Pell
He was lying on his back on the rubbish heap, with his arms spread out on either side of him, as if he had fallen backward into a soft bed and was too tired to get up.
That was the first thing Corin thought.
He looks tired.
Not dead.
Not murdered.
Just a young man who had lain down at the end of a long day and gone to sleep with his eyes open.
He was not big.
Smaller than Toby, even.
Slim and narrow-shouldered, in the gray coat and gray trousers of a Ministry scribe, both of them soaked dark with damp and smeared with the filth of the heap.
One of his boots had come off.
It lay on its side a little way down the slope of rubbish, among the broken crates, and his foot was bare except for a gray wool sock with a hole in the big toe.
His cap had come off too.
His hair was brown and curly and thick, too long for a Ministry clerk, falling over his forehead.
His face was round and young and freckled.
He had a wide mouth that looked as though it was used to laughing.
It was not laughing now.
It was slightly open.
And his eyes were open too.
They were brown.
Warm brown, like strong tea.
And they were looking up at the thin gray strip of sky between the black brick walls with an expression that Corin had seen before.
He had seen it that very morning, on the second-floor landing of No.
14 Tallow Street.
On the faces of the men on the docks.
Calm.
Gentle.
Pleasant.
Empty.
The face of a Slate.
Except that a Slate was alive, and Pell Dorran was not.
Corin stood at the foot of the rubbish heap and looked at him for a long time without moving.
He did not take out the Ledger.
He did not take out the rod.
He just looked, the way he had been taught to look, though he did not remember being taught.
Look first.
Touch second.
Breathe last.
He did not know where those words had come from either.
They were simply there, in the quiet gray place behind his eyes, like the furniture in a room he had lived in for years.
Behind him, he heard Toby breathing.
Short, fast, shallow breaths, like a dog that has run too far.
“Is it him?” said Corin, without turning round.
“Yes.” Toby’s voice was very small.
“That’s him.
That’s Pell.” A pause.
“His hair.
He wouldn’t get it cut.
Supervisor Grane kept writing him up for it.
He said it was the only thing he had that was his own.”
The Doctor
The tall thin doctor had stopped humming.
He straightened up from his crouch beside the heap, slowly, with a crack of knees, and wiped his long gray hands on a white handkerchief, finger by finger.
“Harvester,” he said.
It was not a question.
He had a deep, slow, mournful voice, like a bell at a funeral.
“Fane.
Watch surgeon, Ink Quarter.
I have been looking at your young man for an hour.
I have seen a great many dead men in this Quarter.
Stabbed, strangled, drowned, poisoned, burned, beaten, and on one memorable occasion, eaten by pigs.” He folded his handkerchief into a neat square and tucked it into his breast pocket.
“I have never seen anything like this.”
“Tell me.”
“The skull first.
Since it is the thing everyone will talk about.” Dr.
Fane bent and, very gently, with two long fingers, turned Pell’s head a little to one side on the rubbish.
Toby made a sound and turned away.
The back of the young man’s head was broken.
Not cut.
Not crushed, quite.
Broken, the way a plate breaks when you drop it on a stone floor.
A web of cracks, spreading out from one point just behind the right ear.
The curly brown hair there was dark and matted.
“A single blow,” said Dr.
Fane.
“Hard.
Heavy.
Something round.
A club, perhaps, or the head of a stick.
But here is the curious thing.” He laid Pell’s head gently back as it had been, facing the sky.
“There is very little blood.
Very little bruising.
Hardly any swelling at all.
Do you understand what that means, Harvester?”
Corin thought.
Then he said, slowly, “He was already dead.”
“Or so near it as makes no difference.” The doctor nodded.
“The heart had stopped, or almost stopped, before the blow fell.
The blow did not kill him.
The blow came afterward.
To make it look as though it had.”
“And the other thing?”
The doctor was quiet for a moment.
“Look at his eyes,” he said.
Corin looked.
The warm brown eyes looked back at the sky.
Calm.
Pleasant.
Empty.
“I have a small skill,” said Dr.
Fane.
“Not much.
A very little Sensory Burn.
I learned it in the army, a long time ago.
