CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
?
SEREN
On Sunday and Monday the hook had slid. Each morning Crane changed an angle, noted the failure, and sent me back with my throat more bruised. On Tuesday she had shears beside the cloth. The Chancellor had authorized them.
“Seren Vale,” Ottoline Crane said at my shoulder. “Sit up as far as the strap lets you, and I’ll tell you what I’m going to do.” The white room, the same table, and no way to tell the hour in it.
I sat up as far as the strap let me, which was about three inches.
She says my whole name once when I come into the room and then she never says it again. Nobody in this building has a habit that small except her.
The old straps hung off the far edge of the table. An attendant had cut them when the last buckle jammed. New ones held my wrists and ankles, with a broader strap across my hips.
The stone was colder than the room, and the room was cold. The four channels under me ran out to the corners of the table and not to the center.
A drain sat in the middle of the floor. It took something down and clicked.
“You’ll want to hear the procedure,” Crane said.
“I heard it last time.”
“Last time it was wrong. I’ll read it to you the way I’m going to write it, and that isn’t for your comfort. It’s so that when somebody asks you afterward whether you were told, there’s the one answer and no other.”
“Who asks me afterward?” I said.
“Nobody does. It’s in the procedure, and the procedure was set down by a man who’s been dead sixty years.”
“Then why—”
“Because it’s the procedure.” She turned a page. “Straps, collar, shirt, hook. In that order. If I go out of the order I start again at the straps, and we’re not doing this twice.”
They had walked me up from the under-cells barefoot, and the light in the corridor had come over the Shelf flat and yellowish, which is new. The cold has eased. Everybody up here says that like it is good news.
My hands lay on white stone and did not put a mark on it.
“The first severance failed at every pass,” Crane said. “I’ve had the instruments over it twice since. The fault isn’t in the instruments.”
“Where’s the fault?”
“On your throat.” She came around to my left side, which is the side with the rope burn on it, and she did not touch that. “No instrument in this building will read it. So it comes off. That’s all that is.”
“You’ve had it under glass twice. It slides off.”
“It slides off. Everything I own slides off it.” She said that the way another woman would say the price of bread. “There’s a thing in this city with no reading on it at all, and it’s been walking around a kennel yard in the north for nineteen years.”
“It’s a collar.”
“It’s a collar the way a lock is a bit of shaped iron.”
My chin came up. My nose was full of nothing at all, which is what that room smells of, and I filled my chest with it anyway.
“Yes, Warden,” I said.
I heard it come out of me. I heard the shape of it and who it belonged to and it was somewhere north of the Shelf with a leash on his belt, and it had gone to her.
Crane did not correct me. She wrote something down instead, one line, and I could not see it. My name is on a page in this building that nobody has ever shown me, in her hand, and it will outlast me.
“Say that again,” she said.
“No.”
“Then I’ll have it as I heard it.”
Two attendants stood at the linen stand with their hands folded. A clerk stood at the door with a board. None of the three of them had looked at my face since I came in, and all three had looked at my throat.
Crane put her thumb flat on the front of the collar. Everyone puts a hand there from above. Most people did. Three men had learned not to, who come at me from under the jaw, and have for three years, and have never said why.
“There’s a seam across the front of it. It’s warmer than the rest.”
“I’ve had two fingers under that thing every day since I was nine. I know which bit of it’s warm.”
Her thumb stayed on the warm seam a moment longer than the procedure needed. Then she took a pair of shears off the tray and did not ask me anything.
?
The cut made two sounds, one for each side, and neither of them was loud in that white room. It was the second one that let go, and Crane did not move her hands.
Then the weight came off my neck.
“Don’t—I’ve never had it off. Not once. Not for a wash, not for a night, not ever.”
“I know. It’s in your file, and the file is the only honest thing in this city.”
Air went all the way around my throat.
Air on the front and the sides is ordinary and I have had it every day of my life. Air on the band under the metal is a thing my skin did not know how to report.
The air was cold and it was everywhere and it kept happening, over and over, because air does not stop.
My right hand came up off the stone and the strap caught it at four inches and held it there. My hand has gone up under the front of that collar ten thousand times and I have never touched the skin under it.
One of the attendants stepped in with a cloth and Crane put two fingers up and the attendant stepped back out.
“Leave it. I want the marks.”
She said it to the attendant and not to me, over my body. Neither of them looked at my face while it was settled.
The skin under a collar comes out pale and thin and soft, like the inside of a wrist. The chafe scar at the back of my neck was hers to look at now. The bruise across the front, the one they gave me in this room the first time, had nothing over it any more.
Crane looked at my neck for as long as she wanted to.
Then she set the collar down on the table beside the hook.
She did not put it in a case. She did not send it out with the clerk. She did not square it to the edge, and she squares everything, and I watched her hand come away from it and go to the tray instead.
It sat there. It was the only warm thing in that room and nobody said one word about it.
“Bare to the waist,” Crane said. “The hook has to reach under the bone.”
They took my shirt off in pieces because of the strap and left the pieces on the floor. The cold got at my nipples the way cold does, and the clerk wrote, and the attendants folded their hands, and none of them looked up, and I have never been so completely a thing on a table.
