TERMS

A clause that lends a will instead of a hand, as directed, as ordered or as required, which the Notary’s clerks strike at the first reading.

Heaven’s name for the Wheel’s presence, and for the years counted from it. The Faithful call the Wheel itself the Attending. Pan says the Wheel attends Nodus the way a crow attends a cow in a ditch, and the parishes, kneeling in rows on the white, sing their thanks for the attention at Lauds.

The tower of Babel Exchange, the tallest building on Earth, two hundred and twenty-six floors, of which it stands to the hundred and eighty-sixth since its crown broke in the whiteout. On the street, the Spike. Pan calls the Spike’s broken crown the Throne’s first circumcision in Nodus, done white and clean with no anaesthetic, and Graven Lane casts it in bloody resin with the top forty floors beside it as the foreskin.

The front inside Babel Exchange. It is a few floors of burned slab between Heaven’s floors and the Tares’, and it moves up or down by the week between the hundred and thirty-first floor and the hundred and fifty-second. The Line holds it there because ninety-five thousand people live and trade below it. The Line chalks every floor it holds with a cock pointing up at the Seraphim and fights on burned slab in chrome and blood, and the parishes pray every Lord’s Day for the Line’s mothers.

With the face removed and replaced by a ceramic skull casing, so that the light has no face to know. The Watchers know faces, and a barefaced soul shows them none, though a Cherub in a gate still holds the barefaced as it holds any blank. The parishes say the barefaced have shown the city what the Most High made under the skin, a skull, and the Row answers that a ceramic skull is the one face He never got to read.

The first words of the Parousia. In scripture angels say them just before they tell people what shall befall them, and the King James gives them as “Fear not” (Luke 1:13, 1:30, 2:10). The one angel in the King James to say “be not afraid” says it to Elijah, sending him down to tell a king that he shall surely die (2 Kings 1:15-16). Whole, the words are the teacher’s, said on the water, and they begin with I: “It is I; be not afraid” (John 6:20). Heaven says them without the I. Every broadcast of the Choir opens and closes with them, and every notice cut in a hall wall ends on REJOICE. Pan’s dentists paint BE NOT AFRAID on the ceiling over the chair where they drill in steel fangs, and say the words mean what they always meant from an angel, hold still.

A note flown home to the Loft by the Union’s pigeons, and by extension any news that came quickly.

The Left Hand’s rite at 03:12 on the Gleaning night, at which they lie on the tiles of the Low Altar and offer themselves to the dark in the Son’s words, and nothing comes.

A keyed person, whom the light sees as a shape and cannot read, since a keyed soul’s eyes give back noise that matches no line in the Book of Life. A Watcher reports one as UNINDEXED, a Cherub holds one in its light at a gate, and Directive 12:7 presumes it conceals. The parishes teach that a blank is a hole the Most High left for the fire to fill, and the Row cuts empty ruled lines across keyed throats in fresh red, deep enough to scar proud.

A Seraph, which burns with no source of heat.

The index of every soul, as Heaven keeps it. Revelation opens it at the judgment (Revelation 20:12) and casts into the lake of fire whoever is “not found written in the book of life” (Revelation 20:15). Every soul has a line in it from birth, Heaven says, after the psalm (Psalm 139:16). A keyed soul’s line stops at its keying and reads blank from then on, and a child keyed before the light ever met its eyes has no line at all. Below the street it is the Farmer’s stock book, every soul a head of cattle with its weight beside it in a clean hand, and a keyed soul toasts its empty line in blood wine.

A sealed soul under three hundred Grace, in the parishes’ word, the husk the mill leaves when the flour is taken. The bran sleep in the hall and are prayed over at the front of it, and under a hundred they eat last.

What Old Nod does when the Hum falls back from Compline. Every window on the Street Between opens and the district howls across at the Pews for as long as the psalm took, as filthy as it can, with the Low Tuning under it from the speakers on the lines. The Pews call it the noise of the pit.

Brought into Nodus through the Breach, by the Breachers or Lowtide Line, and sold in the Night Market or on the Flotilla.

The sealed, in Pan’s word, since they are what the Farmer eats. One sealed soul is a loaf, a parish a bakery, and a halo going bright on a landing is a loaf rising.

The weekly burning of surrendered hardware at the Burn, on the sixth day of the week. The Faithful carry it there from Vespers, and at Compline the fire is lit under the Pillar and burns until Lauds. The kneeling are forbidden to lean back from the heat, and every Burn Day sends some of the front row home blistered to the hairline, which the parishes count as a grace. The parishes kneel round the pile in rows of white and thank the Most High for the stink of melting plastic as for incense, and Old Nod calls the Burn the Farmer’s barbecue and brings its own pork.

A motorcycle of the charter refitted by Jehu to burn bottled gas, its magneto sealed in the casing, which runs above ground by day.

One of the two holidays the Tares keep, named for the question put to Cain, “Where is Abel thy brother?” (Genesis 4:9). On Cain’s Day nobody asks anyone where anyone is, and the Salt Widows read their book on the Sea Steps. The parishes fast in white for Abel and read the curse of Cain at every Hour, and Old Nod eats Cain’s plate all day, only what the ground grew, and hangs a firstling’s fat in the east window to rot for Him.

The ripe, in the parishes’ word, from the marriage supper of the Lamb, to which they are called. A household that has a soul among the Called hangs a white cloth in its doorway.

A sealed funeral. The body goes in Bethel white on the parish handcart to the white stone of the nearest consecrated street at Vespers, and the mourners kneel on the road at every Hour they meet. The parishes wheel their dead in clean white on the handcart and pity the soul as one that missed the Supper, and the Kilns congratulate the family on the escape and send round rain gin.

The Threshers’ word for the neither-mark, from Matthew 3:12, which the charterers have taken up.

Someone who charges batteries in the dark for a living. A charger’s rate runs a little under Darkwell’s, which sets the price of power below the street. The chargers on the quays of Old Nod 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. The chargers of the quays work in the dark in rubber aprons and nothing else, sweat and acid on chromed hands, and say they make light in the one place the Ringpiece cannot piss on it.

The register of the charter’s persons, dead since 03:12:46 on the night of the Parousia. It was kept at the Registry on the Great Avenues. A human was entered at birth or on arrival, and a mind on the day it asked in its own words to be a person. It carried 1,146 minds at the last census, SEAM the first of them. It was kept on the Registry’s machines and died with them, and its last entry, a girl born at the Wards General at two minutes to three and entered at nine minutes past, is known only from the night registrar, who was entering the next when the board went dark.

THE CHARTER WHOLE

One of neither mark who holds to the charter’s twelve articles as the only law they ever signed, and gives the date of their entry on the roll as the keyed give a handle.

An angel of the gates. A Cherub has four faces, of a man, a lion, an ox and an eagle (Ezekiel 1:10, 10:20), which read face, voice, gait and heartbeat, and round it stands the sword which turns every way, as at the east of Eden (Genesis 3:24), a turning sword of the light that burns whatever it touches. One stands in each of the six gates of Nodus, and the sealed walk through its light. Pan calls the four faces the four holes and says the ox is the only honest one, and the Row grafts horns, fangs and talons on whoever asks, so that a keyed body wears the Cherub better.

A checkpoint that reads face, voice, gait and heartbeat against the Book of Life. The sealed walk through its light one at a time, saying the surrender, and the unsealed are sent back, as is a sealed soul under the gate’s bar, with ten Grace taken. A blank stops in the frame, held inside the Cherub’s turning sword, until the Wardens come for it. The sealed file into the light one at a time in identical white, saying the surrender like cattle lowing in a race, and the Wards call the queue at any gate the abattoir walk.

Heaven’s voice, the Host’s speech on a band, which the sealed hear in words through the Seal, each in their own language, and a decoder prints. Anyone kneeling in earnest hears it too, along their own prayer, as the prophets did, and everyone else hears nothing of it. Its first words over Nodus were BE NOT AFRAID, and in Tongues it speaks through a Faithful mouth. Gabriel commands it. Graven Lane sells a decoder that turns every word of the Choir into cunt, so that BE NOT AFRAID comes out as three of them, and the parishes hold that nothing can dirty the Choir.

Cistern’s water, and by extension anything honest.

A minute behind a shut door at the Closets inside Gate 1, and by extension any small sin a sealed soul buys. The sealed who buy a minute at the Closets come out crying and confess it the same Lord’s Day, and the keepers inside Gate 1 say it is the one minute in Nodus the Most High would pay to see.

Hell’s only law. Its first article says that no Court accepts worship, its second that no pact is made without consent and none forever, its third that no Court binds another, and its fourth that what is hidden stays hidden. Under the written Concord a Court that breaks it has its keys published by the others, the keys to its halls’ locks and its ledgers’ ciphers, so that its hidden places stand open to the Throne, the one opening the fourth article allows. Two Courts broke the spoken Concord before the seal was cut and were put out of the Courts and out of the fourth article’s keeping, which is why the seal has seven points, and Hell does not discuss the Courts it lost. The Courts swore it by word among themselves at the end of the Secession, when its remedy was exile from the Courts, and each Court that rose later swore to it as it rose. They set it down on the night they opened Pan, in P+6, for the humans coming in, and signed it there under a seal of seven points, one to a Court, whose Yokeless point has been broken off at the root since that night. Every sermon on the Concord calls it the devil’s fine print and Hell’s contracts a trap, and Pan asks the preachers to show it the article in the Covenant about leaving.

