They bring the dead to me before they give them to the sky. That is the order of it in Kormor Kirak, and has been since before I had grey in my hair. The Hallaset Fields do not take a body that has not been washed. I am the one who washes them. Forty years I have knelt on that cold stone with my basin and my grey soap, and I will tell you the thing no one in the market will say aloud, the thing I have learned with my hands when my eyes were too tired to lie to me. The dead in this city are not always finished being used.
You learn to read a body the way Yuri Szek reads a stall ledger. A drowning swells. A fever leaves the skin like wet paper. A knife is honest, and a fall is honest, and the Red Guard, when they are in a hurry, are honest in their own crude fashion. Those I wash without fear. I close the eyes, I fold the hands, I carry them up the terraces to the flowers, and the priests of no church I would name say their words over the sky-burial frames. That is a clean night. I have had perhaps a thousand clean nights.
This was not one.
He came down on the cart near the third bell, under a sheet that had soaked through black. The boy who drove the cart would not look at me, which told me enough. Tomas, the stablehand, a good lad who carries messages he is too frightened to read. He set the body on my stone and stepped back into the dark of the doorway and stayed there, and I did not send him home, because I am old and the lamps were low and I did not want, that night, to be alone with what was on the stone.
I drew the sheet down. A man of middle years, a clerk by his soft hands, a stranger to me. And then I saw the work that had been done to him, and my own hands went still in the cold water.
He had been cut. Not torn, not stabbed in fear or in fury. Cut, with care, with a small clean blade and a steady wrist, in a pattern that ran from the hollow of his throat to the turn of his ankles. The marks did not bleed any longer. They had been made to be looked at. Each one was the length of a thumb, and each was set at a measured distance from the last, like the script in the Perpetual Ledger that only the holder can read, and I understood with a sick certainty that I was the holder it had been written for. I was the one who would count them. That is what a washer does. We count.
I did not want to. I want you to understand that I am not a brave woman and I was not curious. But the hand knows its work better than the heart knows its fear, and my fingers found the first mark before I had decided anything, and they moved, and I counted, because counting is what keeps the dead from becoming a number you cannot put down.
One. Two. Three.
There is a thing the old ones say in the Bastion, when Eppy has poured enough that her tongue forgets to be careful. She says the city has two arithmetics. The one the living use, to buy bread and pay the Queen her tithe. And the older one, the one that runs the other way, that counts not to add a thing up but to call a thing in. She says a sum is a kind of door. She says you should never finish another person's sum, because whatever they were building, you will have built it, and it will know your hands.
I thought that was an old woman frightening the young ones away from the catacombs. I was an old woman myself and I had stopped being frightened of stories.
Thirty. Thirty-one. The marks climbed the ribs in a spiral now, the way the runes spiral on the iron of a door I have heard of but thank the dark have never seen. My voice had begun to keep the count aloud without my leave. The Fields were very quiet. Tomas had stopped breathing in his doorway, or I had stopped hearing him.
Fifty. The comet was up. I had not noticed it rise. It hung over the Eastern Tower, that wrongness of black stone they have been raising all spring, and it was the colour of a bruise under skin, and by its light the cut marks on the clerk seemed to deepen, to be fresher than they were, to wet themselves again. I told myself it was the light. I have told myself many things by the light of better stars.
Sixty-six. Sixty-seven.
And here is where I will be honest with you, stranger, because I have not been honest with the magistrate, and there is no longer a magistrate to be honest with, the Queen having grown tired of Voron the way she grows tired of all her instruments. Here is the truth of that night. I knew, at sixty-seven, that the pattern was not finished. I could see the unmarked skin waiting. I could see, the way a seamstress like poor Magrit could see a hem before she sewed it, exactly how many cuts the body still wanted to make the shape whole. And I knew that the body could not make them, being dead. The counter makes them. The voice makes them. That is the second arithmetic. The cuts call, and the count answers, and the answer cuts the air where the blade cut the flesh, and somewhere a door that has been waiting all spring under the castle feels a hand it did not expect upon it.
Twenty-one more. He wanted twenty-one more, this clerk who had been some accountant once, who had perhaps counted something he should not have and been counted in return. Twenty-one more and the sum would close. Eighty-eight.
I have thought, since, about who left him on my stone. Not the Red Guard, who do not have the patience for small clean blades. Rozito, perhaps, who manages the market by day and other things by the dark, who owes debts to powers that meet under the Terra Sotto where the stalls give way to older stone. Rozito knows the washers. Rozito knows that we count. He would not have to lift the blade himself. He would only have to know which cart to send, and to which old woman, and to trust that her hands would do at the Fields what no cultist could do for him in the catacombs, because the sum required a true counter, a tired one, an honest one, a woman who had closed a thousand pairs of eyes and earned the right to call the dead by their full number.
I was the blade. He had only to deliver me the wound.
I stopped at sixty-seven.
It is the hardest thing I have done with these hands, and they have done hard things. I took them off the body. I put them in the cold water and I held them under as though they were two animals that would climb back out and finish the work if I let them up for air. My voice wanted the next number. My voice had been promised the next number for forty years of small clean countings, and it strained against my teeth like a child at a shut door. I bit down on it. I tasted blood, my own, an honest wound, and the honesty of it was the only thing in the Fields that was mine.
"Tomas," I said, when I could. "Burn him. Not the sky. The fire."
The boy was crying. He had counted with me, in his head, the way you cannot help but count when a voice in the dark is keeping time. "They'll know," he said. "They'll know he wasn't given to the Fields."
"Let them know an old woman went soft and broke the law," I said. "That is a thing they can punish. Let them not know what nearly went through her tonight. That is a thing they would want."
We burned him in the lime pit where we put the parts that the flowers will not take. He went up ugly and he went up unfinished, and the comet watched, and the door under the castle stayed shut one more night for want of the last twenty-one strokes of an old woman's tongue.
I am telling you this because the comet is still climbing, and they are still cutting clerks, and the Fields still want washing, and I am old. One night they will bring me one I am too tired to stop at. Or they will bring me one already at eighty-seven, needing only the final word, and my mouth will be quicker than my conscience.
So learn the count. Not to use it. To know when it is being used on you. If a voice in you starts keeping time that you did not start, if your hands take up a sum you did not set down, stop at the wound before the last. The sum is a door. Do not be the one who opens it.
I have closed a thousand pairs of eyes. I would like, before the end, to close my own with the door still shut. It is a small ambition for an old woman in this city. In Kormor Kirak it is the largest one I have ever dared to keep.