Chapter 3: Signs

The word came to her on a Tuesday, except that there were no Tuesdays.

That was how she knew it was wrong. She was carrying oil from the forward stores, two measures in the long can, and the can was heavy and the corridor was cold the way the rearward corridors went cold when the wind off the wilds found a seam in the train, and a word arrived in her mouth fully formed, the way a name arrives when you see a face. February. She did not say it aloud. She stood in the cold seam of the corridor with the oil pulling at her arm and turned the word over and found that it had a taste — grey light, a particular thin grey light that fell on nothing she could see, and a cold that was not this cold, an older cold, a cold with a shape to it, streets and a sky the colour of a coin — and she found also that the word meant nothing. It pointed at nothing. There was no February on the Pilgrim. There was the morning watch and the noon watch and the long watch and the still watch, and there was the loop, and there were the stations on the holy circuit, and time was a thing the train carried you through gently so that you need never carry it yourself. February was a word for a slice of something the train did not have, and she did not know where she had got it, and the grey light behind it frightened her more than the word did, because the grey light felt like a place she had stood.

She set the can down and pressed her cold hand flat against the warm wall, forward of the seam, where the train was kind, and she waited for it to pass, and it passed, and she picked up the oil and went on, and she did not tell anyone, because there was no one to tell who would not have to do something about it.

After that they came more often.

Not memories. She would have known what to do with a memory; a memory had edges, you could hand it to a Confessor and say I dreamed of a house, and the Confessor would smile and say that the Mercy left the furniture sometimes and took the deeds, and you would both be comforted. These were not memories. These were the pressure of memories — a face she did not know arriving with a feeling she did, so that she grieved a stranger; a smell of something burnt and sweet at once that opened a door in her with a draught behind it and nothing she could see through it; her own hands, again and again, knowing things. Her hands learned to dread her noticing them. She caught herself coiling a rope in a particular braided fashion the deckhands forward did not use, and stopped, and could not for the life of her undo it deliberately, because the knowledge was not in her head where she could refuse it, it was lower down, in the part of her that had mended Corun’s lamp, the part that had been somewhere before it was here.

She did the only thing she knew to do. She prayed.

She was good at the prayers. The Pilgrim’s prayers were not pleas — the Mercy was not a thing you pleaded with, it had already given you everything, you would no more beg the Mercy than beg a man who had handed you his coat — they were thanks, and acceptance, and the long quiet emptying of the self that the Confessors called making room. You knelt forward, toward the Fore, toward the warmth, and you let the day’s small weights down out of you the way you let a lamp’s flame down at the end of a life, gently, to nothing, until you were light and clean and ready. Halia had loved the prayers from her first week. They had felt like being rinsed.

Now she knelt forward and made room, and the room would not empty.

She would get herself down to nearly nothing, the warmth on her face and the bells far off and the self letting go, and then a word would surface — February, or another one, tarmac, Sunday, escalator, words with no objects, words for things that did not exist, rising in her like air from a drowned thing — and the room would fill again, and she would start the emptying over, more fiercely, and that was the wrongness she could not pray her way out of, because she could feel, kneeling there, that she was not making room at all. She was packing it tighter. Every time she reached for the holy emptiness she found a little more in the way of it than the time before, as if the prayers, which were meant to scour, were instead uncovering — as if under the clean room the Mercy had given her there was a second room, furnished, lit by a grey light, and the harder she swept the first one the more she felt the wall between them go thin.

She understood it, of course, in the only frame she had. The wrongness was in her. She was a flawed vessel. The Mercy was perfect; the Mercy did not fail; so a soul in whom the gift sat badly was a soul who had received it badly, who had not made herself empty enough to hold the fullness she was meant to be given, and the cure for that was not less devotion but more — more emptying, more thanks, more room. She redoubled. She fasted the small fast. She took the cold-corridor walk the Confessors recommended for the over-full heart. She knelt until her knees printed the floor’s grain into them, and she begged — no, not begged, asked, you did not beg — she asked the Mercy, kneeling, take it back, take the rest of it, finish what you began, I want to be empty, I want to be light, I want to be only seven weeks old and nothing behind me, please, take the grey light, take the cold with the shape in it, take the word that means a slice of nothing, I don’t want it, I never asked to keep it, take it the way you took the rest.