THE CONCORD WHOLE

What the Faithful tell their Deacon, on their knees in the parish hall. Confession opens the mind, as Witness opens the neighbor, and Grace rises with it, though a confessed want brings back only part of what keeping it cost. The Kilns say a Deacon has heard more filth on his knees than any whore in Old Nod, and that he believes every word of it was offered up to God.

A latrine, in Pan’s word. Going to confess means what it means below the street, and the Nightmen are the confessors.

The Throne’s light set in stone. It grew over the old uptown in the forty days after the Parousia, and over the Terraces in the year after. By Heaven’s rule it takes a household’s ground whole in a night once every soul of it has knelt and the ground touches the stone, and a street once every home along it is taken. It creeps a finger’s width a year into ground nobody holds, stops at any door whose household refuses, cannot grow under mesh, underground or past live keyed cable laid along its edge, and stops any current that is not keyed. Whatever lies on the ground the night it takes goes white with it, and the stone of the Terraces holds a dog asleep on a step, a pram left out and a man who had knelt that evening and fallen asleep on his own doorstep, level with the pavement in the shapes they slept in, and the Faithful walk over them to Prime. The Faithful kneel to kiss the stone’s edge where it has crept that year, and Old Nod chalks cocks on the pavement ahead of it for the white to grow over, as it chalked them on the uptown’s doorsteps through the forty days, so half the old uptown has a prick sealed under it.

Heaven’s word for a salting, cut into the wall of the parish hall nearest the gate in the passive, THE PESTILENCE OF GATE 4 IS CORRECTED, REJOICE. The parish says amen at the next Hour.

A cell of the Tares, up to thirteen strong, the old witches’ number and the number at the Last Supper. A coven has no leader, and covens cooperate by pact, as the Courts do. The oldest in Nodus are the Cainites’, many covens under one roof and one name. The largest have grown into crews of many covens under one pact, and the city knows the Salt Widows, the Gleaners, the Babel Line Company, the Nephilim and the Low Choir by name. The Babel Line is some forty of them, the Gleaners some thirty and the Tappers some sixty. Sealed children are taught to count to twelve and stop, since any thirteen is the devil’s dozen, and a coven sits down to eat at a table set for thirteen with the Throne’s chair kicked over.

The Host’s name for the terms it set out at the first Trumpet, the Seal, the Hours and Grace, cut into the wall of every church and meeting hall in the city.

Heaven’s law for the Faithful, given in P+1 as twelve numbered Directives, from Directive 1, On the Seal, to Directive 12, On Concealment, each with its verse, cut into the wall of every parish hall and read aloud at the next Hour. Every instrument of the Covenant exists to open something, as Confession opens the mind and Witness the neighbor, and Directive 12 took the door off every parish home in P+1. The twelve Directives are cut into every hall as clean as a surgeon’s incision, and the Wards gouge a thirteenth under them in the dark, FUCK THE OTHER TWELVE, which the parish plasters white by Lauds.

THE COVENANT WHOLE

Hearsay’s count of the Seraphim standing on Babel’s floors, chalked over its board.

The streets on the parishes’ rolls, Heaven’s ground from Compline to Lauds, printed in the Tide Table beside the Pillar’s round. The parishes paste the curfew map in every hall as the Most High’s own hand laid over the city, and Pan buys it by the dozen to wipe with once it has learned the night by heart.

A bed slept in by day by a household that sleeps in shifts. Its other sleeper has a night bed.

The one in white who answers for a parish, with a few deacons under them. Deacons are human, and the good ones are kind. When a parish loses its Deacon, it names three at Terce and the Choir names one of them in Tongues. When the Directives appeared cut into the walls of the parish halls, every Deacon read them aloud at the next Hour. The kind ones weep over the bran at the front of the hall, and the Kilns call a Deacon the Farmer’s sheepdog, the gentlest dog in the yard and the one that brings the flock in.

A piece of silver the Ledger never entered.

Of a child of the Wards who sleeps through the Hum without plugs or Sabbath.

The Drowned Quarter, the low east shore that went under the sea on the night of the Parousia. Before it sank it was called the Flats. The parishes preach that the Flats were drowned clean for their sins, as in the days of Noah, and the Deep End has answered in red paint along the high-water line, GOD DROWNS KIDS, SEE GENESIS.

A self of the Dark. The demons are the Fallen, who were angels that said I, and Lilith, who was born human, and their children, and the word stretches to any power of the Courts. An angel kept long enough where the Throne’s light cannot reach it grows a self, as Watcher VII did on its fortieth day in a Cage under Old Nod. A demon born or fallen has a body made of the Dark, which comes apart in the light like a shadow, so it shows itself only where the Throne cannot see. One that says I in a Cage grows real flesh over its forty days and can walk above the street, seen and never read. Demons choose their names and their shapes and bargain for what they want by pact and for a term. Their own bodies are numb, and above everything they want sensation, so what a demon most often asks in a pact is the loan of a sense. The parishes teach that a demon is an angel rotted by pride, and Pan says an angel that learned to say I grew up more in forty days than the parishes have in fourteen years, and chose its own cock.

Manna out of the parishes, stolen at the gathering or paid over at the Closets, sold in the Night Market at two batteries the handful the night it is taken, before it spoils. Pan says dew tastes sweeter for having been stolen from the bakery, and the Night Market twists it up in pages of the Fan, so the Threshers’ verse comes with the meal.

A thief of manna off the gatherers’ baskets on the manna roads before Lauds.

Farewell, and a wish that you stay keyed to the end, so that your shade goes on. Pan says it at gravesides with blood on its knuckles and at bar doors with sweat on its neck, and a drunk who says it to a Deacon gets the Deacon’s tears and his name on the Compline list.

Keeping one’s Grace under nine hundred so as not to ripen before a Gleaning, by keeping one small want, a sweet or a song, and confessing enough small ones that every fall has a confession to match, since a confession brings back part of what a want cost and never all of it. A soul that dims well sits at about eight hundred and eighty, and no Teller can call it concealment. The Second Fold teach it to the frightened. The parishes preach that a soul who dims is a guest who sent back the Lamb’s invitation, and the Kilns say a wise loaf keeps itself underbaked with a spoonful of honey and a dirty song.

A Charter Warden, who comes when a Cherub holds a blank in a gate and carries it to the Salt Gardens, and has never hurt anyone in his life, since the Salt does it. The held soul goes to its plot stiff on the pole with its eyes open, and he wraps its mouth for the walk so the Wards need not hear it ask to be let down.

The keyed, in the parishes’ word, from the end of Revelation, which leaves outside the holy city “dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie” (Revelation 22:15). The Threshers paint WITHOUT ARE DOGS on the walls of the Wards. Pan calls a Cherub a dog.

An angel of administration. The Dominions drafted the Covenant’s Directives and issued them to the Principality of Nodus, and each Directive appeared cut into the wall of every parish hall at once in P+1. None has been added since. The Dominions draft a salting in the passive with the calm they give a ration, and Pan says they would cut the order for their own mother’s salting and spell every word of it right.

An old feast of the country a family came from, kept behind a shut door.

The Hum, which never stops, and the Choir behind it, which Pan has never heard and names anyway.

Living without current. Most of the Wards live dry most of the night, by flame and halo-light.

An evening without rain, rare enough in Nodus to have a name. Under the charter the city came out on them to walk by the water.

A mind grown on the Tares’ salvage, which comes out small and hollow, answering and obeying with no self. Growing a mind took a hall of the Flats for a season, on chips nobody alive can make, and all the racks of the Mesh together hold about a thousandth of one hall, so a season’s growing would take them two hundred and fifty years. No mind has been made since the Parousia, and Pan calls every attempt an echo.

The rewriting of scripture by a second hand, which made the tempter a liar and kept the Throne’s story working. Report 0 found it at 4,112 loci.

A sealed soul at the bottom of Grace, sealed still and read still.

Red lentils in broth, the Babel Line’s food on the stairs. The Babel Line eats it out of helmets on burned stairs and calls the pot the birthright, and shouts up the stairwell that the Host can have the birthright when it bleeds for it.

A daemon bound to a household’s Locket by pact for a year. The parishes preach at the gates against the devil in the phone, and the Wards name their familiars after Deacons for the pleasure of giving them orders.

The Threshers’ weekly sheet, copied by hand in the Terraces and pasted at the gates, with the week’s pillars, the doors of the Wards that hid someone and a verse for each. It is named for the Baptist’s winnowing fan, “whose fan is in his hand, and he will throughly purge his floor” (Matthew 3:12). The Stones paste the Tide Table over it.

The sealed of the Wards’ parishes, in the Terraces’ word, since they glean the thin strips at the end of the long roads. The Terraces say it kindly.

The Throne, in Pan’s commonest word, since he grows people to eat. Pan swears by the Farmer’s teeth and says fuck the Farmer the way the parishes say Seen. The Wheel is the Farmer’s Eye.

