Frank Cotton is exhausted. He has burned through every earthly sensation and still carries a chasm of emptiness inside him. Then he finds a puzzle box, and everything changes.

Beyond it is another dimension, where pain and pleasure are two sides of the same coin, and Frank joins the ancient discipline of the Order of the Gash. He is put through experiences so extreme they would destroy anyone else. And still he wants to go further. The chasm is not filled.

A Hellraiser fan-fiction, reimagining the lore in its purest form — reuniting fans with Kirsty Cotton, Tiffany, Dr. Channard, Harry D’Amour and other legendary characters from the franchise’s best stories.

A new doctrine in the exploration of the senses will hook your flesh and pull you into The Order of the Gash.

We have such sights to show you.

Part One

The Novitiate

One · An Exhausted Man

The room above the market had a smell he could no longer identify, and that was how Frank Cotton knew it was time to leave.

He had been able to name it once. Cardamom, he thought, and drains, and the particular sourness of fruit going over in heat, and underneath all of it the mineral flatness of the river four streets away. Three months ago he could have separated those things the way a man separates the instruments in a piece of music. Now they arrived as a single grey fact and lay in his sinuses without meaning, and when he opened the shutters in the morning the light came in and did nothing to him at all.

It had been happening for years. He had watched it come the way you watch a tide go out, and had assumed, for most of that time, that it would come back.

He was forty-four and he had spent the whole of his adult life in the pursuit of sensation, which he had always considered a serious occupation and had never bothered to defend. Other men made things or raised children or accumulated money, and Frank had gone looking, methodically, without shame, for the outer edge of what a body could be made to feel. He had been thorough. They saw the appetite and assumed it was laziness, an absence of discipline, when in fact it had required more discipline than any of them had ever mustered for anything — the travel, the cultivation of the right kind of company, the money got by whatever means and spent immediately, the willingness to be somewhere very unpleasant for a long time on the chance that something at the end of it might be new.

He had eaten things that were illegal in four countries and things that were sacred in two. He had been beaten by professionals in Osaka and by amateurs in Marseilles, and had learned the difference, and had preferred the amateurs, and had eventually stopped preferring anything. He had lain in a hut outside Puno for twelve days while an old woman fed him a paste that made the walls breathe, and he had come out the other side of it and stood in the road and thought, with a calm that frightened him more than anything in the hut had: is that all it was.

Women had been the longest project and the first to fail. He could still perform. That had never been the problem. The problem was that somewhere in his thirties the whole enterprise had begun to arrive pre-digested, as though he were being handed a report on an event rather than attending it, and no variation in the event changed the report. He had tried increasing the number of participants and then decreasing it. He had tried cruelty, which he had found he was capable of and which had held his interest for a season. He had tried tenderness, which he had also found he was capable of, briefly, with a woman in Antwerp who had loved him and whom he had left because being loved was a sensation like any other and it had taken him nine weeks to reach the end of it.

He did not think of himself as a man who had ruined his own life. He thought of himself as a man who had finished a large piece of work and was now waiting to be told what the next one was.

The stall on the corner sold cassettes and dried fish and, on certain days, other things. Frank had been buying from the boy who ran it for two months and had established, in his way, that the boy's uncle dealt in objects — that there was a room somewhere with objects in it, and that some of the objects were the kind that people came a long way to look at and then declined to buy.

He asked about the room in the fifth week and was told there was no room. He asked again in the seventh and was told the room was not for people like him, which he understood to be a price rather than a refusal, and he paid it over the following fortnight in cash and in a favour that involved holding a man's hand flat on a crate in an alley behind the fish market while somebody else broke three of the fingers with a length of pipe. Frank did the holding. He noted, while the man screamed into the meat of his own shoulder, that he was not enjoying it, and filed the observation with all the others.

The room, when he was finally taken to it, was on the third floor of a building with no lift and smelled of camphor and old paper. There were perhaps two hundred things in it. Most were rubbish — trench art, ivory of no particular provenance, a stuffed civet with one glass eye missing. Frank went along the shelves with his hands behind his back and felt the familiar deadness settle over him, and had already decided the fortnight had been wasted when he came to the box.

It was small enough to sit in a cupped palm. Lacquered black, inlaid with gold in patterns that did not repeat, and it did not look old so much as it looked unaged, as though it had been made recently by someone working to a very old specification. The gold caught the bulb overhead and moved. He picked it up. It was heavier than it had any business being.

And something happened in his hands. Not a sound. Not a vibration. Attention. It arrived the way a stare arrives across a room, and it came from the thing in his palm, and Frank understood with complete clarity that the box had been asleep until he picked it up and was not asleep now.

Frank stood very still in the camphor smell on the third floor and felt, for the first time in a long time, his heart go.

"That one is not for sale," said the uncle, from the doorway.

"How much."

"It is not for sale. Three men have owned it since it came to me. Two of them brought it back."

"Why?"

"Because it would not open for them." The uncle did not move out of the doorway. "That is not the same as it being difficult. A difficult thing is difficult for everybody. This is not locked and it is not difficult. It simply does not answer every hand that picks it up, and a man who has carried it about in his coat for a season and got nothing for it will bring it back, and he will be angry, and he will be alive."

"And the third?"

The uncle looked at him for a while. He was an old man with a careful face, and Frank saw him arrive at a decision that he clearly did not think much of himself for making.

"The third did not bring it back," he said.

Frank paid an amount of money that would have appalled him at any other point in his life, and did not haggle, because haggling would have been a way of pretending the thing was ordinary.

He carried it home through the market in the late heat with his hand around it in his coat pocket, and the smells came at him — cardamom, drains, sour fruit, the flat mineral river — and he found, walking, that he could separate them again. All of them. Each one arriving distinct and vivid and slightly too loud, the way sound is too loud when a fever breaks.

A man does not get nine years of his senses back in the length of a market street. Frank knew that. He walked faster.

He climbed the stairs to the room above the market and set the box in the middle of the table and sat down opposite it, and did not touch it again that night, and did not sleep either. He sat and looked at it and let the anticipation build, because anticipation was the last pleasure he had left that still worked, and he had learned long ago to spend it slowly.

Somewhere in the small hours he said aloud, to the box, in the tone of a man opening a negotiation:

"All right. Show me."

He would remember saying it. Much later, and for a very long time, he would remember that he had asked.

Two · Lodovico Street

He did not open it in that room, or in that country.

It took him seven weeks to get home, and he spent the money he had left on the crossing and on the freight, and arrived in the house on Lodovico Street with the box, a bag of clothes and about forty pounds. The house had been his mother's and was now, on paper, his brother's, and Rory was in Cyprus for the summer with the wife, and would not be back until September. The key was under the loose brick where it had been since he was nine. Inside, the house had the particular deadness of somewhere with the heating off and the owners abroad — dust sheets over the furniture, the smell of cold soot, a dead wasp on every windowsill. He went up through it without looking into any of the rooms.

He did the preparation properly. That was another thing nobody credited him for.

He had read enough by then to know that the box was a door and that doors have thresholds and that thresholds want dressing. He did not know whether any of it was necessary. He suspected most of it was theatre, and he did it anyway, because he had spent twenty years learning that the frame around an experience is part of the experience, and a man who cannot be bothered with the frame gets a smaller picture.

So: he stripped the upper room down to the boards and scrubbed them. He nailed sacking over the window until the light in there was the colour of weak tea at noon and nothing at all after four. He bought candles and set them in a rough ring, and burned things in a dish that he had been told to burn, which smelled of scorched hair. He drew what he had been told to draw on the boards in chalk, working from a photocopy of a photocopy, copying shapes he did not understand with the care of a man copying a language he cannot read. He hung three dead pigeons from the picture rail because a page in Düsseldorf had said something about birds, and he was aware, hanging them, that he probably had the page wrong.

He fasted for two days, which was not difficult, and he did not sleep, which was.

By the second evening the room had gone wrong, and the wrongness was in the air itself, which had stopped moving. The candle flames stood straight up and did not lean once, all evening, in a room with a two-inch gap under the door. It was not fear. Frank had been afraid a number of times and knew the taste of it. This was closer to the feeling in a house where someone is dying in an upstairs room — a sense of the ordinary furniture of the world having quietly agreed to stand aside.

He sat down cross-legged on the boards in the middle of the chalk with the candles going and took the box out of the cloth.

It took him seven hours.

The box did not spring open. It was not a trick with a catch. It was a conversation, and it was conducted entirely in the fingers, and it went on for most of a night. A panel would give under the pad of his thumb — not slide, give, the way a floorboard gives before it lifts — and then refuse to go further, and he would sit for forty minutes turning it over, breathing, waiting for his hands to work out what his head could not. Twice he got a section round and heard something inside change position with a small sound like a tooth going into a socket.

And it gave, differently, at different hours. A lock resists you at one pressure and goes on resisting at that pressure until you beat it; this did not. The face that would not move at midnight came round under his thumb at four in the morning without any change in his hands that he could account for. Twice he put it down out of temper and walked to the window, and twice, when he sat back down and picked it up, the panel that had been dead for an hour turned inside a minute — not because he had got better at it in the ninety seconds he had been standing at the window, but because he had come back. Once, around three in the morning, the gold on the top face was demonstrably in a different configuration to the one it had been in when he started, and he had no memory of having moved it.

He stopped being bored somewhere in the second hour. He noticed this happening and was so grateful that his eyes stung.

At around ten past six, with the sacking over the window going grey at the edges, his thumb found a place at the base that had not been there before, and he pressed it, and a section of the box's face rose and rotated on its own, smoothly, with the unhurried competence of a machine finishing a job it had begun a long time ago.

A bell rang somewhere in the house. Not a bell in the room. A bell in the house, several rooms away and several storeys down, deep and unhurried, and Frank Cotton, sitting on scrubbed boards among his dead pigeons and his half-remembered chalk, felt the hair rise on the backs of his arms and thought, with absolute clarity and something close to joy:

Something has heard me.

The candles did not go out. He noticed that, later, when he had time to notice things: nothing so cheap as the candles going out. They went on burning perfectly steadily while the walls of the room stopped agreeing about where they were.

There was a wall behind him that had been a wall his whole life, and it opened along a seam that had no business existing, and the light that came through it fell across his hands and turned them a colour he had no word for — not the grey of dusk, not the blue of a television in a dark room, but a shade his eye kept trying to correct and could not. Cold came with it. Not the cold of weather — the cold of a very large space that has never been warm.

Then the hooks came.

They came fast, and they came from behind him, which he had not expected. He had expected, if he was honest, an audience. A figure. Something to negotiate with. What he got was a sound like a fishing line paying out, four times over, and then a series of impacts across his back and his right shoulder and the meat above his hip, each one arriving as a hard blunt punch and only afterwards, half a second afterwards, resolving into what it actually was.

The hooks did not want him dead. That was the first correction.

They wanted purchase. The one below the collarbone had come through clean and then turned, the barb opening in the meat of the pectoral like a mouth remembering how to bite, and the chain above it did not yank — it inquired, a short testing lift that peeled the skin away from the fascia in a wet sheet the size of his hand. Fat showed, yellow and indecent in the weak tea light. Blood followed it in a thick unhurried sheet and hit the scrubbed boards and steamed among the chalk. Frank heard himself make a sound that was not a word.

The second hook, in the meat above the hip, had gone in shallower and had to work for it. He felt the point skate along the crest of the ilium, miss, skate again, find the notch between muscle and bone, and seat with a grind he would afterwards be able to date to the second. When it turned its quarter-turn the barb opened inside the obliquus and took a fist of him with it.

He was still holding the box. The configuration open in his left hand, gold panels locked in their final face, while the right side of him came apart along seams he had not known he possessed.

The chain at the shoulder took up next. It did not lift him so much as unfold him. The latissimus tore with a sound like wet linen ripped down the warp. He was looking down — he could not stop looking down — at the dark red interior of himself, the clean architecture under the skin, the pale slick of the exposed scapula, and the cold that came through the opened wall went into that interior as if it had been invited. It touched the wet of him. It licked along the opened rib. His cock thickened in his trousers, absurd and immediate, the body doing the only thing it had ever known how to do with intensity, and the shame of that was a third hook he had not been promised.

Then the pain arrived properly, in full, an enormous unfolding pressure that went up through his jaw and behind his eyes, and underneath it, running along beside the agony like a second voice in a piece of music:

At last. Something new.

The two of them fucked each other in him and neither one finished.

The wall took him at the sternum. He felt the seam close on the hook still standing out of his chest, felt the barb catch on the far side of the stone, and for a long stretched instant he was in both rooms — the upper room with its chalk and its dead birds and the dark stain spreading under his knees, and the grey corridor — and the box fell out of his hand and hit the boards and did not open any further, because it had already done the only thing it was for.

He went through as meat on a line. The last of the skin of his back came off on the seam like a sleeve. He felt the cold take the raw of him, take the cleft of him, take the opened hole of the wound under the hip and push into it as if the wound were a mouth, and he came, helplessly, into the ruin of his own clothes, as the room went away from him in every direction at once, and Frank Cotton went through the wall.

Three · What He Expected

He expected the screaming to be his.

He had built a fairly detailed picture over seven weeks at sea, and it was a picture assembled, he understood afterwards, entirely out of things he had absorbed without noticing: cathedral vaults, abattoirs, red light, the particular whine of machinery under strain. He expected heat. He expected the noise of a great many people in serious trouble. He expected, above all, to be addressed — for something enormous to take an interest in him personally and begin, immediately, the business of his ruin.

He landed on a stone floor, on his side, in a corridor, and it was quiet.

He lay there a while. The hooks were gone; he could feel where they had been, four bright coins of ache in the meat of him — one under the collarbone, one in the right shoulder, one above the hip, one across the back, exactly where the barbs had turned, but there was nothing standing out of his chest and nothing pulling. When he got a hand under himself and pushed up onto one elbow, his shirt was whole. Not repaired. Whole, and clean, and his, and the boards' dust was gone off his knees.

The corridor was long and lit from somewhere overhead by a grey even light that did not flicker and cast almost no shadow. The walls were dressed stone, very old and very well kept, with a line of dark iron rings set into them at shoulder height at intervals of about ten feet. There was nothing hanging from any of the rings. Somewhere a long way off, water was moving through a pipe.

The temperature was that of a cellar in October.

Frank got up. He was shaking, which annoyed him, and he stood still until it stopped, which took longer than he would have liked.

His palm was stinging where he had put it down to push himself off the floor. He turned the hand over. Clean skin. No grit, no cut, not even the red flush where he had ground it into the flags — nothing at all to account for the fact that it was still stinging. He crouched and laid the palm flat on the flags again, deliberately, the way you test a radiator.

The stone was pleasant. Cool, smooth, and welcoming — the specific pleasure of a banister worn down by two hundred years of hands.

It also stung.

He knelt in the corridor with his hand on the floor for a good half minute, pressing down and lifting off, pressing down and lifting off, and got the same answer every time: the floor liked him and the floor bit him, in the same half-second, out of the same square inch of stone. He stood up. He had been dragged through a wall on four hooks and was, he decided, entitled to feel peculiar.

"Right," he said, to the corridor.

The corridor did not answer.

He walked. The direction chose itself because one end of the corridor turned a corner and the other end went on further than he could see. He walked a long way. The iron rings went past at his shoulder, ring after ring after ring, and every one of them was worn bright on the underside where something had hung from it and swung, and nothing hung from any of them now. There were doorways without doors, and through the doorways he saw rooms: a room with a long table in it and nothing on the table; a room with tiered wooden stalls around three sides like a chapter house; a room that was full, floor to ceiling, of narrow drawers, thousands of them, each with a small dark label he was not close enough to read.

Nobody screamed. Nobody appeared. Twice he heard, distinctly, the sound of a door closing somewhere out of sight, in the unhurried way that doors close when someone has finished in a room and is going somewhere else.

He began, around the fifteenth minute, to be angry.

It was the anger of a man who has paid a great deal for a ticket and arrived to find the theatre dark. He had gone to enormous trouble. He had fasted and cut himself and hung birds from a picture rail and given three-quarters of a year of his life to the pursuit of this, and had crossed a wall that should not have opened, and had been dragged through it on hooks — and what waited on the other side was a well-swept passage with good drainage and nobody bothering to come out.

"Hello," he called. It came out louder and thinner than he intended.

Nothing.

He kicked one of the iron rings and hurt his foot.

At the far end, where the corridor turned, there was a stair going down, and at the bottom of the stair the light changed from grey to something warmer, and Frank went down it two at a time, ready at last, ready, for the real thing to begin.

At the bottom was a wide low room with a stone bench along one wall, and on the bench somebody was sitting.

It was a woman, or it had been. She sat with her hands in her lap and her back straight, and she was dressed in something dark and close-fitting that Frank's eye kept trying to read as leather and kept failing. Her scalp was shaved and marked out in fine lines like a surveyor's grid, and where the lines crossed, pins had been set into the bone — dozens of them, in perfect order, each one seated to the same depth, the whole arrangement done with the patience of a craftsman and, he understood immediately, over a very long time. The skin of her throat had been opened at some point and closed again with black thread, in a seam so neat that his first thought, ridiculously, was of a tailor.

She was not hideous. She was terrible, and she was composed, and she was beautifully finished — and Frank, who had spent his whole life looking at bodies, caught himself admiring the work several seconds before he remembered to be afraid of it.

She looked up at him as he came off the last step, and her eyes were an ordinary brown.

"You took your time on the stairs," she said.

Frank stopped.

"I'm sorry?"

"You stopped twice." Her voice was light. There was no menace in it at all; she might have been asking why he had taken the stairs instead of the lift. "Most of them run the corridor. You walked it, and then you stopped twice, and then you kicked something. Why did you kick something?"

He found he had nothing to say.

"You expected an audience," she said. It was not a question, and it was not unkind. "You expected us to be waiting. You had a shape in your mind for what this would be, and you have arrived, and the shape is wrong, and you are angry about the shape rather than frightened about the fact."

"Who are you?"

"That is a better question than the one you nearly asked." She stood. She was tall, and she moved as people move when nothing hurts them any more. "What is your name?"

"Frank Cotton."

"Frank." She said it as though testing whether it would take weight. "You solved the configuration. Do you know what you have solved your way into?"

"No," said Frank. "That's rather the point."

And her mouth moved — the smallest possible movement, at one corner, gone before it had finished happening — and Frank would spend a considerable part of the rest of his existence trying to decide whether what he had seen was amusement, or pity, or appetite.

"No," she agreed. "It usually is."

She turned and walked away down the warm corridor, and after a moment Frank Cotton followed her.

"You will be shown where you sleep," she said, without turning round. "You will be given work in the morning. There are bells; you will learn them faster than you expect. In time someone will explain the name of this Order to you, and you will laugh, and that is permitted."

"Sleep," Frank repeated. "Work."

"You are not being punished, Frank," she said, mildly, as though correcting a small error of fact. "Whatever gave you that idea."

Four · Horarium

There were bells, and she had been right: he learned them faster than he expected.

Seven of them, spread across a day that was not a day, because there was no sun anywhere in the realm and the grey overhead light never varied by so much as a shade. He worked out inside a week that the hours were not equal — that the stretch between the fourth bell and the fifth was roughly twice the stretch between the second and the third — and he worked out inside a month that the inequality never varied. Not by a minute. Not once, in nine years. Whatever governed the length of the fourth hour had settled the question a long time ago and had not revisited it.

Nobody rang them. He established that early, and then spent an embarrassing amount of his first year trying to establish it again, because the answer kept failing to be interesting to anybody he asked. There was no bell tower and no rope and no brother whose duty it was. The sound simply arrived, at the same unequal intervals, from a direction that was not a direction, and the Order stood up and went where it went.

Nor did anybody know why the fourth hour was long. He asked six of them across nine years and got six versions of the same shrug, and the last of them — old enough to have been standing there when the ninth gallery was built — said, "It has always been long," and went back to work. It was not evasion and it was not a test. Nobody had ever needed to know. The bell went, and you went.

The first bell woke you. The second called you to the refectory, where you did not eat. The third sent you to work. The fourth was silence, and the silence was enforced, and it lasted a very long time. The fifth sent you back to work. The sixth was the only bell that meant anything different from one day to the next, and was the one everybody listened for. The seventh sent you to your cell.

He had a cell. That was among the first indignities. He had imagined — insofar as he had imagined anything — a pit, or a rack, or at the very best a cage with a view of something appalling. What he got was a room eight feet by six with a stone shelf for a bed, a blanket of coarse undyed wool, a niche in the wall with a jug in it, and a door that closed but did not lock.

He tested the door on the first night. Naturally he tested the door. It opened onto the corridor, and the corridor was empty, and there was nowhere in particular to go, and after standing in the doorway long enough to feel foolish Frank went back in, lay down on the shelf, pulled the blanket over himself and lay awake in a state of insult so pure it was almost restful.

They have not even locked me in.

The blanket was the thing that taught him, in the end, and it took about four months.

It was good wool: coarse, heavy, warm, the kind of blanket a careful person chooses, and on the first night he pulled it up to his chin and felt his whole body let go of something.

It also hurt.

