Kael

Observation, self · Day

I do not know the day. I have counted from the wrong thing twice and there is no book to check it against and I have been lying here long enough to have tried.

That is the first difficulty and it is not the important one and I keep going back to it.

The floor is cold. I have already written that somewhere, I think, in the other one, but the other one is ash under a pillar somewhere behind me and I am not going to be able to check anything I have ever written again, and so I will write it twice and let whoever finds this decide which of us was repeating himself.

Nine pillars, dark. Prayer inscriptions on all of them, which are marks now. Language with nobody left to read it.

The dais is empty. There is a scorch and there is nothing else and there is not going to be anything else. I knew the man for eleven years as a shape on a coin and I have no idea what to feel and I have looked.

There are thirty-one of them along the north wall.

I did not know that. I was on the floor for the whole of it and I did not know there was anyone else in the room. They are in a row at the amplifiers and they went where they knelt.

One of them, four in from the end, an older woman, has her hand flat on the stone.

Not folded. Not at her chest. Flat, palm down, fingers a little spread, the arm straight and the shoulder turned into it, and I have stood in front of that posture for some time now because it is my own. It is the exact thing I did on a corridor wall at four years old and on a wall in the Ashlands at forty-one days and on this floor an hour ago with a hand that cannot feel.

She was praying. That is what it is. She was an old woman at the end of the world with her hand on the temple and she was praying the way the faithful pray, and I have been standing here envying her, because she had somewhere to put her hand and something on the other side of it, and I have had neither of those things since the eleventh day of the ninth month, and I gave them back myself.

I would put her name in this if I had it.

The Coalition came in on the fourth day. I was in the outer districts by then, which took me two days on hands I do not want to describe.

They are efficient and they are kind in the specific way of people working from a list. There is a woman from Varix at the eastern gate with a table and a ledger and she asks everyone the same four questions in the same order and she has been doing it for eleven hours and she has not once let it become a recitation.

The terms are complete disentanglement. Every thread out of every citizen. Every lattice dark. The Lightways down.

I want to record that I agree with the terms, and that I was not consulted, and that both of those are true and neither of them is comfortable.

The water went in the second week.

I will not put the number here. I know the number and I have been told the number four times by people who did not know they were telling it to me, and I am not going to write it down, because I have spent my life putting figures in fields and I have learned in the last month that a figure in a field is a way of not looking at a thing.

I carried water. That is what I can put down. Eleven days in the southern provinces carrying water in a pair of hands that will not close, badly, slowly, and being thanked for it by people who would have opened my throat in the street if they had known who they were thanking.

I did not tell them. I want to be honest that this was not humility. It was that they were tired and the buckets were heavy and a confession would have been a thing they then had to carry as well.

Here is the difficulty, and I have been circling it for four pages because there is no field for it.

I keep looking for the anger.

I look for it the way you go back into a room for a thing you have already failed to find in that room. Brother Oresh, and the handlers, and the door with no inside handle, and the file closed on a boy who went to a labour cohort. It is all there. I can lay it out in order. It happened, and it was done to me, and it was done as administration, and every part of it is exactly as true as it was when I was eleven.

And there is nothing in it. It is a set of facts about a building.

I gave the anger back. I did it deliberately, on the floor of that room, as an item on a list, because it had been taken and not outgrown and I would not be edited. I would do it again. I am doing it again every day, which is the part nobody warns you about.

What I did not understand, and what I would like recorded by somebody in case it is useful, is that the anger was the only part of the account that was mine. The rest was the bill.

So I have the bill and I do not have the grievance. I have four months of water and the number I will not write and the memory of a boy on a plateau with a piece of bread who did not put it down, and I have no case to set against any of it, and I am not permitted the relief of being owed.

That is the arrangement. I do not think it is unjust. I would like it on the page that I do not think it is unjust.

They relit the Everflame on the sixty-first day.

Oil and a wick and a woman on a stool trimming it, and a rota of six because a fire that runs on attention goes out when the attention stops. It smokes. It is the wrong colour. It went out on the ninth night because someone was ill and the relief was late, and they lit it again in the morning, and there was some embarrassment, and that was all that happened.

I stood at the back. I did not go in. What comes after this has to be built by people whose hands are not burned.

I went to the corridor.

Inner ring, outside the Vessel quarters. The doors are standing open because the locks were hers and there is nothing left to decide when they should be closed.

There is a woman further down, past the third arch, doing what I came to do.

Both palms flat. Shoulders in. Her head is tipped forward against the stone in the way I have seen a hundred children do it, and she has been there long enough that a bag of her things has slumped over on the floor beside her.

Neither of us speaks. Neither of us moves closer. We are two people in a cold corridor performing the same private gesture at the same dead wall, and there is no version of this where either of us goes over, because the only thing that ever put us in the same room was the wall, and the wall has stopped.

I press with the left. I have always pressed harder with the left, and turned my shoulder into it, and I did not know this about myself until something in the dark handed it back to me on a flat rock as proof that it could see me, and I handed it back again on a floor nine floors above where I am standing.

Two things in the whole of creation ever knew that. One was a god and one was a small frightened liar wearing the shape of a god, and they killed each other in the ninth month, and the fact is still true. I pressed harder with the left. It is true right now, while I am standing here doing it, and it is not held anywhere.

The wall is cold.

I take my hands off it.

I bought a book in the outer city with the last thing I had to trade, which was a coat.

It is not a good book. The paper is grey and it takes ink badly and there is no ruling on it, no fields, no margin for a date, no column for a baseline and none for a deviation. I have been carrying it for nine days without opening it because I do not know what a book is for if it is not for a file.

I have decided to write down the things that went nowhere.

Not the war. The war has four factions writing it already and they will manage. The other things. The ones with no use, that no tablet took, that no institution had a column for, that nothing on the continent could have done anything with.

I am starting with the one I have. I do not know what happened to him and I am never going to, because the only thing that ever offered to tell me was a small frightened liar going through its pockets, and I put it down, and I would put it down again.