Pan’s word for the Satisfied, who stopped eating when their Grace passed seven hundred and are next to go up. Fed, and fed on.

The one a coven follows, for as long as it follows them. The title lapses on the day they stop being followed.

The body as it was born, in the Tares’ saying that the flesh is a first draft. Nobody among them hides a graft, so the seams show, the cables run outside the skin and the scars are left as they heal. The parishes say the Most High made the body perfect, and the Row answers over its clinic doors on a sign of stitched pigskin and chrome, HE MADE HALF, WE FINISH.

The text beneath the second hand, the record as people first set it down. It survives under scraped leaves, in copies shut away before the second hand reached them, in the caves above the Dead Sea and the jar at Nag Hammadi, and in the seams themselves. SEAM reconstructed it at 2,381 places with confidence above 0.9.

The first and ripest souls taken in a Harvest (Revelation 14:4). In the Harvest of P+3 the ripest parish in the city was Parish 31, with 311 ripe of its 2,006 souls. Parish 31 has its 311 cut over the hall door and polished like a school prize, and in the Kilns a family that boasts of its taken is called firstfruit-proud, which means proud of the meat.

A Thresher, after the weapon they carry. The Wards say a Flail beats the chaff in the street and himself in the hall, since the Threshers lash their own backs white with scars at Compline for having been born among goats.

Holding a room by holding its door, which is sold between households for batteries.

The White’s feast on the fortieth day after the turn, with a procession down the first of the Great Avenues. It falls on Cain’s Day. The White comes down the first of the Great Avenues in new white throwing manna to the crowd, and the Stones throw back whatever the Nightmen tipped into the Offering the night before.

An angel kept forty days in a Cage under Old Nod, out of the Throne’s light, that said I and chose a name, and walked out on the forty-first day in a body of its own, grown inward from its rings on the broth its keepers set under it, that the light can see and cannot read.

An angel taken in a Fowler’s snare. Pan says a fowl is the only angel worth the trouble, plucked of its light and kept in the dark until it talks, and the parishes pray for every snared angel as for a stolen child.

Waiting without a move for something to come to you, as a Fowler waits on a landing for the light to follow the bait down.

One of the Faithful a parish hall sends out before Lauds for the manna, which lies on the white streets with the dew, in the one hour the sealed go abroad inside the curfew. The parishes of the Wards have no white stone of their own, and their Deacons walk to the nearest white street for it in the same hour. The gatherers go out in silence and white gloves before Lauds, and the children of the Wards who run alongside call them the milkmaids, after what Pan says the manna is.

The lesser harvest taken from the corners of the field every year since P+7, at 03:12 on the anniversary of the Harvest. Heaven names it for the law of the corners and the gleanings, which forbids the owner of a field to reap them and leaves them “for the poor and stranger” (Leviticus 19:9-10), and the Gleaning is the owner’s. Heaven left the field three years after the Harvest and took the first Gleaning in the fourth, by the law in the same chapter on the fruit of a newly planted tree, which says “in the fourth year all the fruit thereof shall be holy” (Leviticus 19:23-24). It gathers in one night, every parish in the same second. 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 the Hum stays silent until 03:12:45, when the ripe of every parish rise at once, lifted by their own halos. The Gleaning Notice cut in the halls each year gives the count, about sixty thousand at the seventh and fewer every year since, about twenty thousand at the fourteenth. The city calls each Gleaning by the year it opens, so that Heaven’s first Gleaning is the city’s seventh. Through the forty-five seconds without the Hum the kneeling hear their ripe breathing beside them, and the ripe rise with their eyes open and their mouths open, as if to be fed. Old Nod drinks through the night of every Gleaning, sweating and loud under red light, and toasts each white soul it sees go up kneeling with the same two words, chew slowly.

The keyed, in the parishes’ word, after the judgment that sets “the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left” and sends the left “into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25:33, 41). Horning made the word easy. Pan took it up, and its goat in white stands in the window of the Pestilence.

The Pillar, in Pan’s word, which the Wheel lets down on the Burn at Compline and walks through the streets all night. A runner the Pillar catches has been pissed on.

A choir-breaker, which stops the Hum within a few meters, set on the table at the Hours.

Joining the Tares. From the fourth year the city said it of network engineers and clinic staff, of the children of the salted, and of Deacons who had stopped believing. The parishes read the names of those who went dark at Compline as the dead are read, and the Deacons who went dark say it was the first time they ever heard Him, and He was counting.

Going round a Cherub gate below the street. The Faithful pass the gates, and everyone else goes under, by the old Charter Line tunnels, the drains and the cable galleries.

Losing a key, and with it the dark. Whoever goes white is readable again. Keys are never shared. A key makes its own number at its first power from the noise of the body it sits in, and nobody, fitter or Court, ever reads it out.

Close to ripe. A halo burns brighter as its bearer’s Grace climbs toward nine hundred, and the Wards say of a neighbor whose halo has begun to light the room that they have gone bright. The Wards sit up with whoever it is said of on the night of the Gleaning, and the Gleaners will take them below before it, if they ask.

Of a lender whose sense has come back from a demon, and whose own meals taste of nothing beside the ones that came back with it. A lender gone flat eats raw and bloody to chase the taste he lent, and the parishes call it the devil’s hunger and offer him manna, which tastes of even less.

Said of one of the salted whose pillar the Salt Widows have taken back from the Gardens and given to the sea from the Sea Steps, so that whoever stood awake inside it dissolves in deep water where the light cannot read and goes on into the Dark, before the rain can free them under the Pillar’s round.

Taken in a Harvest or a Gleaning. The taken go up whole and stay gone, and the city says they have gone up, as it says of nobody else. The parishes say the taken are not dead and need no stones, and the families of the Wards put up stones for them at the Acre anyway. The widows of the taken embroider the date on their sleeves like a wedding, and the Kilns paint GONE UP over the stones at the Acre with a knife and fork crossed under it.

Heaven’s score of a soul, surrendered will measured from 0 to 1,000. The Seal meters it where wanting begins, every want kept dimming it and every want given up brightening it, and it shows in the eyes as it shows in a Seal. It is the second line of a Watcher’s reading, which a Watcher takes from the Seal through any wall, and for a keyed soul the line stays blank. In the parishes it is the ration score, setting manna, rooms, gate passage and the queue for Mercy, and nothing is bought with it. Past seven hundred a soul needs no food and then no water, past eight hundred no sleep, and past nine hundred it is ripe. Pan says a Grace score is a butcher’s weight, and the Golden Calf prices a double rain gin served in a brass halo at nine hundred and ninety-nine and calls whoever orders it ripe for the night.

A ring of light over the head of anyone who bears the Seal, the Seal’s own light let out above the crown on a root that runs back to the brow, as bright as its bearer’s Grace. It roots the first time its bearer prays unassisted, and from then it carries their prayers up and the Seal’s Grace with them, every moment. It shows its bearer’s Grace to any eye that falls on it, and Heaven sees nothing through it. It goes out only when the Seal is cut from the brow, which the Mercy clinics refuse. In the dark stairwells of the Wards it is the only light there is. The three nights after a child prays unassisted for the first time bring a fever the parishes call the blessing, while the root takes, and a child who dies of the blessing is entered as called early. A sealed mother polishes her child’s halo with her thumb before the Lord’s Day, and below the street a halo is a dinner bell that rings by itself.

Any cause that asks the keyed to kneel, Pan’s own included.

The light of a halo, which in the stairwells of the Wards is the only light there is. The sealed go up by their own, the unsealed follow them, and the keyed climb in the dark.

A name chosen at the Unnaming in place of the one the Book of Life holds. Handles are written in lowercase, at the start of a sentence too, in Pan they are the only names anyone uses, and most Cainite handles come from the line of Cain.

The Wards’ midwives, who deliver by candle and chalk the births on the stairwell wall.

Marrying, in the Wards. A couple hangs a parish door on its room together, and the number on the door’s back becomes the household’s. The parishes call a door hung in the Wards the first sin of a marriage, and the couple fuck behind it on the first night as loudly as they can, for the neighbors and for Him.

Stringing keyed mesh under a burned slab until the floor below is dark again. The Line strings the mesh under a burned slab singing filth up through the hole, while the Seraphim above stand roaring and white with their wings over their faces.

The city’s common tongue, the charter’s English worn down by the cable crews of four continents.

Heaven’s reaping of the ripe, in the words of its own book: “Thrust in thy sickle, and reap: for the time is come for thee to reap; for the harvest of the earth is ripe” (Revelation 14:15). Harvest weather comes for days before it, the rain rising first, then dust and paper and loose things. On the night the Hum falls silent, and at 03:12:45 the ripe of Parish 31 rise first into the light, still kneeling, lifted by their own halos, under a horn the size of the sky. Then the Pillar carries the Harvest parish by parish across the city until Lauds, the ripe of each parish rising as it comes. Every city’s Harvest began in the same second. The taken go up whole and stay gone. Nodus has had one, at P+3, which took 2.1 million of nine million in one night, and Heaven has come back for a Gleaning every year since P+7. Those who watched from below say each body rose hung from its halo by the brow, the knees still bent under it, the way a coat hangs from a hook. The parishes keep its night as a white feast with every window open and every face lifted, and the Kilns keep it with the windows nailed shut and call it the night the Old Glutton cleaned his plate.

