Chapter 8: The Second Hearse

The Second Hearse

Down in the Coil there was no up, no sun, no weather, nothing to measure himself against, and he had been going down long enough that time had stopped being an amount of anything and had gone over into a direction, and the direction was down.

The guide-lamp stood small and hard over the back of his wrist, good for an arm’s length, and past that it showed him what black looks like with a light in it. His tracking sigil was out ahead somewhere. He went where it pulled and stopped using his eyes for anything else.

He saw Sable once. The back came up out of the dark on his left — brown, ridged like a plowed field, a long way of it and then more of it — and went down again, and the water closed over the place it had been, and after that the sigil was only a sigil. He followed it anyway. There was nothing else down here to follow.

The bottom came up under him late and then all at once. He found it with the toes of his boots: soft, then grit, then an edge, then straight. Silt is round and cut stone is square, and no river lays square stone.

Ahead of the lamp the black took a shape. Two pillars, twenty feet apart, with the dark standing up between them where a door ought to be.

They were cut the way the Bearing Stones are cut — a squared drum, a stand, a slope, a seat. He knew the near one the way a man knows the back of a chair in his own kitchen: the long lean of it, the shelf, the notch out of the seaward face where the weather works. Somebody had cut North Heron out of the bottom of a river.

He did not say anything about that. He put his hand on it, because it was the only thing down here he had ever seen before.

Both pillars were written over from about the waist up: godscript, close and even, row on row, no space kept between the lines. His godscript was never good and the lamp was no better, so he got a word in nine. Halfway up the near pillar there was a phrase he could read both ends of — the high word, and then the sign for a name put into a book. True king. Or rightful king, one of those. And under it: enrolled.

He turned the lamp to catch the next line and got a piece of a verb and nothing after it. It read like a commendation. Somebody had written this god’s good works on the god’s own doorposts and signed it in a hand that had been taught to write in a chancery — square, patient, no pleasure in it anywhere. He thought: the Chancery. He thought it the way you think a thing you cannot see. Then he let it go, because he could not see it.

Past the pillars there were steps. Cut steps, going up out of the water toward a doorway the size of a barn door, and he went up them and stepped through.

The water did not come with him.

Not thinned, not dripped away. It stopped at the threshold all at once, the way smoke stops at a screen, and stood there behind him, upright and black, and did not come in. He walked into the house dry and stood a moment with his back to it.

He kept the ward up anyway — a hand’s width of cold carried around a room that had no use for it. It was politeness, and there was nobody in the room to be polite to.

That was when he noticed he could hear. The whole way down he had been deaf — under water, nothing arrives — and inside the door he heard his own boot come down on the floor and the small hum the guide-lamp made at his wrist, and both of them were loud.

The room was three or four times the lamp chapel up on the bank, and it was not a chapel. He had been in chapels since he was a boy and he knew what chapels were for. This room had not been built for people, and there was nowhere in it to stand that was not in the way.

The only light in it was the one on his wrist.

The floor was stone, worn down in a path that ran from the door to the far end and back again, worn the way a floor is worn where something heavy goes the same way every day.

There were coppers on it. He put his boot down on one and it slid out from under him, and he bent and picked it up: one of the thin cheap ones they throw into the water before they push the girl in, green at the rim, thin as a fingernail. He turned it over once and put it back where it had been. There were more of them along the foot of the altar, in the angle where the step met the wall. Some green through. Some still with the shine on them. He crouched over the little heap and could not work out how many years were in it.

The altar was at the far end and took up the whole of it, two men high standing on each other’s shoulders, and it was the only finished thing in the room.

On the middle of it, upright on a block of the same stone, was a god-tag.

Gray wood, no longer than his palm. He knew the shape before he knew the letters; every registered shrine in the valley keeps one by the door. He had never seen one at the bottom of a river.

The name was cut in common letters. That is what a god-tag is for.

MISTER SABLE.

Up close there was a smell. Faint and old: fish, low tide, and something colder underneath it, like the inside of a well. It was not coming off the stone.

The four corners of the altar were worn flat. Not chipped — worn, the way a stair is worn, by weight crossing the same place over and over: all four corners taken down, and a curve worn along the top between them.

He climbed up onto it, which he was going to have to answer for at some point, and stood where the thing lay, and looked back down the room from up there.

That was when he heard the bells.

Coach bells — four of them, the flat brass kind they hang at the corners. Not the rattle of something loose. The same four notes that had come up over the water with the first coach, out of the dry dark at the far end of the room this time, coming closer.

He turned around.

There was a coach in the room.

Five of the little dead had it. One at each corner of the body, one behind at the shaft — green-faced, tusked, out of the old run of carving over the shrine doors and gone to work, not ghosts and not men. Shoulders down, heels dug in, the strain in them the way it is in men carrying something past their weight.

It was the same coach. Same height, same black sides, same four bells, same ribbons at the corners, no horses and no driver and nobody walking at the head of it, and the whole of it printed over with paper.

He had walked the other one up onto the bank an hour ago, hand over hand on the shaft, and put the end of it into Wren Ashby’s hands, and she had had both of hers on it with her heels in the mud. Nobody had said a word to him about a second one.

He got down off the altar, so as not to be standing on the god’s bed when company came, and looked at it for a while.

“All right,” he said.

The paper went from the roof down to the shafts. Slips, a span long, cut square, laid flat edge to edge and then over each other, layer on layer, until the coach had stopped being a coach with paper on it and had become paper in the shape of a coach. None of it lifted at the corners. Somebody had taken their time.

At the front, over the door, two slips bigger than the rest, side by side. He knew what they were before he read them, because nobody cuts a ward that size and hangs it head high over a door to keep out weather.

He read them anyway. Out loud, under his breath, the way he reads everything.

The high ward casts down all evil.
The true word breaks the fierce and the crooked.

He knew the pair. He had not seen anything cut heavier in the valley, or anywhere else he had been.

He read them a second time, the way he would read anything he was going to have to answer for. Then he went around the back of the altar.

Counting them as he came, there were five little dead and all five were still holding. The one at the shaft had his eyes on the floor.

A coach does not come off its wheels onto stone without ringing the whole floor. This one put its weight down and the floor took it and gave nothing back, and the four bells ran out their note and quit, and the quiet afterward was a different size than the sound before it.

He went around the back of the coach. There was no driver’s box on it, and there had not been one on the other one either. The shaft hung empty. The ribbons were tied the way ribbon is tied for a funeral, which he had known at the water’s edge and had not wanted to be sure about.

He stood behind it and thought about the first coach, and it did not take long.

The first one had had no paper on it at all. Not one slip, not one line, nothing cut and pasted from the door to the wheels. You do not paper what you are selling. You paper what you are afraid of, and whoever wrapped this one had been afraid of it slowly, going back for another length of paper and then another. Whatever that paper was cut for, it was not cut for a man. A man is held with rope and two men sitting on him.

He went along the near side and read as much of the layering as the lamp would let him have. It was one hand the whole way down: the same square cut, the same tight line, the same word for the fierce and the crooked coming back and again and again, because the man writing it had not been going for beauty.

He still did not know who the coach was for, or who had cut the paper, or whether the thing the paper was for was already in there with him or still out in the river, coming.

He had come down here to make sense of a wedding. Whatever this was, it was worse than a wedding, and there was a hand behind it that he had not seen yet.

He stood in the dry, a hand’s width of cold around him, with the coach between him and the door and the river standing up black in the doorway behind it, and waited.