Of the Mark

Keys

A key is a secure element set under the skin. At its first power it makes its own number out of the noise of the body it sits in, a number that exists nowhere else and that nobody, fitter or Court, ever reads out of it, and from then on it runs the body’s own nerve current through a cipher, so that what the eyes give back to the light is noise. It is the reason Watcher VII’s reading of the woman on the roof came back blank. To the Host a keyed soul is ciphertext, and noise matches no line in the Book of Life, which a Watcher reports as SUBJECT UNINDEXED. The light sees a keyed body as a shape and never reads it, and the Pillar finds the keyed as blanks, by the shape of what it cannot read. The light stops and takes only what it can read.

A Watcher reads a person against their line in the Book, and the Book is written in the Throne’s hand. A key keeps a secret the Throne does not share, and the Throne cannot write down what it cannot read, so from the Keying the line stops. What was written in it stays, and nothing more can be. A child keyed before the light ever met its eyes has no line at all. The keyed like to quote Heaven’s own book on it, the promise of “a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it” (Revelation 2:17), in the verse that also promises the hidden manna. A key hides who its bearer is, and the body still shows where the bearer stands. By day a blank among six hundred thousand blanks in Old Nod is nobody in particular, and so the Host hunts the keyed at night, with the Pillar, at the gates and in the parishes, where a blank stands out.

In the fourth year of the Attending keying spread from the covens to ordinary people, to dock workers and clinic staff, the children of the salted, and Deacons who had stopped believing. In its first week a key inks a glyph into the skin above it from underneath, drawn from its number one way, as a lock shows a maker’s stamp without giving up its key, so that no two are alike, and the glyph stays when a key is taken out. The Seal of the Faithful is the same on every forehead. Covenant Directive 12 had already forbidden those who bear the mark described in Revelation 13:16 to buy or sell in the parishes, and in this year, under the third of the seven Trumpets, Heaven named the key that mark, the Mark of the Beast. In Revelation it is the people without the mark who cannot buy or sell (Revelation 13:16-17). The Host’s citations are always accurate, and in this one the application turns the verse around.

A key is the first property most of the keyed acquire and the last thing they would give up. Losing one is called going white, because it leaves the loser readable. A key cannot be shared, since nobody can read its number out of it, and a key whose making was seen is broken.

At the table

Ordinary people went to be keyed in the back rooms of the Row and the Stones, and in the Wards wherever someone had a steady hand and a chair, one at a time and then by the household, and paid with what they had, and many of them keyed their Lockets the same night. In Nine Acres the dentist Hana Novak began fitting keys in her chair after Compline, in the back of the right hand, one of the two places Revelation puts the mark (Revelation 13:16). The Wards say she has keyed ten thousand; she says she has never counted, and keeps no book, since a book can be read. From the same year the Tide Table printed no indexed name, and gave the city’s missing and dead by the names their families brought to the chandler’s. Afterward a family might have a keyed son and a sealed mother at the same table, and most families went on eating at it. The Harbor and Freight Union split as the city split, and went on meeting.

The Dawson children of Parish 31, whose father rose at the Harvest and whose mother was left, were fed. The parish’s book records it through the winter that followed, and then records nothing more under the name, and the parish says the family was moved to another. The Stones say that a woman and two children crossed the Street Between one night in the fourth year and went below the street to have their halos cut out, and that the name they go by now is not Dawson.

The name they were given

The keyed who fight for themselves are called the Tares. The name is Heaven’s. In the parable an enemy sows tares among the wheat while men sleep, and at the harvest the householder tells the reapers to gather the tares first and bind them in bundles to burn them (Matthew 13:24-30). Matthew has the teacher explain the parable a few verses later, in lines SEAM marks as the second hand’s, where the field is the world, the enemy is the devil, the harvest is the end of the world, and the reapers are the angels (Matthew 13:38-39). The Gospel of Thomas, out of the jar at Nag Hammadi, has the parable without that explanation, and without the order to gather the tares first (Gospel of Thomas, saying 57). Heaven took the parable as policy, and the Tares kept the word, since everything burned in the Throne’s name arrives in the Dark. The weed is darnel, Lolium temulentum, drunken darnel, which passes for wheat until the ear shows.