It costs me the taste of something each time, and I have already given up oranges and apricots and the taste of good wine, so I do not use it lightly.” He took off his spectacles and polished them on his sleeve.
“But I used it this morning.
On him.
I put my hand on his forehead and I listened.
The way you listen to a man’s chest to hear his heart.
Except that I was listening for his mind.”
“And?”
The doctor put his spectacles back on.
Behind them, his long gray face looked very old.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Do you understand me?
Not damage.
Not burn scars, the way you find in a mage who has used too much.
Not the slow wearing-away you find in a Slate.
Nothing.
Every pathway.
Every road and lane and alley of that young man’s mind, scrubbed clean.
Swept bare.
As clean as a slate that has been washed with a wet cloth.
His name.
His mother’s face.
How to walk.
How to tie a boot.
How to breathe.” He paused.
“All of it, taken.
In one go.
Very fast.
Faster than I would have believed possible.”
The lantern flickered on its barrel.
Somewhere far back up Gutter Lane, the crowd at the rope murmured like the sea.
“And that,” said Dr.
Fane quietly, “is what killed him.
Not the blow.
Somebody took everything he was.
And without it, his body simply forgot how to be alive.”
Third This Year
Sergeant Moll had been listening with his pipe gone cold in his hand.
Now he knocked it out against the side of the barrel, sharply, three times.
“Third one,” he said.
Corin looked at him.
“Third one this year.
In my Quarter.” The sergeant’s boiled-ham face was red, and not from the cold.
“First was in the spring.
A woman.
Ink-shop girl, from Madame Oola’s.
Found her in a doorway on Quill Street.
Same eyes.
Same everything.
Second was in the summer.
Old man.
Some kind of scholar.
Lived alone in two rooms over a candle shop, wrote books nobody read.
Found him at his desk, pen still in his hand.” He jammed the cold pipe back between his teeth.
“I wrote them up.
Both of them.
Sent the reports to the Ministry.
Asked for a harvester.
Asked for anyone.”
“And?”
“And nothing.
Two weeks, and a clerk comes down from the Ministry with a piece of paper.
Death by natural causes.
Case closed.
Do not investigate further.
Stamped and sealed.” He spat on the ground.
“Natural causes.
A girl of nineteen.
With her head scrubbed out like a pot.”
Corin took out the Ledger and wrote: Third this year.
Spring: ink-shop girl, Madame Oola’s, Quill Street.
Summer: old scholar, over candle shop.
Both closed by Ministry.
“Natural causes.”
He looked at it.
Then he wrote, underneath: Why did they send a harvester this time?
And underneath that, after a moment: Because this time it’s one of theirs.
The Button
Corin pulled on the thin gray gloves.
They fit him like a second skin, soft and worn, every crease in the leather matching a crease in his hands.
Then he climbed carefully up the slope of the rubbish heap, testing each step on the broken crates and rotten sacks, and knelt beside Pell Dorran.
Look first.
Touch second.
He looked.
He looked at the young man’s hands, lying open on the rubbish on either side of him, palms up, as if he were waiting to catch rain.
They were small hands, thin-fingered, a scribe’s hands.
The first two fingers of the right hand were stained black almost to the second knuckle with ink, so deeply that it had sunk into the skin and would never have washed out.
There was a hard lump on the side of the middle finger, where a pen had rested every day for years.
The nails were bitten short.
There was no ring.
No watch.
The pockets of the gray coat had been turned inside out, and hung down limply like the ears of a dead rabbit.
Empty.
“His satchel,” said Toby, from the bottom of the heap.
He had turned back around.
His face was white, but he was looking.
“He always had a satchel.
Brown leather.
With a buckle that didn’t work.
He kept it shut with a bootlace.”
“It’s not here,” said Sergeant Moll.
“We looked.
Nothing here but him.”
Corin looked at the young man’s coat.
It was a Ministry coat.
Gray wool, cheaply made, the same as Toby’s, with a high collar and a row of brass buttons down the front.
Each button was stamped with the Ministry sign, the open book and the closed eye.
They were dull and scratched and the stamp on some of them was worn almost away.
He counted them.
Six on the front.
Two on each cuff.
He looked at the left cuff.
Two buttons.
Brass.
Open book.