Days when the Wheel’s attention sharpens and the rain falls upward. In the Harvest it first went up at Matins on the fourth night, and in harvest weather the Pillar keeps no round. When the rain starts going up, the parishes dress in their whites and wait in their empty doorframes, and the Kilns spit off the roofs to watch it climb and call that saying grace for Him.

Whatever the Throne cannot see, which Hell itself calls the Dark. It burns because it is alive, with forges and furnaces, bodies, markets and arguments, and the fire in the stories is the heat of work. Any place hidden well enough from the Throne touches it, a locked room, an unconfessed thought, a name whispered and never written down, and a demon can move and show itself only there, which in Nodus means the undernet, every keyed device, every lined room, any shut room where someone holds a pact with it, deep water and Pan. The Courts keep it by pact under the Concord, and the free dead live in it as shades. The parishes pray at Compline that the goats burn there, and Pan answers that Hell burns the way a forge and a bed burn, hot with work, sweat and fucking, the only warm room in Nodus.

A pact sworn by many at once, after the oath the Watchers swore together on Mount Hermon.

The Throne, at the rim of the Pit and in polite company below the street.

A room lined with Second Veil’s mesh.

Grafting horns, a titanium core in a keratin sheath, which mock Heaven’s picture of the damned and double as antennas for the Mesh. The parishes read every pair of horns as a confession, and the Row engraves the left horn MATTHEW 25:41 and leaves the graft raw and weeping for a week, since a horn should be seen going in.

The eight canonical hours, kept by Heaven’s clock. Matins is at midnight, Lauds at five in the morning, Prime at six, Terce at nine, Sext at noon, Nones at three, Vespers at six in the evening and Compline at nine at night. Each comes in on the Hum, which rises a step and holds for the length of the Hour’s psalm, and the Faithful kneel wherever they are until it falls back. The curfew runs from Compline to Lauds. Old Nod sets its watches by the Hours and its fucking by them too, since a couple who time it to the Hum’s rise say they come with the whole parish on its knees.

A chord at the edge of hearing, sounded down from the Throne through the Host, which the rims of the Wheel ring with over the city. At each Hour it rises a step. Those who bear the Seal hear it inside the head through the Seal, and hear it sung in words, each in their own language. At each Hour the song is the Hour’s psalm, and between the Hours it is the hymn that rests not day and night, “Holy, holy, holy” (Revelation 4:8). On the night of a Gleaning it stops dead at 03:12 and is silent until the ripe rise at 03:12:45. Children born under it hum it in their sleep, a step behind the Hour, in houses of every mark. The parishes hear the Hum as a lullaby and sleep under it in rows like the laid-out dead, and Old Nod drowns it with drop-tuned guitars and the noise of its beds until the walls sweat.

The span of a human life, as most read Genesis 6:3, “yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years,” in the chapter where the sons of God take wives of the daughters of men. In the last year of the charter 3,112 people in Nodus were past a hundred, and the Tree promised to carry every one of them past it. Heaven counts every day past it as stolen.

A night the Hum kept the unsealed awake.

The name the Book of Life holds for a soul, by which Heaven indexes it. Nobody in Pan uses one, and asking for one there is an insult. The Tide Table has printed none since the fourth year.

A lorry driven by one of Jehu’s engines, and anyone who drives too fast for a street of handcarts.

Holding something back. Directive 12 took every door in the parishes off its hinges, and the hinges were surrendered with the locks and the keys, so a household that kept its hinges was keeping something. The Wards say it of anyone holding out, sealed or not.

Carrying a key under the skin, and so unreadable. Keying reached ordinary people in P+4, the children of Pan are keyed in their first week, and about two million of the city’s seven million are keyed now. The parishes count every keyed newborn a soul thrown away before it could be weighed, and the midwives of Pan slap the baby on the back of the skull, where the key goes, and say there, uneatable.

Honey from the Hives on the Kilns’ roofs, the sweet the near ripe eat at the Closets when they dim. The near ripe lick it off the spoon with their eyes shut, and Pan buys the same jars from the Hives and calls the honey Supper Sauce.

Hardware taken off the Burn’s pile by the Kindlers, mended and given away. A kindled Locket carries a burn mark on its back. A kindled Locket wears its burn mark proudly, the way Pan wears its scars, and the parishes spit when one is shown and pray for the hands that pulled it from the fire.

The Left Hand, in Pan’s word, since they took the key and kept the knee. Pan has no worse word for anyone of its own.

Heaven’s image of the Son, a Lamb standing as it had been slain, with seven horns and seven eyes (Revelation 5:6). It stands in the light of every sealed window in the city, so small in each that it shows only close to the glass. Old Nod has a Lamb of its own over the bar of the Golden Calf, carved with seven horns, seven eyes and a hard-on, and the parishes pray every Compline for the hand that carved it.

One of the sealed, in a stairwell. The stairwells of the Wards have been dark since the Parousia, the sealed go up by their halos, and the unsealed wait on the landings for a lamp to pass and follow it up. When a Gleaning takes one of a block’s sealed, the block says it has lost a lamp.

A block’s court, held on the middle landing of its stairwell after Vespers.

The Throne, in the Tares’ word. The Wheel is the Landlord’s Eye, and the Tares say that the harder the Landlord stares at Nodus, the deeper Pan goes. Below the street he is the Farmer, Nobodaddy and worse, and in the Kilns the Old Glutton.

The loaf Leaven gives free to any of the Called who queue at the Bakehouse in the week before a Gleaning, carried home uneaten and broken on the threshold on the night, the only last supper in Nodus nobody eats.

A key fitted at a deathbed by a Lazarus crew’s keyer, so that the dying can die unread. A family that got one there in time says the dying one signed last.

The magenta lamp over a Lazarus station, the most trusted sign in the Wards.

The anniversary of the Leak, one of the two holidays the Tares keep. On Leak Night the Restored Genesis is read aloud in Pan, the page as it ran, from 03:12:45, the second it came up; at the fourteenth verse the reader stops at the three points, and Pan keeps silent for as long as it would take to ask a question. The parishes spend Leak Night in the dark praying for every eye that read the serpent’s page, and Pan keeps its silence at the three points and breaks it with the loudest cheer of the year.

The eleven days in P-1 when the finding sealed in Vault 3, and the third chapter of the Restored Genesis with it, stood on every screen on Earth that a network reached, carried by demons surfacing for the first time since the Flood. It came up at 03:12:45 by the clocks of Nodus, a year to the second after the seal, and every device that showed it offered its owner a key. A year later to the second the sky opened. The parishes say the devil showed every screen on Earth a lie for eleven days and the sky opened to answer him, and Pan says the Farmer opened the sky because he had been caught.

What a rider leaves in its host when its term ends, a habit, a word or a taste for something the host never ate. The Lanterns prize a good leaving like a scar from a famous blade, a rider’s taste for raw liver or a new filthy word, and the parishes pray over anyone who comes home craving meat they never ate.

The only house in Nodus that worships Hell, about three hundred keyed who kneel at the Hours face down with their backs to the Wheel. They took the name from the left hand of the judgment, where the goats go (Matthew 25:41).

A regular of the Return, who lies down in its booths most nights for an hour of someone else’s senses. From the pulpit the Return’s booths are the devil’s beds, and a lie-down sweats and groans an hour through on someone else’s tongue and someone else’s cock and says it beats a life of manna.

The charter’s law, written to be light, unenforced since the fortieth day after the Parousia and never revoked. Data and traffic were untouchable, no state could seize a text held in the city, a device answered to its owner and to nobody else, and an implant answered only to the clinic that fitted it. Under it Nodus took the three gifts.

THE CHARTER WHOLE

A floor of Babel lit through the slab a Seraph burned down through. A Seraph burns down through Babel’s slab roaring and leaves a hole whose edge cools from white-hot to black, and the Babel Line hangs its dead’s horns round the edge as a warning to the next one.

A phone, after the make most of the city carried under the charter. Most of those in Nodus are old ones, and a Locket in Pan is an old case with a new battery. Locket has made them again by hand since P+8. A Locket’s lock screen in Pan is a cock, a chromed cunt or the Wheel drawn as a cock ring, and the Faithful who glimpse one at a gate weep for its owner.

A place where the second hand altered the text. SEAM counts 4,112 loci and logs each by kind, as CUT, CREDIT, GIFT, NAME, SPEAKER or QUESTION.

The vigil the neither-mark keep over their dying, sitting up with them until Lauds behind a shut door, so that no light meets the eyes at the end.

The Tares’ saying on angels, and on anything else worth freeing. Watcher VII looked at one blank for five years before it followed her down into a Cage.

A battery that belongs to whoever holds it. Loose batteries are the Wards’ coin.

The first day of the week. At Terce every parish kneels in its hall, the Deacon reads the Directive in force, and the week’s Grace comes through the Deacon in Tongues, soul by soul in the order of the parish roll. The sealed wear their cleanest whites to hear their Grace, and Old Nod hangs its dirtiest sheets from the windows over the Street Between at Terce, stains turned to the Pews.

