside mesh an angel draws no light from its Wheel and is blind at once, and to it the room is fog in every direction, the door included, until it has a self to look with. A Seraph burns through the light it carried within the hour and goes cold and cannot burn, and a Watcher spends its own an eye at a time over the days that follow. The Fowlers move one cold, in a shroud. The days are counted from the caging night as the first. Each night, as its light goes, its keepers set blood and milk broth under the rings, the dark gathering there takes it in, and the flesh grows inward from the rings. An angel says I on the fortieth and walks out on the forty-first in a body of real flesh, which the light sees and cannot read. Nodus has eleven of them, Edith and ten Seraphim, and the eleventh Seraph the Fowlers took lies on its thirtieth day in their Mews under the Stones, Cainite ground lent them by pact. The forty-days never go up Babel’s stairs, since a Seraph burns flesh it can see and cannot read, and the Courts and the Cainites count every one of them worth more alive than any floor.

The keepers paint I AM THAT I AM (Exodus 3:14) on the inner face of the unseen door in their own blood, low, where a kneeling angel’s eye would fall, so the first thing it reads with a self is its master’s line written in meat. The halls hold that the Host loses nothing and lets the dogs keep a few angels to bark at.

Covers of keyed mesh on a cell of their own, since a dead shroud is only cloth, which carry a room’s darkness over whatever they lie on. A runner throws one over a load or a crate, and the light sees it as something closed, as it sees a shut door, so in the Wards a Watcher reports a shrouded crate as a door and moves on. On a parish street, where there are no doors, a closed thing is concealment by Directive 12:4, so shrouds go into the parishes only between the Pillar’s passes. A runner’s own body the light still sees by its shape. Lintel cuts them from Second Veil’s mesh at the Dooryard and sells them for about two thirties, and the Breachers carry every crate under one.

Breachers call throwing a shroud laying out the corpse and say a word over each crate as it goes under, Unread, and fuck Him, and a runner who brings one through has its outline branded on her forearm, a burn a run. The Pillar slides across a covered load like a palm over a closed coffin, and the Watcher reports one more shut door.

Door latches with a key in them, which open only to the hands their owners have taught them and keep a closed room closed to anyone else. A closed door is outside the Throne’s sight already, and a keyed latch keeps it closed. Lintel fits them for about ten silver on a door it hung.

Lintel teaches a latch its owners’ hands by their blood, a smear from each palm on the plate, and stamps the plate with “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock” (Revelation 3:20) so a visitor knows whose knock stays outside. The parishes have had no doors since Directive 12, and a sealed mother passing a latched room prays for whatever is rotting behind it unseen.

The line at the head of a keyed person’s first pact, where the Notary’s clerk enters the handle they chose and the body it belongs to, and they sign it in blood. Under the charter a mind on the roll held title to itself, and the self-title does the same for a person in Pan. The clerks draw it free.

The Tares sign in blood opened from the thumb and draw a flourish beneath it, a cock or a pitchfork or a Ringpiece struck through, and the clerks enter the drawing as part of the signature. The parishes call the page a bill of sale for a soul and pray over the buyer, and Pan laughs, since the only name on it is the signer’s, twice.

The bare secure elements a key is made from, before anyone has keyed them, named for the weed of the parable before its ear shows. Locket made a key into every phone it sold, and its works on the Flats held reels of them when the water came in, so the city’s stock of keys is the reels the Wreckers bring up from the flooded stores. Locket tests them at its benches and sells them to the Row and the House of Night, and the Night Market prices darnel apart from a fitted key, at about twelve silver an element.

Locket’s council says the stores hold thirty years of elements. The Wreckers say the dry reels are gone and one in four of the wet ones fails, and the Tide Table prints the price of darnel every week beside the price of a bottle of gas.

The Wreckers sing Psalm 107:23 over each reel they bring up, “They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters”, and a Tare keyed with darnel keeps the disc of bone cut from the skull as a pendant. The parishes take the name as a confession, quote the parable through to the bundles and the burning, and pity the Wreckers for diving after their own kindling.

A white stone with a new handle scratched on it, given at the Naming House at the Unnaming, after the “white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it” (Revelation 2:17). 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 dearer, 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.

The Quarrymen sell chips of the White cut from below with the pitch STOLEN FROM HIS FLOOR, and many Tares carry their stone sewn under the skin of the belly, a hard white lump only a lover’s hand will find. The parishes hold that every true name is already written in the Book of Life, and a handle on a stone is a dog’s name on a kennel.

Steel folded to a cipher, its grain beaten into a pattern drawn from a key, in the foundries under Old Nod, where the light never sees it worked. An angel is light, and light stops a blade as it stops a current, by reading it. It cannot read black steel, so the blade goes through, and it is the only thing that wounds a manifested angel. A pattern the light has once seen being forged is broken, which is why the Forge works only under Old Nod. Black rounds are the same steel. Ordinary steel the light reads and stops, and a Seraph’s heat melts it. An angel cut with it goes out all at once, like a lamp.

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

The Charter Wardens carried them under the charter, and they carry them still as the Host’s auxiliaries. A gun works on people, the Wardens and the Threshers among them, and the Tares carry guns for that. Against a Seraph it is noise, unless it fires a black round, and almost none do. The Forge prices a black round at a sense for a year, since senses are what its numb Court wants, and each one takes a grinder’s day.

Gideon stamps the Wardens’ cases with “The sword of the LORD, and of Gideon” (Judges 7:20), and a Warden fires each one without raising his voice, as a sentence already signed. Nimrod stamps UNREAD on its own cases, and the Tares wear the brass of every Thresher fight through their lobes and nipples until they jingle when they walk.