Closed eye.
He looked at the right cuff.
The one by the ink-stained hand.
One button was the same as all the rest.
The other was not.
It was brass, like the others, and the same size, and sewn on with the same gray thread.
But it was older.
Much older.
The brass had gone dark, almost brown, worn smooth and shining at the edge where years of a thumb had rubbed it.
And the pattern stamped on it was not the Ministry’s book and eye.
It was a leaf.
A single leaf, with a long stalk, and wavy, rounded edges, like little scallops.
An oak leaf.
Stamped deep into the old brass, so cleanly that even worn as it was, Corin could see every line of its veins.
He looked at it for a long time.
He did not know why.
It was a button.
An old button, sewn onto a cuff where a Ministry button had been lost.
People lost buttons every day.
People sewed on whatever button they had.
But something in the quiet gray place behind his eyes had gone very still, and very alert, like a dog that has heard its name called from very far away.
“Toby,” he said.
“This button.”
Toby came closer, up the first step of the heap, reluctantly.
He peered at the cuff through his thick spectacles.
“Oh,” he said.
“That.
Yes.
He always had that one.
He lost the proper one his first week, and he sewed that on instead, and Supervisor Grane wrote him up for it.
Improper uniform.” A small, wet, crooked smile.
“Pell said he didn’t care.
He said it was from home.
His gran gave it to him when he left.
It was off his grandfather’s coat, or something.
He said everyone in his village had them, the old people.
It was their sign.”
“Their sign,” said Corin.
“The oak leaf.”
“I suppose.” Toby shrugged unhappily.
“I don’t know.
He never said what village.
I asked once.
He just laughed and said you’ve never heard of it, Toby, nobody has.
It’s not on the maps.”
Corin did not say anything.
After a moment, he took out the Ledger and wrote, very carefully: Right cuff.
Old brass button.
Oak leaf.
“From home.” Village not on the maps.
He looked at the words for a long moment.
Then he looked at the first page of the Ledger.
At the inside of the front cover.
At the second line.
You were born in Oakhaven.
He did not know where Oakhaven was.
He had never seen the word anywhere except in his own handwriting.
It was just a word.
Oak.
Haven.
He closed the Ledger.
The Red Sock
Corin stayed kneeling on the rubbish heap for a while after he had closed the Ledger.
He did not move.
He looked at the young man’s bare foot, with its gray wool sock and its hole in the big toe, sticking out from the end of the gray trouser leg.
Then he looked down the slope of the heap, at the boot that had come off.
It was lying on its side between two broken crates, half in a puddle of black ink-water.
An ordinary boot.
Brown leather, cracked across the toe, with the heel worn down on the outside edge.
The kind of boot a young man buys once, secondhand, and then wears every day until it falls apart.
Look first.
“Sergeant,” said Corin.
“Did anyone touch the boot?”
Sergeant Moll frowned.
“The boot?
No.
Why would we?
It came off when they threw him down, I reckon.”
“Boots don’t come off when you throw a man down.
Not laced boots.” Corin climbed carefully down the heap.
“Somebody pulled it off.
Looking for something.
And then they heard Wick tread on the bottle, and they dropped it, and they ran.”
He crouched beside the boot.
He did not pick it up.
He looked at it.
The laces were still tied, in a tight double knot.
It had been pulled off without being untied, hard, and the leather at the back of the heel was torn where a hand had wrenched it.
He picked it up, then.
Gently.
He turned it over and tipped it toward the lantern so that the light shone into it.
Something was stuffed into the toe.
Something red.
He reached in, carefully, with two gloved fingers, and drew it out.
It was a sock.
A woolen sock, knitted by hand, bright red once but faded now to the color of dried roses, and darned at the heel with blue thread.
It was heavy.
It clinked when he moved it.
The top of it had been knotted shut with a piece of string.
Behind him, at the corner of the alley, he heard a sharp breath.
Toby had not gone all the way to the end of the lane after all.
He was standing at the bend, half hidden by the corner of the wall, with one hand pressed against the slimy brick.
He was staring at the red sock.
“That’s it,” he whispered.
“That’s his money.
For his sister.
He said he hid it where nobody would think to look.