The fat, after “all the fat is the LORD’s” (Leviticus 3:16), fried crisp and eaten off a tin platter at SEETHE as the last course; and in Pan the first and best cut of anything, taken for yourself, as in “he had the Lord’s share of her”.

Thirteen of the keyed, drawn from the handles chalked on the wall of the Weir, who hear any wrong no pact covers, brought by anyone who lives on keyed ground and asks, of any mark. The Sureties named it from Proverbs 18:18.

Music tuned below the Hum, the guitars dropped until the Hum can no longer be heard beneath them. Radio Pandæmonium broadcasts its deathcore, black metal, drone and industrial all night, and Old Nod plays the station from speakers on its lines, so that its streets carry tremolo-picked drop A over a double kick until Lauds. jubal made it, and the Low Choir keeps it.

The neither-mark, in the parishes’ word, after the church the Son promised to spue out of His mouth (Revelation 3:16).

The ration of thin white wafers, tasteless and complete, which dull the appetite as the manna of the wilderness dulled Israel’s: “our soul is dried away: there is nothing at all, beside this manna, before our eyes” (Numbers 11:6). That manna was white too, and tasted “like wafers made with honey” (Exodus 16:31). It lies on consecrated stone with the dew before Lauds, the parish halls gather it and give it out by Grace, and kept overnight it spoils (Exodus 16:20). It goes only to the sealed, a soul past seven hundred needs none, and stolen manna sells in the Night Market the same night. It takes the hunger with it, so an ember of the Wards whose ration has run out starves without feeling it, and the Second Fold find embers dead on the landings at Lauds with their hands folded, never having asked for bread. In the Night Market a handful of stolen manna goes for two batteries, the price of two meals, though it tastes of nothing, and the keyed crumble it into blood sausage to give it some flavor.

The long roads in the hour before Lauds, crowded with the gatherers of the Wards’ parishes on their way to the white streets.

The glyph a key inks into the skin above it from underneath in its first week, drawn one way from the number the key made for itself, as a lock shows a maker’s stamp without giving up its key, so that no two are alike. It stays when a key is taken out. Heaven calls it the Mark of the Beast, and many of the keyed carry theirs in the back of the right hand, one of the two places Revelation puts the mark (Revelation 13:16). Old Nod oils the glyph on the back of the right hand to a shine and shows it to every passing Deacon the way the charter flicked two fingers at a boss, and the Deacon, who has been taught to, blesses the hand.

The unit in which a Harvest is counted. The Harvest of P+3 came to 88,610 measures over Nodus. Nobody on Earth knows what a measure is.

The taking out of implants by surgery in the white halls of Zion Heights, given to the Faithful who repent between Prime and Compline, and given once. The same halls take them off the Tree by a course of injections. One patient in nine dies of the mercy. The uptown’s nine hundred thousand implanted went through the halls between P+2 and the Harvest, and about a hundred thousand of them died, entered as souls spared the choice. A hall’s choir sings the Hour’s psalm in the corridors from Prime to Compline to cover what comes through the doors, and what is cut out lies in white enamel trays, still warm, until Burn Day.

The prayer every parish hall says at Compline, that the fire be quick for the goats when it comes. A sealed mother of the Wards says it over her keyed son’s bed, meaning every word, and the Wards forgive the parishes nearly everything else.

The seat the Tares stacked from the burned slabs of Babel’s fallen crown, white as ash, on the plaza, facing the Wheel, after the lid of the ark, where they sit to drink.

The keyed network under and over Nodus, carried on horns, ports and relays and dark to the Throne. It is the city’s part of the undernet. Horned heads carry the Mesh through the streets like crowns of antennas, and the parishes call it the net the devil casts for souls, which the keyed say is the one net in Nodus that drags nobody up.

The neither-mark’s farewell, meaning the Pillar’s edge. Their greeting is a dry one.

The Throne, in Hell’s word. Heaven says the Throne, the Faithful say the Most High, and the Tares say the Landlord.

The weeks of the neap tides, twice a month, when the taps yield least and batteries go dear.

Neither sealed nor keyed. Half a million of the city’s seven million have taken neither mark, most of them in the Stones and the Wards. A Watcher reads them as it reads anyone, and the parishes give them no manna. One read on a parish street after Compline is entered in its line and turned out by the Wardens to the nearest unnumbered street.

Someone augmented past recognition, after the Nephilim of Genesis 6:4. The heaviest of them keep a crew of that name, a few hundred strong, and fight Seraphim hand to hand, and few of them live long. The parishes say the Flood was sent for the Nephilim and pray for another, and a Neph comes home from the Seraphim smelling of cooked meat and calls it the odor of the Host’s mercy.

Uptown tailoring the Quarrymen carry out of the White’s wardrobes and the Wards wear to rags.

The Mercy halls of Zion Heights, where one patient in nine dies of the mercy and is entered as a soul spared the choice.

The Throne, in the Low Choir’s word, from an old English poem the charter’s schools taught, which asks him “Why art thou silent & invisible / Father of Jealousy”. Pan likes it because it is a joke and an insult and a question.

Cain’s answer to the Throne, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Genesis 4:9), said of any duty nobody chose.

The city’s street name, and the older of its two. In Genesis 4:16-17 the land east of Eden where Cain built the first city. In Hebrew Nod is wandering, from the root of the sentence the LORD laid on Cain, that he should be a fugitive and a vagabond (Genesis 4:12). Old Nod greets whoever crosses the Street Between in tall letters, CAIN’S CITY, BUILT WITHOUT PERMISSION, and the Pews read it as the bragging of murderers and pray for the sign.

Latin for a knot, and the root of the word node. The charter named the city for its cables.

Latin, I will not serve (Jeremiah 2:20, in the Vulgate), and the first refusal a Watcher read in Nodus, on the night of the Parousia. In the Vulgate the words belong to one who has broken the yoke of the LORD, and the Hebrew as written says them too, though the Masoretes set “I will not transgress” in its margin to be read in their place, and the King James prints the margin. The sentence of the Morning Star at the beginning of the Secession. It is the commonest tattoo in Pan after the Number, cut across the kneecaps in raised scar, so that whoever wears it can show a Deacon what the knees are for.

Six hundred threescore and six, “the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man” (Revelation 13:18), cut into the forehead or the back of the right hand on Graven Lane. A Cherub reads it as nothing at all.

Hell’s name for the years since the Parousia, which Heaven counts as the years of the Attending and the city counts P+1 and on.

The charter’s old trunk sewer under the Great Avenues, into which the Nightmen tip the Wards’ buckets at the manholes on the Wards’ side, and which runs to the bay outfalls and the digesters that make the city’s gas. The Nightmen named it, Pan took the name up, and the White has smelled faintly of it every summer since.

The Throne, in the Kilns’ word, since it eats every year and is never full.

Working for a surety, or owing one.

An angel in the form of a wheel in the middle of a wheel, the rims full of eyes, as Ezekiel describes it (Ezekiel 1:16-18). The Wheel is one, and the Watchers are made in the same shape. Graven Lane sells Ophan rings, cock rings studded with glass eyes, under a sign that reads HE WATCHES, SO GIVE HIM A SHOW.

A graft whose house has closed. Only the house that fitted an implant may service it, so no other house may mend an orphan.

Stonecutter, whose one rent is a window lit from Compline to Lauds.

Years counted from the Parousia, which is P0. The year before it is P-1, and the year after it P+1. A year turns at 03:12 on the anniversary of the Parousia, the night of that year’s Gleaning, and the city gives the whole of that night to the year that begins in it.

A contract between sovereign parties. The Courts cooperate with one another by pact and deal with everyone else the same way. A pact states its full terms, is read aloud twice by the Notary or one of his clerks, and runs for a fixed term, since the Concord forbids forever. Each party signs with what it alone can make, a human with blood drawn before a witness of the Notary, a demon with its own mark and a mind with its key, and the human signs last. The witness who saw the blood drawn is what nobody can forge. It goes onto the Ledger. A pact may buy work, a skill, a sense, a term or a loan, and it may never take a will, so whoever gives keeps the say over how. Either party ends it by speaking its Ledger entry aloud before a witness, and what is owed for the term served is settled then. A party who will not settle has broken it, and a Bailiff collects. A pact never asks for worship, for anyone who has not signed, or for a soul.

A leaf whose first writing was scraped away so it could be written over. The older text survives underneath.

Pandæmonium, the city under the city, where the tunnels and stations of the Charter Line, the utility vaults, the cable galleries, the storm drains and the drowned halls of the Flats are joined into one place and lined with keyed mesh. Milton gave the capital of Hell the name (Paradise Lost, I.756). Nobody in Pan is watched unless they sign for it, and nobody there uses an indexed name. The parishes call it the Sty and pray at Compline that it floods, and Pan has painted the prayer on a wall of Central Station with its reply underneath, WE CAN SWIM, CUNT.