Not much. Not anywhere near enough to complain about — a fine bright sting everywhere it touched him, constant, unvarying, the sensation of skin that has been in the sun a day too long. It did not fade with familiarity. He tested that. On the fifth night he caught himself pulling it higher. He slept under it for four months waiting for it to become background and it never once did, and he never stopped wanting it either.

Everything in the realm was like that.

The water in the jug was cold and clean and superb and it went down his throat like a swallowed splinter. The stone of the corridor was pleasant underfoot — properly pleasant, smooth and cool and sympathetic under the arch of the foot — and every fourth or fifth step it took a small bright bite out of the sole. The soap they gave him was the best-smelling thing he had encountered in nine years and it stung like nettles. The wooden fronts of the drawers were warm to the hand and left his palms aching by the fifth bell.

None of it was dramatic. That was what took him four months. He had come here braced for the fork bursting in his mouth, and the fork was real and would happen, but the fork was an examination and examinations are rare. The ordinary condition of the realm was much quieter and much more relentless: a low, permanent, two-sided hum, in everything he touched, at every hour.

He asked Antiphon about it in his second year and got a shrug and: "Where would you like us to put the part you don't want?"

"That isn't how it works."

"No," said Antiphon, cheerfully. "It isn't. I have no notion how it works and neither has anybody else in this building. We have twelve hundred years of it working, and a great deal of very fine writing about what it feels like." It leaned on the rail. "Ask Custos. He will tell you the same and he will be less pleasant about it."

He came to understand, over the following weeks, that the unlocked door was not trust and not carelessness. It was arithmetic. There was nowhere to go. The realm went on for a distance he never established, and the corridors ran into other corridors, and the few doors that were closed were closed for reasons that had nothing to do with him. You could walk for a day and a half in a straight line and arrive at a hall you had never seen, and be given a bowl of water by somebody who did not ask your name, and walk back. He did it twice in the first year. Nobody stopped him and nobody remarked on it when he returned.

The work was worse than the door.

He was sent, on his fourth morning, to the room full of drawers.

It occupied three floors and he never saw all of it. The drawers were shallow, about the width of two hands, and they ran from ankle height to a little above his head, and above that were galleries reached by ladders on rails, and above those more galleries, and above those the dark. Frank stood at the bottom of it and understood that the room had been built by people who expected to need the space. Each drawer had a label in a slot on its face, written in a small even hand in a language Frank could not read, though after a few months he could read the numbers.

Custos was waiting for him with a cloth.

He was old. Everyone in the Order was old and most of them looked it as stone looks old, which is to say not at all. Custos looked old in a different register: he stood with his head very slightly forward, like a man who has carried something heavy for so long that his spine has agreed to the shape and stopped complaining about it. His modifications were extensive and very fine and almost entirely healed. Where newer members of the Order had seams that were still angry, Custos's had gone to silver.

"You will dust," he said.

Frank looked at the cloth. He looked at the three floors of drawers.

"Which ones?"

"All of them."

"That's not possible."

"No," Custos agreed, and handed him the cloth, and went away.

He dusted for six weeks before he opened one. He was fairly sure he was supposed to open one, and he was equally sure that the length of time he took to do it was being noted, and he was right on both counts.

Inside was a single sheet of something like vellum, and on it, in the same small even hand, perhaps forty lines of text. There was a date at the top in numbers he could read: it was, as far as he could work it out, a little over twelve hundred years old.

He took it to Custos and put it on the table between them.

"What is this?"

"An account."

"Of what?"

"Of what was done, and to whom, and what was found in it." Custos did not look up from the ledger he was ruling. "Someone crossed something for the first time. It is written down. That is what this room is."

Frank stood with the sheet in his hand. Somebody had gone somewhere. Somebody had come back from it, and sat down, and written forty lines about it in a small even hand, and then somebody else had put the forty lines in a drawer and written a number on the front.

"You keep records."

"We are explorers." Custos ruled another line, unhurried. "What would be the use of exploring if nobody wrote down where we had been. You would have men going over the same ground for centuries and calling it discovery." He set the ruler down. "Read the numbers on the spines, Cotton. You can read numbers. That is why you have been put here."

So Frank read the numbers on the spines.

It took him the better part of a year to see it, and when he saw it he stopped dead in the aisle with the cloth in his hand and stood there long enough that someone came to ask if he was unwell.

The dates ran deep — enough on its own to keep him quiet for months. There were drawers in the lowest gallery whose numbers he could not parse at all, and above them, drawers from before there was writing worth the name anywhere on Earth, and above those a thickening, an acceleration, a great dense band of centuries where the accounts came so fast that they had run out of gallery and started a new floor.

And then, above that, at about the height of his own head, the band thinned.

It thinned, and it thinned, and it kept thinning. There were runs of forty and fifty drawers together, up in the newest galleries, where the sheets inside were cross-references. He learned to recognise the notation before he learned to read the words: a date, a hand, and then a string of older numbers. Somebody had gone somewhere, and what they had found was that it was the same as somewhere else.

The most recent drawer with an original account in it — an actual account, forty lines of a thing done for the first time — was, by Frank's best reckoning, four hundred and eighty years old.

He put the cloth down on the step of a ladder and walked to the end of the aisle, where the newest gallery ran out into a length of empty rail, and looked at the empty rail.

Then he took the cloth and went back to dusting, because the fifth bell had gone, and because he had understood that he had just been handed something, and because he had enough sense, even then, even that early, to want to be very careful about what he did with it.

Five · The Novice Whelan

The boy arrived in Frank's second winter, insofar as there were winters.

There was no reason to call it winter. Nothing changed. But the Order used the word, and the older members used it with a particular dryness, and Frank had begun to suspect that the seasons were kept up the way a very old family keeps up a joke nobody remembers the start of.

He was twenty-three, and his name was Denny Whelan, and he came down the stair from the corridor at a dead run with his hands out in front of him like a man going through a dark house, and he was screaming — not words, and not for help: the flat, tearing, unembarrassed screaming of an animal in a trap, which most people never hear a human being do and do not forget once they have.

Frank was crossing the low hall with an armful of ledgers. He stopped and watched.

Two of the Order took the boy — not roughly. He never could explain it to himself afterwards, or to anybody on Earth. There was no relish in it. One of them got a hand on his shoulder and one of them stood in front of him, and the standing in front was the restraint, and Whelan hit the second one and rebounded off him and went down on the flags and stayed there with his arms over his head.

The one he had hit crouched down and waited. Just that. Waited, with its forearms on its knees, in the attitude of somebody waiting for a bus, while the boy came apart on the flags — heels drumming, both hands locked over the back of his own skull, making a high thin sound on every third breath like a dog shut in a car.

It went on for a long time. Nobody hurried it.

Eventually the boy ran out. They picked him up under the arms. One of them said, There. That was the worst of it. It gets easier from here — in a tone of complete and unhurried kindness — and they took him away down the warm corridor, and Frank stood there with his ledgers and thought, quite clearly: that will be the sixth bell for him tomorrow, and he doesn't know it yet.

He found out about the box that evening, in the way one found out about things — obliquely, from somebody who had been told by somebody else. Whelan had come through a configuration in a bedsit in Kilburn. He had bought it in a house clearance for two pounds fifty along with a box of records and a broken lamp. He had had it on the windowsill for eight months.

He had solved it because a girl called Aoife, who he had been trying to impress for most of a year, had picked it up at a party in the flat and turned it over twice and said, without much interest, I bet you can't do it.

It took him two days. He did not sleep and he did not go in on the Monday, and Aoife had gone home to Kilburn and forgotten the whole thing by the time the last panel came round at about four on the Tuesday afternoon, in a bedsit with the curtains shut and nobody in it to be shown.

Frank laughed out loud when he heard that. It was the first time he had laughed since he arrived, and the sound of it in the stone corridor was so unpleasant that he stopped.

He watched Whelan for the next year.

He did not befriend him. Frank had never befriended anybody in his life and he was not going to start in a monastery. But he watched, the way you watch a bird that has got into a room, and he noted what happened, and later — much later, when he was in a position to do something with what he had noted — he found he could still walk through every part of it in order, and that he could not remember one other thing from those years.

Whelan was given work. He was put in the water rooms, and then, when it was clear he could not be trusted near the sluices, in the refectory, carrying things.

He was taught. The boy was taught, patiently, over months, by three separate members of the Order in rotation, and what he was taught was how to breathe, and how to hold his attention in one place while something happened at the edge of it, and how to distinguish between a sensation and his opinion of a sensation. It was, Frank realised with a kind of vertigo, a curriculum. Somebody had designed it. It had an order to it and the order made sense and the first eight months of it did not involve a single hook.

And Whelan could not do it.

It was not for want of effort. He tried. He tried in the way that terrified people try, which is the least effective way there is, and every time he failed he flinched forward into a worse failure, and the Order corrected him and set him back at the beginning and started again, without impatience, without any sign at all that they had noticed how many times they had done it.

There was a night in the fourth month when Frank came back late from the drawers and found the boy sitting on the flags outside the refectory with his back against the wall and his hands loose in his lap, not crying, looking at nothing.

Frank stopped. He did not know why he stopped.

"They keep saying it's not a punishment," Whelan said, to the corridor.

"It isn't."

"Then why won't they stop?"

Frank thought about that. He genuinely thought about it, standing in a cold passage with a ledger under his arm, and the answer arrived whole, and he heard himself giving it before he had decided to.

"Because they don't think you're finished," he said.

Whelan turned his head and looked up at him, and his face was doing something Frank had not seen a face do in nine years — hope, of the worst kind, the kind that has nothing to attach to and attaches anyway.

"Are you finished?" the boy said.

And Frank Cotton, who would have said afterwards that he had never in his life told a young man the truth about anything, heard himself say:

"No. And I don't think I can be."

Two weeks later Whelan broke.

Six · The Name

He had been in the Order for a little under two years when Custos told him what it was called.

It was not, Frank realised afterwards, that nobody had said it before. It was that the words had gone past him as a piece of furniture — a phrase people used, in a language he was slowly acquiring, as people in an office say the name of the company. He had heard it thirty or forty times. He had never once listened to it.

They were in the low gallery. Custos was doing something meticulous with a broken spine, and Frank was holding the glue.

"When you are entered," Custos said, "you will be entered under the second hand. Not the third. That is Antiphon's hand, and Antiphon has opinions about you."

"Entered where?"

"In the register of the Order." He did not look up. "The Order of the Gash."

Frank laughed.

He did not mean to. It came out of him the way a cough does, entirely without consultation, and he heard it go up into the galleries and come back, and even while it was still coming back he was aware that it had been going to happen sooner or later and that some part of him had been saving it up.

"Sorry," he said. "Sorry. It's just — you do know."

Custos set down the spine.

"Know what?"

"What that means." Frank was grinning. He could feel himself grinning and could not entirely stop. "In English. Where I'm from. It's not — it isn't a holy sort of word. It's what you'd hear shouted out of a car. It's the crudest thing a man can call a woman, more or less, and you've all been walking round for a thousand years calling yourselves —"

He stopped, because Custos was looking at him.

It was not anger. Frank had braced for anger, and would have enjoyed anger, and would have known exactly what to do with it. What Custos was doing was worse. He was waiting, with mild attention, the way you wait at a door you have held open for somebody still fumbling with their bags.

"Have you finished?" he said.

"I've — yes."

"Good." Custos picked the spine up again. "Then I will tell you what the word means, and you will not be able to unlearn it, and in about a year you will be very glad, because you will stop feeling clever about it, and feeling clever about it is the most tiring thing a novice does."

He turned the spine over in his hands.

"A body is sealed," he said. "That is its condition. It is a closed system and it defends its closure with great energy — that is what skin is for, and pain, and shame. You have spent your life, I am told, trying to get something in through it. Food, drink, other people. Every appetite you have ever had is a strategy for defeating the seal, and every one of them failed, and the reason they failed is that they were all conducted at the surface. You were licking the outside of a locked box."

Frank had stopped grinning.

"A gash," said Custos, "is not an injury. That is what the word means where you come from, and where you come from is a small place. A gash is an opening. It is the moment at which a sealed thing stops being sealed and becomes, for the first time, capable of receiving. It is the only event in the material world that is genuinely without precedent — everything else that happens to a body happens at the boundary. This happens through it."

He set the spine down and squared it with two fingers.

"Do not lean on that press," he added, without looking up. "The ninth gallery goes over at the sixth bell and the shelving walks about a hand's width when it does. It has done it for four hundred years and it will do it tonight and it will do it when you are a great deal less interesting than you are now. Everything here is on a cycle, Cotton. The corridors realign. The temperature in the chapter house comes up two degrees between the third bell and the fourth and goes down again, and it does not do it because anybody is cold." He drew the next account towards him. "Novices find that eerie. It is the least eerie thing in this realm. Weather is capricious. This is not weather."

"Why two degrees?"

Custos ruled a line.

"I have no idea," he said. "There are four hundred years of the measurement upstairs and not one line anywhere about the cause. If you find it you may have a drawer of your own."

Frank looked at the shelving, which was not moving, and which he would notice moving in about four hundred years.

"There is a tradition on your own world that got most of the way to it," said Custos, "and then lost its nerve and made a devotion out of it instead. Women who spent their lives contemplating a wound in a man's side. Not the blood. Not the suffering. The aperture. One of them wrote that she was led by the wound into his side within, and found there a fair, delectable place, large enough for all mankind to rest in. She was not being metaphorical, and she was not mad, and all of them were considerably closer to us than anyone has been since." He glanced up. "Your world produced them and then decided they were charming. We read them. We have most of them, upstairs, in the fourth gallery."

Frank said nothing.

"So," said Custos. "The Order of the Gash. The brotherhood of the opening. We are named for the only door that matters, and we have been named that for longer than your language has existed, and a boy from Lodovico Street heard it and thought of a rude word." He picked up the glue pot without being asked. "It is not the first time. There is a drawer for it. Somebody makes that joke about once a century, and the account of it is four lines long, and yours will be shorter, because you at least stopped."

He worked in silence for a while.

"I'll tell you what to be embarrassed about," he said, "since you're clearly going to be embarrassed about something for the rest of the day. Not the laugh. The laugh is nothing. Be embarrassed that you have been here two years, and dusted thirty thousand accounts of people going through the wall of themselves, and it not once occurred to you to ask what we were called."

Frank went back to the drawers.

He worked through the fifth bell and past the sixth — it was permitted — and somewhere in the long quiet he stopped with his hand flat on a run of drawer fronts, and found he had been standing like that long enough for the wood to go warm under his palm.

Capable of receiving, he thought.

And under it, immediately, unstoppably, in his own voice and with his own particular greed all over it:

Receiving what, though. Receiving how much. And what happens when you've received all of it.

He would not have called it heresy, then. He would not have called it anything.

Seven · The Refectory

The refectory was the largest room Frank had access to and nobody ever ate in it.

They gathered there at the second bell and stood at the long tables in their places, and something was read, and they went away again. There was no food. There had never been food. He had asked, in his first month, what the room was for, and had been told it is for the second bell, which he had taken at the time for insolence and understood later to be the exact and complete truth.

So when he was told, in his third year, to go to the refectory at the sixth bell, he went with his shoulders up.

The doors were open and the light coming out of them was wrong. Not grey. Warm, and moving.

He stopped in the doorway.

They had dressed it. Somewhere in the realm there was a place where such things were kept, and they had gone and got them and brought them here and set the room, and Frank, who had eaten well in six countries and had once been served a dinner in Kyoto that cost more than a car, stood in the door and felt his mouth fill with water at the sight of it.

Candles the length of his forearm, a hundred of them at least, down the centre of the long table in branched holders of dark silver. Linen. Plate. A cloth so white it hurt to look at after three years of stone. And on it — laid out with the composure of a still life, steaming gently, going all the way down the table into the far dark of the room — dinner.

Whole birds glazed the colour of old varnish. A rib of beef standing in its own juices with the fat scored into diamonds. Bread torn open and still breathing. Figs split and dressed. Six kinds of cheese sweating on a board. A salmon under a lattice of cucumber, a bowl of small pale grapes with the bloom still on them, a dish of something dark and glossy that he could not identify and immediately wanted. The smell got into him with the violence of a hand on his throat.

She was standing at the head of the table.

"Sit," said the Priest.

He sat. The chair was upholstered. He had not sat on anything upholstered in three years and the sensation of it went up his spine like a swallow of brandy — and underneath it, immediately, the fine bright sting he had lived inside since his first night under the blanket, coming up through the backs of his thighs.

She did not sit. She stood at the head of the table with her hands loose at her sides and looked down the length of it at him.

"Eat," she said.

Frank looked at the birds and the beef and the bread and the dark glossy dish, and then up at her, and he laughed — a short one, mostly breath, the laugh of a man declining to be made a fool of.

"I wasn't expecting this," he said.

"No." She inclined her head very slightly. "Food is yet another layer of sensation to explore. After all — we are not monsters."

And she meant it. He came back to it years later, turning it over as you turn a stone carried so long in a pocket that it has gone smooth: there was no edge in it. No irony, no relish, not the smallest crease of a joke anywhere in her face. She had said a plain thing about the nature of the world and had assumed, correctly, that he was hungry.

Frank picked up the fork.

It was heavy. Good silver, worn thin at the shoulder of the tines by generations of somebody's thumbs. He took a piece of the beef and a little of the fat and the crust of salt on the outside of it, and he put it in his mouth.

He made a sound.

It was the best thing he had ever eaten. Not the best thing he had eaten in the Order, not the best thing he had eaten in a decade — the best, whole and outright, the top of the entire list, better than Kyoto, better than the lamb in the mountains outside Fez when he was twenty-nine and the whole world had still been in front of him. The fat went across his tongue and undid something at the base of his skull. He heard himself groan and did not care.

He reached for the bread.

The fork burst in his mouth.

There was no warning and no sound. The shaft of it came apart along its length into six or seven flat ribbons that opened outward like a flower, and they went through the inside of his cheeks and up into the gum above his back teeth and down through the floor of his mouth under the tongue, and the whole apparatus set itself against the roof of his mouth and held.

Frank came up out of the chair. He got about eight inches before the pain arrived properly and took his legs, and he came down hard on the upholstery with both hands flat on the table and the plate ringing and every candle down the length of it standing perfectly straight and untroubled.

He could not close his mouth. He could not open it further. He could taste the beef and the salt and the fat, still, absolutely undiminished, underneath the flood of iron, and that was the obscenity of it — that the good thing did not stop. His body could not decide which of them to attend to, and the failure to decide was its own separate agony running underneath both of them, and it was the one he could not get away from.

He got a hand up to his face.

"No," said the Priest.

He put the hand down.

He was making a noise. He could hear it. It was not a word.

She came down the length of the table, unhurried, the candle flames leaning very slightly as she passed them and then standing up again, and she stopped beside his chair and looked at him with an attention so complete and so devoid of appetite that it was like being read.

Then she reached past him, and picked up the bread, and put it on his plate.

"Eat," she said.

Frank Cotton sat in the warm light with silver through both his cheeks and his mouth full of blood and salt, and picked up the bread, and ate.

He could not chew on the right. He learned that in the first mouthful, when the ribbon standing through his cheek moved against the inside of the bread and turned a quarter of an inch in the wound it had made, and something at the back of his jaw let go with a sound he heard through the bone. So he chewed on the left, slowly, the way a man eats after dental work, and the blood came down his chin and into the collar of his shirt and onto the white cloth in front of him, and the bread went red where he had held it and he ate that part too.

It was extraordinary.

Eight · The First Session

Afterwards he could remember the room in a sequence of very hard, very clear pieces, and nothing at all connecting them.

The slab. That first. Black stone, and long, and set at a height that meant you had to make a decision to get onto it, which he understood immediately was the point. Nobody helped him. Nobody watched to see whether he would. He undressed. There was a ledge left for the clothes, which told him everything about how many men had stood exactly where he was standing, and he folded them onto it because there was nothing else to do with his hands. Then he stood in the cold, pale and unremarkable and three years older than the man who had opened the box, and got up onto the stone, and lay down on his back.

The cold. That second. It came up through his shoulder blades and the backs of his thighs and the base of his skull, and it was not the cold of a cellar, it was the cold of a thing that has never in its existence been at body temperature and never will be.

And it was lovely. He wanted to say that to somebody and there was nobody to say it to. Lying naked on it was like lowering yourself into a lake in August, and it was also the worst cold he had ever been in, and by then he had been in the Order long enough not to find the combination remarkable. Within a minute he was shaking. Within three he had stopped, because the stone had taken enough out of him that shaking was no longer available.

The ceiling. Very high, ribbed, with the chains coming down out of the dark of it at intervals — some of them ending in hooks and some of them ending in nothing, just links, hanging, going up out of the light. When they moved, later, they did not move the way a thing moves that has decided to. They paid out in even increments, with a soft regular clicking a long way up in the dark, and they stopped when they had come the distance they had been set to come — not the distance the moment asked for. The distance they had been set to come.

Then she was beside him and he had not heard her come in.

"You have three questions," she said. "You may ask two."

His teeth were going. "What —"

"That is not one of them. Think."

He lay on the black stone and thought, with an intellect that had spent three years in a room full of drawers, and what came out was not either of the questions he had prepared.

"Will I remember it?"

"Yes."

"All of it?"

"Yes." She looked down at him. "That was two."

