The Hollow Saint

The heretic had been a big man, and the ground outside Grael's north wall did not want him.

Ilse Varn drove the spade in with her heel and felt the shock of a stone run up both arms into her shoulders. Frost still furred the turned earth. Behind her, the hut wall scraped and squeaked where Tobit was drawing.

"If that's another horse," she said, "it had better be pulling a cart of bread."

The squeaking stopped. When she glanced back, the boy had added a loaf to the horse's back. It was enormous and badly shaded, and he stood beside it with chalk dust to his elbows, looking pleased.

She went back to the grave. The heretic waited in his sacking by the yew, feet bare, because someone in the city had wanted his boots more than God had wanted his soul.

The bell-ringer's boy came at a run along the wall path, breath smoking. She knew him by his ears, which stuck out under his cap like handles. He usually brought lists. Today he brought nothing in his hands.

"Mistress Varn." He stopped at the edge of the yard as if the dead might reach him past the gate. "They pulled a lamplighter out of the Rushlight Canal at first light. It's your Emil. He's on the dusk pyre list. Plague, they're saying."

Ilse put the spade into the ground and lifted out a clod of black earth.

She did it again. And a third time, square and neat, the edge of the hole sharp as a table.

"Mistress?"

"I heard you." Her tongue found the chip in her front tooth and stayed there. "Who wrote the list?"

"The dead-house clerk. Same as always."

"Did anyone look at him? A physician?"

The boy's face said what he would not. Nobody looked at the plague dead for longer than it took to turn them over.

"Thank you," she said, and found a copper in her apron and flicked it to him. He caught it and ran.

Tobit had come up beside her. He did not touch her. He held out a stub of chalk, the way other children might offer a hand.

"I need to go into the city," she said. "You'll finish the heretic."

He shook his head, slowly, and pointed at her chest. Then at himself. Then at the gate.

"No."

He sat down in the frost by the half-dug grave and folded his arms. She knew that face. It meant she could go now and find him trailing her through the gate, or argue with him until noon.

* * *

Haske worked the plague runs because nobody else would, and he priced himself accordingly.

He was eating an onion on the shaft of his cart in the shadow of the Mercy Gate, and he did not get up. Behind him the cart was empty, its boards stained a colour that did not wash out. The smell of lime came off it in waves.

"The dead-house," he said, as if she'd asked for the moon on a plate. "Under the Lantern. In daylight."

"You go in and out four times a day."

"I go in with a load. The lay brothers count what I bring. They don't count what I take."

She set the silver on the shaft beside him. Emil's silver, from the tin under the floorboard where he kept his wages because he trusted her floor more than any bank. Haske looked at it and bit the onion.

"Keep it," he said.

"Then what?"

"A favour." He chewed. "To be named later."

"I dig graves. I don't do favours."

"You dig graves outside the walls where nobody goes." He smiled with half his teeth. "I might need something put somewhere quiet one day. Or something kept. I'll know when I know."

Ilse thought of the pyre being stacked in the Lantern's yard, the oil being carried up in jars, her brother's hands going black and curling like paper.

"Fine," she said.

"Say it properly."

"I owe you a favour, Haske. Named later." The words tasted like the onion smelled.

He swung down and threw back the stinking canvas. She climbed in and lay flat on the boards. Something shifted under the canvas at the far end, and a small chalky hand came out and found her sleeve.

She closed her eyes. "Of course you did."

Tobit's fingers tightened once and let go.

* * *

The dead-house lay under the Cathedral of the Lantern like a cellar under a rich man's table.

Haske unloaded her with three real corpses and a joke for the lay brother at the door about how heavy the poor were getting. Then she was inside, in the cold, in the half-dark, lying on a stone shelf with a stranger's elbow in her ribs.

She waited until the brother's footsteps went back up the stair. Then she slid off.

Rows of shrouded shapes ran away from her into the gloom. Lime crusted the floor and burned in her nose. Somewhere at the back a cistern dripped, slow and steady, counting.

