Chapter 31: Death Jars

"You went around the hole," he said.

"Yes."

"How many times?"

"Eleven."

Nam Gyeol winced. It was a small, entirely genuine wince, the expression of a craftsman watching somebody hold a chisel wrong.

"That'll have cost you two days," he said. "I'm sorry. There wasn't a way to send it to you that didn't have the hole in it — Chunsam only ever had the version with the hole. None of them have the whole thing. I'm the only one, and I'm the only one because I'm the only one who was ever taught the fourth rite by somebody who cared, and that's not a boast, it's the entire point, and I'll come back to it."

"You had a twenty-three-year-old kill himself."

"I had a twenty-three-year-old instructed that if capture became certain he should end himself in front of a rite-keeper who could hear," said Nam Gyeol. "He decided. I want to be exact about that, because I'll be exact about the rest. I told him what it would do and I told him why it mattered and I let a boy who thought I was holy make the decision, and that is worse than ordering it, and I know it is worse, and I did it anyway."

Nobody in the yard moved.

"Say what you came to say," said Grandmother Ok.

"I came to say four things," said Nam Gyeol, "and then I'll go, and nobody else here has to be hurt tonight."

"The first," he said, "is the one you already know, and I'd like it out of the way. In eleven days that boy will stop being able to put his own feet down. He'll be lucid the whole time — that's the arrangement, you stay perfectly clever — and somewhere around the fourteenth day he'll be doing five beats of my rite once an hour, and then twice, and by the spring you'll have him in the orchard with the washing on the line and somebody bringing him soup."

"We know," said Chan-i.

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"You know, and you have nothing," said Nam Gyeol. "In four hundred years this Hall has had one answer to a live knot in a living man, and it's in a body in that ossuary, and Ok Sanhwa won't let anybody perform it, and she's right not to, and I want that said. She is right not to. I have thought about it for eleven years and she is right."

He turned back to Doha.

"I have the other answer," he said. "I built it. It took eleven years and it is not beautiful and it works, and the fifth beat of it will take a knot out of a living man, and I know it works because I have taken four hundred and ten of them out of the dead and eleven out of people who were still breathing when I started."

"Eleven," said Doha.

"Nine survived."

"And the other two?"

"Are the second thing I came to say," said Nam Gyeol. "I killed them. I did it learning. They were volunteers and it doesn't matter that they were volunteers, and I could tell you their names, and I'm not going to, because you'd use them and they were mine."

"The third thing," said Nam Gyeol, "is the offer, and I'd like to make it in front of everybody, because I'm not ashamed of it and because half the people standing in this yard are going to think about it for the rest of their lives, whatever they say out loud tomorrow."

He raised his voice slightly. Not much. It carried.

"Every one of you is dying of arithmetic," he said. "Six a year, forty years, four hundred and out, in a posture, eyes open, with somebody in the room guessing which one of you it was. You do it because it has to be done and there is nobody else, and the great sects pay you in cash and seat you below the servants, and your Hallmistress is at three hundred and eighty-one, and everybody in this yard knows the number because she tells you, because she is honest, because she has always been honest, and it has never once helped."

Nobody spoke.

"I can take them out," said Nam Gyeol.

The wind went across the yard.

"Not all. Not fast. It's four hours of work for one seam, and it very nearly killed the first nine people I did it to, and it will get better, because everything gets better if somebody works at it for long enough." He looked around the yard, unhurried, at forty faces. "But I can take them out. Su Han came to me at a hundred and eighty-seven, and I have not been able to help him yet, and that is my failure and not his. In five years I will be able to. In ten I could empty this Hall."

"And the price?" said Grandmother Ok.

"Bodies," said Nam Gyeol.

He said it without any drama at all, which was the worst possible way to say it.

"You need somewhere to put what you take out. It doesn't have to be a jar, it can be open air and fifteen minutes, if you've got the stomach to stand there while somebody's last minute thins out to nothing in your hands." He shrugged very slightly. "I found I hadn't. So: jars. And to make a jar you need a person who died within the hour, and the world does not produce them where you need them, when you need them."

"So you make them," said Doha.

"So I make them," said Nam Gyeol. "Yes."