"That's not —"

"It is." Something that was almost, but not at all, a smile. "You will find that it was the right two. Nobody asks about the pain. In twelve centuries nobody has ever asked about the pain, and every single one of them thought they were going to."

She put her hand on his face.

He could never afterwards fit that piece anywhere. It came out of sequence every time he tried, and it would not go where he put it. Her palm along his jaw, and her thumb at the corner of his mouth where the fork had gone through and healed and gone through again, and the touch of it was —

He looked for the word for two hundred years and never found one that would hold it.

It was not seduction. He had been seduced by professionals and this had none of the flattery in it. It was not comfort either, though it was closer to comfort than to anything else in his experience — it was the way a hand comes down on the head of a child who is very frightened and has been very brave, and it arrived in him with such completeness and such total absence of warning that his eyes filled before the first hook moved.

"There," she said.

And the hooks came.

He had been braced for the shoulders and the back, because that was where they had taken him the first time, and he was wrong; they came into the meat of his chest and his thighs and up under him and along both flanks, four and two and two and two, and each one entered and set and turned a quarter turn to seat itself, and the chains above him took up their slack one at a time in an order that had clearly been decided in advance by somebody who had done this ten thousand times.

They did not pull him up. They pulled him open.

The skin of the chest came off in one sheet from the collarbone to the mouth of the stomach. Not cut. Lifted, the way the skin lifts off a cooked bird if you get your thumb under it at the right place. The cold of the slab met the wet underside of him — the fat, yellow and beaded; the mapped red of the pectoralis; the bright running of opened vessels — and the cold was tender. The stone licked him where nothing in forty-seven years had ever been touched.

Frank's back came up off the stone.

And her mouth was on his. Her tongue was in him with the same unhurried competence as the hooks, and he could taste her and taste his own blood and could not tell which of them he was swallowing.

She did not rush the kiss, and that undid him. He had spent twenty years taking people quickly, as if speed were a kind of mercy and as if getting a cock into a mouth or a cunt or a hand were the same act performed in different rooms. She took the whole of his mouth and kept it. When the sixth hook seated in the meat of the inner thigh and turned its quarter-turn he felt himself thicken against the air, absurd, exposed, the glans pulling wet and dark in the cold, and she put her hand there without looking down and held him as she had held his jaw — no appetite, complete attention — and the hold was a pressure that was exactly as much pain as it was anything else. Her palm was dry. The hook in the thigh was not. Blood ran down over his stones and over her wrist and dripped off the edge of the slab and made no sound on the flags.

"There," she said, into his mouth.

The chains went up one link.

He came apart along the midline. Not a figure of speech: the sternum gave with a sound like green wood, and the two halves of the opened chest lifted as the hooks took their load, and he was looking at the wet dark interior of his own ribs while she kissed him. He could see his heart. He could see it working, indecent, a fist clenching in a well. The cold hit the pericardium and he shouted into her teeth. She did not stop. She put her other hand flat on the opened sternum where a palm had no business being and pressed, gently, as if settling a page.

The seventh and eighth hooks took the gluteal meat, left and right, and lifted. His ass opened. The cold went up into him there too, a thick unlubricated invasion that was not a cock and was better than a cock because it did not pretend to be anything but the room itself entering him. He felt his hole give and keep giving. He felt the slab's chill on the inner wall of himself. He spent across her fist in a long helpless stripe that hit his own opened belly and ran down into the dark of the chest cavity and was lost there, and the orgasm did not finish the agony and the agony did not finish the orgasm.

He would try, later, to lay these two things end to end so that they made a sequence, and they refused. Her mouth on his, and the sheet of himself coming off his ribs. Her hand flat on his sternum, and the fourth hook seating. The whole of her, over him, unhurried, taking her time in a way he had never taken his time with anybody in his entire life — and the chains going up into the dark, and the drag, and the cold on the wet of him.

And it was love, arriving in his chest and his throat and the backs of his eyes with exactly the authority of the pain, and refusing, exactly as the beef had refused, to be cancelled by it.

He was saying something. It went on for some time and there were no consonants in it, and he heard his own voice come back off the ribbed ceiling in a register he had never used before and never used again.

At some point language stopped being available. He was aware of this happening, distantly, the way you are aware of a light going out in another room. Words went first, and then the sense that there had been words. Then duration failed — he could not have said whether he had been on the stone for an hour or since the beginning of the world, and both answers seemed reasonable, and then the question stopped being interesting. Somewhere in there the difference between the hand on his face and the hooks in his flanks quietly dissolved, and he understood — not as a thought, there were no thoughts left, but as a condition, the way you understand that you are wet — that they had never been two things.

What came after that left no record he could get back to. What he had instead was evidence: the clicking of the chains a long way up in the dark, paying out and stopping and paying out again on a schedule that had nothing to do with anything he was doing — and the fact that when it ended, the candles at the head of the slab had burned down into their collars.

And then he was lying on the black stone, whole, dry, unmarked, with his pulse going in his hands, and the room was quiet, and she was standing at the head of the slab with her hands folded, looking at nothing in particular, waiting for him the way Custos waited at a door.

He was still hard. It was the least interesting fact in the room. Seed had dried on a stomach that was no longer there to have carried it. The body had put itself back and had kept the wanting.

He could not speak for some while. When he could, what came out was cracked and small and not at all what he had intended.

"Do that again."

The Priest looked down at him.

"In forty days," she said.

"No. Now. Do it —" He got up onto an elbow. The room went sideways and settled. "Now."

"No."

"Why not?"

And she considered him for a long moment, and Frank felt himself being written down.

"Because there is no use in it," she said, "until you can tell me what happened."

"I know what happened."

"Then tell me."

He opened his mouth.

Nothing came. He reached for it — for the whole vast thing that had just been done to him and in him, the exact texture of it, the sequence, the content — and it was there, entirely present, undiminished, and every route he tried to it collapsed the instant he put weight on it. He got as far as it was like four separate times and each time the sentence died on the second word.

He sat on the edge of the black stone, naked, with the best vocabulary he had ever had in his life, and could not describe his own afternoon.

"Forty days," said the Priest.

She was at the door before he found anything at all, and what he found was so far beneath the occasion that he was ashamed of it even while it was leaving him.

"That's not long enough," he said.

She stopped. She did not turn round.

"No," she agreed. "It is not."

Nine · What Does Not Come Back

Antiphon found him in the fourth gallery a fortnight later.

Antiphon was the only one of them who sought Frank out. The others tolerated him the way a household tolerates a lodger of long standing; Antiphon came looking, which Frank found flattering for about a year and then found interesting for a great deal longer, because he worked out eventually that being sought out by Antiphon was not a compliment, it was a symptom.

"You're counting," Antiphon said.

Frank did not look round. He had a ladder halfway along the run and a sheet in his hand. The rungs were warm and good under his bare feet and had been quietly taking the skin off them for three years.

"I'm dusting."

"You're counting. You've been counting for three years." Antiphon leaned against the rail. It had been a young man once and had kept the worst of that — a lightness in how it stood, a habit of getting to the point too fast, and a pleasure in its own cleverness that four hundred years had not sanded off. Its modifications were showy by the standards of the Order, and Frank had noticed that Custos's eye slid off them. "Ask me. You've been not-asking me for a fortnight and it's making you dull."

Frank came down the ladder.

"Forty days," he said. "Why forty?"

"That's not your question."

"It's a question."

"It's a decoy and it's beneath you." Antiphon folded its arms. "Ask."

So Frank asked it.

"Something's gone," he said.

He had been working on how to say it for fourteen days and that was the best he had managed, and it came out flat and stupid and exactly right.

"I've been over it and over it. I'm whole. Everything came back — I've checked, I've — everything came back. But I went in with something and I came out without it, and it wasn't skin." He looked at his own hands. "The second time I ate in the refectory it was still the best food I'd ever had. It was. I'd swear to it. And it was smaller."

Antiphon was quiet for a moment.

"Smaller," it said.

"Not worse. Smaller. Like a room you go back to."

"Yes," said Antiphon. "That's it, actually. You've got there in three years, which is fast, and Custos will pretend it isn't."

"What is it?"

"There's a word. It won't help you." Antiphon pushed off the rail and came along the gallery and stood looking down through the well at the floors of drawers below. "Leviathan puts the body back. That is what Leviathan is for, as far as we are concerned, and it is very good at it, and it does not miss. Bone, blood, the lot. It is the reason this Order is here and not somewhere on your world doing something much cruder in a cellar." It glanced sideways. "You understand that, at least? We did not come out of Leviathan. We found it. We were looking for a place where the work could be done properly and we found the only one there is, and we moved in."

"I understand that."

"Good. Then understand the rest. It puts the body back. It does not put that back." Antiphon tapped the rail once with a fingertip. "You have a capacity for the new. Everyone does; it's the commonest thing in the world, a child is made almost entirely of it. It is also the only material in this realm that is not replaceable, and every single thing we do here spends a little of it, and there is no drawer anywhere in this room that tells you how much you started with."

Frank stood very still.

"How much have I spent?"

"No idea. Nobody has any idea. That's the — " Antiphon stopped, and Frank saw it decide, quite visibly, not to finish the sentence, and put its hand back on the rail.

"That's the what?"

"Nothing."

"Antiphon."

"It's not mine to say and you'd make it worse." It was already moving. "Forty days, Cotton. Don't ask for it early again, it embarrasses everybody."

Frank stayed in the fourth gallery long after the seventh bell.

He was thinking about a room you go back to, and about what would happen to a person, or to an institution, that went on going back to the same rooms for a very long time with a capacity that did not grow back.

And for the first time since the wall opened, Frank Cotton was not frightened, and was not hungry, and was not bored.

He was interested.

Ten · The Auditorium

He was made to watch one, in his fifth year, and it was not his.

That was part of the instruction and he did not understand that at the time. He assumed he was being shown a thing because it was impressive. It was three hundred years before he worked out that watching another person's lesson is itself a lesson, and that the Order had known this for twelve centuries, and that there was a drawer about it.

Her name was Ines and she had been in the realm about a year.

She had come through a configuration in Valencia and she wrote poetry, and she had gone on writing it here, which was not as unusual as Frank had expected — the Order gave people paper if they asked; the Order gave people almost anything if they asked, and Frank never got used to it: that you could go to the people who were going to open you and ask for a pen, and they would find you a good one. She had a cell like his with a stone shelf and a jug, and she sat on the floor of it in the long silence after the fourth bell with her back against the wall and filled sheets.

They had given her a pen. Frank saw it once and it was a good one — weighted, warm, the barrel worn to the shape of a particular grip by somebody's hand a long time ago — and it hurt to hold. She wrote with it for six hours at a stretch and came out of the cell flexing her fingers, and went back in after the fifth bell and did it again.

Frank had read one, once, over her shoulder in the refectory, without asking. It was in Spanish and he could make out perhaps a third of it, and the third he could make out was about the inside of a mouth.

"You will come to the hall at the sixth bell," Custos said.

"Whose is it?"

"The Valencian girl's."

"What's the apparatus?"

"There isn't one," said Custos, and went away.

⁂

The hall was one he had never been into and had assumed was a store, and it was not a store. It was an auditorium. Nine hundred seats in a horseshoe going up into the dark, a raked floor, and a stage at the bottom of it with boards — actual boards, worn pale in the middle the way stage boards go — and a set of lamps overhead of a kind Frank had not seen since a theatre in Buenos Aires in 1969.

The seats were full.

He could not see who was in them. He understood the lamps from the wings, professionally, before he understood anything else: they were angled down and forward and they were very bright, and from the boards you would have a wall of white and nothing behind it.

Ines came out with her sheets in her hand, barefoot on the boards.

Frank noticed the bare feet and understood them a moment later. The boards were warm. He could see it in how she stood — that first involuntary settling of the shoulders that people do on a good floor — and he could also see, because he had been in the realm five years by then and knew what to look for, the small repeated adjustment of her weight that meant the same boards were taking something out of her the entire time she was on them.

She was shaking. Frank could see it from the wings — the fast shallow shaking of somebody who has wanted a thing for years and had stopped believing it would ever arrive — and she came to the middle of the boards and stood in the light and could not see a single face, and nine hundred people waited in the dark.

She read for forty minutes.

Frank did not follow much of it. His Spanish was bad and hers was fast and full of the vocabulary of a woman who had spent a year having her body opened, and there were long stretches where he lost the sense entirely and simply listened to the shape of it.

It was, he thought, probably very good.

And the hall gave it to her.

They laughed in three places. They went absolutely silent in one, so completely that he could hear the lamps. And when she finished, and stood there with the sheets down at her side and her chin up in the white light, nine hundred members of the Order of the Gash came to their feet and gave her four solid minutes of it — real applause, unstinting, with no cruelty in it anywhere, the sound of a large room that has been genuinely moved and has decided to say so.

Ines put her hand over her mouth.

Frank, in the wings, found that his own throat had gone tight, and was irritated about it.

Then the lamps went down.

They did not go out. They dimmed, smoothly, over about ten seconds, the way house lights come up at the end of an evening — and as they went down the hall came into view, tier by tier, nine hundred seats rising into the dark.

The applause did not stop. It went on at exactly the same volume, and it went on for a few seconds after the light had reached them, and by then Ines had seen.

They had no faces.

Smooth. Nine hundred of them, from the front row to the gods, standing and applauding a woman on a stage with a blank oval of skin where the eyes and the nose and the mouth had been — and no ears. Frank looked for the ears and there were no ears.

They had been like that the whole time.

The applause ran on for another four seconds and then stopped, all at once, and the silence that came down was the largest thing Frank had ever been inside.

Ines made a sound like a door being forced.

She got half of a word out — a name, Frank thought, or the start of one — and then her legs stopped holding her and she went down onto her knees on the warm boards with the sheets going everywhere, and she stayed down, folded over her own lap with both fists in her hair. After that she made no sound at all. Frank could see her ribs working and nothing was coming out of her.

Nine hundred members of the Order of the Gash stood in perfect silence and did not sit down, and every blank oval in the hall was turned very slightly towards the stage, because whatever they were using instead of eyes was still working.

The Priest was standing in the middle of the raked floor, halfway up, where she had been the entire time.

"Ines," she said.

The girl did not look up.

"They heard none of it," said the Priest. Her voice went up into the dark of the ninth tier without any effort at all. "I want that established before anything else, because you will spend a hundred years trying to make it mean something crueller than it does, and it does not mean anything cruel. No one in this hall heard a word you said. They cannot. They have not been able to since before your country had a name."

Ines said something into the boards.

"Yes," said the Priest. "It was real. That is the difficulty and I am not going to take it away from you. Four minutes of nine hundred people on their feet. You felt it — you felt every second of it, and it was the best thing that has ever happened to you, and I will not have anybody in this hall tell you otherwise, including you.

"And it was worth nothing. Also true. Both of those are true and neither one cancels the other and they are going to sit inside you together for a very long time, and that is the entire content of tonight's lesson, and now I am going to say the rest of it out loud, because you are new and because I am not in the habit of letting people work this out over twelve hundred years when it can be said in four minutes."

She came down two steps.

"You have spent your whole life sorting," she said. "Everyone does. It begins before you can speak. This is pleasant; keep it. This is unpleasant; get rid of it. And by the time you are grown the sorting has become so fast and so total that you no longer experience anything at all — you experience your verdict on it, arriving a fraction of a second afterwards, and you spend the remainder of your existence arranging your affairs so that the verdicts come out favourably.

"Consider what that costs. You wanted an audience. You have wanted one your whole life and you have written six hundred poems in pursuit of it. What you wanted was the applause — the good half. You did not want the silence, and the empty room, and the four hundred nights of writing something and being heard by nobody, and you spent fifteen years arranging your life so as to have as little of that as possible.

"But the silence is not the failure of the applause. It is its other side. They are one thing, and you have been trying to hold a coin by one face since you were a girl, and it cannot be done, and every year that you tried you got a little less of the whole.

"Half," said the Priest. "That is all any of them ever get. Your entire species, every one of them, at every moment of their lives — half of what is actually available, because they are busy sorting. They call it happiness. They call the pursuit of it a right."

She stopped in front of the stage.

"There is a story on your world," she said, "and it is more than a thousand years old and it is the only thing your world has ever produced that we keep in the fourth gallery. A monk comes to his teacher and says: master, the heat and the cold descend on us, how does one escape them. And the teacher says: go to the place where there is neither. And the monk, who is clever, says: where is that. And the teacher says —"

She turned her head slightly, and Frank realised, with a lurch, that she was speaking to him, in the wings, where he had assumed he was invisible.

"— when it is hot, let the heat kill you. When it is cold, let the cold kill you."

Nine hundred faceless members of the Order of the Gash stood in the tiers and did not move.

"That is not endurance," said the Priest. "Every single novice hears it as endurance and every single one of them is wrong. Enduring is still sorting; it is simply sorting with the jaw set. He is not telling the monk to bear the heat. He is telling him that there is no him separate from the heat to do the bearing, and that the moment the sorting stops, the summer is not something happening to you.

"That is what we do here. That is the whole of it. Not pain — anybody can have pain, your world is drowning in it and has learned nothing. Both at once, with the sorting switched off. And it takes about four hundred years, and most people cannot do it, and we do not stop."

She looked up at the girl on the boards.

"You have just had four minutes of the best thing that will ever happen to you, and it was given to you by nine hundred people who did not hear a word, and you are lying on a stage because you cannot hold them together." The Priest's voice did not soften and did not harden. "Nobody can, at a year. I could not, at ninety. You will read tomorrow night, and the night after, and the night after that, for as long as it takes, and I will be standing here every single time."

Ines lifted her head.

"How long," she said. Her voice was in pieces.

"I do not know," said the Priest. "Nobody has ever known. It is the only honest thing anyone here will ever tell you."

And then she did something Frank had never seen her do and never saw her do again.

She went up onto the boards, and knelt down, and gathered the sheets — all of them, taking her time, squaring them at the edges the way Custos squared a ledger — and put them back into the girl's hands.

"They were very good," she said. "I heard them."

Then she stood up, and went down off the stage, and the sheets caught fire.

All of them at once, in Ines's hands, in one soft concussion of light — six hundred poems, fifteen years, everything she had brought with her and everything she had written since, going up in a hall with nine hundred silent people standing in it.

Nobody moved to help her. Nobody made a sound. Nothing was said about it, then or ever, by anybody.

She did not let go.

The paper went first and went fast, and then her hands began. The heat took the fine hairs off the backs of them in a flash and then the skin came up in a line of blisters along both index fingers where she was gripping hardest, and the blisters broke and the fluid ran and hissed and the sheets stuck to her palms and went on burning through them. She turned her wrists to keep the stack together. That was the only movement she made. He could smell it from the wings — paper, and the particular sweetish pork smell of a person cooking, which he had last met in a market in Osaka and had never expected to meet again.

Frank watched from the wings with his hands on the rail and saw a woman on her knees on a warm stage holding fifteen years of her own work while it burned down through her fingers, and he could not tell — he was five years in, he had no instrument for it, and he would not have one for a long time — whether what he was looking at was a person breaking or a person beginning.

The hall filed out in silence up the raked aisles.

When it was empty she was still there, kneeling in the ash, with her hands open in front of her.

⁂

Frank walked back through the north galleries afterwards and had to stop twice, once with a hand on the rail, because his legs kept trying to do something other than walk.

He was five years in. He had not yet made his case; he had not yet counted the drawers; he had not yet stood on the flags of the chapter house and been agreed with.

What he had got, and what he would have said out loud to anybody who asked, was: four hundred years is too long, and they are wasting her, and I could see all of it in about twelve minutes and she is going to take a century.

What he had actually got, and did not notice for two and a half centuries, was a sentence.

Half. That is all any of them ever get.

It went into him, and when it came out again he was standing in the middle of an apparatus the size of a district with his hands on a panel the size of a door, explaining to seventy people in a chapter house why five billion of them should be brought through the wall at once for their own good.

Eleven · Whelan Breaks

It did not look like anything.

Frank had expected — and this was the last of his expectations to die, and it took the longest — some kind of event. A scene. A moment at which the boy came apart in public and was carried off shrieking to a place with a name.

What happened was that Denny Whelan went into the water rooms one morning at the third bell and came out at the fifth, and there was nobody behind his face any more.

Frank passed him in the passage that afternoon and looked at him properly, because something was wrong with the way he was walking. He was walking well. That was the wrong thing. For four months the boy had gone along the corridors with his shoulders up round his ears, flinching off the warm stone every fourth step. Now his feet came down flat and easy and he did not flinch once, and his face while he did it was pleasant and open and had nothing in it, the way a room is pleasant and open and has nothing in it.

He still worked. He worked, in fact, rather better than he had before. He carried things from the refectory to the store and back again without dropping them, which was new, and he stood in his place at the second bell without shaking, which was new, and when he was spoken to he answered in a clear pleasant voice with no delay in it at all.

Frank watched him for two weeks and then went and stood in front of him in the passage outside the store.

"Whelan."

"Yes."

"What's my name?"

"Frank Cotton."

"How long have you been here?"

A pause of perhaps a second. "I don't know."

"Do you want to go home?"

And Denny Whelan looked at him with a face that was pleasant and attentive and entirely unoccupied, and said, "I don't know," in exactly the same tone, and waited politely to see whether there would be anything else.

Frank went and found Custos.

