Chapter 27: A Clear Morning

They brought him home on the fourth day, roped, in the corpse cart, with a dead boy beside him and a bronze bell in a lead box.

The Hall did not react the way Doha had braced for. Nobody stared. Nobody asked. Forty rite-keepers looked at a seventeen-year-old lying tied at four points in the bed of a cart, understood the situation within about a second and a half, and went and got more rope.

That was the thing about the Hall that he had never appreciated until he had been away from it.

By the seventh hour there were four posts sunk in the yard behind the ossuary and a man on watch, and Su Han had drawn up a schedule with the intervals on it, which had gone from eleven hours to nine to seven and a half over four days and was, on his paper, a very tidy descending line.

"Six hours," said Su Han. "Tomorrow. Then five and a bit. Then—"

"Then it stops being an interval," said Doha, "and starts being what I do."

"Yes."

"How long?"

Su Han looked at his paper for a while. He was about forty, and he had a long careful face, and Doha had liked him since he was six.

"Eleven days," he said. "Perhaps nine."

The first morning she asked about the horses.

The second morning she asked about the horses.

On the third morning Doha came up the east stair and found Grandmother Ok sitting with her back to the door and all four windows open, and she said, without turning around:

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"You went around a hole in front of a live knot and fed it, you have taken five Cuts and six seams in eleven days having sworn on a ledger line to take one Cut a month, you have a rite in you that will be doing your walking for you inside a fortnight, and you have brought a device into my Hall that I would rather have burned. Sit down."

"Yes, Hallmistress," said Doha, with enormous relief.

"Her name was Yun Ha-gyeong," said Grandmother Ok.

The lead box was on the table between them, open. She had looked at the bell for a long time and had not touched it.

"She taught me. She taught Mo Yeongsu. She would have taught Nam Gyeol, but she was eighty-four by then and it was the other way round by that point — he read for her, at the end, because her hands had gone." Grandmother Ok's own hands lay on the arms of the chair. "She was the finest rite-keeper of the last two hundred years and she died eleven years ago in the middle of a rite."

"Which rite?"

"The ninth," said Grandmother Ok.

The wind came through the four open windows.

"You've been told it exists and that we won't discuss it, and that is exactly correct and I am about to stop doing it, because you are seventeen years old and roped to a post in my yard and I have run out of the luxury." She shifted. "The ninth rite is called the Forgetting. It takes a seam out of a living person."

Doha's hands closed on his knees.

"It works," said Grandmother Ok. "That is the first thing and you must hear it plainly: it is not a legend and it is not a hope. I have seen it performed twice. A woman with a hundred and sixty seams walked into a room and walked out of it with a hundred and fifty-nine, and I watched it happen, and it is the single most beautiful thing this Hall has ever made."

"Then why—"

"Because of the price," said Grandmother Ok, "and I am not going to tell you the price."

"Hallmistress—"

"I am going to tell you that there is one, that it is paid by someone other than the rite-keeper, that it is paid permanently, and that in four hundred years the Hall has performed the ninth rite eleven times and buried the results of nine of them." She looked at him. "And that if I tell you what it is today, roped to a post with eleven days left, you will do it before the week is out. So no."

Doha sat very still.

"That's the most frightening thing anyone's ever said to me," he said.

"Good."