He said he kept it on him, all the time, because his rooms had rats and the landlord had a key.” His voice cracked.
“In his boot.
The idiot.
The great donkey-laughing idiot.
In his boot.”
Corin untied the string.
He tipped the sock gently over his gloved palm.
Coins slid out.
Coppers, mostly.
Brown and worn.
And a few silvers, bright among them like stars in mud.
He did not count them.
He did not need to.
It was not much.
It was what a Grade Three scribe might save, a coin at a time, over a year or two, by eating bread and dripping for his lunch on the boiler-room steps.
And folded among the coins, small and square and soft from being handled, a letter.
The Letter
Corin put the coins back in the sock, one by one, and laid it on the barrel beside the lantern.
Then he unfolded the letter.
It was written on cheap brown paper, the kind that is used for wrapping fish, in pencil.
The handwriting was round and careful and young, the letters joined together the way children are taught to join them in a village school, with big loops on the ls and the hs.
The pencil had been pressed so hard that it had gone through the paper in two places.
Corin read it aloud.
He did not know why.
It seemed wrong to read it in silence, here, at the end of this alley, with the young man it was written to lying a few feet away.
Dear Pell,
Gran says to tell you the apples are in and they are the best for years.
She made six pies and gave one to the Coopers because of Old Abe’s leg.
I ate a whole one by myself and she did not notice, so do not tell her.
Gran says are you eating properly.
I said you are eating pigeon pies with your friend Toby and she made a face.
I have been practicing my letters like you said.
Can you tell?
I am going to be a scribe too and come to the city and sit at a desk and write all day and be bored like you.
You say it is boring but I do not believe you.
Gran says to tell you to keep the button safe.
She says you know why.
She says do not show it to anyone at your Ministry.
I do not know why she says that.
She will not tell me.
She says I am too young.
I am TWELVE.
The tree has new birds on it this year.
Gran carved one for Grandad.
It is a robin.
It is very good.
Come home at the harvest if you can.
If you cannot, I will come to you when you have saved enough.
You promised.
Your sister,
Nan.
P.S.
Gran says to tell you we remember.
She always says that.
I do not know what it means either.
The alley was very quiet when he finished.
Sergeant Moll had taken his hat off.
He was holding it in both hands against his chest, turning it slowly round and round by the brim.
Dr.
Fane was looking at the ground.
Old Wick, on his crate in the dark corner, was rocking very gently back and forth, with his eyes shut.
And Toby, at the corner of the wall, had both hands over his face.
Corin folded the letter again.
Along the same soft creases, exactly as it had been folded before.
He looked at the top of it, and the bottom, and both sides, searching for the name of a village, a street, a town.
Anything.
There was nothing.
No address.
Only Dear Pell, and Your sister, Nan.
He turned it over.
On the back, in different handwriting, older and shakier and smaller, someone had drawn a tiny picture in pencil.
A tree.
A big, round, spreading tree.
And hanging from its branches, very small, a few tiny shapes that might have been birds.
He looked at it for a long time.
Then he put the letter back inside the red sock, with the coins, and tied the string again, and held it out to Toby.
“Keep this,” he said.
“Don’t log it.
Don’t put it in the evidence room.
Don’t tell anyone upstairs.”
Toby took his hands away from his face.
His spectacles were fogged.
He stared at the sock.
“That’s—I can’t.
That’s evidence.
There are forms.
If anyone finds out—”
“If the evidence room gets it,” said Corin quietly, “someone will count the coins, and write the number on a form in triplicate, and the coins will go into a Ministry strongbox and never come out.
And the letter will go in a file.
And the file will go in a drawer.
And in two weeks, a clerk will come down with a piece of paper that says natural causes.” He held the sock out a little further.
“And Nan will never get her brother’s money.
And she’ll never know what happened to him.
She’ll just stop getting letters.”
Toby looked at the red sock for a long moment.
Then he reached out with a shaking hand and took it, and pushed it deep into the inside pocket of his too-big gray coat, and buttoned the pocket over it.
“I’ll find her,” he said.
His voice was very low and very steady.
“I don’t know how.
But I’ll find her.
I’ll take it to her myself.”
“Good,” said Corin.