He was angrier than he had been about anything since he arrived, and it was not an anger he recognised. He had been angry about being bored, and angry about being ignored, and angry about the door not being locked. This one had a floor under it, and the floor was a pleasant, attentive, entirely unoccupied young man standing in a corridor waiting politely to see whether there would be anything else.

"You've finished him," he said.

Custos was at the long table with four accounts spread in front of him and a straight-edge across two of them.

"No."

"I've just been talking to him. There's nobody in there."

"There is somebody in there." Custos moved the straight-edge down a line. "There is less of him available. That is not the same as nobody, and the difference matters, and you will find it matters more the longer you are here."

"He's twenty-three years old."

"Twenty-four. He had a birthday in the water rooms."

"He bought that box for two pounds fifty because a girl at a party —"

"I know why he bought it." Custos set the straight-edge down and looked up, and for the first and almost the only time in Frank's acquaintance with him he had to wait for his own face before he could speak. "I have three hundred and six of them in the ninth gallery. I know why every one of them bought it."

"Then he never asked for this."

"He asked for two days." Custos drew the next account towards him. "He put it down four times and picked it up four times. On the second night he took it into the bath, because he had worked out that the plates ran easier when his hands were warm, and he sat in cooling water until three in the morning with his fingers going white and pruned at the pads." He found his place on the sheet. "Nobody was watching him. Nobody had promised him anything. There was no girl in the room by then; there had not been a girl in the room since Saturday."

"He was showing off for somebody who'd gone home."

"He was. On the first evening." Custos ruled a line. "On the second afternoon he was alone in a bedsit in Kilburn with the curtains shut, and he did not stop. The thing in his hands knows the difference between those two men even if you do not, and it opened for the second one."

"He came down that stair screaming."

"They all come down that stair screaming," said Custos, "and every one of them spent between one hour and eleven years getting the last panel round, alone, on purpose, against no resistance but the object's. I have thirty thousand accounts upstairs, Cotton, and I will tell you what is not in a single one of them: a configuration solved by a man who wanted to stop."

Frank put both hands on the table.

"Then what happens to him?"

"He continues."

"Continues what?"

"The instruction." Custos's voice did not change at all. "He will be taught to breathe. He will be taught to hold his attention in one place while something happens at the edge of it. When he cannot, he will be set back to the beginning and taught again. That is what we do here."

"He can't learn it."

"Probably not."

"Then stop."

"On what grounds?" said Custos.

And there it was: the thing Frank could never get round, then or later, not once in all the years he spent trying. There was no cruelty in the question. Custos was not scoring. He had asked it the way you ask a colleague to explain a procedure you have never used, and he was waiting, with genuine interest, for the answer.

"Because it's pointless," Frank said.

"It is not pointless. It is unlikely to succeed. Those are different, and the difference is four hundred years of this Order's history, and if you had read the fifth gallery instead of counting the spines in it you would know that at least six of the accounts up there came out of men everyone had written off." Custos picked the straight-edge back up. "You are asking me to decide, on his behalf, that he is finished. He has not asked me that. He is not able to ask me that. So I will go on offering, and he will go on being unable to take it, and one of those two things may change in three hundred years."

"He'll be like that for three hundred years."

"He may be."

"And you don't —" Frank found he had run out of the end of the sentence and had to go back for it. "Doesn't anybody mind?"

Custos ruled a line.

"I mind," he said.

He did not elaborate. He finished the line, and squared the account, and drew the next one towards him, and Frank stood there for a while and then went away, because there was plainly nothing else on offer and because he had begun to suspect that he was the one behaving badly, and could not find the flaw in the suspicion.

He looked in on Whelan once more, about a year later.

He was in the refectory at the second bell, standing in his place, straight-backed and pleasant and empty, and one of the Order was beside him with a hand lightly on his shoulder blade, correcting his breathing. Patiently. For perhaps the four-hundredth time.

Frank Cotton, who had left a woman in Antwerp because being loved had taken him nine weeks to exhaust, stood in the doorway of the refectory and discovered that he wanted, very badly, to break something.

He did not examine the feeling. He was not in the habit. But he kept it. He put it away with everything else he did not examine, and when it came back up years later it had his own name on it and a philosophy built round it, and by then he had entirely forgotten where he got it.

Twelve · The Argument

He asked for the audience in his seventh year and was granted it in his ninth, which he understood by then was not obstruction but arithmetic of a different kind, and he spent the intervening two years assembling his case.

He did it properly. He had never in his life prepared anything as carefully.

He had the numbers. Four hundred and eighty-one years since the last original account. He had the cross-reference notation and could read it now. He had the acceleration curve of the deep galleries and the long fat centuries where the Order had been going through the wall of the world roughly once a decade and writing it down in a hand that got sloppier and happier the deeper you went. He had the exact drawer, in the twelfth gallery, where an account began this has not been attempted and he had checked the phrase against the index and found it used one hundred and ninety times before the year 1290 and six times since.

He had the sealed corridors. Nine of them, that he had found, in a realm he had walked in every free hour for nine years. Doors that were closed. Not locked — closed, which in the Order meant something worse. He had asked Custos about two of them and been told, without heat, that they were not part of the present work.

And he had Whelan, though he did not intend to use Whelan, and would have said with complete sincerity that Whelan had nothing to do with it.

They gave him the chamber.

It was the room with the tiered wooden stalls, and they were full — sixty or seventy of the Order, seated, silent, arranged by something that was not seniority and that Frank never did decode. Custos was in the fourth row on the left with his hands in his lap. Antiphon was standing at the back, and it was a statement. The Priest sat at the head, in a chair no better than any of the others.

Frank stood on the flags in the middle, in a room where seventy faces had been arranged into total stillness, and made his case.

He spoke for the better part of two hours. He did not raise his voice, because he had worked out in advance that raising his voice would be the first thing anybody remembered.

He began with the drawers, because the drawers could be checked.

"Ninth gallery," he said. "West run. Drawer six hundred and two. An account in the second hand, undated, of a thing done to a woman out of Antioch that had not been done to anybody before. Six hundred and three. The same. Six hundred and four, six hundred and five, six hundred and six." He stopped. "I am not going to read you the run. There are two thousand of them, they cover a hundred and forty years, and every single one is an original account. I dusted them for the better part of a year before I understood what was in my hands."

Nobody in the stalls moved.

"Twelfth gallery. East run. Drawer nine hundred and one. The notation on that sheet is a date, a hand, and a string of older numbers, and the string is the entire content of it. Somebody went out. Somebody came back. And what they had to report was that where they had been was the same as somewhere in the ninth gallery, west run, four centuries earlier." He turned his head until he found Custos in the fourth row. "You taught me to read that notation. It took an afternoon. There are eleven hundred of them and they are all in the last three galleries and there are none anywhere else in this building."

Custos did not move either.

"There is a phrase," Frank said. "This has not been attempted. It is in the index; anybody here can pull it. It occurs a hundred and ninety times before the year 1290." He had the sheet in his hand and did not look at it, because he had all of it. "It occurs six times after. The last of the six is an account of a procedure conducted on the same tissue, for the same duration, to the same end as one entered in the eleventh gallery four hundred and eighty-one years earlier — with a different apparatus. The brother who wrote it up used the phrase in good faith. The brother who filed it did not check."

Somewhere in the third row a chair took somebody's weight differently. That was the whole of the response.

"Four hundred and eighty-one years," said Frank. "That is not my figure. I got it out of your own drawers with a cloth in my hand.

"I have heard the answer to this. I have had it from three of you in corridors and once, at length, across a table. The answer is that the work was never about novelty; that the practice is the point; that a thing done for the ten-thousandth time with the whole of the attention is not a repetition." He nodded. "It is a good answer. It is the answer a monastery gives, and a monastery is an honourable institution, and I have no quarrel with a word of it except one.

"You are not called a monastery."

He let them have that, and counted, and nothing came back.

"There are nine doors in this realm that are closed," he said. "Not locked. Closed. I have found nine and I do not for a moment believe nine is all of them. I asked about two of them and I was told they were not part of the present work, and I have thought about that sentence more than anything else anybody has said to me since I came through the wall — because it does not say they are dangerous, and it does not say they are empty. It says there is a present work. It says the doors are outside it. It says somebody decided that, and wrote nothing down."

He set the sheet on the flags at his feet. It was theatre. He knew it was theatre when he did it.

"Thirty thousand accounts upstairs. In an institution that records the colour of the light in a room, there is not one line in any of them about what is behind those doors."

He looked up at the tiers.

"So. An order of explorers that has not been anywhere new in five centuries. That keeps a museum. That runs a syllabus. That teaches, patiently, over decades, a curriculum discovered in its entirety by people who are all of them dead." He put his hands behind his back, which he had not planned. "I would say that institution has quietly become something else, at some point nobody noticed and nobody voted on. And I would say the honest thing — the rigorous thing, the thing the second hand in the ninth gallery would have done inside a week — is to change the name."

He finished. Nobody moved.

He had rehearsed for four or five different responses. He had a follow-up ready for outrage, and a better one for contempt, and his best material by a distance was held in reserve for the moment when somebody — he had assumed Custos — stood up and began explaining, patiently, that the young man had misunderstood the nature of the work.

The Priest said:

"Yes."

Frank waited.

"I'm sorry?"

"You are correct." She had not shifted in the chair. "Four hundred and eighty-one years. Nine sealed corridors — there are fourteen. Your reading of the twelfth gallery is sound, and your reading of the index is better than sound; nobody had counted that phrase before. It has been put in the fourth hand and it will be entered." A slight movement of her chin. "You are right about the name, too. It should have been changed. It was raised, twice. Nothing came of it."

The chamber was very quiet.

"That's — " said Frank.

"You may sit down."

"I don't want to sit down."

"No," she agreed. "You want to be argued with. I am aware. It is the only thing you have asked for in nine years, and it is the one thing I cannot honestly give you, because you are not wrong."

And Frank Cotton stood on the flags in front of seventy of them with two years of preparation in his mouth and absolutely nowhere to put it.

He had never been so comprehensively beaten in his life, and it had cost her four words, and the worst of it — the part that got into him and worked away at him for a decade afterwards — was that she had not been trying. She had simply told the truth immediately, at no cost to herself whatsoever, and in doing so had informed him, in front of the entire Order, that the most valuable thing he had ever produced was worth about as much as a corrected date.

"Then why hasn't anything changed," he said. It came out with a crack in it.

"Because being right is not an engine," said the Priest. "It is a description. Somebody has to want to go, and wanting is not a thing that can be resolved upon." She rose. "That is the end of the audience. It was well made, Cotton. Genuinely. It will be in the drawers a long time after you and I are both a great deal less interesting than we are now."

Afterwards, in the passage, Antiphon fell into step beside him.

"You do see," it said.

"See what."

"She agreed with you in public and it cost her nothing. Everyone in that room now knows the Order is ossified, and they knew before, and tomorrow they will get up at the first bell." Antiphon's voice had an edge on it that Frank had not heard before and did not entirely trust. "That is the trick. You cannot break something by telling it the truth. It just writes the truth down and files it."

Frank walked on for a while.

"Then somebody has to go," he said.

"Yes."

"Through one of the corridors."

"That is one way." Antiphon stopped walking. "Or out."

Frank stopped too.

"Out," he said.

"They are not locked," said Antiphon, and did not say anything else, and turned off into the fourth gallery and left him standing in the passage.

Thirteen · The Unlocked Door

He took nine months over it, which he was proud of at the time and understood very differently later.

He did not go at the first opportunity. He mapped. He watched the traffic in the corridors across a hundred and fifty days and worked out that there was a period after the sixth bell, on the days when the sixth bell meant a session, when the northern galleries were as close to empty as they ever got. He found the place where the stone changed — where the dressed blocks gave way to something older that the Order had built around rather than replaced — and he found, in the oldest part of it, a door.

It was wood. He sat down on the flags opposite it the first time he saw it and got his breathing under control. There was no wood anywhere in the realm except in the stalls of the chapter house and the fronts of thirty thousand drawers. This was a plain wooden door in a stone frame in a corridor nobody used, and it had a latch, and the latch was a latch such as you would find on a garden gate in Kent.

He did not touch it for two months.

He went back eleven times and stood in front of it and did not touch it, and on the twelfth he put his hand on the latch and lifted it and felt it come up under his thumb without resistance of any kind, and set it down again, and went to his cell and lay awake until the first bell.

They are not locked.

He thought about Antiphon saying it, and he thought about the particular way Antiphon had not looked at him, and he thought — because he was not a stupid man, whatever else he was — that a member of the Order who wanted the Order shaken up might find it convenient to have somebody else do the shaking. He turned this over for a long while.

Then he decided that he did not care.

It happened in a stone cell eight feet by six with no one else present. Not the mapping. Not the door. The moment, somewhere around the fourth bell on an unremarkable morning, when he laid out the whole shape of it in his head — I am being handled; this is a leash; something wants me to do this and has arranged for me to think of it myself — and looked at it clearly, and understood it, and got up anyway.

Because the alternative was to stay, and stay, and be taught, patiently, forever, by people who would not stop and would not be angry and would not lock the door.

He went on a session day, after the sixth bell.

The corridor was empty. He lifted the latch and the door opened inwards onto a smell he had not smelled in nine years — dust, and old plaster, and the flat sweetish reek of a house shut up through a hot summer.

Beyond it was a membrane of grey about four feet deep, and looking into it did to his eyes what looking down a well does: the four feet went away from him, and kept going, and did not arrive anywhere.

Frank stood at the threshold.

It occurred to him then, with perfect clarity and much too late, that whatever it was Leviathan did for a body in this realm, it was not likely to travel; that he had been taken apart and put back together perhaps forty times in nine years, and that every one of those occasions had happened here; and that he had no idea at all what was actually holding him together at that moment.

He thought: ask.

And then he thought about Whelan standing in the refectory with a hand on his shoulder blade, being corrected for the four-hundredth time, and about being right is not an engine, and about forty days and forty days and forty days more stretching away in front of him in a straight line for three hundred years.

Frank Cotton went through the door.

It took everything.

It came off him in the four feet of grey between the two worlds, and it came off in the order the body is built in.

The clothes went first and he barely registered them. Then the skin, all of it at once, from the crown down, peeling back off the meat with a long wet tearing drag like a wetsuit taken off a diver by somebody in a hurry — face, scalp, the skin of the eyelids, the sheath of the cock, the soles of the feet — and he felt every square inch of it go and he was still thinking clearly enough to be astonished at how much of him there was. The cold got into the raw of him instantly and completely. There was no surface left anywhere to keep it out.

Then the fat, in a yellow slurry. Then the long muscles, unwinding off the bone like rope off a drum, the great sheet of the latissimus letting go across his back, the belly opening down its own seam and the gut sliding out of him into the grey and being taken. He felt his own heart continue for four or five beats in a chest that no longer had a front to it. He felt his tongue go. He felt the eyes go, and the world did not become dark, because seeing had never been in the eyes for as long as he had been in that realm and he had not once thought to ask what it had been in.

And then the rest. The depth. The ballast, the weight, the thing Leviathan had been putting into him every hour of every day for nine years without once mentioning it — and that went out of him the way water goes out of a bath, all at once at the end, with a pull.

He had time to feel every part of it and no time at all to change his mind, and the last coherent thing that went through what was left of him was a flare of pure hilarity —

so that's what it was doing —

— and then he came out into the upper room of the house on Lodovico Street, four feet above the boards, as a wet red nothing, and dropped, and soaked away between the floorboards into the dark.

In the chamber, the sixth bell had not yet finished.

Custos came in with the ledger under his arm and stood a moment, and then said to the Priest, in the tone you would use to report a shortfall in the linen:

"The north door."

"I know."

"He has been nine years." Custos set the ledger down. "He was the best novice in four hundred of them and he has gone out through the north door onto a world with nothing to hold him and he will be — " He stopped. Squared the ledger with two fingers. "There is very little left of him."

"There is enough."

"For what?"

The Priest was looking at the empty flags in the middle of the chamber where a man had stood nine months ago and made an excellent case.

"He has not finished," she said.

Part Two

Earth

Fourteen · The Attic

He was under the boards for three years and he could not count them.

That was the first thing he understood, when there was enough of him to understand anything: that duration had been done to him and that he had no instrument to measure it with. In the Order there had been bells. Seven of them, unequal, and he had hated them, and he would have given the whole of what was left of him for one.

There was nothing here. There was a dark, and a slow cold coming and going that he eventually worked out was seasons, and the vibration of the road, and — very occasionally, at intervals that might have been months — a bird landing on the slates above him. The tick of the claws, the shift of the weight, the small scrape as it turned round. Nine seconds, perhaps. He attended to it the way a man attends to a concert, and then he had it for months.

He was a stain. He used the word, when he could hold a word, because using it was a way of not falling apart entirely. Somewhere between the north door and the boards he had been reduced to something that had no surface, and it turned out that almost everything he had ever been was a function of having a surface. He could not see. He could not move except in the sense that a damp patch moves. He had no orientation and no appetite and no capacity to act, and he had, in exchange, an intact and undiminished mind, which he came to regard as the single most vicious thing that had ever been done to him by anybody.

He thought about the Order constantly.

Not with longing, at first. At first it was rage — a long unbroken current of it that went on for what he later estimated was most of a year, an argument conducted with Custos and the Priest and Antiphon and a boy called Whelan in a dark under a floor with no one present.

You agreed with me. That was how it opened, every time, for ten months. You sat in a chair no better than anybody else's and you agreed with me in front of seventy of them, and then you did nothing at all, and I would like you to account for that, because I have been through the wall of the world twice now and I have never met anything as contemptible as a creature that concedes a point and does not move.

And she answered him.

That was the part he could not stop and never afterwards described to anybody. He had her voice exactly — three years of it, in stone rooms, with nothing else to listen to — and she came back at him out of the dark with the mildness completely intact, and she was better down there than she had ever been in the chamber, because he was writing both sides and the side he was better at writing was hers.

You have described a shortfall, she said. You have not described a door.

I named nine of them.

You named nine doors you did not open.

He would go round that for weeks. He would come at it from underneath — from the drawers, from the phrase out of 1290, from a boy standing in the refectory at the second bell with a hand on his shoulder blade — and he would build something over days that had no flaw in it anywhere and put it to her whole, and she would say four quiet words, and it would be finished.

He beat Custos. He beat Antiphon in an afternoon. He did not once, in ten months, beat her.

And Whelan said nothing at all, in any of it, because Frank had never troubled to learn the sound of his voice.

Somewhere in the eighth month he caught himself looking forward to it.

It changed nothing, and when he came out the other side the rage had burned down to something else, and the something else was worse.

It was homesickness.

He denied it for years afterwards, to people who had no way of contradicting him. But under the boards, in the third winter, with the road going through him and nothing else happening in the universe, Frank Cotton discovered that when he wanted to be somewhere else the somewhere else was not Kyoto or Marseilles or a hut outside Puno.

It was a cell eight feet by six, and a wool blanket, and a bell going in the dark to tell him that the day had a shape.

He never forgave anyone for that.

Then the house woke up.

There were feet on the stairs — many of them, over days — and furniture dragged, and a radio, and voices. He listened with the concentration of a man in a cell listening to a trial. Two of them, mostly. A man, and the man was Rory; he knew that voice the way you know your own handwriting and he was surprised at the violence of his contempt for it, arriving fully formed after three years of not existing.

And a woman.

He knew that one too.

He had had her on the afternoon of her wedding, in the room directly beneath the one he was in, while the reception went on downstairs, and he had done it because she was Rory's and because she held herself very straight and very still in a way he had wanted to see come apart, and he had made it come apart, and had left the country nine days later without a note. It had taken him about a fortnight to exhaust. He remembered it as competent.

She came up to the top of the house alone, more than once, and stood in the room, and did not do anything, and went down again. He could feel her weight on the boards over him. He got to know the pattern of it, and after a while he understood — in the dark, with nothing to do but understand — that she was not coming up to look at the room.

She was coming up because it was the only place in the house where nobody would ask her anything.

Oh, thought Frank. You never got over it either.

He began to work at it then. He had no mechanism, no voice, no method. What he had was nine years of instruction in holding attention in one place while something happened at the edge of it, and he had thought all that time that it was a curriculum in receiving.

It turned out it was also a curriculum in transmitting.

He was six months at it. He put everything he had into the boards under her feet — not words, he had no apparatus for words, but the shape of himself, the weight and the appetite and the specific gravity of Frank Cotton, pressed up through six inches of pine into a woman standing in an empty room in the afternoon. She began to stay longer. She began to come up when she had no reason to. Once she sat down on the floor.

And then, on an ordinary day in the summer, Rory carried a bed frame up the stairs and put his hand through a nail in the doorway of the upper room and swore and bled, four or five good drops of it, onto the boards, and went downstairs to run his hand under the tap.

It went into the wood, and it came down, and it reached him.

It was warm, and it was salt, and it had edges.

That was the whole of it. For three years he had been a smear with no boundary anywhere, worked into the grain of a floor in every direction at once, and four drops of his brother's blood came down through the pine with a shape on them, and he went into the shape the way a man who has been standing in the sea since Tuesday steps up onto a stone.