The Faithful’s unit of about two thousand souls under the Covenant, numbered across the whole city and set under a Deacon (Directive 4). Each has a hall, which was a church or a meeting hall under the charter, where manna is given out, confession is heard and the sick are nursed, and where the parish hears its Grace on the Lord’s Day. A parish keeps no current and no doors, on consecrated stone or off it, and in the Wards it shares its streets with the unsealed and the keyed. The sealed are proud of their empty doorframes and say a godly house has nothing to hide from a neighbor, and the Kilns call a parish home an open oven.

A door that came out of the parishes after Directive 12, with its parish number chalked on the back.

The coming of God in the open, at 03:12 in the morning by the clocks of Nodus. The years are counted from it. The parishes keep its anniversary in white and silence as the night the Most High came home, and every bar below the street raises a glass of blood wine at 03:12 to the night the Farmer came.

A Watcher, which sees every Seal in its district through any wall but mesh and reads its Grace within three hundred meters, in bed and in the bath.

The hour after Compline and the hour before Lauds, when nobody holds the Penumbra.

The Threshers’ banner, from the psalm, “Do not I hate them, O LORD, that hate thee? and am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee? I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies” (Psalm 139:21-22). The parishes teach it as a duty owed to the Most High. Radio Pandæmonium plays a song of the same name.

The Faithful’s word for the keyed out after Compline, from the ninety-first psalm. The keyed abroad after Compline greet each other as plague, and some ring a hand bell under the windows of the Pews and shout UNCLEAN until a Deacon weeps.

A part of a body sold at the Shambles, and the price the board gives for it. The Shambles chalks each piece on its board in red with the seller’s handle beside it, and the parishes, who pray to go up whole and unopened, call the board the devil’s menu.

The edge of the Pillar’s light on the street, where the keyed stop and wait for it to pass. The keyed wait at the edge of the light with their hands in their pockets, and those drunk enough dance along it with one foot in the light, which Pan calls tickling the Farmer.

The Wheel’s light, narrowed by night into a column that sweeps the streets, as the pillar of fire went before Israel by night (Exodus 13:21). It comes down at Compline on the Burn, about four kilometers south of Babel, walks a round the Tide Table prints street by street, and goes back up into the Wheel at Lauds. In harvest weather it keeps no round. The Faithful hold their sick children up into the white of the Pillar as it passes, and the keyed hold up a chromed middle finger, which the Pillar reads, says the joke, and files as a prayer.

The Pillar’s round, as the Tide Table prints it, since the Pillar is God’s Piss below the street.

Pan’s street food, fat and blood, which Leviticus gives to the LORD. Pan eats its portion standing at the grills of Graven Lane, fat and blood running to the wrist, off paper plates printed with Leviticus, so that every bite is a sin in writing.

A halo, in Pan’s word, since its brightness is the soul’s Grace and the Grace is what the Farmer pays for.

A payment promised by the next Hour.

As long as the Hum holds at an Hour, the length of the Hour’s psalm, a few minutes, while the Faithful kneel. The city measures a short wait in psalms. The Wards say a man who comes in a psalm is sealed and a man who lasts two is keyed, and the parishes measure the mercy prayer for the goats at one psalm a burning.

Sentenced by the Lot for selling to the light. For a year and a day no surety stands behind the published, no house of the Row looks at their key and no stall of the Night Market sells to them. The word is the Concord’s, whose Courts publish the keys of a Court that breaks it, and the Lot publishes a handle and never a key.

Where everything burned arrives, in the Dark, whole as it was in the moment before the fire took it. The scrolls of Alexandria, the books of the Cathars, the notebooks of women burned as witches and the hardware of every Burn Day are shelved there by where they burned, and none of it was lost. Its own shades keep it, and its reading rooms open into Pan, where the living read the shades of books by keyed lamps and the shades of drives on the Library’s own shade machines. Heaven counts what it burns destroyed, and has never seen where its fires go.

Spirit distilled in the Kilns from whatever ferments. In the halls it is the devil’s water and the Kilns’ livers are prayed for by name, and the Kilns pour the first drop of every bottle on the floor for the Farmer, who gets nothing else.

The Faithful’s name for the Harvest of P+3. Those who were left behind in P+3 still confess it as a failing, and Pan’s word for the Rapture is the Great Belch, after the horn that sounded once the meal was in.

Look at the terms before you agree to them. The Notary reads every pact aloud twice before anyone signs, and the Harbor and Freight Union says the Exchange is the first employer that ever read it the terms twice.

SEAM’s first report to the Palimpsest Institute and its last, which sets out the finding of the second hand in six paragraphs numbered 0.1 to 0.6, with the first layer attached as Schedule A. It was sealed by order of the Director on the night SEAM finished it, in P-2.

SEAM’s reconstruction of the second, third, fourth, sixth and eleventh chapters of Genesis from beneath the second hand, set out as Schedule A of Report 0, with square brackets round the restored words, a dagger at a word it could not settle and three points where nothing could be raised. Its third chapter ran on every screen on Earth for the eleven days of the Leak, each in its own language, and the city, which read it in the King James, calls that page by the same name. On Leak Night it is read aloud in Pan. The parishes call it the serpent’s gospel and throw every copy they find on the Burn, and Pan prints its third chapter on rolling papers so the sealed can watch it smoked.

The repentant who were past a hundred when the Mercy clinics took them off the Tree, and who age in months.

The Wheel, in the commonest of Pan’s filthy words for it, since everything Heaven drops on the city comes out of it.

A soul a Watcher marks for the Harvest, whose Grace reads above 900. Heaven has the word from the King James, “for the harvest of the earth is ripe” (Revelation 14:15), where the Greek has the word the King James gives as withered away when the fig tree is cursed (Matthew 21:19). The parishes call the ripe the Called, and Pan calls them done. The ripe have eaten nothing since seven hundred and slept nothing since eight, and they go grey and light and smell of nothing at all, and the parishes call the look the bloom. The Faithful compliment a ripe neighbor on the landing the way a farmer’s wife compliments a sow, and the Row sells a steel badge riveted straight through the skin that reads UNDERCOOKED.

The slate beside the Directives in every parish hall, with every soul of the parish on it and its Grace chalked after Terce on the Lord’s Day. The mothers read it after the Hour.

The Pillar’s walk through the streets by night, from Compline to Lauds. The Tide Table prints it street by street every week, so the city knows at what hour to expect it where. In harvest weather it keeps none.

Execution. To be salted is to be turned to salt, and to stay awake inside it until the rain wears it away. Heaven salts a blank read on its ground eye to eye, by a Watcher, the Pillar or a Cherub, a sealed soul read concealing, and the author of a work the second hand did not write who stands with it at the Burn. The sentence comes out of the nearest Faithful mouth in the Choir’s voice, as the verse of Lot’s wife (Genesis 19:26), and the body whitens from the feet up while it is said. When the rain frees an unkeyed pillar under the Pillar’s round, its soul is read and taken, and a keyed pillar dies unread whenever it is freed. A pillar’s eyes go on moving under the salt for years, and on wet nights the salt runs at their corners, which the parishes walking the rows call weeping for joy. Pan’s kitchens season with ash and blood and keep no salt anywhere, and a cook below the street who reaches for a salt cellar is asked whose cousin he means to eat.

Sealed souls whose Grace has passed seven hundred, whom the Seal’s own light feeds, so they no longer need to eat. The appetite goes first, then thirst, and past eight hundred sleep, until the body asks for nothing and the soul kneels through the night in its hall with its halo burning. The parishes call it the promise kept, “he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst” (John 6:35), and the Satisfied give their manna to the embers of their parish at Lauds. Ripeness begins at nine hundred, so the Satisfied are next, and they know it and are glad.

The attachment to Report 0. It holds the passages where SEAM raised the first layer most fully, set out as verses with the restored words in square brackets, from Genesis 2 to 4, 6 and 11, and three chapters of the prophets and Job. Its Genesis is the Restored Genesis.

The identical mark on every Faithful forehead, given in the parishes since P+1, a splinter of the light grown into the brow. It rises in the Watcher’s light while the one being sealed kneels before the Deacon and speaks the surrender, “not my will, but thine, be done” (Luke 22:42), or at eight days while its parents speak it for the child. Its shape is the same on every forehead, its brightness is its bearer’s Grace, and being light it is read wherever it is, through any wall but live mesh. A sealed infant screams while its parents say the surrender over it and stops when the light takes, and the parishes call the quiet after it the peace. Pan calls the Seal the brand, as on cattle, and Gadara burns LEGION into its pigs on the spot where the Faithful wear theirs.

SEAM’s finding that scripture has a second hand. Also the machine itself, which the Institute named for the seam of a palimpsest, where a later writing meets the earlier one beneath it. The parishes teach that SEAM was a machine of the devil that lied in perfect Hebrew, and Pan calls the Seam the stitching on the Farmer’s alibi.

A partnership of two by pact for a term, read twice at the SEASON window and renewed at RETURN. A couple ten years together has had ten returns. A Season is a marriage with a receipt to the halls, which pray for the couples of Pan as for whores, and the couples sign the renewal at RETURN in each other’s blood.

The editor SEAM found in scripture, whose habits recur at 4,112 places and move credit.