Sergeant Moll put his hat back on.
He did not say anything.
He looked at the Ministry harvester and the Ministry clerk for a long moment, with his boiled-ham face very still.
Then he turned and looked at the blank brick wall at the end of the alley, carefully, as a man looks at something very interesting when he wants it to be clear that he has not seen anything else at all.
Corin took out the Ledger one more time, and wrote: Pell’s sister: Nan, 12.
Lives with Gran.
Village with a tree hung with carved birds.
Gran: “keep the button safe, don’t show it at the Ministry.” “We remember.” Toby has the sock.
He looked at we remember for a moment.
The same words he had seen that morning, scratched small and old into the brown paint of the stairwell at No.
14 Tallow Street, near the fourth-floor landing.
He did not know what they meant.
But he underlined them.
Then he went back up the rubbish heap, to where Pell Dorran was lying with his warm brown eyes open to the sky, and knelt down beside him again.
What Was Left
Look first.
Touch second.
Breathe last.
Corin leaned down over Pell Dorran’s face, close, closer, until he could feel the cold coming off the young man’s skin.
He did not touch him.
He just looked into the open brown eyes, and past them.
And there, very deep, very faint, he saw it.
A light.
Not much.
Hardly anything.
A thread of pale blue-white, no thicker than a hair, curled up in the very bottom of the brown eyes like a sleeping cat at the bottom of a well.
It moved, very slightly.
It flickered.
It was so faint that if the lantern had been any brighter, he would never have seen it.
“There’s some left,” he said quietly.
Dr.
Fane drew in a sharp breath.
“That is not possible.
I listened.
There was nothing.”
“You listened for a mind,” said Corin.
“This isn’t a mind anymore.
It’s what’s left over.
The bit that was burning when he died.
The bit that didn’t go into the jar.” He did not know how he knew this either.
He only knew it was true.
“Whoever did this was fast.
But they weren’t perfect.
They were in a hurry.
Somebody trod on a bottle, and they turned round, and they stopped too soon.”
On his crate in the shadows, old Wick let out a thin, wavering moan.
“It’s Ash,” said Corin.
“A little.
Enough.”
He sat back on his heels on the rubbish heap.
He reached into the inside right pocket of his coat, and took out the silver rod, and held it in his gloved hand.
It was cold.
So cold.
And as soon as it was in his hand, the whisper came back, behind his eyes, dry and thin and rustling, like old paper turned in an empty room.
Clearer this time.
Almost words.
Well, well, it seemed to say.
Here we are again, scavenger.
What have you found me this time?
Corin ignored it.
He reached into his coat pocket and took out one of the three small jars, and unscrewed its brass lid, and set the lid down carefully on a broken crate beside him.
Then he turned his head.
“Toby,” he said.
“End of the alley.
Back turned.
Now, please.”
He heard Toby’s boots go stumbling and slipping away down the rubbish heap, and across the mud, and around the corner, fast.
He heard the sergeant shift his feet, and mutter something, and then step back, a long way back, to the far wall.
He heard the doctor close his black bag with a snap and step back too.
Nobody wanted to be close when a harvester breathed.
Corin knelt alone on the rubbish heap at the end of Gutter Lane, in the yellow light of a single lantern, with a dead young man lying in front of him, and a silver rod in one hand, and an open jar in the other.
He looked down into the warm brown eyes one last time.
“I’m sorry, Pell,” he said quietly.
“I didn’t know you.
I won’t remember you tomorrow.
But for the next few minutes, I’m going to know you better than anyone ever has.”
He touched the tip of the rod to the dead man’s forehead.
The thread of blue-white light in the bottom of the brown eyes stirred.
Lifted.
Uncurled, slowly, like smoke rising from a candle that has just been blown out.
It rose up out of the eyes, out of the still face, thin and pale and shining, and touched the spiral tip of the silver rod, and wound around it, round and round, following the carved lines, like a vine climbing a stick.
It was cold.
Colder than the rod.
Colder than anything.
And behind Corin’s eyes, the dry thin whisper laughed, very softly, in delight.
Breathe, scavenger, it said.
Breathe.
Corin lifted the rod to his lips, and closed his eyes, and breathed in.