Tobit crept from the cart's last load and stood at her elbow, eyes huge. She pointed him at the stair. He went and crouched there, chalk in fist, keeping watch.

She found Emil in the fourth row because his feet were too long for the shroud. They always had been. She'd told him a lamplighter needed long legs and he'd believed her for years.

She folded the cloth back.

His face was his face. Swollen a little from the water, lips blue, hair dark with canal muck. She wiped a smear of weed from his eyebrow with her thumb and kept her thumb there a moment longer than it needed.

Then she looked at his hands.

The right was clenched. She worked the fingers open one by one, the way she would loosen a frozen knot. In the hollow of his palm, a saint's medal had been sewn into the flesh. Six neat stitches through the pierced rim, pulled tight.

She held it toward the grey light from the grating. A woman with a bell in her hands and a cloth over the bell's mouth. Letters around the edge, worn but legible. SAINT GRETA OF THE QUIET BELL.

The thread was yellowish and stiff. Ilse rubbed it between finger and thumb and her skin came away tacky. Waxed. The same waxed thread Emil used to bind his wicks, that the lamplighters' store gave out by the spool and counted back.

Her eyes went to his belt. The leather loop where his lamp-hook should hang was empty.

He never took it off. He'd once walked into a tavern brawl with it and walked out with a split lip and the hook still on his hip.

She slid her thumb under the edge of the medal and lifted it as far as the stitches allowed.

The skin beneath was pink.

Not grey, not ash. The soft pink of a living palm, kept from the air.

She looked at his throat, his wrists. Grey there, yes. But the grey of cold water and cold stone, not the dust-grey that started at the fingertips and crept. She had buried enough of the plague dead the church let slip through to know the difference.

"Liars," she said, quietly, to the vaulted ceiling.

From the stair, Tobit tapped twice on stone. All clear.

She took the coin from her pocket. A worn copper, nothing special. They never needed to be special. She opened Emil's jaw with two fingers and laid it on his tongue.

Then she bent and put her mouth near his, close enough to smell the canal, and swallowed.

* * *

The night was wet and the lamps were lit. He had lit them. His shoulders ached in the good way, the end-of-round way.

The canal path along the Rushlight was empty. Water slapped stone. He was whistling something off-key, and Ilse, inside him, knew the tune: the one their mother sang badly while scrubbing pots.

A step behind him. He turned.

A figure stood under the lamp he had lit ten minutes earlier. Cloaked, hooded, and where the face should be, a mask. Smooth, pale, without features, like the inside of a shell. The lamplight slid across it without catching anything.

"Evening," he said. Friendly. Of course friendly.

Then the bell.

It rang so close overhead that his teeth buzzed in his jaw and his vision shook. Once, twice, a third time. He looked up and could not see it. There was no tower on the Rushlight, there was nothing above him but haze, and still it rang, inside his skull now, everywhere.

Hands on him. Gloved. Strong. A breath against his ear, warm through the cold.

"Vigil," the voice said.

Then the cold water closed over his head, and the bell went on ringing under it, and his lungs filled, and

* * *

Ilse came back on her knees on the lime-crusted floor.

Her palms were flat on the stone. She was soaked with sweat and her teeth still rang. She spat the coin into her hand and it was warm.

No fever, she thought. He'd been tired, cold, whistling. No cough, no ache in the bones, no grey creeping up his fingers. A healthy man on a canal path, and a mask, and a bell where no bell should be.

She knew what came next. It always came. She made herself do it now, while she was still on the floor, so it could not ambush her later.

She reached for the summer at the mill pond.

She reached for the green water and the reeds and Emil at eight, shrieking, while she held him under the belly and told him to kick.

There was nothing there.

She reached again. She knew the shape of the place where it should be. She knew it the way you know a tooth has gone because your tongue keeps finding the gap. There was the gap.

Her hand went into her coat and came out with the notebook. Cracked leather, pages soft with handling. Forty entries in her own cramped writing, the things she still had, numbered.

She found it. Number eleven. Teaching Emil to swim at the mill pond. He was eight. He swallowed half the pond and said it tasted like frog.