He came up out of the boards across the whole of that afternoon in the emptied room. It took him from the light through the window being white to the light being orange, and the pain was not the difficulty. He knew pain. He had been taught by professionals.

What he had not been prepared for was the poverty.

In the realm a body was opened forty times and was whole by the seventh bell and nobody remarked on it. Here he had four drops of his brother's blood and the dust of a floor and three years of his own dissolved matter lying in the joists, and he had to do the work himself, by hand, with nothing to build out of but what was there.

It came up through the gap between two boards as a thread of red and then a rope of it and then a slow blind pushing mass, and it found the underside of the pine and had to force the nails. The wood gave with a shriek. What came through was not a man and did not resemble one: a wet coiling heap the size of a dog, steaming faintly in the cold room, glistening, quietly working. It had no front and no top. It sorted itself.

Vessels came first, because vessels are cheapest — a red lace of them spreading out across the boards, questing, joining, going purple where they found each other and held. Then the long muscles laid themselves down along nothing, on a scaffold that was not there yet, and lay twitching and unanchored in the dust while the bone came up underneath them out of the marrow-slurry, wet and soft as cheese and hardening as he watched. A hand assembled at the end of an arm that had no shoulder. It opened and closed on the floorboards and left five red streaks and did it again. A jaw arrived without a skull to hang from and worked, chewing on nothing, on the boards, on itself.

He was conscious for all of it. In the realm the restoration happened to him and he came back from somewhere; here he was awake the whole time, present in every wrong half-made piece at once, feeling a lung inflate against no ribcage and an eye come into a socket that had no lid yet and roll wetly in the open air of a bedroom in north London.

The dust got into him. Plaster, hair, a dead wasp, forty years of the house — it went into the matrix and stayed there and became part of what he was rebuilt out of, and he could feel it in himself afterwards for as long as that body lasted, a fine grit in the tissue, the floor's contribution.

He got a head. He got a shoulder and most of a ribcage and one arm to the elbow, and the pelvis came halfway and stalled, and there was a lung on the outside of him that he could not get in, and then the rest gave out — a spill of unorganised meat from the hips down, twitching in the dust, going cold at the edges because there was nothing in it yet to keep it warm.

He was lying in the middle of the floor with one arm, half a pelvis and a lung on the outside of him when the door opened.

Julia was in the doorway with a cup of tea in her hand.

Frank Cotton — what there was of him — turned the ruin of his head towards her, and worked the wet apparatus of his jaw a few times until it would do what he wanted, and said the first word he had spoken in three years.

"Julia."

She did not scream. He noticed that immediately, and what went through him was affection — real affection, the only sort he had ever been capable of, which is the sort you feel for a well-made tool — and he thought, quite clearly, through the roaring:

Ah. Yes. That's why it was you.

Fifteen · The Men

She brought the first one on the ninth day.

He had considered lying about it and had decided against it, not out of decency but because he had nine years of theological training and no patience left for people who would not look at a thing directly. He said: I need bodies. I need what is in them. There is no other way and there is no smaller version of it. He said: you can walk out of this house now and I will not be able to follow you, and I will lie in this room until Rory finds me, and that will be the end.

Julia stood at the window with her back to him. Down in the street a car door went. Somebody's television came on through the party wall. She did not move for a long time.

Then she said, "How many?"

That was the whole of the negotiation. He thought about it a good deal afterwards, as a man returns to a sum that will not come out. He had expected to have to work on her — to spend weeks, to use the affair, to be tender, which he could do. He had prepared for a campaign.

She asked how many, on the ninth day, with her back to him.

The first was a man from the Edgware Road, and she brought him up talking. Frank had not anticipated that, and could not stop cataloguing it: the man still believed he was about to be fortunate. He had his hand on the small of her back on the second landing. His thumb worked at the waistband of her skirt as if the fabric were a problem he had already solved. He said, "Christ, are we decorating?" and laughed at it. Julia laughed — a short, correct laugh, the laugh of a woman who has decided — and let him go ahead of her into the upper room.

Frank was in the corner where the light failed. He had enough of a face by then to watch.

The man turned, grinning, already opening his belt, and Julia hit him at the base of the skull with the hammer on the second step he took toward the bedframe. The sound was small and final, like a joint going into a socket. He went to his knees. He was not dead. His hands found the dust sheet and bunched it. A string of spit hung from his mouth. Julia stood over him with her weight on the balls of her feet and hit him a second time at the temple, and the second blow opened him. Bone showed, pale as china, and then the dark pulped matter underneath it, and a piece of him went across the sheet in a wet arc and hit the skirting. He made a thick questioning noise. The third blow finished the shape of the head. Something grey and living came out of the opened place and lay on the cotton, still moving, and then did not.

She was breathing through her mouth. There was a fine spray across the front of her blouse and a darker wetness down one stocking that she looked at as if it were soup.

"Now," she said, without turning.

Frank came out of the corner.

What he did was not eating in any sense the word would survive. He put his mouth to the opened skull because that was where the heat was, and the heat was shape, and he had been a stain for three years and a shape was the only sacrament left to him. The blood went into him with a violence that had nothing to do with thirst. He felt the man's last warmth find the unfinished architecture of his own throat and take, the way mortar takes. He got his fingers into the ruin and scooped what would hold — clot, brain, the slick rope of vessel — and packed it into the wet hole of his own face where a cheek had not yet decided to be, and the sensation was so close to the first night under the wool blanket that he almost laughed into the wound. His new tongue found the broken edge of bone and worked it. He sucked. The body beneath him jerked once, a leftover, and was still.

He went lower because there was more of the man still hot. He opened the shirt with the nails he had and put his mouth on the chest and tore with his teeth until he had muscle enough for a shoulder. He took the inner thigh next, the femoral heat, and when he bit through the cloth and the skin the blood hit the back of his throat in a pulse and he swallowed around it and felt a leg begin, obscenely, to remember itself down the length of him. He was hard. The half-made cock of him, assembled out of other men and not yet honest, thickened against the sheet in the dead man's blood, and he did not stop to do anything about it. There was no sting anywhere in it. Only meat, and the filthy relief of having a surface again.

Julia watched from the doorway with the hammer still in her hand. She did not look away when he lifted his head, red to the eyes, and she did not look away when he put his wet mouth on the dead man's cock and took what was in it — not for lust, for bulk, for the particular dense heat of that flesh — and pulled it off him in two long tearing motions and packed it into himself where the groin was still only an idea.

When it was finished he had two legs, and a jaw that would close, and an erection lying in the mess of the sheet like a piece of anatomy that had not been asked whether it wanted to attend.

"There will need to be more," he said.

"I know."

She put the hammer back in the bag. She knelt and began to roll the sheet. Her hands did not shake. There was a smear on her forearm she had not noticed, and it came to Frank — with an interest so cold and so exact that he knew at once where he had learned to look at people like that, and did not enjoy knowing it — that Julia Cotton was not in shock.

She was concentrating.

In the corner of the room the unfinished half of him sat in the light of the bare bulb and felt, through the new jaw, the first true hunger he had had since the north door — and under it, immediately, the knowledge that this hunger had only one side. No bright counter-voice. Just a woman cleaning, and a house that did not care, and six pints of a stranger soaking into pine.

There were five more over the following weeks. He was in no position to be delicate about it and he was not delicate about it. He asked for them and she got them. By the second she had worked out that the hammer wanted a shorter swing in a room that size. By the third she had stopped using her own name in the bars and had a story about a flat in Ealing. By the fourth she was carrying the bucket and the vinegar up to the landing before she brought the man up, and leaving them there where they would be to hand.

The third was a boy of about twenty with a bad haircut who did not go down on the first blow and got as far as the landing with the back of his head open, calling out for his mother in a voice that had not finished changing, and Frank — who had a mouth by then and could have said something — put a hand over the boy's face from behind and held it there and took him at the throat while he was still asking. He tore the windpipe out with his teeth to stop the noise. The blood came in a hot arc up the wallpaper and across a framed print of a harbour that had belonged to his own mother, and he drank what he could catch and let the rest go into the carpet on the landing, which was not covered by any sheet, and which Julia was still working at on her knees with a bowl of vinegar two days later.

He never mentioned it and neither did she. But he thought about the print afterwards, at intervals, for the next four hundred years — not the boy. The print, and the wallpaper, and a woman on her knees on a landing with a bowl.

He watched all of it happen to her and did nothing to prevent it, and years later, when he had time to become interested in his own history, he understood exactly what he had done and would still not have called it cruelty. He had needed a mechanism and there had been a mechanism available. That was all.

Except that it was not all, and he knew it was not all, because of what she said after the third one.

She had come up the stairs afterwards with a bowl of water to clean the floor, and she had knelt down on the boards with the cloth in her hand and had not started. She stayed like that with the water going cold beside her, looking at the join between two floorboards where something had gone down and was not coming back up. And Frank, out of the corner, with his new face nearly finished, had said, to fill the silence:

"You're doing very well."

And Julia had looked up at him and said, "Am I finished after this? When you're done. Am I finished?"

And Frank had said, "Yes," because it was the thing that would get the floor cleaned.

He was thinking about the Order the entire time.

That was the private truth of those weeks, the one he would not have admitted to anybody, and it ran underneath everything — under the hammer and the dust sheets and the arithmetic of how much of a man it takes to make one thigh. He would come back into himself after each one, a little more complete, a little more able, and he would lie in the dark of the upper room with his brother's wife scrubbing pine below him and think:

This is what it looks like without Leviathan.

Because that was the comparison, and he could not stop making it. And here was the alternative, laid out on a dust sheet on Lodovico Street: six men, and a hammer, and a woman in the next room who had learned to leave the vinegar on the landing.

We are not monsters, she had said, with candles going down the length of a table and nothing in her face at all.

Frank lay in the dark of an English attic with another man's calf muscle knitting into his thigh, and understood the sentence for the first time, and did not enjoy understanding it.

Sixteen · Kirsty

The girl was the mistake, and it was entirely his own, and he made it because he was bored, and he could never dress it up afterwards. He had six men in him and he was nearly whole — near enough that he had begun to think about the outside, about the street, about a boat, about the enormous grey continent of Earth waiting to be gone through again with a body that felt everything at full volume for the first time in a decade. He had a fortnight of it in him — standing in the dark of the upper room flexing a hand and being genuinely, uncomplicatedly delighted by the sensation of his own knuckles.

Uncomplicatedly. That was the word that eventually gave the game away, and it took him the better part of a year to notice he had been using it.

Because everything on Earth had one side.

He had not been able to name it at first. He had put his hand on the banister of the house on Lodovico Street on his first night out of the boards and something had been wrong with it, and he had stood there for a full minute in the dark trying to work out what, and the answer was: nothing. It was a banister. It was smooth and cool and slightly waxy and that was all of it, all the way down, with nothing underneath — no bright sting rising through the pleasure of it, no second voice.

The bathwater was hot and was only hot. The whisky was good and was only good. The sheets were soft and were nothing else at all, and he lay in them in a hotel in Bloomsbury on his second night with six men inside him and stared at the ceiling feeling as though somebody had taken the bass out of a piece of music and left him the melody.

He had spent nine years resenting the realm for what it did to him every waking hour, and it had not once occurred to him that it was also feeding him, constantly, at a level so low he had stopped hearing it.

On the twelfth day it began to thin.

Not the hand. The interest. It went exactly the way it had gone in the room above the market — the light coming in and doing nothing — and it took twelve days rather than twelve years, and Frank stood in an attic on Lodovico Street with his brother's wife killing men for him downstairs and something went through him that was worse than anything the hooks had ever done to him, because the hooks had at least been happening:

It's faster now.

So when the girl came up the stairs, he wanted her to see him.

He would say later that she surprised him. She did not. He heard her on the second landing and he could have gone into the corner and been a shadow and she would have gone away again, and instead Frank Cotton, who had been bored for one day, stood out in the middle of the floor where he could be looked at.

What Kirsty Cotton saw, from the doorway of the room at the top of her father's house, was a naked man made out of the wrong number of men.

The seams had not gone. They never entirely went. He was assembled — a forearm that did not match the elbow it came out of, one shoulder carrying somebody else's tan line, a face built slightly too wide across the cheekbones. There was hair on one thigh and none on the other. The right hand was a labourer's and the left was not. He was standing barefoot on bare boards in a room that smelled of vinegar and the other thing, and he was smiling at her with her uncle's mouth, and he said her name in her uncle's voice.

She screamed. It came out of her in a way she had not known a person could make a sound, and she went down the stairs so fast that she took the last six of them on her back, and she put her right hand out to stop herself on the half-landing and heard the bones in the back of it go, and she was forty yards up Lodovico Street in her socks before she had decided to run.

And then — and this was the part that got him — she came back four days later with a canvas bag and a hammer of her own and a plan.

She had worked it out. He got all of this later, in pieces, over four hundred years, and never stopped turning it over: in four days, with nobody to ask, she had worked out that there was a box, and that the box had been the beginning of it, and that the thing under the floorboards of her father's house was frightened of it. She had gone to the police and been sent home. She had gone to a hospital and had been listened to, at length, with great courtesy, by a man in a good jacket who wrote everything down and gave her a card, and she had come out of that room understanding for the first time that she was going to have to do this by herself.

And she had come back to the house.

Frank got her wrist. He was faster than she was by a long way — six men's worth of faster — and he had her against the wall and the box in his own hand before she had finished turning round, and he held it up between them and said, pleasantly, an inch from her face: "I have been eating men in your father's house for a month, Kirsty. I'll do you last, and slowly, and you'll be awake for a very great deal of it. I've become extremely good at keeping people awake."

She kicked out the window behind her and threw it into the street.

He had not considered that. Nobody had ever, in the whole history of the thing, simply thrown it out of a window, and nobody ever had.

He hit her. He did not hit her the way a man hits a girl; he hit her the way six men hit a girl, backhanded, without winding up, and her head went into the door frame. She went down on the boards and stayed down long enough for him to get to the stairs, and by then a boy on a bicycle in the road below had picked up an interesting-looking black and gold puzzle box from the gutter, and the entire subsequent history of a great many people turned on it.

Julia found him in the hall with his hand on the door and blood on his knuckles.

"That was her," she said.

"Yes."

"Frank."

"It was her or it was all of it." He was already looking past her at the street. "You know that."

Julia Cotton stood in the hall of her husband's house with a dust sheet folded over her arm, and looked at him for a long moment, and something in her face closed like a shop.

"Yes," she said. "I do know that."

He should have paid attention. He did not. He had a body and a street and a whole world in front of him and about two days of interest left in it, and he went out through the front door of the house on Lodovico Street into the evening without once looking back, and that was the last conversation Frank Cotton ever had with Julia in which either of them told the other the truth.

Seventeen · The Statement

The room was on the third floor and it had a window with a view of a car park, and there was a box of tissues on the low table that Kirsty resented very much.

"Take your time," said Dr Channard.

He was about fifty and he had a good jacket and a fountain pen, and he had the trick — she noticed it inside two minutes and could not stop noticing it afterwards — of never being the one to fill a silence. He asked a question and then waited, with his pen resting on the pad and his eyes on her rather than on the paper, and the waiting did the work. She had come in intending to say almost nothing. She had been sent by a doctor at the Royal Free who had used the words just to talk to somebody, and she had decided in the corridor that she would give it twenty minutes and get out.

She was there for two hours and ten minutes and she told him everything.

"There's a smell in the top of that house," she said. "I want to say a butcher's bin in August. Only somebody's gone over it with vinegar, so you get the vinegar first and the other thing about a second later, underneath it. I can still get it. I got it in your waiting room and there's nothing in your waiting room."

Channard wrote. He did not look up.

"How many men."

"Six."

"You're certain of the number."

"I counted the sheets." She had her hands round her own elbows. "Airing cupboard. There were fourteen in September when I did the beds and there were eight when I looked in November. She wasn't putting them back, was she. Six sheets. Six men."

"Your father."

"He put his hand through a nail in the doorway. Carrying a bed frame up." Her voice did not do anything at all. "Four drops. Maybe five. I've thought about that a lot, because if he'd gone up ten minutes later with a plaster on it there'd be nothing in that room now."

Channard wrote four to five drops — blood — threshold and underlined the last word once.

"And in the room."

"A man." She looked at the car park. "Not a man. It was standing in the middle of the floor under the bulb where I couldn't miss it, and it had done that on purpose, and it was made out of more than one person. You could see the joins. One arm was somebody with a tan." She stopped and started again. "It said my name in my uncle's voice and it got the accent wrong. That's the bit. Not the arm. It got the accent wrong, and I've known that voice since I was four, and that's the thing I can't be in a dark room with."

He let that sit and did not fill it, and after a while she went on by herself.

"They said there were bells."

"Who said."

"The ones that came. After." She did not elaborate and he did not ask her to, yet. "They said there'd be bells and I'd learn them quicker than I expected. And they said the hours aren't the same length as each other. That's the part I keep going back to. Some of the hours are twice as long as the others and it's the same ones every time, forever, and nobody rings them. There's no rope. It just happens."

Dr Channard's pen stopped for a fraction under a second, and went on.

"My uncle got out," she said. "He told me that himself, in the attic, like it was funny. He went out through the north door and nobody stopped him. He kept saying it — the north door, nobody stopped me — and he was pleased about it and he was furious about it at the same time and I couldn't work out which one was underneath."

"Did he say what the place was?"

"He didn't call it anything. He said it was a room you go back to." She shrugged, and the shrug cost her something. "Not a place you go. A room you go back to. Then he laughed at me because I didn't understand it, and I still don't."

Channard did not write that one down immediately. He wrote it down about four seconds later.

"There's one more thing and it's going to sound stupid."

"It won't."

"When the woman talked about it — " Kirsty touched her own scalp with two fingers and did not finish the gesture — "she kept trying to explain and then losing interest halfway. Every single time. She'd get a sentence and a half in and then just stop, and look at me, and start on something else. Like she'd remembered I wasn't going to get there and it wasn't worth the walk."

Dr Channard put the pen down flat on the pad, which he had not done once in ninety minutes.

"Say that again," he said. "Exactly as you said it."

She told him about the box.

She came back to all of it at three in the morning for years, in a rented flat, long after there was any use in it. He did not once say and how did that make you feel. He wrote steadily, in a small careful hand, and when she said something he had not expected he stopped and made her go back and give it to him again.

"The configuration," he said. "You said panels."

"Six. There were six that moved, that I saw."

"And the sound. You said a bell."

"Not in the room. Downstairs. Only there isn't a bell in that house."

Dr Channard wrote that down.

At one point — much later, and she reconstructed this a hundred times and was never entirely sure she had not imported it — he asked her whether the thing in the attic had ever spoken about where it had been.

"It said it had been somewhere," she said. "It said the word further, I think. It was — it kept trying to explain and then losing interest halfway."

"Losing interest," said Dr Channard.

"Like a man telling you about a holiday."

The pen stopped.

It was for perhaps a second and a half, and she was young and tired and had not slept properly since the top of the house, and she did not think about it again for a very long time. But Kirsty Cotton, sitting in a beige room in a hospital in north London, had just told a man who had been reading about the Lemarchand configurations for a decade that somebody had been through the wall of the world and had come back bored.

"You've been very clear," he said. "Clearer than you know. May I keep these?"

"They're your notes."

"They're your account." He capped the pen. "There's a difference and it matters. Some of what you've told me I have never heard from anyone. Not in this room and not anywhere."

She should have heard it. She would say that to herself for the rest of her life, in the dark, in the very worst hours: he told me. He told me in the room, on the day, in plain English, and I was too tired to hear it.

"I'd like to see you again," Dr Channard said. "Thursday, if you can. And Kirsty — " He was already reaching for the card. "If any of it comes back to you. Any detail at all, however small, however stupid it seems. Write it down and bring it. Do not decide in advance what matters."

She took the card.

Going down in the lift she cried for the first time since the house, out of relief, because somebody had finally, finally written it down.

Eighteen · Eight Months

The job was a missing person and it was not interesting.

That was the thing Harry D'Amour came back to for the rest of his life, at three in the morning, in rooms with the light off. Not the door. The invoice. He had taken it on a Tuesday for a hundred and fifty dollars and expenses because his rent was due, and he had written Ronnie Vasquez — b. 1949 — last seen 2 Feb at the top of a legal pad in his own handwriting, and he had underlined it, because that was what he did with a name.

Ronnie's sister had come up the stairs to his office in a coat too warm for the weather and sat with her handbag on her knees and told him her brother had stopped coming to Sunday dinner and then stopped answering the phone and then stopped being at his address. She had been to the police twice. The second time a sergeant had explained to her, kindly, at length, that a thirty-one-year-old man is permitted to move.

"He wouldn't," she said. "Not without telling me. That's the whole of it and I know it doesn't sound like anything."

It never does. That is what the work is.

He found the building in nine days, which was fast, and he found it by doing the dull half of the job properly — the utilities, the last three landlords, a girl at a chemist's counter on Rockaway Boulevard who remembered Ronnie because he had bought the same brand of eyewash every week for a year and then twice a week and then every day.

The house was on a street of houses. That was the first thing Harry noticed and the last thing he ever stopped noticing. Aluminium siding, a basketball hoop over the garage of the place next door, somebody's sprinkler going. It was four in the afternoon.

The door was in the cellar, behind the furnace, and it was a cellar door, and there was nothing wrong with it at all.