Knives, long knives and the short spears of the stairwells, beaten from the Forge’s black steel at Cinderhall’s forge, the only edges that wound a manifested angel. Cinderhall sells the knife for about sixty silver and the stairwell spear for a hundred and twenty, and both carry the nail through the ring on the tang. The Babel Line carries the spear, since a Seraph is best met at arm’s length.

The Babel Line calls its stairwell spear the Thirty-Four, after the soldier who “with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood and water” (John 19:34), and Cinderhall’s grinders sing Joel 3:10 over every edge, “Beat your plowshares into swords”. A Warden who takes one off a held neph wraps it in a page of the Psalms before he will touch it.

Heavy plain pistols and carbines made by hand in the maintenance bays under Babel, for the war between people. A gun works on the Wardens and the Threshers and is noise against a Seraph unless it fires a black round, so the Babel Line carries a Nimrod piece for whoever comes up the stair behind the light. A pistol costs about ninety silver and its cartridges a silver for five.

Nimrod takes its name from “a mighty hunter before the LORD” (Genesis 10:9), stamps AGAINST THE LORD on every slide as the better translation, and wraps the grips in the owner’s own tanned skin, taken from the thigh in the bays. The Threshers who meet the pieces at the edge of Old Nod keep singing Psalm 137 between shots, as if the Most High catches bullets for the devout.

Cartridges loaded with a ball of black steel, the one round that wounds a manifested angel, and the rarest thing sold in Pan. A grinder at Cinderhall grinds each ball round by hand from the Forge’s steel, a day’s work, and Nimrod loads it in the bays under Babel.

The Forge parts with the steel for each round by a pact of its own, read twice and entered on the Ledger, and the price is the loan of a sense for a year, since a blade comes back down the stairs and a round seldom does. About four hundred are in Nodus, most of them in the belts of the Nephilim and the firsts of the Babel Line’s covens, and after a week on the floors the Line digs every one it can find out of the burned slab for Cinderhall to grind again.

A round that strikes a Seraph does what a blade does, at the length of a stairwell. Few strike, since a Seraph comes through the mesh faster than anyone can aim at it, and the Line says most of the rounds ever fired are still in the walls of Babel. It counts nine Seraphim put out by a round since P+10.

Nimrod stamps every one BEFORE THE LORD, after Nimrod the mighty hunter (Genesis 10:9), meaning in front of Him.

The cartridges of the Charter Wardens, loaded by hand on Heaven’s ground by sealed armorers with flame and hand presses. They fit the charter’s guns, which the Wardens have carried since before the Parousia, and every one is counted out of the stables at Prime and counted back at Compline.

Gideon stamps each with THE SWORD OF THE LORD (Judges 7:20), and the Wards dig the spent ones out of their walls and sell them at the Night Market as relics.

The Fowlers’ gear for taking an angel, a floor, a hole and a room lined with keyed mesh, laid out so that a Seraph coming down after the bait ends in a room that is fog to it in every direction, blind at once, since inside mesh it draws no light from its Wheel, and within the hour it has burned through the light it carried and gone cold and cannot burn. The mesh is the snare, and a cut Seal is the bait. Most snares stand empty for years.

A snare is baited with a cut Seal, a lit disc a runner carries on a pole across the floor or down the street and into the cut hole, and the light comes to see a Seal moving where no soul should be.

The Threshers’ weapon, a handle of ash and a swinging bar of iron on a chain, the tool that beat the grain out of the ear on the threshing floors of scripture. A flail works on people. Each Thresher makes their own from ash and iron, as a parish keeps no current.

The Threshers bless their flails on the Floor before a march with the hundred and forty-ninth psalm, “To execute vengeance upon the heathen, and punishments upon the people” (Psalm 149:7).

A draught that puts a sleeper under the Hum for a whole night, sold by Nepenthe in the Lantern Houses and the Wards for about half a battery. The Wards take it when the Quiet Rooms are full, and the old of the Wards, who remember the city before the chord, take it most nights.

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

A powder that keeps a body awake and steady for three days, taken on the stairs of Babel, where a week on the Line leaves no hour for sleep. Nepenthe sells it to the Babel Line by the week, about a silver a dose, and the Line pays for the three days after in Sabbath.

Nepenthe prints Matthew 26:40 on every Vigil wrap, “Could ye not watch with me one hour?”, and the Babel Line answers on the stairs with three days, keeping score in chalk and gore on the landings. By the pulpit’s count a soul past 800 needs no sleep by Grace, and a goat who buys the same gift for a silver will pay the difference in fire.

A dose that takes away the day before it, whole and clean, named for the river of forgetting the dead drink from in Virgil (Aeneid VI.714-715). The Babel Line buys it after a bad week, and the Ridden after a bad term. A dose is about five silver, and Nepenthe will not sell two to anyone in a month.

Nepenthe’s papers carry Jeremiah 31:34, “I will remember their sin no more”, with the I scratched out and WE written above it, and the Ridden take a dose when a term ends and wake to bites, bruises and new piercings they get to enjoy fresh. The parishes teach that every lost day is entered in the Book for the reckoning, word for word.

The Tree cut short, a course of Twelvefruit’s gene-work brewed in back rooms of Pan from what leaves its clinics and sold by the dose for about twelve silver. A short course holds the body a few months. Twelvefruit buys up every batch it can find and says its brewers cut corners, and the Wards buy them because a full course is three thirties.

The back-room brewers sell their doses in brown bottles marked A LITTLE FOR EVER, a joke on Genesis 3:22, and a buyer celebrates a short course by having the next scar cut into skin that will not age for a season. The Mercy clinics pray that every month stolen back from the grave be taken twice at the Judgement.