She read it three times. She believed it, the way you believe something written in a history book about strangers.

She took the stub of pencil and drew a single line through it. Thirty-nine.

Tobit was beside her. She had not heard him come. He looked at the notebook, then at her face, and he put one chalky finger on the struck line, very gently, as if pressing a bruise to see if it still hurt.

"It's fine," she said. "I've got others."

She covered Emil's face. She tucked his hand back under the shroud with the medal still in it, because whoever had sewn it there would want to know if it were cut out. Then she pulled Tobit up by the collar and went for the stair.

At the top, in the corridor where the lamps hung on chains, a brother of the Lantern was coming the other way.

He was tall, too tall for the low ceiling, and so thin his habit hung from his shoulders like wet laundry. His cuffs were stained black with ink to the wrist. He had a ledger under one arm.

Ilse kept walking. Tobit kept walking. There was nowhere else to go.

The brother's eyes went over her face, her muddy hems, the boy. They stopped on her mouth. She realised she was still tasting copper, and that she had wiped her lips with the back of her hand.

He said nothing. He stepped aside to let her pass.

At the turn of the corridor she glanced back. He was standing at the top of the dead-house stair, looking down into the dark. Then he went down, ledger and all, toward the fourth row.

* * *

The heretic was in his grave when she got home. Tobit had come back ahead of her through the gate after all and finished it. The earth was mounded badly, like a sleeping dog.

On the hut wall, beside the horse with its loaf, there was a new drawing.

A lantern. The Cathedral's lantern, she'd have said, with its tall glass and iron crown. But inside the glass, where the flame should be, Tobit had drawn an eye. Open. Lashes and all.

"Where did you see this?"

Tobit looked at the wall, and then away toward the city, toward the haze where the Lantern's spire stood. He did not draw anything else.

"In the dead-house? On the stair?"

He shook his head. His mouth tightened. He went inside and lay down on his pallet with his face to the wall, and she let him, because she had no more answers than he did.

She sat on the step with the notebook open on her knee and read the thirty-nine things she still had until the words stopped meaning anything. Then she sharpened the spade, because her hands needed something to do.

The Lantern's bells rang dusk. Somewhere behind the walls, they would be lighting the pyre.

She did not look toward the smoke.

* * *

It was near midnight when the gate creaked.

She had the spade in her hand before she was on her feet. A handcart stood in the lane, and behind it the tall brother from the corridor, the ink on his cuffs gone black in the moonlight. His breath smoked. He had pushed that cart a long way uphill.

Under a sackcloth on the cart lay a shape too small to be a man.

"You're out late for a holy man," Ilse said.

He did not answer. He drew the sackcloth back.

A girl, sixteen or so. Brown hair, chapped lips, a servant's rough apron. Her right hand lay open on her chest, and sewn into the palm with six neat yellow stitches was a medal. A woman with a covered bell.

"She died yesterday," the brother said. "Afternoon. They found her in the Saltmarket cistern."

"And brought her to me? She'll be on a list."

"She was on a list." His jaw worked. "The l-lay brothers have l-lost her paperwork. Twice. They w-would have l-lost her too, in the oven, by morning, w-without anyone asking why a p-plague girl has p-pink hands." He stopped. He breathed through his nose until the stammer let go of him.

Ilse looked at the girl's palm. At the rim of skin around the medal. Pink.

"Who are you?"

"Anselm." He did not offer a title, and she noticed that. "I saw you come up the stair today with a copper in your fist. Nobody in Grael pays the ferryman any more, sister. And I saw your face." He laid one inked hand on the cart's edge, beside the girl's shoulder. "She has one day left before she's past whatever it is you do. I can't make you. I won't report you either way."

He took a copper from his own sleeve and set it on the cart, beside her open hand.

"So. Will you?"

Ilse looked at the coin. She thought of number twelve in her notebook, and thirteen, and all the ones after, waiting their turn.

Her tongue found the chip in her tooth.

The spade was still in her other hand. She leaned it against the gate.