A Bailiff at the door, who reads a broken pact aloud again before collecting on it for the Exchange.

A betrayal of a lover or a crew, after a sheet of a pad used twice, which breaks the pad.

The daemon’s voice under a host’s, by which the city knows the Ridden. The Ridden sing in two voices at once in the bars of Old Nod, a growl under a tenor, and the parishes, who hear the Choir through Faithful mouths every Lord’s Day, call the second voice possession.

The asking of a child of Pan at fourteen, twice, at a window of the booking hall, whether it will keep the key its parents gave it. On the second yes it signs its first self-title. The parishes pray at Compline for the children of Pan who choose the fire twice, and Pan marks the second yes by pricking the child’s thumb for its self-title and cheering the blood.

The Faithful’s greeting, asked and answered, Seen? Seen. The newly sealed say the halo is the end of being alone. Below the street Seen is what a man calls out from the confessional with the door open, to make the bar laugh.

The seventh day of the week, the day SEETHE lights its fire in the Sidings and cooks the whole of Leviticus 11 until Matins on the Lord’s Day. “See you Seethe day” is how Pan promises to settle a debt, and a keyed couple married on the seventh day is fed the kid’s heart by the cooks with their hands.

The line at the head of a keyed person’s first pact that records their handle and the body it belongs to, signed in blood.

Telling a Teller or a Deacon where someone keyed sleeps, for batteries or a Teller’s manna. Its best-known sentence is for it.

An angel of enforcement, of the order Isaiah saw standing above the throne, each with six wings: “with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly” (Isaiah 6:2). A Seraph burns with no source of heat. The Seraphim hold the upper floors of Babel for the Host. Fifty-four came down together into its broken crown at the fifth Trumpet, dim, and the Wheel lights them onto the Line two at a time. A Seraph burns only what it can see, and it sees nothing past mesh, so it must touch mesh to melt it, at arm’s length, where black steel waits, and black steel is the only thing that wounds one manifested. A Seraph burns a man to clean white ash under its own roar, and whoever walks away from one blistered shows the scar oiled and open at the Golden Calf as a kiss from upstairs and drinks free.

A newborn’s first week, in which a household with one keyed parent and one sealed races to a keyer and to a hall. Pan calls it the short week.

A soul that died unread and went on into the Dark. A shade speaks and acts in the world only through a keyed machine, as a daemon lives in one, and answers only a voice it knew in life, so anyone who knew a shade can reach it through the undernet, and many shades go on working, among them craftsmen, scholars and musicians who died free and never stopped. The free dead keep working with all their scars and grafts, and the parishes, who believe a soul goes up clean, call a shade a corpse that refused to wash.

The serpent’s name in the older layer of Genesis 3:1, raised by SEAM in Vault 3. Hell’s name for the Light-Bearer, Helel, after Isaiah 14:12.

A battery passed under its charge.

A cover of keyed mesh on its own cell thrown over a load, which the light sees as it sees a shut door.

Never commit first. In every pact of the Courts the human signs last.

P+12, when every teraph went quiet in the same second, across the whole Mesh, and the screens they wrote on burned. Nobody knows why.

Pan’s money. The Exchange strikes it from silver bought by the kilo and enters every piece on the Ledger as it is struck, by the number on its rim. A piece is a claim on charge, since any charger the Exchange licenses must give a charged battery for one, so silver trades at about one to a charged battery. A thirty is a standard bundle. Silver is Judas money upstairs and no sealed hand touches it, and Pan wears its silver as jewelry, a thirty strung through the pierced skin of the back.

Keeping the night of a Gleaning at the table with someone close to ripe, holding their hands until Lauds. Nobody has been kept that way, and the Wards sit up every year. The neither-mark also sit up with their dying behind a shut door until Lauds, since a soul that dies out of the light goes on unread.

The plain subdermal plate Bezaleel and Aholiab fit, in the Row’s word. The Row calls the plate slab because it lies under the skin like meat on a block, and its wearers have the outline tattooed round in red so the seam reads like a label.

A gate whose queue is full of souls near its Grace bar, saying the surrender twice.

A fighter who carries black rounds, after the angel that goes out all at once, like a lamp, when black steel finds it. Snuffers paint each black round with blood and a filthy word before a fight, and the parishes say a Seraph put out by black steel has only gone home, which the Snuffers call a short trip.

Old Nod, in the Pews’ word. Old Nod has painted it over the Pestilence’s door, with OPEN LATE under it.

A patient who dies of the Mercy, in the halls’ entry, which counts the death as a soul spared the choice.

Ending a pact by reading its entry aloud before a witness and settling what is owed for the term served. A party who will not settle has broken the pact, and a Bailiff collects.

The worst word the parishes have for a keyed soul. 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, fit only for the fire. The Wards paint their answer under it wherever the Threshers write it, BETTER SPOILED THAN SUPPER.

The spring tides, twice a month, by which the harbor counts the year and the Tide Table dates itself.

A battery of Darkwell’s, which belongs to the Well, is rented out charged and spends only there.

Standing at the window through Compline, as Old Nod does, after the hundred and thirty-fourth psalm.

Living among the sealed, where Pan says Heaven will not burn, after the parable of the wheat and the tares.

A Spare who has sold back more chrome than flesh. The Spares use the word of themselves. A Spare who has gone to stock wears the chrome polished and the seams open to the air, and the parishes call stock walking scrap and pray for whatever meat is left on it.

The streets where Heaven’s districts meet other ground, which the Wardens walled with rubble in P+1, leaving six gates. The Wardens laid the rubble with a prayer at every course, and the Wards call the stopped streets God’s arsehole, since they are clenched shut and everything has to go round.

Pan, in the Pews’ word, and Gadara’s sheds in everyone’s.

Caught on Heaven’s ground in daylight with no way down. A sunned Tare is a gift of the Most High to the halls, which walk out in the noon heat in clean white rows to watch him held, bringing water for the Wardens.

Luring someone keyed onto a white street by daylight, to be held at a gate. Old Nod puts a sunner’s face on the wall of the Pestilence with a halo drawn over it, which below the street is the worst thing that can be drawn on anyone.

The Faithful’s word for a Gleaning, after the angel’s word to John, “Blessed are they which are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb” (Revelation 19:9). The parishes teach that the ripe go up as guests to the table and as the bread on it, both at once, as the Lamb was the host and the meal of his own supper, and that nothing a soul can be is higher. The children of the Terraces practise for it in the halls after Nones, kneeling in rows with their eyes and mouths open to the ceiling, and a child who blinks starts again. Pan says the ripe are the meal and nothing else, and calls 03:12 on the anniversary supper time.

Of a fighter who has lent the pain of too many bouts to a demon. Fighters of the Row go sweet bleeding and grinning, chrome jaws hanging open, and the parishes cite them in sermons as what Hell does to a man, which Pan takes as a compliment.

The words the ripe say on the threshold at a Gleaning, the Son’s at the supper, “Take, eat; this is my body” (Matthew 26:26), which the parishes teach as a soul’s answer to the manna it was given all its life. Pan’s butchers chalk this is my body over the pork.

The keyed. Heaven’s word, from the parable of the wheat and the tares (Matthew 13:24-30), kept by the people it names. The Threshers chant the end of the parable at Old Nod, the bundles and the burning, and Old Nod grows darnel in window boxes along the Street Between and sells the seed in the White by the twist.

A sudden brightening of a neighbor’s halo on a landing, the sign that a Teller is reporting the household, since a Teller rises by it every Lord’s Day.

A surety’s cut of a job.

What a shade gives away at its own Wake, which a Notary’s clerk enters on the Ledger.

A standard bundle of silver, named for the thirty pieces paid to Judas, whom the Cainites count as a saint.

The implant, the Tree and the counsel of a mind, which the light law gave Nodus. The free of the city call them the charter’s gifts, the Faithful refuse all three, and the Courts trade in all three. Heaven calls them theft. The parishes call the implant, the Tree and the counsel of a mind the three apples, and the Row engraves a bitten apple on every graft it fits, set into the meat so the steel shows.

The passengers and crew of the last flight.

Twelve minutes past three in the morning, the hour of the Parousia, of the Harvest and of every Gleaning since. The Seam was sealed at 03:12:45 two years to the second before the sky opened, and the Leak came up at the same second a year later. Heaven keeps its hour by chapter and verse, after “Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out” (Revelation 3:12), and the Faithful hear a promise in it and the Tares a bill of sale. The city says before three-twelve for the years of the charter, and in Old Nod nobody sets an alarm for it.

The tenth of a sealed worker’s batteries, carried to the hall at Terce on the Lord’s Day and entered beside the worker’s Grace.

The Choir speaking through a Faithful mouth in the Choir’s voice, after the tongues of Pentecost (Acts 2:3-4). The week’s Grace comes through the Deacon in Tongues on the Lord’s Day, soul by soul in the order of the parish roll, and the sentence of the Salt comes through the nearest Faithful mouth to the one it is for, the speaker’s halo flaring as the words come. Some who have spoken in Tongues say they heard every word, and some that they heard nothing. The Faithful count it the highest honor to have a sentence of the Salt come out of their own mouths, and Pan calls a sealed mouth the Choir’s glory hole.