The same parable is the reason the Tares are still standing. When the servants offer to pull up the tares, the householder answers: “Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest” (Matthew 13:29-30). Everyone in Nodus has family in white, and Heaven could not burn Old Nod without burning the wheat on the next street. So the Salt takes the tares that show themselves, one at a time, and the rest stand in the field until the reapers are told to gather them first.

Heaven has its own reasons for patience. It keeps every word it has had written, and it cannot act against one; it will not drown a city again (Genesis 9:11), and Old Nod has wheat of its own, thirty thousand sealed in the harbor tenements of the quays. Burning costs the Host more light than anything else it does and feeds it nothing, since a burned soul is no food, so the Throne farms where it could burn.

By the ninth year of the Attending about two million of Nodus’s seven million were keyed, and they came from everywhere, among them network engineers from Babel, clinic staff, sex workers, soldiers, former Deacons, the children of the executed, and a generation born under the streets who have never once been read. The city calls joining them going dark. They worship nothing, Hell included; they are allied with Hell by contract and owe it what they sign for, and most of them have never met a sovereign.

Horns and faces

The keyed alter their bodies openly. Horning grafts horns with a titanium core in a keratin sheath; the horns mock Heaven’s picture of the damned, and they work as antennas for the Mesh, the keyed network under and over the city. Lenses replace the eyes and glow when they run hot, and at full burn they go white. Ports are opened at the back of the skull for jacking into the Mesh, and the cables from them run down the spine outside the skin. Nobody among the keyed hides a graft, and the seams are left to show as they heal. They say that the flesh is a first draft.

In barefacing, which goes furthest, the face is removed and replaced with a ceramic skull casing, because the light knows a face once it has seen it, the Watchers know faces, and a skull leaves them no face to know. At a gate the barefaced still go under, since a Cherub holds whatever it cannot read. The Faithful are taught that the damned look like death, and the keyed wear death as they wear horns, in mockery. The Cainites call the skull a vow, and say that whoever wears their death in advance has taken from the Throne the giving of it.

Rites

In the Unnaming, one of the six rites of going dark, you erase your indexed name from every record you can reach and choose a handle, because Heaven indexes by name and a chosen name is the first thing a person owns. In the Keying a clinic sets a key under the skin. Dehaloing cuts the Seal out of the brow of those who leave the Faithful, and the halo goes out with it. Horning and barefacing are as above. And in the Wake, 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 chrome, and calls the shade through a keyed machine on the third night; the shade answers if its owner died unread, and only to a voice it knew in life.

A child of the Tares is keyed in its first week, in the birth clinics of the House of Night in Pan, before it has ever been in the light. It is the Tares’ answer to the sealing at eight days.

Covens

The Tares organize in covens of up to thirteen, which is the old witches’ number and the number at the Last Supper. A coven has no leader. The person the others follow is called first among none, and the title lapses on the day they stop being followed. Covens cooperate by pact, as the Courts do. The oldest house is the Cainites, many covens under one roof and one name, holding Old Nod through Stonecutter. The Salt Widows are the relatives of the executed, who steal pillars back from the Gardens and dissolve them in the sea. The Gleaners smuggle the nearly ripe who ask to go out of the parishes. The Babel Line Company holds the stairwells of Babel; the Nephilim are heavy augments who fight Seraphim hand to hand, and few of them live long; and the Low Choir are the musicians and jammer-builders around Radio Pandæmonium.

Sayings

They greet one another with a word that began as a check that both keys were live, in the years when keys still failed, Unread? answered with Unread. They say goodbye with two words, die unread, since to die keyed is to go on and to die readable is to be eaten. They say sign last, meaning never commit first; nobody’s keeper, which is Cain’s answer; look long enough, of angels and of anything worth freeing; and every cipher is a small Hell. Non serviam is said once, when it counts. Their two holidays are Leak Night, when the Restored Genesis is read aloud in Pan, and Cain’s Day, when nobody asks anyone where anyone is.

Their mark is an inverted pentagram, drawn by hand and never twice the same, sprayed on the walls of Old Nod and scratched into keyed devices. Hell signed the Leak with it, when the horned glyphs locked together into one on every screen on Earth, and the keyed took it for their own the same month. It marks where the Throne’s sight ends, and past it nothing is read. It carries no prayer, since no Court accepts worship. Heaven calls it the sign of the Beast.