Received Wholly | Covenant Beneath Her Skin: Book III

Part One: Under the Chair

The floor took the light.

There were lamps. I’m sure of that much, because afterwards I wasn’t sure of a great deal else: bronze lamps on tall stands, one every so often down both sides of the hall, all lit, and their light went down into the floor and didn’t come back. Stone gives you something. I’d walked stone my whole life, flagged and worn and scrubbed on my knees, and stone always hands you a little shine, a wet gleam, your own feet coming up to meet you. This was black glass from wall to wall, and it gave nothing. The lamplight stopped a hand’s breadth above it and went no further, as if it had lost its nerve.

My feet were bare. The cold came up through the soles of them, the clean hard cold of a well bucket in January, and it didn’t warm where I stood.

I counted.

One. Two. I counted the way I used to count coppers on a tavern table by a fire, touching each one, not trusting the last. Seven. Eight. The marks were lit, all of them at once, the throat and the breastbone and the belly and the insides of my thighs, gold under the grey I had on, bright enough that I could see my own chin at the edge of my eye; and none of that reached the floor either. I walked inside my own light and the glass drank it.

Eleven. Twelve.

The hall was long. I couldn’t have told you how long. The far end was dark, and then it wasn’t, and I never saw it change.

Nineteen. Twenty.

Somewhere past twenty the floor was different under me. Two steps, perhaps three: smoother, and duller, a narrow track worn into the glass as if feet had come along this same line before mine, a great many feet, or a few over a very long time. It took the lamp no less than the rest did. I felt it with my soles and didn’t look down, and then it was ordinary glass again, cold, and I was past it.

Twenty-six.

Who had worn it? I didn’t stop to wonder. I’d have lost my count.

At thirty I could see him. He was sitting at the far end of the hall in a chair that was part of the floor, or the floor was part of it, black into black; very tall, even seated, taller than any man; and still, though not with the stillness of a man holding still. The air changed as I walked into it. It got heavier, and colder, and it leaned, the way the sky leans an hour before a storm when there’s not a cloud in it yet; and behind my breastbone the cold came, the cold I’d have known in my grave.

Thirty-four. Thirty-five.

I’d thought he might stand. Would he? I kept asking it, step after step, with the cold in my chest and the gold burning at my throat and the numbers going on under my breath: now, at this one; now, at this. He didn’t. He didn’t come down to meet me, or lift a hand, or turn his head. He only looked, and the looking came down the hall ahead of me like weather down a valley, and I walked into it with my bare feet on glass that took every scrap of light I had and gave none of it back, and the count went on without my leave, out loud, into all that quiet:

“Forty-one.”

He didn’t rise.

* * *

The Chapter Book of the House of the Dawning Light, Velundra.

The Synod of the Feast of First Light, in the chapter house. The Session at Vespers.

Present: the Mother Anselle, High Priest of this house by acclamation of the consecrated women at the morning session, presiding. The nine bishops of the synod, as at the morning session, with their chaplains. Father Benedek Ryle, Sacristan. The brothers of the chapter. The consecrated women of this house, standing.

Attending at the synod’s order: Master Dorran, Deputy to the Registrar of the City of Velundra, with his clerk, Master Quiller. Caelor Vyn, keeper of the Lesser Records House of the city, under summons, with one bound book and four bundles of the Carriers’ Guild rolls, carried by two of the Registrar’s men.

Not present: the woman who spoke at the morning session, Seren, formerly of this house, who went out by the west door at Vespers.

Written by Brother Wystan, of the scriptorium, in the absence of Brother Esmond, clerk of the chapter, who asked to be excused after the morning session. (I have set down what was said as it was said, so far as my hand would go. Where it would not go, I have written that too.)

The Mother opened the session with the collect for Vespers.

Master Dorran laid the book on the table below the dais. He said: “The concordance, Mother, my lords. And the rolls. Entered on the city’s register this afternoon at the fourth hour, as received from the keeper, and here by the synod’s leave.”

Q. (The Bishop of Torburgh.) You’re Vyn.

A. Yes.

Q. You were a brother of this house.

A. Novice. Scriptorium. Third year.

Q. And you kept these registers you’ve been reading. The registers you took out of this house.

A. Sent. The city sends them. When your archive’s full.

Q. Why did you leave the Order?

A. Doctrine.

Q. What doctrine?

(The keeper did not answer. The Mother said:) “Brother Caelor. Tell them the other reason. I was in the second row.”

(He took off his spectacles and cleaned them on his sleeve, the thick glass first and then the other. It took some while. I did not know whether I should write it down. I have.)

A. I held the book at the Rite of Marta Elen. I was nineteen.

Q. (The Bishop of Anvard.) Did she give the responses?

A. Two. Then the third as far as “received.” Then nothing.

Q. And the High Priest?

A. Tarrel. Went on as if she’d said it.

Q. And you?

A. Wrote it. “The responses given, the third excepted.” It’s in your register. Page is still there. Look.

Q. Why did you not speak?

A. I was nineteen.

Q. And afterward? In all the years since?

A. Nobody asked.

(The Mother looked at her hands.)

