Wick Thread

Grey noon came through the shutters in strips and lay across the counter like dirty bandages. The store smelled of tallow, and under the tallow it smelled of Hobb's chair: old wool, fever-sweat, the sweet rot of a sickroom nobody had aired.

Ilse shut the oilcloth book and pushed it inside her coat, against her ribs. It was cold through her shirt.

Through the slats she could see the cart. Haske sat on the box with the reins slack in one fist. He was grinning his half-teeth grin at nothing in particular, the way a dog grins in hot weather.

Somebody else was climbing down from beside him.

He was a soft man in a lay brother's brown, round in the face and round in the shoulders. He wiped his palms down the front of his habit as he came, once, twice, as if he had touched something wet. A brass key hung from his wrist on a cord.

"Brother," Anselm said at the door, loud. "You're early."

"Brother Mattick, Saint Barrow's. Ward witness for the recount." The man's voice was mild and pleased with itself. "I thought I'd spare the ward the walk. Only the one locker wants clearing, the drowned boy's. Then we burn the lot and I'm home for soup."

He drew a pen from his sleeve, wiped the nib on his tongue, and ticked something on a list without looking at it.

Ilse sank down behind the counter. Her knees found the boards. Tobit was a shape in the back doorway, chalk held still in his fist.

"The store is sealed until the bell," Anselm said.

"And I have the key to the seal." Mattick's key went jingling past the end of the counter. "You're Anselm, aren't you? The counting one. I've read your letter. Everybody's read your letter."

Anselm said nothing. She heard the cloth of his sleeve as he pulled at his cuff.

The lockers stood along the back wall, ten narrow doors of grey pine with names burned into the lintels. Ilse could see them from where she crouched, under the lip of the counter. VARN was third from the end.

She could stay down. The ledger was inside her coat. Mattick would take what was in the locker, nod at the corpse, ride off for his soup, and nobody would ever know she had been here.

Mattick's key turned. The little door swung.

He took out a coil of wick thread first, a fat skein of it, and tossed it on the floor for the fire. Then a handbell, small enough to sit in a palm, its brass lip gone green. Somebody had bound a rag tight over its clapper with more of the same thread. When Mattick shook it, it made a dull knock, like a knuckle on a coffin lid.

He frowned at it. Then he took out a folded card, stained brown at one corner, and put it in his own pocket without unfolding it.

Ilse stood up.

"That's my brother's," she said.

Mattick turned. He had pale eyes with hardly any lashes, and they went to her tooth, and then to the twine in her hair, and then to Anselm.

"Is it," he said. "And who let you in?"

"Give me the card."

"It's ward property. Everything in a plague store is ward property." He wiped his free hand down his habit. "Are you family? Family can apply to the—"

She came around the counter and took his wrist.

It was a stupid thing to do. She knew it while she did it. He was heavier than he looked and he pulled, and the bell knocked dully against his hip, and her coat swung open, and the oilcloth book slid out of it and hit the floor on its spine.

It fell open where it had been opened last. It was a book that remembered.

Mattick looked down. The page lay between their feet, Emil's name sloping uphill, and under it, small and neat:

Witnessed. Br. Mattick.

He went the colour of tallow. Then he dropped to grab it.

Ilse got her boot on the corner. He got both hands on the binding and wrenched, and the oilcloth tore with a sound like a sheet ripping. He was half up with the book clutched to his chest when Anselm reached him.

"You s-s-signed," Anselm said. "You s-signed him. You never s-saw him. You were there."

He took Mattick by the front of his habit and put him into the tally board.

The board slammed back on its hinge. Mattick's head met the iron catch with a noise Ilse felt in her teeth. He sat down hard among the pegs, a thin line of blood ran out of his hair and along his eyebrow, and the book fell out of his arms.

Anselm stood over him. His hands were open and lifted a little, as if he had been burned and was waiting to see where.

Mattick touched his forehead and looked at his fingers. Then he was up and through the door faster than a soft man ought to move, out into Wickmongers' Lane, and his voice went up the walls.

"Ward! Ward! The grave-wife's in the plague store, and Anselm's with her, Anselm struck me, ward!"

The young lay brother on the step stared after him with his mouth open. Then he ran too, the other way.

Ilse snatched up the book. Tobit was already on the floor, scooping the handbell into his shirt. The folded card had fallen from Mattick's pocket by the door, face down in the slush from someone's boots. She took that as well.

At the street door, Haske had come down off the box.

He didn't say anything. He went to the cart bed, where two shapes lay under a stained sheet, lifted the corner, and jerked his head at the gap.

* * *

Under the sheet it was dark and close, and the dead were very cold.

Ilse lay on her side against the boards with the ledger under her and a stranger's elbow in her back. Tobit was folded small against her front. Anselm was too long for the cart and lay with his knees up, and his boots, she knew, were sticking out at the tail. There was nothing to be done about it.

Then Hobb came down on top of them.

Haske had carried her out alone. Ilse could tell by the grunt. Hobb was light, a bundle of sticks in a shawl, and the shawl still smelled of the shop. Haske tucked the sheet down around them all like a nurse. He dropped a sack across Anselm's feet.

"Breathe small," he said. "The dead don't pant."

The cart lurched. The bell began to clank on its post over the box, slow and steady. That was the ring that meant stand back, and in Grael people did.

Ahead, voices. Running feet. A man shouting for the Wickmongers' ward-captain. The cart did not hurry. Haske was singing under his breath, something filthy about a miller's daughter, and the cart rolled through the shouting at a dead man's pace.

