Elder Mo lost the use of three fingers.
The physician from Duman came up at dawn and said what everyone in the room already knew, which was that the tendons were cut through in a place where nothing could be done, and that the hand would close and open in a limited way and would never again be able to tell the difference between two textures.
Which meant Mo Yeongsu, who had read corpses for forty-one years with the best hands in the Hall, would never read one again.
He took it the way he took the fee ledger.
"Chan-i is better than I was at his age," he said, to the ceiling, while they wrapped it. "Doha is something else entirely and not a replacement. Su Han is adequate and will improve if someone frightens him. Write that down, somebody, before I become sentimental and revise it."
Nobody laughed.
"That was a joke," said Elder Mo. "I want it noted in the ledger that I made a joke and nobody laughed."
The Cut was set for the ninth hour.
They performed it in the yard, in the open, with the bound corpse on the flat stone and forty rite-keepers standing in a ring at eight paces, and this time nobody had to be told to come.
Doha had slept for two hours. It was not enough and there was no more available.
He did the first four rites out loud.
The Washing had been done twice. The Binding had been done, comprehensively, by eleven people in a falling building. The Weighting: he set the stones, and every five seconds the ropes creaked, and he set them anyway.
Then the Naming, and this one he had.
"Hong Ji-an," he said. "Second son of the Snowlight Pavilion. Nineteen years old. He was on escort work in Sohari and he was walking on a road and somebody killed him because he happened to be there."
The ring of rite-keepers said nothing.
"He got his arm up," said Doha. "He was turning around and he got his arm up. That's what he did with the last part of his life and I want it said out loud, because he didn't know what was behind him and he tried anyway."
He looked up, at the woman standing at the edge of the ring with her hands at her sides.
"You are not lost," said Doha. "I know where you are."
Then he went down into the seat.
Twenty-two seconds.
Beat one. The left hand comes across the body and closes on a sheath that isn't there — and the fingers of that hand had a particular arrangement, a small specific curl, and Doha's own two crooked fingers made it easier and not harder, which was the first mercy of his life that had come out of that injury.
Beat two. The shoulders rotate. Not the hips. The hips stay in the seat and the spine stays perpendicular and everything above the belt turns like a millstone, slow, absolutely even, and the weight goes down through the heels the entire time — down and down, more of it, not less, so that by the top of the second beat he was heavier than he had been standing.
Beat three. The rise begins. And this was the part he had gotten wrong for three days, because it looked like standing up and it wasn't: the seat did not rise, the seat was released, and the whole structure came up in a spiral out of the ground like water finding a crack, and the blade left the sheath in the middle of it without anybody appearing to have decided anything.
The borrowed sword came out of Doha's scabbard in the third beat.
Beat four. Extension. Everything arriving.
And beat five —
— the pull.
Like a rope out of a well. That was what he had told them in the cold room, groping for it, and he had been right and had not understood what he was saying. At the end of the fourth beat, with the arm fully out and the edge at the top of its travel, the whole technique reversed its intention: everything that had been going out came back, slowly, drawing, the blade retracing its own line at a quarter of the speed with the wrist held at an angle that had nothing whatsoever to do with cutting.
You could not kill anyone with the fifth beat. It was not for cutting.
It was for taking something out.
Doha finished the draw eighteen inches above the bound body of Hong Ji-an, and the knot untied.