Harry stood in front of it for eleven minutes.

He was not, then, the man he became. He had the ink on his left forearm only, and it was six years old and he had been told what it was for and had not entirely believed it. He had been in two rooms in his life that he could not explain afterwards. He was not a hero and had never met one, and what he had instead was a habit of finishing things, which is a smaller quality and had already cost him a marriage.

He could hear Ronnie Vasquez on the other side of that door.

Not a voice. Harry has never once said it was a voice. What came through was the sound of a man breathing in a small space — the wet catch at the top of each one, the way a person breathes when they have been crying so long that the crying has become respiration — and it was coming from behind a cellar door in a house in Rockaway with a sprinkler going in the yard.

He went through because the man was alive.

That is the whole of his reason and he has never improved on it and he has been asked a great many times.

⁂

He does not talk about the inside. It is not a refusal and it is not modesty; he has tried, twice, both times to people who had a professional right to ask, and both times he got about a minute and a half in and then found he was describing the room he was currently sitting in instead, in detail, at length, and could not stop doing it, and had to be brought back by somebody saying his name.

What can be established is this.

He was in there for eight months. That is not his estimate; it is the calendar. He went through the cellar door on the eleventh of April and he came up out of it on the nineteenth of December, and in between, Ronnie's sister buried their mother, and a president was elected, and the girl at the chemist's counter left for a better job in Queens Village.

He was not fed and he did not eat.

He came out with Ronnie Vasquez.

He came out with all of Ronnie Vasquez, which was the part that took him years to understand as an achievement rather than an outcome — that there had been a version of those eight months in which he came out alone, and a version in which he came out with a piece, and he had got the man whole and up a flight of cellar stairs and out into a street with a basketball hoop on it, and had put him in the back of a car, and had driven him to his sister's house on Ninety-Fourth, and had rung the bell.

And Ronnie Vasquez has been sitting in that house ever since.

He eats. He is pleasant. He answers when he is spoken to and he has, his sister says, never once been any trouble. He does not go out of the front door, and it is not that he refuses; he goes to the door, and stands at it, and after a while he comes back and sits down. He does not remember Harry. He has never remembered Harry, not the first week and not in any of the years since, and he is glad to see him every single time, in exactly the same way, with exactly the same warmth, as a man is glad to see a pleasant stranger who has come about the meter.

Harry goes on the second Sunday of the month. He has not missed one.

⁂

The ink was afterwards.

He went to a man in Pittsburgh who did not want the work and said so, and who did it anyway over five sessions across eleven weeks, and it was the most pain Harry had ever been in, including the eight months, because in the eight months there had been nothing left of him that was arranged in the shape of a person who could be hurt. This was a needle and a chair and a radio playing and a stranger's hand on his shoulder blade holding him steady while he sweated through his own shirt, and it went on for six hours at a time, and it was ordinary, and the ordinariness of it was what he could not stand.

The man in Pittsburgh finished the second forearm, and the throat, and the plate across the shoulders, and put his tools down and said: "That'll hold you. It won't get you anywhere."

"I know."

"No, son. Listen to me, because I've done four of these and I'm not doing another. It will hold you and it will not get you anywhere. It's a wall. You put a wall up, you don't then go looking for somewhere to put a door in it." He was washing his hands and he did not turn round. "Everybody I've done this for went back."

Harry paid him and got the bus.

⁂

He got four months back.

That was how he put it to Frank Cotton over a table in Kentish Town years later, and Frank took it for modesty or for a figure of speech, because Frank Cotton took most things for a figure of speech. It was neither. Harry had gone in with a life in progress — an office, a lease, two standing card games, a woman in Bay Ridge who had started leaving a toothbrush — and eight months later he came up out of a cellar and stood in a street in December, and what was still there when he got to it was about four months' worth. The lease. One of the card games.

The rest had closed over, the way water does, without any malice and without anybody doing anything wrong.

He did not resent it. That was never the shape of it. What he had instead, and kept, and never entirely put down, was a piece of arithmetic that he ran whenever anybody offered him a door: eight months of his own, four returned, one man brought out whole, and the man is sitting in a chair on Ninety-Fourth Street being pleasant to a stranger on the second Sunday of every month.

That is what going further costs. It is not paid by the man who goes.

Frank tried, in a flat above a launderette, for about ten minutes.

He had no idea what he was standing in front of.

Nineteen · Credentials

The boy on the bicycle sold the box for six pounds to a stall on Camden Passage, and the stall sold it four days later to a man who paid cash and did not haggle, and Frank was two hours behind him the whole way.

He caught up with it in a flat above a launderette in Kentish Town.

He had been out of the house eleven days by then, and the eleven days had done what he knew they would do. He had walked the length of Oxford Street at nine in the evening with everything turned all the way up — every voice, every wet reflection, the whole din of a city coming at him through a body that had been assembled out of six men — and by the Thursday it had gone flat, and by the Saturday it had gone quiet, and by the Monday he was standing in the rain outside a launderette in Kentish Town feeling absolutely nothing, and the box was upstairs, and he wanted it very badly and could not have said what for.

The door was open at the top of the stairs.

The man sitting at the table had a bottle of beer in front of him and a cigarette going in a saucer and the box in his two hands, and he was turning it over the way a man turns over a thing he has already decided not to buy.

He did not look up.

"It's not yours," he said.

"It is, actually."

"No." He set it down on the table between them. "You came out of it. That's not the same as owning it. I've met one or two people who got that wrong."

Frank came into the room.

The man was in his forties and had been hit a lot at some point in his life, and had not entirely got over it. He had his sleeves rolled to the elbow and both forearms were covered — not tattoos in the ordinary way, no anchors, no names, but dense worked patterns in old ink that went up under the fabric and, Frank saw, came out again above the collar at the back of the neck. Somebody had put a great deal of work into him. He did not look like a man who had enjoyed it.

"D'Amour," he said, without being asked. "You're the Cotton brother."

"You know about me."

"I know about the house." He picked up the beer. "There's a stink comes off a place like that. I'd have got there sooner but I was in Wisconsin and I'm slow these days."

Frank looked at the box on the table.

"Are you going to try and stop me taking that?"

"No," said Harry D'Amour.

There was a pause.

"No?"

"You want it, take it. I can't beat you across this table and I know it, and I've done enough of that kind of thing to know when to sit still." He drank. "I'm not here for the box. I'm here to have a look at you, and I've had a look at you, and that's me finished."

Frank did not pick it up. He was aware of not picking it up and he did not entirely understand why.

"You know what's on the other side of that," he said.

"Some."

"You don't."

"I know enough."

"That," said Frank, "is a word people use when they've decided to stop." He came round the table. He was enjoying himself for the first time in a fortnight and he was aware of that too. "I've been. Nine years. Do you understand what I'm telling you? Not a séance. Not a bad night in Wisconsin. Nine years, in the place itself, being taught by people who have been doing it since before your language existed — and you're sitting in a rented flat with a bottle of beer telling me you know enough."

Harry looked at him for a while.

"I've been through a door," he said. "Not that one. A different one, and a smaller one, and it took eight months out of me and I got back four of them." He put the bottle down. "There's a woman I work with who hears things. She hears them all the time, every day, and she can't turn it off, and she has never once asked to hear more. I used to think that was cowardice. Took me a long time to work out it's the only intact person I know."

"That's not an argument. That's an anecdote about a frightened woman."

"It's not an argument, no." Harry pulled the saucer over and put the cigarette out in it, unhurried. "I'm not going to argue with you, Cotton. That's the bit you're not going to like. You've got a whole speech and I can see it sitting there and I'm not going to make you use it." He looked up. "You want to know what I think? I think you went to the best university there is and you came out the other side of it exactly the same as you went in, only faster. Nine years. Nine years of the actual thing, from the actual people, and you're standing in my kitchen in the rain because a fortnight of being alive has already run out on you."

Frank said nothing.

"That's not appetite, son," said Harry. "That's a hole."

And Frank Cotton, who had an answer for everything, and who had spent two years building a case that had silenced seventy of them in a chapter house, stood in a flat above a launderette in Kentish Town and could not think of one single thing to say.

And he meant it. He said it flatly, the way you give somebody directions, and he had the credentials, and he had put the box down on the table of his own accord and gone back to his beer.

Frank took it and left.

He got to the bottom of the stairs before Harry said, from the top of them, not unkindly:

"For what it's worth — she threw it out a window. Your niece. Straight out into the road with a broken hand." A pause. "You want to think about why that never occurred to you."

Twenty · She Puts It Down

Kirsty solved it in a hospital side room at two in the morning with her father's funeral fourteen hours away.

She had been four days getting it back. Harry would not go near the question of where it had gone, but he gave her a name in Whitechapel, and the man in Whitechapel handed it over without a word of argument, and the one thing Harry had told her about the thing was whatever they offer you, the offer is the trap, not the price — and she had been all that night getting it open. She had a broken hand. She used the other one and her teeth.

It took the top of her thumbnail off. She barely noticed.

The bell went somewhere in the building, several floors down and deep as a ship, and the wall of the side room opened along a seam that had no business existing, and the cold came out first.

Three of them.

Kirsty had prepared for demons. She had spent four days in a public library reading about demons, because that was the only shelf there was, and what came through the wall of a hospital side room in north London was three tall figures in dark close-fitting cloth who stood in a loose triangle with their hands at their sides and did not advance on her, and the woman at the front had a shaved head marked out in a fine grid with pins set into the bone at the crossings, and an ordinary brown eye, and the calm of a headmistress at a difficult interview.

"You have opened it," she said.

"I want to make a trade."

The Priest inclined her head about a quarter of an inch, which Kirsty understood — correctly — to be the entire hearing she was going to get.

She made her case fast and badly and it did not matter, because the substance of it was sound. Frank Cotton had come out through their door. He was walking around a city with six men inside him. He had escaped, which she took to be against their rules, and she knew where he was, and she would give him to them.

"He did not escape," said the Priest.

"He's here. He's on this side of it. He —"

"He went out through a door that was not locked, having satisfied himself that nobody had noticed." The corner of her mouth moved and did not come back. "We noticed."

Kirsty found that she had stopped being able to feel the chair under her.

"Then why haven't you gone and got him?"

"Because we do not do that." The Priest's voice did not change. "That is a persistent misunderstanding and I have stopped correcting it. We are not bailiffs. We do not pursue, we do not collect, and we have not once in our history dragged a man out of his own kitchen. Somebody must open the box. It is the entire condition of everything we do." A pause. "He will open it himself."

"You don't know that."

"I know it in the way that you know a stone will come down." She looked at Kirsty with an attention that was quite without appetite, and Kirsty had the distinct and horrible sensation of being read rather than looked at. "Your uncle is not a wicked man, whatever they will tell you at the inquest. He is a man with a hole in him, and there is nothing on this world large enough to fill it, and he has now had nine years of proof that there is nothing in ours either. He will come back because there is nowhere else, and he will believe that he chose to, and he will be right about that in every way that matters and wrong about it in the one way that does not."

Kirsty stood in a hospital side room holding a puzzle box in a broken hand.

"Then what do you want from me?"

"Nothing," said the Priest.

And then, after a moment, in exactly the same tone:

"That is not quite true. We would take you."

Nobody in the room moved, and the cold that had come in with them settled onto the backs of Kirsty's hands.

"You have solved a configuration with one hand, in a night, having been told nothing by anybody, four days after watching your father's house be used as an abattoir. You did not run, and then you ran, and then you came back — that is the sequence, and it is rarer than you can possibly know. You have the only quality we cannot teach." The Priest did not move at all. "There is a place. There has been a place for four hundred years and no one has been in it. You would be taught. Not tonight, and not tomorrow, and not the way you are imagining. You would be given work, and a room, and a very great deal of time, and you would go further than anyone on this world will ever go."

"And what does it cost?"

"Everything you have," said the Priest. "But not against your will, and not by trickery, and not tonight."

Kirsty looked at the box in her hand.

Afterwards, when people asked, they wanted it to have been fear, and it had not been fear at all. She thought about her father's hand on a nail. She thought about her mother. She thought about a man at a table upstairs from a launderette saying the offer is the trap, not the price, and she thought — most of all, and this was the thing that made the decision and she never told a living soul — about how the woman in front of her had said there has been a place for four hundred years and no one has been in it, and about how badly, how nakedly, an institution has to want something before it says a sentence like that out loud to a nineteen-year-old with a broken hand.

She understood, in a hospital side room at two in the morning, that she was being recruited.

And Kirsty Cotton, who had bargained and lied and used their own rules against them four days running, put the box down on the bed.

"No," she said.

Nobody spoke.

"You can have him," she said. "You'll get him anyway, apparently, so you can have him, and I hope it takes a long time. But I'm not coming, and I'm not going to be talked into it, and I'd like you to go now."

The Priest looked at her for a moment longer.

"Very well," she said, and there was nothing in it — no anger, no disappointment, not so much as a shrug — and the three of them were gone, and the wall was a wall, and Kirsty Cotton sat down on the floor of the side room and shook for twenty minutes.

The offer is the trap, Harry had said. Not the price.

He had been right about that. He had just been fifteen years early.

Twenty-One · Julia

He went back to Lodovico Street for his coat, which was the truth, and he told himself it was for the box, which was not.

The house had been sealed and then unsealed. There was tape across the gate that somebody had already torn and a sticker on the door from a firm of loss adjusters, and inside it smelled of industrial disinfectant laid over something sweeter and older that had got down into the joists and was not coming out of them in anybody's lifetime. Somebody had taken the boards up in the upper room and put most of them back wrong.

Julia was sitting on the stairs.

She had a suitcase beside her. That was the detail that stayed with him: a good suitcase, packed, standing upright on the tread below her with the handle turned outward, and she had been sitting there long enough that the dust had settled on the top of it.

"I knew you'd come for the coat," she said.

"How long have you been here?"

"Two days."

He stood in the hall. There was a version of the next four minutes that he could see perfectly clearly, in which he was kind, and it would have cost him nothing, and he did not take it — not out of malice, but because taking it would have meant staying in the hall a further four minutes, and he had already begun, in the way he had, to be somewhere else.

"They've been through the whole house," he said. "You shouldn't be here."

"Take me with you."

Frank stopped.

"What?"

"Take me with you." She had not raised her voice and she did not stand up. She had her hands on her knees. "Wherever it is. The place. I want to go."

"Julia —"

"Don't." Now she looked at him. "Don't do the voice. I have carried six men up those stairs. I have washed that floor twenty times. I have been in this house for four months with the smell of you in the walls and I have not once — not once, Frank — asked you for anything, and I am asking you now."

"It isn't a place you can want."

"You want it."

"That's different."

"Why?"

And Frank Cotton opened his mouth to explain why, and found, to his considerable irritation, that the explanation was not there.

He was certain he had one. It had to do with capacity, and with the difference between an appetite and a habit, and with the fact that Julia had killed six men out of love, and it was the most ordinary motive in the world and the least interesting, and that the Order would take one look at her and see a woman who wanted a man rather than a woman who wanted to know. It was all perfectly clear to him and none of it would come out in a form he was prepared to say on a staircase.

So what he said was:

"Because you'd be finished in a year."

Julia sat very still.

"Say the rest of it," she said.

"There isn't any rest of it."

"There is. You've been thinking it since October and you've never said it and I would very much like to hear it out loud before I decide what I'm doing."

So he said it. He was never able to reconstruct afterwards whether he said it to hurt her or simply because she had asked a direct question and he had been trained, in a stone building on the other side of the world, to answer direct questions directly.

"You'd be a novice," he said. "There's a boy there called Whelan who bought a box for two pounds fifty and he's been carrying plates for twelve years because he couldn't hold his attention still. They'll teach him for three hundred years and he will never get anywhere, and they'll never stop, and nobody will ever be unkind to him. That's what's on offer. It's not a reward, Julia. It's a school, and you're not — "

He stopped.

"Say it."

"You're not interesting," said Frank.

She did not cry. He had braced for crying.

She looked at him for a long moment with an expression he had never seen on her before, which was the look of somebody totting up a column and finding that it came out, and then she stood up, and picked up the suitcase, and said, in a completely level voice:

"You're right. I've been the most boring woman in England since I was twenty-two. Everybody says so." She came down two steps. "You're the only thing that ever happened to me and I killed six people for it and it turns out I'm not interesting."

"Julia."

"Get out of my way, Frank."

And he would have. That is the thing he could never get past, in all the years afterwards, in a realm where he had a great deal of time to consider it: he was already moving aside. He had his hand up. The whole business was over and she was going out of the door with her good suitcase and he was going to have his coat and his boat and his enormous grey continent, and none of the rest of it would have happened.

She stopped on the bottom step and said:

"They'll take me if I open one."

Frank stopped with his hand still up.

"You haven't got one."

"I know where one is." She was not looking at him now; she was looking at the door. "That girl had it. Kirsty. She had it in the hospital and she's not going to keep it in a drawer, is she, a thing like that — she'll have given it to somebody or she'll have hidden it, and either way it's four phone calls." She shifted the case to her other hand. "I've had four months of practice at finding things out about people, Frank. You taught me. It's the only thing I'm any good at now."

And Frank Cotton did the arithmetic.

It took him about a second and a half, and he was aware of every part of it, and there was no rage in it anywhere. He thought: she will find it. He thought: she will open it, and they will take her, because they take everyone who opens it, they have never in twelve centuries turned anyone away — that is the point of them. He thought: and she will be there. In the corridors, at the second bell, standing in her place. For three hundred years. Every time I turn a corner.

He thought, quite distinctly: she'll be in the drawers before I am.

He picked up the loose spindle from the broken banister on his way past her.

She had one foot on the bottom step and the case in her left hand and she turned her head because she heard the wood come free. He put the turned point of it in at the base of her throat, above the collar of the dress, and drove it. It was not a clean entry. The spindle was ornamental, barley-sugar, and the point was only a point by courtesy, and it had to be forced. He felt the resistance of skin, then the harder give of the cricoid, then the sudden filthy ease as it found the soft behind the pipe and went through. Her mouth opened. Nothing came out except a thick wet sound and a bright rope of blood that ran over her teeth and down her chin and spotted the good suitcase. Her right hand found his wrist and held it, not fighting, just holding, as if they were on a stair in a different year and he had only taken her arm.

He put his weight on it.

The point came out the nape. He felt the pop of it in the tendon there, and then the wood was through her and his knuckles were against the wet hollow of her throat and she sat down hard on the step with the case still in her hand and the spindle standing out of her like a banister that had grown in the wrong direction. Blood came down the front of the dress in a sheet and soaked the dust she had packed that morning. It went between her breasts and found the lap and dripped off the wool onto the hall runner in a ticking that was, for a few seconds, the only clock in the house. Her eyes were on him. She was trying to say the thing about the four phone calls again and the throat would not do it. Air went in at the new hole and came out of her mouth in bubbles.

It took longer than four seconds. He would lie about that afterwards.

He put his other hand on the side of her head, not gently and not roughly, and turned her face away from him so he would not have to watch the last of the attention go out of it. A tooth had caught on her lip. Blood ran into her ear. He waited until the hand on his wrist loosened, and then he waited a little longer than that, because he had been taught to know the difference between a sensation and his opinion of a sensation and he wanted to be sure he was not inventing the stillness. A last thin noise came out of the wound around the wood. Then even that stopped.

He pulled the spindle out. The wound closed on nothing and opened again and kept opening, a mouth that would not learn a word. Blood followed the wood in a dark rope and slapped the runner. He set the spindle down on the hall table beside the bowl where she kept keys. His hands were red to the wrist. He looked at them the way he had looked at the box on the first night: as an object that had done what it was for.

He waited to feel something.

He waited a long time. The hall smelled of her blood and of the street coming in through the door she had been about to use and of the particular sourness of a house that has been shut up in summer. No sting under any of it. The body on the stair was only a body.

He got his coat off the hook where it had been hanging since the previous September, and went out, and left the front door open behind him because he could not think of a reason to close it.

⁂

Dr Channard arrived at the house at ten the following morning, three-quarters of an hour after the police, with a letter of introduction from a coroner he had known for nineteen years and a manner so unremarkable that nobody afterwards could recall who had let him upstairs.

He was there for two hours. He looked at the boards in the upper room for most of one of them, on his hands and knees, at the places where they had been lifted and put back wrong.

He asked, at the end, whether the mattress from the top-floor bedroom was going to be destroyed, and was told it was going to be destroyed, and asked whether it might instead be released to him, as material, for a research interest of his in patterns of — and here he used a phrase, and the officer wrote down a version of the phrase that was not quite what he had said, and initialled it.

It went into the back of an estate car at ten past two.

He drove it home himself and carried it up to the room at the top of his own house, which had been empty for a decade and a half and had very good locks on it, and he laid it out on the boards under the light and stood over it with his coat still on, reading the stain the way other men read maps.

Twenty-Two · Nothing Lands

He had a year, and he did it properly.

He had money inside a fortnight — Frank had never in his life had trouble getting money, only in wanting it — and by the spring he was in a house above a bay in the south of Spain with white walls and a terrace and no neighbours within a quarter of a mile. He worked from a list. He had made the list in the attic, over three years, in the dark, and it ran to about two hundred items, and he had thought at the time that it was the most valuable document in the world.