Q. (The Bishop of Torburgh.) The woman said the Guild’s rolls. Show us.

(The keeper opened the first bundle on the table and read from it. I could not keep pace with the whole of it and have set down the lines he read twice.) “Sanctuary of the Dawning Light, wain, hides and flour, Hael Crossing hospice.” (Spring.) “Sanctuary of the Dawning Light, wain, bread and oil, Hael Crossing hospice.” (Autumn.) (He turned the leaves and read the same, or near the same, for some years, one after another, until the Bishop of Torburgh said “Enough.”)

(Then the loss rolls, which are tied in red. He read the losses of this year, carrier by carrier.) “Harker’s, salt, seven drovers, the Bend, not come in.” “The garrison, patrol, twelve, the Bend, not come in.” (And fourteen more before those, since the spring, which I could not keep pace with. I did not hear the Sanctuary’s name among them. Then he turned to the last column, the insurers’, and put his finger on it, and held the leaf up to the bishops, and did not say anything.)

Q. (The Bishop of Hael Crossing.) Never? In a hundred and sixty years? Twelve of the Crossing garrison went into the trees at the Bend this summer.

A. Not in these rolls.

Q. What does that mean?

A. What it says. These are the rolls I’ve got.

Q. (The Bishop of Torburgh.) Did you know what it meant? All these years? Sitting on it?

A. Yes.

(Here several of the bishops spoke at once, and I could not take down any one of them.)

Q. (The Bishop of Lenmouth.) Is the book to be copied?

(Master Dorran.) “A fair copy will be made at the city’s charge, my lord, for the Registrar’s record.”

Q. And sent where?

(Master Dorran.) “Where the Registrar’s record goes, my lord.”

(The Bishop of Lenmouth wrote something on his tablet, and asked nothing more.)

Motions.

1. Moved by the Bishop of Torburgh: “That the book and the rolls be entered on the record of this synod, and held by the Registrar of the city, and not given back to him until we rise.” Carried without dissent.

2. Moved by the Bishop of Kelsey Mere, who had not spoken at either session till then: “Mother. My lords. I move that the inquiry of this synod be bounded to the carriage rolls of this house, and not extended to the Guild’s general registry of losses; the matter before us being the conduct of this house, and not of any other see.”

(The Bishop of Torburgh.) “Why not the other sees?”

(The Bishop of Kelsey Mere.) “Because we should be sitting here till the thaw, my lord, and the rolls are the city’s to read, not ours.”

Seconded by the Bishop of Anvard. Carried, seven hands to two (the Bishops of Torburgh and of Hael Crossing against).

3. Moved by Father Ryle, Sacristan: “That the stipend this house pays the Lesser Records House for keeping its sent registers, four silver the quarter, be stopped from the coming quarter-day; the keeper having laid those registers before the city without the leave of this house.”

(The Mother.) “Is anyone against it?”

(No one spoke. The keeper said:) “Ha.”

(I have written it as he said it.)

(The Mother.) “So ordered. The registers are on the city’s record now, Master Dorran?”

(Master Dorran.) “They are, Mother.”

(The Mother.) “Then the city can pay for his coal.”

The Bishop of Torburgh then put to the chair the matter of the covenant.

(The Bishop of Torburgh.) “Mother. We heard the woman. The thing sits with the chair now; the chair can give it back. What does the chair mean to do? And what becomes of my road?”

(The Mother.) “The chair has been the chair since the second hour, my lord. It will not be hurried by a synod that hasn’t had its supper.”

(The Bishop of Torburgh.) “And my drovers? In the meantime?”

(The Mother.) “Are in the Light’s hands. As they were this morning. As they were before anyone in this room knew anything at all.”

(The Bishop of Lenmouth.) “By your leave, Mother.” (The Mother nodded. He went out before the question was answered.)

The keeper Vyn was dismissed at the second bell after Vespers. The Registrar’s men took up the book and the rolls.

(The keeper Vyn.) “My book.”

(Master Dorran.) “In due course, Master Vyn.”

(The keeper Vyn.) “When?”

(Master Dorran did not answer. The keeper asked again, “When?”, and was not answered, and went out.)

The synod adjourned to Terce on the morrow. The Mother closed the session with the versicle for Compline.

Leaves used: eleven, and one spoiled when the Bishop of Torburgh struck the table and the ink went over. W.

(The keeper Vyn could not find the step down from the chapter-house door in the dusk. His left eye. Brother Anscom gave him his arm as far as the gate, and came back.)

(The oil is still on the dais. Nobody has told the lay brothers to wipe it up. I have not told them either.)