And the weight did not go.

That was the thing she carried out of those days and could not set down: that she had asked the kindest power in the world to do her the kindness it did everyone, the one kindness it never refused, and it had not done it. The Mercy had emptied four thousand souls and counting. It had emptied Pria.

Pria was the test of it, and the worst of it, and the thing that finally undid Halia’s not-telling, though not in the way she feared.

They had been delivered the same week, Halia and Pria, which made them a kind of family — a cohort, the Office called it, souls who came through near enough together to have stood in the same Rite and heard the same bell, and who were given to each other gently so that no one was new alone. Pria had been delivered laughing. That was the first thing Halia had known about her, before either of them had a name: across the Rite-hall, blank and damp and shivering in her first shift like all of them, Pria had looked up at the lamps and the gold and the watching faces and had laughed, out of pure overflow, the way a baby laughs at light, and the whole hall had loved her at once. Seven weeks on she was the most untroubled soul Halia had ever met. The Mercy had taken everything from Pria and left a person who woke glad. She emptied in her prayers like water finding a drain. She did not have a second room. She had one room, clean and lit and warm, and she lived in it the way the Pilgrim promised you could live, and when she said, as she often did, aren’t we lucky, she did not mean it as anyone older than seven weeks could ever quite mean it. She meant it the way you mean a thing you have no reason to doubt.

Halia loved her, and could not tell her, because to tell Pria I think the Mercy has failed in me was to set, in the middle of Pria’s one clean room, a thing that would not come out — the suggestion that the gift could fail, that the emptiness might come back full, that the floor they all stood on was a floor that could, in at least one soul, give way. Halia would rather have carried the second room alone forever than put a single grey word into Pria’s mouth.

So she carried it alone, and it grew, and on the ninth or tenth day of carrying it she was in the Office in the still watch, alone, putting the delivering-bell back in its case.

The delivering-bell was the oldest thing in the Office and the only thing in it that was holy in the way the Fore was holy — a small bronze hand-bell, green-black with age, that was rung once over each new soul at the Rite, the first sound a delivered person heard in the world. It lived in a fitted wooden case lined with felt worn to the shape of it, and it was Halia’s care now, which she had received as an honour, because you did not give the bell to a careless soul. She lifted it by its worn handle to settle it in the felt, and she did not ring it — you did not ring the bell, the bell was rung only at a Rite, by an Acclamant, never idly, never by a clerk in the still watch — she did not ring it, her hand was nowhere near the clapper.

And the bell sounded.

Not a peal. A note — low, single, held, rising up out of the bronze with no hand on the clapper and no strike to start it, a hum that was almost too low to be a sound at all, that she felt in the bones of her wrist before she heard it in the air, and that went on, and on, far longer than a struck bell rings, longer than a bell that size could possibly hold a note, until the felt and the wood and the warm brass dark of the Office were all very faintly singing with it, one held grey note, and Halia stood with the holy thing humming in her hand and understood, in the part of her that had mended the lamp, that it was not ringing despite her.

It was ringing at her.

She got it into the case. She closed the lid on the note and held the lid down with both hands until the bronze went quiet under the felt, and she knelt right there on the Office floor, forward, toward the warmth, and made room, made room, made room, and the room would not empty, and far up the train the Fore carried them all on around the holy circuit, kind and warm and saying nothing, and for the first time in seven weeks of a life she had loved without complication, Halia was not sure the Mercy could hear her, and could not think of a single thing more frightening than that, and was wrong, because there was one more frightening thing, and it was waiting for her in the morning.