He went through it in order.

He ate the best food available on the continent and did not gulp it. A fortnight in each region, the words learned, a bottle chosen in the morning and five courses at eight with the sea going dark below the terrace. It was very good. On the ninth evening he found he could not tell it from the seventh.

The wine took longer to fail, and he was in Jerez in October when it went.

He had bought the bottle that morning from a man who did not want to sell it, which was in itself a small pleasure and lasted about as long as the walk home. It was amontillado and it was older than he was. He carried it back through the white streets in the flat afternoon heat with his jacket over his arm, and set it on the table of the rented room, and did not open it until the light began to go, because he had learned in the Order that the frame around a thing is part of the thing.

He did it properly. He could not have said why doing it properly mattered so much that evening, and he did not ask himself.

The glass was a copita, thin at the lip, and he warmed the bowl of it in his hand first. The cork came out dry and short and broke, and he got the rest with a knife, and the smell came up out of the neck before he had the glass anywhere near his face — a high dry nutty thing, walnut and old wood and something underneath it like the inside of a chapel.

He poured two fingers and held it up against the window.

Mahogany at the centre, thinning to a green-amber at the rim: the colour of a varnished instrument, of a thing that has been in the dark a very long time and has gone on quietly doing something the whole while. He tilted it. The legs came down the inside of the glass slowly and did not run. They crawled, and stood, and beaded.

He put his nose in it and stayed there.

Walnut first. Then the saline note, which is the part nobody can explain to anybody and which you either meet or you do not, and which he had first met at twenty-six in a bar in Sanlúcar and had been chasing ever since. Then, underneath both, the long bitter dryness of the wood — not oak the way young wine is oak, but wood that had given up everything it had to give before he was born and had been sitting in the dark being slowly emptied ever since.

He could name all of it. That was never the problem. He named it as it arrived, precisely, in order, the way he had been taught to name things by people who were very good at teaching.

He drank.

It went across his tongue with a weight that had nothing to do with sugar — dry to the point of austerity, and then, at the back, an enormous slow unfolding of something almost sweet that was not sweetness but the memory of it. The acid stood the whole structure up and held it there. The finish went on, and on. He counted it out of habit: thirty-one seconds, and then not an ending but a subsidence, the thing going away from him by degrees like a train leaving.

And he sat in a rented room in October with a glass in his hand and understood that he had just had one of the four or five best mouthfuls of wine available anywhere on the surface of the Earth.

There was nothing underneath it.

Not disappointment. Disappointment would have been something; he would have taken disappointment gratefully and turned it over for a week. What arrived was the report: excellent, textbook, structurally magnificent, thirty-one seconds.

He poured a second glass.

He did not drink it. He knew exactly what it would do.

He sat with it in front of him until the light was gone and the courtyard had gone quiet and the wine had come up to the temperature of the room, which ruined it. Then he tipped it into the plant on the balcony and went to bed.

That was item nine.

The ice he did in a bucket in the same rented room and it was finished inside a week — past cold, past ache, into the place where the hand stops reporting and starts screaming. He timed himself. He beat his own record twice and then stopped, because a record is a number and a number is not a sensation.

The candle was November.

He put his palm flat over the flame on the terrace and held it there.

The first two seconds are heat, and everybody knows the first two seconds. What comes after is a bright hard pressure that has stopped being temperature at all. Then the smell arrived — and it was not the smell of burning, it was the smell of cooking, which is an entirely different smell, and he recognised it, and it was the only genuinely interesting thing that happened to him that month. The skin over the heel of his thumb went greasy, and then tight, and then split along a line. What came out of the split hissed and put out a part of the flame, and the flame closed over the gap and came back. He held his hand where it was through all of that. He watched the meat of his own palm change colour the way meat changes colour, and he was interested in it, at a distance, clinically, the way he had once stood in a doorway and watched a boy be taught how to breathe —

and what he was thinking, the entire time, with his own flesh cooking a foot beneath his chin, was:

In the Order this would be over by the seventh bell.

He took his hand out of the flame.

It did not close. That was the other thing about Earth, and it took him a moment to remember it, and the remembering was worse than the burn. He sat on the terrace with a ruined palm coming up in a slow yellow blister the width of his hand and the sea going dark below the wall, and understood that he was going to have to keep this hand, in this condition, for a month, because there was nobody here whose work it was to put him back.

He had women. He had a great many women and they were, several of them, remarkable, and one of them stayed four months and was funny and frightening and cleverer than he was, and he liked her, which was new.

He had her on the terrace in February with the sea going dark below the wall and her mouth on him. She was good. Exact. A little cruel in the way he had once paid professionals to be, and she had understood without being told that he wanted her to take him all the way down, past the point where politeness lives, until her throat closed on the head of him and her eyes watered and she kept him there anyway. He held her hair. He felt the swallow work around him. He felt her tongue flat on the vein. The air off the water is one of the good things in the world and it moved over his bare ass and over the wet of her chin and it was only pleasant, only that, and he could feel himself waiting for the other half of it the way a man waits for a second shoe.

It did not come.

She pulled off him with a sound that would have undone him at thirty, a thick string from her lower lip to the glans, and she laughed and spat in her palm and took him in her fist and put her mouth on his stones and sucked one into her teeth just hard enough to make him hiss, and he thought, quite clearly, above her head: in the Order this would be a lesson, and the lesson would have another face. Here there was only the heat of her throat and the small pain of her teeth and the sea. He fucked her mouth in short strokes until the finish was coming from a long way off, clean, uncomplicated, and in the last of it he understood that he was grinding toward a verdict rather than a sensation. He spent into her throat with a sound that was almost disappointment. She swallowed and coughed and laughed against his thigh, mistaking it, and licked him clean with the unhurried vanity of a woman who knows she is good at this.

He lay looking at the underside of the balcony with her head on his thigh and his cock going soft in the cold and thought, quite calmly: that was only pleasant.

He got up before she woke and left, because pleasant was a verdict, and he could feel himself sorting again, and the sorting was the first door he had ever wanted to go through and the only one that would not open on Earth.

He went up the north face of something above Chamonix with a guide who told him twice that he was too old for it. He went into water in Norway that stopped his breathing. He paid a great deal of money to a man in Zurich who put a needle into the back of his hand and gave him forty minutes in which the ceiling of the room was alive and knew his name and had been waiting a long while for him to arrive — unlike anything else available on Earth, exactly as promised — and Frank came out of it and sat on the edge of the couch with his head in his hands and thought, that was the second-best thing I have felt this year, and the best was in April, and the best is getting further away.

By the autumn the list was finished.

He sat on the terrace with the whole of it done and crossed off, two hundred items, everything a body can be made to feel on the surface of the world, executed in order, with money and time and no interruptions and no compromises. Nobody had ever done it so thoroughly. He was certain of that.

The sea went dark. The lights came on down in the bay. October came off the water at that hour with an edge in it that used to make him glad to be alive, and Frank Cotton sat in it with a blanket over his knees like an old man and could not feel a thing.

The blanket was cashmere. He had bought it in Milan. It was the softest thing he had ever owned and it did not sting anywhere it touched him, and he sat under it and thought, for the first time in ten months, in plain terror:

I am not bored of the world. The world is only half here, and I have been recalibrated, and there is exactly one place that isn't.

He thought about Whelan.

He had not thought about Whelan in years and there was no reason for it now, and it arrived whole: a young man standing in his place at the second bell with somebody's hand on his shoulder blade, being corrected, patiently, for the four-hundredth time. Frank had stood in that doorway and wanted to break something.

And it came to him, in a moment of such complete and unwelcome clarity that he actually laughed out loud into the dark:

I've done it four hundred times too. I've just been doing it faster, and calling it a life.

He went inside and got the box out of the drawer where it had been sitting for a year, and put it on the table, and looked at it.

Then he covered it with a cloth, and went to bed, and lay awake until it was light.

Twenty-Three · Calm

He left it covered for nine days.

That was not indecision. He wanted to be certain, and being certain took nine days, and he spent them very quietly. He walked in the mornings. He paid the woman who cleaned three months in advance and told her not to come. He wrote two letters and burned both. He sat on the terrace in the evenings with the cloth on the table in front of him and did not lift it, and he thought about it from every direction he could find.

The first time he had opened it, in an upper room in Lodovico Street with dead pigeons hanging from the picture rail, he had been a man breaking into a building. He had prepared like a burglar and gone in like a burglar and he had thought, right up to the moment the hooks came, that he was taking something.

That was not what this was.

He knew exactly what was on the other side. He had nine years of it: the bells, the cell, the wool blanket, the grey light that never changed, the drawers, the four hundred and eighty-one years of nothing new. He knew that they would take him apart on a black slab and put him back together and tell him to come again in forty days, and that forty days was not long enough and never would be.

And he was going anyway.

On the ninth evening he took the cloth off.

He had one more thought before he touched it, and it was the clearest thing he had thought in a year, and it was this: she is expecting me. Not hoping. Expecting — the way you expect a stone to come down. She had said something to somebody on the day he went out through the north door, he was sure of it, some short flat sentence that had gone into a ledger; and every single thing that had happened since, the girl and the launderette and the six men and the woman on the stairs and the two hundred items and the terrace and the ice and the candle, had been the stone coming down.

He examined the thought carefully for the sting he expected to find in it.

There wasn't one.

All right, thought Frank Cotton. Then at least one of us knows what I am.

It took him nineteen minutes. His hands had not forgotten. Somewhere around the fourteenth he heard, distinctly, a section shift inside with a small dry click, like a lock deciding, and he found that he was smiling, and that the smile was not defiant or clever or hungry.

It was the smile of a man coming up a path he knows towards a house where the light is on.

The bell went, deep and unhurried, in a villa above a bay in Spain that did not contain a bell.

The wall opened.

There were three of them and she was at the front, and the cold came into the room half a second before she did, and Frank stood up from the table with the configuration open in his hand and looked at the woman he had spent a year not thinking about, and said the thing he had been carrying for nine days.

"I chose this," he said.

He wanted it on the record. He was aware of how badly he wanted it on the record and he said it anyway.

The Priest looked at him for a moment the way she looked at everything, which was the way a woman reads a page she intends to file.

"We did not," she said.

Part Three

The Office

Twenty-Four · The Irregularity

He was given his cell back.

Not a similar cell. The same one — eight feet by six, the stone shelf, the niche with the jug, the door that did not lock — and the wool blanket folded on the shelf was the one he had left, because it had a mend in the corner that he had made himself in his fourth year with thread he had stolen out of the binding room.

Frank stood in the doorway with it in his hands for some time.

Nobody said anything about the year on Earth. Nobody said anything about the nine years either, or about the north door, and after a fortnight of bracing for it he understood that nothing was going to be said, ever, by anyone, and that this was not forbearance. It was simply that the Order did not consider it the interesting part.

He went back to the drawers. He asked for it and Custos gave it to him without comment and without warmth, and they worked side by side for forty days before the old man said anything at all beyond the practical, and what he said, eventually, ruling a line, was:

"The north corridor. Was it worth it."

"No."

"Good," said Custos, and ruled another line, and that was the whole of the reckoning.

Frank rose after that, and rose fast.

It was not ambition, or not only. He had come back with something the Order had not had in four hundred years, and it was not intelligence and it was not devotion: it was evidence. Nobody had done that. Nobody had ever wanted to badly enough to be worth the loss. He wrote the account himself, in the fourth hand, and it ran to two hundred and six lines, and Custos put it in the twelfth gallery in a drawer of its own, and Frank stood and watched him do it and felt something arrive in his chest that he had no previous experience of and did not put a name to for eighty years, and the name was pride.

They gave him work with the novices in his third year back. In his eighth he was one of the four who stood behind the Priest in the chamber. In his sixteenth he was given the sixth bell for a house of nineteen initiates, which meant that a man who had spent a decade sneering at the syllabus was now setting it.

He was very good at it. That was the joke nobody made.

And in his twenty-second year back, they brought Julia in.

⁂

He heard about it before he saw her, from Antiphon, who came to find him in the fourth gallery with an expression Frank had learned to read as delight badly disguised as concern.

"There's an irregularity."

"There's always an irregularity."

"Not like this." Antiphon leaned on the rail. "A woman came through the wall at the house on your street. Not a configuration. She has never touched one. She was killed on the boards of the upper room and she went into the gap and she has been in it ever since, and something got her out."

Frank set down the sheet he was holding.

"That's not possible."

"No," Antiphon agreed happily. "It isn't. Custos has had the ninth gallery open for four days looking for a precedent and there are two, and one of them is in a hand nobody can read any more." It watched him. "She's asking for you."

"Is she."

"She has been asking for you for four days in a voice that carries." Antiphon pushed off the rail. "They're in the chamber. Everyone is in the chamber. You are, I would say, about the sixth most important thing in that room and you should go anyway."

⁂

Julia stood on the flags in the middle of the chapter house, in the exact place where Frank had once made an excellent case, and she looked well.

She was not the woman on the staircase with the good suitcase and the dust on it. Twenty-two years in a gap under a floor had done something to her that Frank recognised immediately because it had been done to him: it had burned off her everything that could be burned off, and what was left was standing in the doorway in a dress the colour of a bruise, and what was left was the part of her that had said how many on the ninth day.

Twenty-two years, they had said on the way down. Frank did the arithmetic on the stairs and it did not come out.

Twenty-two for her. A hundred and ninety-one for him since the north door, and he had counted every one of those, because counting was what he did.

He had asked Custos about it in his fortieth year, expecting a figure.

"There isn't one," Custos had said, without looking up. "The eleventh gallery holds a hundred and sixty entries on precisely that question and no two of them agree. It runs ahead of your world. It runs behind it. There is a stretch in the ninth century where it appears to have run backwards for something under a year, and we have three accounts of that and all three are useless." He had ruled a line. "We can tell you what an interval was, Cotton. We have never once been able to tell anybody what the next one will be."

She saw him come in and she did not react at all, which frightened him more than shouting.

"— was not opened," Custos was saying. "That is the difficulty and it is not a small one. She has not consented to anything. She has not been offered anything. There is no configuration anywhere in her history."

"She was murdered in a threshold," said someone from the fourth row.

"The house is not a threshold. The house is a building in which a threshold was opened twice, and if that is sufficient then there are four hundred buildings on that world and we are going to have a great deal of company."

"Nevertheless she is here."

"Nevertheless," Custos agreed, "she is here, and we did not put her here, and we cannot send her back, and I would like it on the record that I do not know what she is."

The Priest, in her chair, said nothing at all.

Frank came down to the front. He did not intend to speak. He had come to look, and he stood at the end of the second row and looked, and Julia turned her head and looked back at him, and the whole chamber went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with either of them being important.

"Hello, Frank," she said.

"Julia."

"They keep telling me I'm a difficulty." She said it perfectly pleasantly. "Four days. Nobody has been unkind. Nobody has been anything. I asked one of them what happens to me and he thought about it for a long time and then said he would find out and went away and hasn't come back, and I thought, well — that's him, isn't it. That's exactly him. That's all of him." She smiled. "You've done well here. I can tell. You've got the look of somebody who's got on."

"Julia —"

"You were right, by the way." She turned to include the room, easily, as though she had been addressing chapter houses her entire life. "He told me I wasn't interesting. On the stairs, just before. That was his reason. I've had twenty-two years in the dark under a floor to think about it, which is rather longer than he managed, and I've decided he was correct." She looked back at Frank. "I wasn't. I was the dullest woman in England and I killed six men for a man who was leaving anyway, out of love, which is the most ordinary thing there is."

Nobody moved.

"But here's what I've been wanting to say to you for twenty-two years," said Julia, "and I would like the room to hear it, because they seem to be the only people who have ever taken anything seriously.

"I was dull, and then I was interesting for four months, and the four months were the best of my life and I would do all of it again. And then you told me I couldn't come, and I said I'd open one myself — and Frank, I hadn't the first idea how. I was bluffing. I was standing on the bottom step of my own house bluffing a man I'd killed six people for, because I could not bear for it to be over."

She let that sit.

"And you believed me," she said. "That's the part. You believed me instantly. Because you have never in your life imagined that somebody might want something they can't have and simply go on wanting it. You thought I'd get there. You thought I'd be at the second bell, standing in my place, for three hundred years. You picked up a piece of the banister rail because you could not stand the thought of turning a corner and finding me."

Frank said nothing. There was nothing to say and he knew it.

"So I'd like to be entered," said Julia, turning to Custos, "if that's the word. In the register. I don't want an exception made and I don't want a fuss. I would like exactly what everyone else gets — the bells and the little room and the three hundred years of being no good at it. And I would like the record to show that I am here without having opened anything, which I gather is not supposed to be possible, and which I am told is a difficulty."

She smoothed the front of the dress.

"I've been a difficulty before," she said. "I found I had a talent for it."

Eight hundred years of the Order sat in the stalls and looked at a woman in a bruise-coloured dress who had been dead for twenty-two years and had killed six men in a house in north London for the man standing next to her.

Then the Priest stood, and said, "Enter her under the second hand," and left, and that was all, and it was the closest thing to a decision anybody got.

Frank found Antiphon afterwards in the passage.

"What is she?"

"Nobody knows. That's what makes her the most interesting thing to happen here since you." Antiphon was almost cheerful. "Do you understand what she is for, though? Never mind what she is."

"No."

"She's proof," said Antiphon, "that consent is a rule we keep, and not a law that keeps us."

Twenty-Five · The Chamber

The chamber did not change.

Frank sat in it something over sixty times in the two centuries after Julia was entered, and by the end he could have drawn the room from memory in the dark: the tiered stalls in their three banks — old wood, warm and smooth and companionable under the hand, and a low continuous burn through the backs of the thighs of everyone in the room, for twelve hundred years, without a single person ever mentioning it — the flags with the two worn places where the light came down, the chair at the head that was no better than any of the others, the fourth row on the left where Custos sat with his hands in his lap and had sat since before there was a Custos.

The bodies moved. That was how you read it. Somebody who had been in the sixth row was in the third; somebody who had been in the third was not there at all, and nobody said where; a new one at the back with the seams still angry, standing because there was no place yet. You could take the temperature of four hundred years off the seating and Frank learned to do it before he learned anything else.

He came down the banks himself, slowly, the way water finds a level. Second row in his eightieth year. First in his hundred and fortieth. In his hundred and ninety-first he was one of the two who came in with her and stood at the head, and when he took his place he found himself looking out at seventy faces from the exact angle she had been looking at him from on the day she had said yes and destroyed him with it.

She had not moved.

Not in the sense of the chair; anyone can keep a chair. She had not moved in any respect whatsoever. Two hundred years, and the set of her hands was the same, and the quarter-inch inclination of the head was the same, and the pause before she spoke was the same length it had been when Frank Cotton was a novice with a dusting cloth, and she said yes in that same flat unshowy voice to seven more excellent cases from seven other people and every one of them left the chamber holding something that had stopped working the moment she agreed with it.

Frank watched three challengers come and go from the front row.

The first was a woman out of the eastern houses who had assembled a case about the fourteen sealed corridors that was better than his had been — properly better; he sat through it with both hands flat on his knees, hearing his own case get smaller — and who was answered in a sentence and never recovered and went quiet and was in the fifth row within a decade.

The second was Antiphon, who did not make a case at all, and instead knelt down on the flags in the middle and stayed there without speaking for the whole of the fourth bell, which was the longest silence anyone in that room had sat through, and was not in any row afterwards for sixty years, and came back, and never referred to it.

The third was a boy — a boy, four hundred years in, still a boy in the shoulders — who stood on the flags and told the Order that it had ossified, and Frank sat at the head beside the Priest and listened to his own argument coming out of somebody else's mouth with different numbers, and understood, with a clarity that took the skin off him, that this had been happening at intervals for all the centuries since and would go on happening, and that the drawer his own account sat in was one of a series.

He had begun, by then, to go and stand in front of them.

The fourteen. He had found the last five in his sixtieth year, in a part of the realm nobody worked any more, and after that he made a circuit of them perhaps twice a century — not touching, simply standing, the way a man visits a grave he has no feeling about and cannot stop attending. Doors that were closed. Nobody knew what was behind any of them, and after two hundred years that still stopped him where he stood.

He asked Custos once, in his hundredth year, why nobody had opened one.

"Somebody did," said Custos, ruling a line. "Four of them. It is in the ninth gallery under the first hand and I would not recommend it to you before a session."

"And?"

"And they came back," said Custos, "and what they wrote is four lines long, and the four lines are the reason nobody has been through the other ten."

Frank read it that night. It took him about nine seconds. He went and stood in front of the fourth door afterwards for most of the fifth bell, and he did not open it, for a reason he only ever half admitted to himself: he had understood, standing there, that whatever was on the other side would not be further in the way he meant it. It would only be worse. And Frank Cotton had never in his life been interested in worse.

He looked along the front row at the faces of the people who had heard it before.

Nobody was smiling. There was no complacency in the room at all. They were listening, seriously, to a boy telling them a true thing they had all known for four centuries, and when he finished the Priest said yes and told him the corrected number of corridors, and the boy sat down, and it was entered in the fourth hand.

Afterwards Frank walked back through the north galleries with the ledger under his arm, and stopped, and turned round, and went back and read the entry again to make sure he had it right.

Being right is not an engine.

