Of Mercy

The clinics of the Healer

In the second year of the Attending the Mercy clinics opened, in the nine white halls of Zion Heights that had been the schools of the Terraces. Raphael, God heals, runs them, and they give Mercy between Prime and Compline, the hours the Covenant had set for it the year before, and they give it once. A Faithful who repents of an implant lies down under white light, and the halls’ surgeons cut it out. They cut awake, the patient unheld and given nothing for the pain, since a will put to sleep cannot surrender, and the patient says the surrender aloud at every piece. Their Grace climbs with every piece removed, and the Hum grows clearer to them as it goes. The same halls take the repentant off the Tree by a course of injections, since the Tree is a kept life, and a soul kept on it cannot ripen. One patient in nine dies of the mercy, and the halls enter each one as a soul spared the choice. The uptown’s nine hundred thousand implanted went through the halls between that year and the Harvest, and about a hundred thousand of them died there.

The halo

The clinics will not take a Seal out. The halo stands over the crown on a root of light that runs back to the Seal on the brow; it roots the first time its bearer prays unassisted, and from then it carries prayer up to the Throne, and the Seal’s Grace with it, every moment, and cannot be switched off. It comes off only by surgery, first done in this year in the clinics of the Row under the street, for those leaving the Faithful, and the street calls it dehaloing, after what is seen to go out. The surgeon cuts the Seal out of the brow with a disc of bone, and the ring goes out as the disc comes free. About one in nine die of that too. A Seal cut from a living brow keeps its light, and a lit disc out of a lined jar would be read through any wall, so the Row keeps the discs in lined jars.