Tobit's hand found Ilse's in the dark. His fingers were chalky. She held on.

At the Rushlight bridge they stopped.

"What've you got?"

"Three for the pyre," Haske said, "and one of them's been leaking since Tuesday. You want to count teeth, brother, there's a spare pair of gloves under the seat."

A pause. A boot scraped. Somebody spat.

"Get on."

The bell clanked. The cart rolled. Ilse realised she had the corner of Hobb's shawl in her teeth. She let it go and tasted wool and lye.

They stopped twice more. Each time Haske had a different joke and each time the joke was worse. The second time a guard laughed. The third time nobody did, and Ilse heard the guard walk the length of the cart, slow, to the tail, where the sack lay across Anselm's boots.

"Twelfth bell before I'm fed, at this rate," Haske said, very bored, and the guard walked back the other way.

Then the cobbles turned to frozen ruts, the city smell turned to ditch smell, and the cart stopped under the Mercy Gate's long arch, where the wind came through.

* * *

Haske handed them down on the outer side, in the shadow of the gate's buttress where the wall-walk couldn't see. He handed Tobit down like a sack of meal. He handed Anselm down like a ladder.

He kept hold of Ilse's wrist after her feet touched the ground.

"That's the ride paid for," he said, "and now I'll name the favour."

His thumb was on the bone of her wrist. Not hard. He wasn't grinning.

"One night soon, I'll bring you one. You'll put it in the ground and you'll not write it in your book. No board, no name. And you'll not put a coin in its mouth." He looked at her mouth when he said it. "Not your copper. Not anyone's."

Ilse ran her tongue over the chip in her front tooth.

She had never told Haske about the coin. She had never told anyone. She thought of yesterday, of how long she had been down in the dead-house while he waited above, and of the face she must have worn coming up.

"Who is it?" she said.

"Somebody who'd rather keep their own business." He let go of her wrist. "You took the ride, Ilse Varn. Twice now."

She had. She'd known it was a debt when she climbed into the cart the first time.

"All right," she said.

Half of Haske's grin came back. He climbed onto the box and clucked to the horse, and Hobb went rocking back into the city to burn, the sheet tucked neatly to her chin.

Anselm had been standing against the buttress with his arms folded. He'd watched her face the whole time. He didn't ask. When the cart had gone, his hand went to the ledger under his arm, and stopped, and stayed where it was.

* * *

The shed at the yard was cold enough to see your breath. Ilse lit the candle stub on the trestle and put the oilcloth book beside it. The binding hung half off where Mattick had torn it.

Anselm set his own ledger next to it.

He didn't sit. He couldn't seem to. His hands were shaking badly, the long fingers jumping on the cover, and he pressed them flat on the wood, and they went on shaking flat.

"I've never struck anyone," he said. "I've written things about people. That's worse, some would say. But I've never..." He looked at his knuckles. "His head. The sound of it."

"He'll live," Ilse said. "He ran fast enough."

"They'll have my name off the rolls by vespers. Mattick will tell it well. He's had practice making things sound like other things." He tapped his ledger. "This was the price, wasn't it? Your dead, my records. I can't get you another page now. I couldn't get you a hymn sheet. There isn't a door in the Lantern that will open to me."

"Then that bargain's dead."

"Yes."

"Good," she said. "I never liked it. It made me your clerk."

He looked up. Something in his face eased, and then tightened again.

"And the ward will want a gravedigger," he said. "With a chipped tooth, Mattick will say. And twine in her hair. He was looking."

"I saw him look."

Tobit had pulled the handbell out of his shirt. He set it on the trestle, carefully, mouth down, between the two ledgers. Then he took his hands away and wiped them on his knees, both of them, over and over, and would not touch it again.

Ilse looked at the rag bound over the clapper. A quiet bell. Saint Greta's bell, with a cloth over its mouth. She thought of the bell in Emil's last hour, ringing right above his head where no tower stood. She did not pick it up either.

She unfolded the card from the locker instead.

The front was what she had expected. A hospice chit, the red wax lantern with the eye in its flame, lamp oil browning one corner. Six. Wicks. The same as the one on Hobb's counter.

She turned it over.

The back was written in a small careful hand, and the hand had left marks of its own: black fingerprints at the edges, round and smudged, where burned fingertips had held the card while the ink dried.

Vigil. Third watch.

Five names, in a column. Two were struck through with a single neat line each, the way a clerk cancels an entry that has been paid.

~~E. Varn, Rushlight~~

~~Berit, Saltmarket~~

"Berit," Ilse said aloud.

Tobit's head came up. He looked at her, then at the card, then at the door. He took his chalk from his pocket and went out into the yard, toward the new grave with the wicker basket drawn on its board, to give her the name she had been missing.

Anselm came around the trestle and read over her shoulder. His breath smelled of the cold.

"Your brother's on a roster," he said quietly. "For a watch."

"He carried their thread for two years." Her voice came out flat, and she let it. "He knew what it was for. He was one of them."

"Or they wanted him to think so."

She didn't answer. She was reading the three names that were left. They had not been struck through. They were waiting.

Hal Sennet, Coopers' Bridge.

Oda Corran, Wick Steps.

And the last, in the same neat, patient hand:

Nib, St. Barrow's tower.

Nib. The bell-ringer's boy, with the cold-cracked lips, who had run all the way out to the north wall at dawn yesterday to tell her that Emil was in the canal.