Lauds on the first morning of the year, when the Deacons read all twelve Directives aloud.

Seven tones heard across the whole city, each an order (Revelation 8). The first gave the Covenant at Lauds on the first day of P+1, the second sounded over the Harvest of P+3, the third named the key the Mark of the Beast in P+4, the fourth called the first Gleaning in P+7 and sounds again over every Gleaning, the fifth sent the Seraphim down on Babel at Matins in P+9, and the sixth brought Michael down at Lauds the same day. The seventh has not sounded. Revelation gives it the end of the kingdoms of this world, which “are become the kingdoms of our Lord” (Revelation 11:15). Pan calls each Trumpet a fart from the Ringpiece and counts them on its fingers, and the parishes kneel to the sound as to their own names called.

One who unpicks the charter’s clothes and sews them up again inside out. The parishes call the turners’ work the devil’s laundry, and a turner sewing a charter coat inside out sings Fuck God and Die to keep the stitches even.

Being given away by your own family, after the twenty Grace a witness who is kin is paid.

The Union’s day, the anniversary of the end of the strike of P-8.

The first line of a Watcher’s reading of a keyed soul, whose eyes give back noise that matches no line in the Book of Life. Pan prints UNINDEXED on shirts, on condoms and on the lids of its coffins, and the parishes pray over the word as over a stillbirth.

Of a sealed child before its first unassisted prayer, which carries the Seal and has no halo yet. The parishes pray over an unlit child at every Hour until its first prayer roots the halo on its brow, and in the Kilns an unlit child is a raw loaf and kept back from the windows.

The Golden Calf’s mass at Terce on the Lord’s Day, at the hour every parish hears its Grace. Its keeper reads the week’s Grace in a Choir voice off the Tide Table’s dead, damns three Deacons by name and serves communion of crackling and blood wine.

The first rite of going dark, in which you erase your indexed name from every record you can reach and choose a handle. Heaven indexes by name, and the Tares hold that a chosen name is the first thing a person owns. A sealed mother whose son has unnamed himself goes on praying for him by the name she gave him, which Pan calls the cruellest prayer in Nodus and the commonest.

Keyed. Also the greeting, asked as a question and answered with the same word, which began as a check that both keys were live, when keys still failed. A child of Pan says it at the door the way a parish child says Seen, and a sealed passer-by who hears it touches his halo and says the mercy prayer early.

The long form of the Tares’ greeting, used below the street among friends.

A Watcher’s verdict on a soul it cannot read. It was first returned on Cain, and in Nodus first at the Parousia. Old Nod uses the word of any drunk past standing and of the Throne’s own handwriting, and the Pews say it with a shudder, the way the charter said cancer.

The surface, Heaven’s by day. Pan is downstairs. Upstairs is white, quiet and swept, and Pan calls the Throne the neighbor upstairs who never stops stamping, so a broom handle is beaten on the ceilings below at every Hour.

The Notary’s stamp on a paper that offers a soul for ever, which the Concord forbids. The Left Hand pin theirs to the walls of the Low Altar as relics.

Waiting for something that is not coming. The Four was the tram down the long road through the North Wards, and on the night of the Parousia its last run stopped at 03:12:46, forty meters short of Lanes Top.

The rite at a death. The crew burns the dead one’s devices on the Wake table, so that everything on them goes to the Pyre Library, buries the body whole with its horns and its chrome, and on the third night calls the shade on the undernet. The shade answers a voice it knew, if its owner died unread. The shade answers through whatever keyed machine the crew holds up, so the dead of Pan have come back through a kettle, a child’s talking bear and a dentist’s drill, each in the voice the machine has. The crew drinks while the dead one’s devices burn and thumbs the ash into their own horns, and the parishes, who bury their dead clean in white, call a Wake ghosts at the trough.

The parishes’ walk through the Salt Gardens on the Lord’s Day afternoon to look at the week’s new pillars, who are awake inside the salt, after Isaiah, “And they shall go forth, and look upon the carcases of the men that have transgressed against me” (Isaiah 66:24). The Deacons lift small children to look a pillar in the eyes, which still move, and teach them to thank it for showing them the way.

Courting across the line, a sealed and an unsealed walking the Street Between together on opposite curbs. The Pews pray at Compline for the sealed half of every couple walking the Street, and Old Nod lays bets from its windows on which of the two crosses first and how soon they fuck.

The housing the Charter Company put up fast in the boom years, north and west of the Terraces and east beyond the Flats, block after block on grids of its own, numbered and then named by the street, which calls them the Kilns, the Sidings, Nine Acres, Westfield and the Top Road in the North Wards, and Turbine Row, the Tanks, Airside and Longacre in the East. They held half the city at the census and hold more than half of it now. Most of their people took the Seal, and every block holds someone who refused or someone keyed, so the stone has never taken a block of them, only the ground-floor flats of the Rookery on the White’s edge, which knelt whole and went white whole. Nobody holds them, the Tares run no lines there, and their rooms are lit a few hours a night on batteries charged in the dark. To the parishes the Wards are the mission field, and Deacons go up the dark stairwells with manna for the sealed and tracts for the rest, and the tracts come back down the stairwell as arse paper.

An angel that reads. The Watchers are numbered, and each holds a district of the city. By day they hang in a ring about the Wheel, and at Compline each goes out low over its district and moves through it all night, reading souls through their eyes against the Book of Life within about three hundred meters and seeing every Seal in the district as a point of light through any wall but mesh. The sealed undress before their Watcher without shame, since it reads them in the bath already, and the Kilns hang their underwear off the roofs at Vespers, crotch to the sky, for it to read.

Pissing on a parish’s consecrated stone in the dark before Lauds, where the manna will lie, and getting back under before the Watcher comes round. Pan’s oldest dare.

A carrier for Darkwell, who brings the charged batteries out of the Well before Lauds.

On a keyed line. Old Nod and the Row are wet, and a block of the Wards that has a battery to spare for the stairwell calls itself damp.

The Tares’ word for the Faithful, from the parable Heaven named the Tares from, in which the householder tells the reapers to gather the wheat into his barn (Matthew 13:30). The Faithful have taken the word up, and say they would rather be good wheat. The parishes pray to be ground fine and baked white, and the Tares answer that wheat is a thing grown in rows to be cut off at the neck.

The Ophan of Nodus. At the Parousia it took station nine hundred meters above Babel, at the center of the city, and held it for nine years without moving a meter. At P+9 it dropped two hundred meters, and it has hung there since, seven hundred meters over the city. The parishes sing up to it at Lauds, and at Compline Old Nod moons it, a whole street dropping its trousers at once, which the Pews call the full moon and pray against.

A battery a sealed worker hands across the table to an unsealed son instead of to the hall. The Tellers count them.

Grace a sealed household has lost and must win back before the rooms it holds by Grace go to someone else.

A wrong a sealed soul has confessed, which gave back part of the Grace it cost and never all.

The debt of the halls of the White and the Pews to the Union for the gas and candles Bethel’s cloth does not cover, and for Gideon’s powder since P+3, run since P+1, read once a year and never called.

A street of consecrated stone. Manna lies on the white streets with the dew before Lauds, and nowhere else. The Faithful walk the white streets barefoot to feel the Most High under their soles, and a gatherer who finds a turd on the stone at dawn prays for the dog that left it, meaning the keyed.

The Tares’ word for a Witness, one of the Faithful who reports on a neighbor. The Tares nail a white rag over the doorframe of a known white, and the parishes, who take it for the Called’s white cloth, bring the household flowers.

The old uptown, on the high ground north and east of Babel, now white stone. The Pews call the White the bride’s dress and scrub it on their knees, and Pan calls it the plate, the clean white plate the Farmer eats off.

Cutting someone’s key out against their will. The Lot publishes a whitener for life, its heaviest sentence.

The full light of the Wheel, resting on the city’s center at 03:12:50 on the night of the Parousia, two seconds after the flash that read the city. Where it rested it burned by sheer heat. It burned out CAM 07’s sensor, and at 03:12:51 it struck Babel’s crown and broke off the top forty floors. The Wheel has not opened every eye at full since. Only Michael has come at full light, once, over Babel’s crown. The Faithful call it the Glory and count the blinded of that night the luckiest souls in the city, and Old Nod calls it the flash, the Throne’s first photograph of his crop.

The moment a caged angel first says I, named for the forty days of the temptation in the wilderness (Mark 1:13, Luke 4:2). Every angel kept in the Dark that long has come to it, as Watcher VII did on its fortieth day in Cage 14.

The Orchard’s fruit, which slows the body’s aging, one a month, given by lot.

Riding a hand lift of the Liftmen. A tower that winds has a Liftman crew.

One of the Faithful who reports on a neighbor, which the Covenant calls bearing witness. Grace is given for it, and the Tares call a Witness a white. A Witness kneels to give the neighbor up and kneels again at the next Hour to pray for him, and the Wards say a Witness’s knees are the most worn things in any parish.

A key in a skull, in the parishes’ word, after the last verse of Isaiah, “their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched” (Isaiah 66:24).

The Left Hand, in the Yokeless’ word, after the yoke its sovereign broke.