“Three of them,” I said. “Under the bone, slightly left. You’ll want the middle one last, and I’m not telling you why.”
“I’ll take them in the order they present. That’s the procedure. It isn’t a kindness and I’m not offering one.”
“I know what it isn’t. Write down that I was told, then. That’s the part that keeps.”
Crane picked up the hook. She held it the way a woman holds a pen she has used for a long time.
“This one is going to take. You get told before, not after.”
“How can you know that?”
“Because the only thing that ever stopped it is on the table behind me and it isn’t on you.” She set two fingers under my breastbone and found the place without hunting for it. “Breathe out and keep it out.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then I wait, and you get tired, and we’re both here longer. I’ve done it that way. It’s no better for you and it’s worse for me.”
I breathed out and kept it out.
?
Crane went in under the sternum and a little to the left of it, on the table in the white room, and she found all three in under a minute.
I could feel her sorting them. There were three threads under my own bone and a stranger’s hand was going along them one at a time, deciding.
The first one she got hold of was the one I have never been able to read.
I have never been able to find Ilyan Frost with anything except my eyes, and I used to make a joke of it, and he used to let me.
He was the one that did not hold on.
The pain lasted about ten seconds and it was very bad and then it stopped, and the stopping was worse, because that was when I found out what was underneath it.
There is a room in me now with nobody in it, and I can feel the shape of the door.
For three years there had been three uncompleted weights beneath my ribs. Since the oak, they had carried presence and direction as well. Now one had lost even its warmth.
One of my three directions is not a direction now.
My chest went to it the way a tongue goes to a pulled tooth, and it kept going, and every time there was room.
Room with edges. My fingers went for my own breastbone and the strap stopped them short. Nothing that had always been empty would have had a rim like that.
I could still find Vaughn. North-northwest, nearer than yesterday, up and cold. I could still find Corvin, closer, and moving, and I was too tired to be surprised.
Then my chest went to the third place, because it did not know yet, and there was room there, and it went again.
That is what it does. It has done it every few minutes since.
The drain swallowed and clicked. The basin on the stand had gone pink. One of the attendants knocked the linen stand over getting a sponge and left it lying on its side, and nobody picked it up, and nobody came and put anything over me.
Ilyan put his coat over my shoulders in a yard once before I had said I was cold. He never mentioned it. Ilyan was in this city, four floors below the white room, and I could no longer feel him at all.
Here is the thing I thought, lying on that stone with the room in my chest.
At first I thought only: not all three. Then the emptiness reached me, and it had Ilyan’s shape.
There would be no quiet warmth at the edge of my senses when he crossed a room. No certainty that the man I could not smell was there. I tried to call him through a thread that no longer existed, and that was when I began to shake.
“Did he feel that?” I said.
“Yes. In the block, four floors down, at the same moment. Distance doesn’t come into it. You knew that when you asked me.”
“I did,” I said.
Crane put the pen down across the top of the page, which she had not done once in either visit.
“Then don’t ask me things you’ve worked out. You’re the best there is at what you do and it makes you lazy with people.”
“He’s four floors down. It’s the same distance to him as it was an hour ago, and it’s the same stone, and it should be the same...”
I stopped, because there was no direction on the end of that sentence to put a word on.
“He is. He went over sideways into the wall and one of my men wrote the time on the board, and the time is the same time.” She looked at me over the top of the page. “That’s the only part of this you’ll want later, so hold on to it. It went out of you both at once.”
She pointed with the pen. The new clerk held a slate from the under-cells. There was the hour in a figure I could read. She had not felt him fall. Someone had come up four flights to tell her.
“Did he make a sound?”
“I wasn’t in the room. If you’re asking me to invent one for you I’m not going to. You’d know.”
She wrote for a while. The pen was the loudest thing in the room.
“How did you hold them shut? On the first day. I’ve asked six people and you’re the only one who was there.”
“I wanted to. That’s all it was. I wanted to more than your hook did.”
She stopped writing and looked at the page instead of at me.
“That isn’t an answer. I’m going to write it down as one.”
The door opened. The clerk who came in was not the clerk who had been standing there, and he came straight across the floor to the table with his hand already out.
He lifted the collar off the stone under Crane’s hand.
“The Chancellor’s asked for it upstairs. They’re setting it out this evening.”
“That hasn’t been recorded.”
He was out of the door with it before she got to the end of the sentence. The door did not even bang. The warm thing went out of the room and the room did not change temperature, because the room had never had it.
Crane stood with her hand where the collar had been for a moment.
Then she turned back to the table and looked at the two threads left under my bone, and picked up her pen.
“Two more,” Crane said, and wrote it down without looking up.
The new clerk came back and put a second order on top of her page.
“Retain the remaining pair for presentation. Nine tomorrow. The Chancellor’s own seal.”
Crane read it, and for the first time in that room I saw her mouth tighten at an instruction.
“You’re making her wait with one of them gone.”
“The Nine are to see the other two taken.”
She put the hook down. An attendant brought clean prison linen to replace the shirt they had cut from me.
Two more. They had not spared them. They had saved them for an audience.