He had spent two hundred years believing that she had said that to defeat him. Standing in an empty corridor with a ledger under his arm, in the hundred and ninety-first year of his second novitiate, Frank Cotton understood that she had said it because it was true, and because she had watched it be true seven times, and because she had been waiting — patiently, without hurrying anybody, in a chair no better than any of the others — for somebody to come along who was not merely right.

He went and found her that night.

She was in the room with the black slab, and she was on it.

Frank stopped in the doorway.

He had been in the Order two hundred years and he had never seen her out of the pins. He had not known it was a thing that could be done. What was lying on the stone in the grey unvarying light was a woman with a shaved head and a face he had never been shown, and the face was ordinary. A face you would pass on a stair and not turn for. A woman on a bus. Somebody's aunt.

The grid was still on her scalp, inked fine and blue-black and exact as a surveyor's plan, and at every crossing of it there was a small dark socket where something had been taken out. They were laid beside her on a cloth, row on row, in order, cleaned. Her throat was closed with its black thread. Her body was a body — small breasts gone slack, a soft belly, the long white seams down both flanks where the Order had been going into her since before there was a word for the country he was born in. She had her hands at her sides. She had folded her own clothes.

The chains came down out of the dark of the ceiling and the first pin went in.

Not a hammer. Nothing so crude. The apparatus took the pin off the cloth and set the point in the first socket and drove it with a slow screwing pressure that Frank could hear from the doorway — a fine dry grinding of steel into bone, the sound a dentist's room makes, and under it the flat unhurried click of something taking up load a notch at a time.

It was the indifference of it that he never got out of his head. A torturer leans in. A torturer has an opinion about the twentieth pin and it is a different opinion from the one he had about the first. This thing seated each pin to the same depth with the same pressure at the same rate and would have done it identically if the woman on the stone had been screaming, or singing, or four hundred years dead. Her whole body came up off the stone. It was not resistance. He had stood over four hundred novices on that slab and he knew the difference between a body pulling away from a thing and a body rising to meet it, and hers went up to meet the pin the way a mouth goes up to meet a spoon.

The second went in beside it. The third. The fourth found the socket at the temple and had to work for it, and a thin line of blood ran down past her ear and into the shell of it and pooled there and did not overflow. She let it. The apparatus did not pause to wipe her.

Somewhere around the ninth her hips lifted off the stone and stayed lifted, and the muscle stood out along her thighs, and her mouth opened — and nothing in that room was touching her below the collarbone. Nothing needed to. Six hundred years had worn the distinction out of her. The steel going into her skull and the thing going through the length of her were one event with two names, and neither name belonged to her particularly.

She made no sound.

Her face did not change through any of it. Not at the fourth and not at the ninth and not when the last of them seated with a small final tick against the bone. It kept the mild attention of a woman waiting for a kettle.

Frank stood in the door with his hand on the frame and understood that she was not enjoying it and was not enduring it. She was doing it. The pins came out and the pins went back in, and there was no more to it than that, and she would do it again when the interval came round, and again, and again, for as long as there was a realm to do it in — because it was the only thing left that still reliably happened to her.

What he thought, at two hundred years, was: that is discipline. He envied her for it the way he had once envied men with better appetites.

It was another two centuries before he understood that he had been watching a woman walk round a track.

She sat up. Blood had run from three of the sockets down the side of her neck and dried there in the time it took her to notice him, and she did not touch it. She reached for the black cloth and put it over her shoulders and looked at him without any expression he could use.

"You have never asked me for anything," he said, "in two hundred years."

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because you would have given it," said the Priest, "and then it would have been mine, and it is no use to me if it is mine."

Twenty-Six · The Sixteen

There is a ledger. It is a hardbacked A4 casebook of the sort supplied to every consultant in the hospital, and it is written in the same small clear hand as the girl's statement, and it survived, and Harry D'Amour has it in a crate in Bermondsey.

It has nineteen entries and it covers fifteen years.

The first is dated eighteen years before Tiffany opened a configuration in a day room, and it says:

Acquired Rotterdam, lot 41, with two others of no interest. Lacquer over a hardwood carcass, gold inlay, non-repeating. Weight anomalous. No provenance offered and none asked for. Query: genuine.

And under it, in the same hand, undated:

Method. There is no test that does not involve a solver. I have thought about this for four months and there is not one. I cannot solve it myself; if it is genuine I lose the object and the enquiry both, and if it is not I have learned nothing and will not know which. It must be given away.

That is the whole of the deliberation. Four months, and then a single paragraph, and then a column that runs for fifteen years.

⁂

He was a consultant psychiatrist with an in-patient population and a research interest, and he had, at any time, between forty and sixty people in his care whose relatives had stopped visiting.

That is not an accusation anybody ever made out loud. The Board of Inquiry, eventually, in a report of some length, found that Dr Channard's therapeutic use of manipulative and constructional tasks was unorthodox and inadequately documented, and recommended a review of procedure.

The ledger documents it perfectly.

2. M., 34, chronic. Given as an occupational task, unsupervised, per usual practice. Retained four days. Returned it to the trolley himself. No effect of any kind. Object subsequently opened by me with a screwdriver: pinned dowels, glued. A toy.

5. P., 22, elective mute, high manual aptitude — the best candidate to date and I had considerable hopes. Six weeks. She took it apart to the last panel but one and then stopped, and would not go on, and became distressed when it was left in the room. Withdrawn. NB: she stopped at the last panel but one. Query whether that is failure or refusal. Object retained.

6. P. again, after eleven months and at her own request, which I did not solicit and which I recorded at the time in the presence of a witness.

There is nothing under entry six for two pages.

Then:

Found 06:40 by night staff. The window was closed and the room was locked and both are in the log. What was on the floor of that room was not done by a fall and was not done by any implement on this ward, and I have been a doctor for nineteen years and I could not have said, standing in the doorway, which way up she was.

Object recovered from the bed, closed, in the first configuration.

Genuine. The first one. God help me, it is genuine and I have it.

⁂

He got better at it.

That is the part of the ledger that is hard to read at any speed, because the improvement is legible entry by entry, in a doctor's dry idiom, over a decade and a half. He learned not to give them to the distressed, who could not concentrate. He learned not to give them to the compliant, who put them down when asked. He learned that hunger was the variable — not intelligence, not dexterity, not any of the six aptitude scales he had trialled and abandoned — and by entry ten he was no longer selecting for who could solve the thing but for who could not stop.

11. D., 41. Alcoholic, four admissions, wife dead. Gave it Tuesday. He did not sleep Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday and I did not intervene. Nursing note Thursday 02:15: "patient sitting up in the dark with it, would not be settled, said he was nearly there."

He was not nearly there. Object is a fake. But the behaviour is exactly correct and I now know what correct looks like.

And later, at fourteen:

I am aware of the objection and I will put it here so that it cannot be said I did not.

These people are in my care. That is the objection and it is unanswerable in the terms in which it is usually put, so I decline those terms. Every one of them arrived here already finished. The eleventh had four admissions and would have had a fifth and a sixth and then a mortuary drawer at fifty. P. would have spent sixty years in a chair by a window in Hemel Hempstead. I have taken people for whom nothing further was going to happen and I have arranged for something further to happen, and if the objection is that they did not consent, then let it be recorded that the Order does not obtain consent either. It obtains persistence. I have simply been more honest about the mechanism than they have, and the only difference between Philip Channard and the woman in the girl's statement is that the woman has better premises.

There is no entry after that for seven months.

⁂

Sixteen went out. Three came back genuine.

The other thirteen were dowels and glue and clever joinery, and Harry, who read the whole ledger in a night in a room in Bermondsey with a bottle he did not open, said afterwards that the thirteen were worse than the three, because a man who has fed fifteen people to a hypothesis and been right three times is a man who was wrong twelve times and carried on.

Three of them were taken, and the three that were taken are the three that were genuine, and not one of the three was ever found. Two were on wards, behind doors locked from the inside, and the locks are recorded as such in the log. The third was in a locked car in the hospital car park, in the back, with the driver's seat pushed forward as far as it would go, as though room had been needed.

Six more did not survive a fake.

That is the part of the arithmetic Channard never once put in the ledger, and it is the part Harry did. Thirteen of the objects were dowels and glue, and a man of fifty in a hospital bed does not need an object to be genuine in order to be destroyed by it. One was found in a bath in Finchley with the water still running. One was on the flat roof of the annexe. One took eleven days over it and was on a one-to-one for the last four of them and got there anyway. The gardener found one in the dahlias and did not work again.

Channard attended five of the nine himself, in his professional capacity, and wrote them up the same evening. He does not gloat in any of the five. He measures. He gives the position of the limbs and the temperature of the room and, twice, the state of the fingernails, and against the one on the roof he has written object recovered intact, unopened, dowels and nothing else at all.

Seven handed them back, or lost interest, or put them on a windowsill and forgot them, and are alive.

That is not mercy and Channard did not intend it. It is the difference between fifteen people and a hypothesis, and it fell where it fell.

Their names are all in the left-hand column. He recorded them properly, with dates of birth, because he was a doctor and it would not have occurred to him to do otherwise. Kirsty Cotton read the nine names in Bermondsey in her second month and wrote them out on a separate sheet in her own handwriting and kept that sheet, folded, in the inside pocket of her coat, and it was in that pocket in a corridor at the end of the world, and it went with her onto the stone.

Nobody in the Order of the Gash ever knew it was there.

⁂

The last entry before the apparatus is undated and is four words long, and it is the only place in fifteen years where the handwriting is not small and clear.

Enough of other people.

Twenty-Seven · Tiffany

She was good at things with pieces.

That was how her mother put it, to the doctors, in the first year, over and over, as though it were a defence: she's good at things with pieces. She could do a five-hundred-piece jigsaw face down. She could take the back off a wristwatch with a butter knife and get it on again. At six she had opened the child locks on the medicine cabinet in ten seconds while her mother was in the room, watching, saying her name.

She had not spoken since she was three.

There was nothing wrong with her throat. Six people had looked at her throat. There had been a fire, and there had been a long time in a corridor of the hospital afterwards with people talking above her head, and somewhere in there Tiffany had put the whole apparatus down, the way you put down a bag that has become too heavy, and had simply never picked it up again.

She was twenty when Dr Channard took over her file, and she had been in institutions for twelve years, and she was not unhappy. Nobody could ever get their heads round that. She had a room with a window in it. She had a routine, and she liked the routine, and there was a woman on the day shift called Marcelle who did her hair on Sundays and told her about a nephew in Lagos.

Dr Channard was kind to her.

She thought about that a great deal, later, insofar as she had a later. She had been institutionalised for twelve years and she could smell a performance through a wall. He learned what she liked. He got her a lamp because the overhead light made her flinch. He talked to her as though she were going to answer, and left the gaps, and not once did the thing where people slow down and get louder.

And he brought her puzzles.

They started small. A cast-iron thing with two nails through it. A folding wooden star. A Chinese ring puzzle that took her most of a fortnight and that she was sorry to finish. He would set them down on the table in the day room without ceremony and go away and come back in a few hours, and if she had done it he would say ah, and write something down, and if she had not he would say nothing at all.

He was there for a year and he never rushed her once.

The lacquered one came on a Tuesday in November.

She knew it was different before she touched it. She had handled perhaps forty of his puzzles by then and every one of them had been inert — a thing lying on a table, waiting. This one was not lying on the table. It was sitting on it, and when she put her fingers on the black and gold face of it something in her sinuses went cold, the way it does before a nosebleed.

She looked up at him.

Dr Channard was standing by the door with his hands behind his back, and he had taken his glasses off, which he did not do, and his face had an expression on it that she had never seen there in eight months and that she recognised instantly, because it was the same expression the man on the ward had worn on the night they took him to Rowanfield.

He was hungry.

"Take your time, Tiffany," he said.

She did not want to.

She wanted to put it down and get up and go and find Marcelle, and she should have — she knew it, at twenty, sitting in a day room with the radiator ticking, she knew it in her hands and the backs of her knees — and she did not.

The box had six panels that moved, and she had already found two of them.

Nobody had ever asked Tiffany what she wanted. Not seriously; not in a decade. She had been fed and dressed and reviewed and discussed at length in the third person while she sat in the room, and the only thing in her life that was entirely and unarguably hers was the thing that happened in her hands when a mechanism gave.

She bent her head over it.

It took her nineteen minutes. Nobody afterwards called that luck, and Frank, who had given seven hours of a night to the same object with the best hands and the worst hunger of anyone who had come through in a century, went and looked at the entry twice.

Somewhere around the fourteenth minute she stopped being aware of the room, and around the seventeenth she heard, very clearly, a small sound inside the box like a tooth going into a socket, and she felt her own mouth pull sideways in the shape it made when she was pleased, which was the only face she had.

The last panel came round under her thumb.

A bell rang somewhere in the building, deep and unhurried, in a hospital that had no bell, and Dr Channard made a sound behind her like a man who has been holding his breath for twelve years.

The wall of the day room opened along a seam that had no business existing, and the cold came out, and Tiffany looked up from the open configuration in her hands into a corridor of grey unvarying light, and saw a tall figure standing in it with its hands folded, in the attitude of somebody who has arrived early and does not mind.

"Good evening," said Frank Cotton.

Twenty-Eight · The Doctor

Philip Channard had been preparing for twelve years and he had done it, by his own lights, immaculately.

He had the account of a nineteen-year-old girl taken down in his own hand in a room with a view of a car park, and there were four things in it that appeared in no source anywhere: the unequal bells, the north door, the phrase a room you go back to, and — the sentence he had read perhaps nine hundred times — it kept trying to explain and then losing interest halfway.

He had the mattress, which had given him blood from four separate men and, in one place near the seam, something that was not blood — thick, faintly gold, still tacky after nine years — which he had learned a great deal from and never identified.

He had, over fifteen years, acquired nineteen configurations. Only three of them were genuine. He had established which three by giving the other sixteen away to other people and keeping careful notes on what became of them.

And he had the thing nobody else in the literature had ever had, which was a thesis.

Every account he had ever read, from the Düsseldorf fragments to the girl in the beige room, described the same relation: a person opens the box, and something comes, and the person is taken. Supplicant and celebrant. Petitioner and priest. Twelve centuries of people going through the wall on somebody else's terms, on their hooks, into their curriculum, to be taught — and Channard had read the word taught in a dozen separate testimonies and had felt his lip curl every single time.

He had not spent forty-one years becoming the foremost man in his field in order to be enrolled.

So he did not open a configuration.

He built one.

It took the last three years and it was a magnificent piece of work — the three genuine boxes broken down to their principles, the geometry re-derived, the whole thing scaled up into an apparatus that occupied the floor of the top room of his house and ran on materials the girl's account had told him about without her ever knowing what she was saying. He put the mattress at the centre of it. He was not squeamish; squeamishness was for people who wanted the results without the procedure.

And on the night the girl solved the black and gold box in the day room downstairs — which he had arranged, and timed, and which was the pin holding the whole thing together, because you need a door to be open before you can widen it — Dr Philip Channard stood in the middle of his apparatus in the top room of his own house and offered himself to Leviathan on his own terms.

Not as a novice. As a colleague.

And Leviathan, which does not judge, and does not endorse, and has never in twelve centuries declared anybody right or wrong, answered him.

It gave him exactly what he had asked for, and it gave it to him in a moment, and the whole of the education was left out.

The apparatus came alive around him — the three re-derived geometries turning at different speeds in the top room of a house in Highgate — and the mattress at the centre of it went dark and wet as the old blood in it was called on and answered. Channard had time to say a word. It was not a prayer and it was not a scream; it was the word he had written at the head of every one of his nineteen notebooks, and nobody has ever known what it was.

Then Leviathan came into him through the wound of the room.

It opened his skull along the coronal suture and lifted the two halves like a book laid flat. It did not remove the brain. It went into it, and the man's own hands came up and held his head open while it worked, because the hands had already stopped being his and had not yet been told. It drew the spine out through the opened back an inch at a time, vertebra by vertebra, and hung it in the air behind him in the shape it wanted, and reattached it at a length no man is built to carry. The ribs it took out entirely and set aside and did not give back. The pelvis it broke at the symphysis with a wet crack that took a pane out of the window, and reset, and broke again, and reset, until the geometry of him was something that could be driven rather than walked.

He was hard through all of it. Of course he was; the wanting was the only tool he had brought. He spent twice while his own vertebrae were being counted out into the air behind him, and the second time it went up the opened inside of his own belly and he felt it there, in a cavity that had no business having a sensation in it, and he laughed through a jaw that was being rebuilt around the laugh.

That was the gift and the ruin of it: a body that could be opened and would come back, and he was given it in the time it takes to fall down a flight of stairs, and nobody made him breathe. Nobody put a hand on his shoulder blade and corrected him for the four-hundredth time. Nobody spent eight patient months teaching him the difference between a sensation and his opinion of a sensation. He came out of that room at the top of his own house with everything the Order had and none of what it was for, and the only lesson he had ever learned in his life was that the way to get a thing is to want it harder than the man beside you.

He healed as he stood up. He watched himself heal. He called the watching knowledge.

⁂

Frank was three hundred yards into the corridor with the girl beside him when it came through the wall behind them.

He had time to turn. That was all.

The thing that had been Philip Channard came out of a seam that was not the seam the girl had opened, tearing it wider as it came, and it was finished — that was the first appalling fact of it, and Frank read it in half a second with two hundred and twenty years of professional judgement. Not a novice. Not a man in the process of becoming anything. A completed article: the skull opened and reset, the spine drawn out and hung, the whole apparatus of him rebuilt to a specification and healed, and it had taken about three seconds.

Frank had spent nine years being taken apart on a black slab and put back together to earn a quarter of that.

"Get her behind me," he said.

Antiphon was already moving. It got a hand on Tiffany's shoulder and took her back down the corridor at a run, and the thing that had been Channard put out an arm that was no longer an arm and opened Antiphon from the collarbone to the hip without hurrying at all.

There was no flourish. The chest came open in a single dark unzip, sternum to pelvis. Cloth and skin and the silvered old seams of the Order parted together. What was inside did not spill so much as present: the long wet rope of the gut sliding forward over the belt of the hips; the pale lobes of the lungs still working, indecently; the liver's dull wet slab; the spine visible for a clean white instant in the opened gutter of the back. Blood sheeted down both thighs and hit the flags in a patter that went on after the cutting had stopped. Antiphon's cock and stones hung in the wreck of the pelvis as if they had not been told, and a loop of bowel came down across them and steamed.

Antiphon's mouth did not open. It put both its own hands into the wound as if to hold itself in and looked at Frank over the thing's shoulder with an expression that was almost irritation — the look of a colleague whose work has been interrupted — and then Leviathan, tireless, uninterested, began to put it back. Tissue found tissue. The gut withdrew with a soft ugly peristalsis. The sternum remembered its line. Silver came up through the blood like frost. In a few seconds the seam was only a seam, angry and shining, and Antiphon was already moving again with the girl's shoulder in its grip, leaving a wet track that the flags accepted as they accepted everything.

Frank read the difference while his own hip was still in three pieces among the drawers: Leviathan would not let them stay broken.

It went through the northern galleries for the whole night, and Frank, who was in no condition to stop it, spent most of that night on his back among the drawers listening to it work.

The Order does not scream. What came up the corridors was the noise of a large animal moving through furniture, and under it, at intervals, a wet unhurried folding — the sound of somebody being closed up like a deckchair — and then nothing at all, and then the animal moving again, further off, or nearer.

The Order fought it, and the Order did not fight as the world thinks. There was no shouting. Nobody taunted it. Seven of them came up through the ninth gallery in a formation that had not been used in six hundred years and executed it with the economy of a surgical team, and four of them were unmade in the first ninety seconds. Not killed. The Order cannot be killed. Unmade, which is worse, and which Frank watched happen to the one nearest him: a body opened faster than Leviathan could close it, and opened again through the closing, and again, and again, until it had been opened more times than it had parts, and stopped being a thing that could be put back, and lay on the flags in sections that went on moving separately for some while afterwards. The remaining three adjusted and went again, and nobody said a word the entire time.

It was stronger than anything in the realm and faster than the seven of them together and it had no discipline whatsoever, and for fourteen hours the first two beat the third.

Frank fought it twice, and lost twice, and was glad afterwards that nobody had been watching the first time. The second time it put him through a wall of drawers and he lay in nine hundred years of accounts with his hip in three pieces and watched it go past him up the gallery towards the sound of Custos closing a door.

And then it came into the chapter house, where she was waiting.

⁂

Frank got to the door in time to see the end of it.

The Priest was standing on the flags in the middle of the room. Not at the head. On the flags, in the worn place where the light came down, in the exact spot where every challenger for twelve hundred years had stood to make a case.

Channard came at her and she moved.

Frank had never seen her move. Two hundred and twenty years, and he had seen her walk and seen her sit and seen her put a hand on a man's face, and he had never once seen her move, and what he saw in the chapter house was so far outside his estimate of her that he found he had put a hand on the doorframe.

She fought it for a long time. Longer than the seven of them in the ninth gallery. She took it apart in increments, without haste and without one wasted motion. She had the left arm off at the shoulder and it had grown back before the arm hit the flags. She opened the throat and went in through the opening and brought out a fistful of liver, and dropped it, and the throat closed over the absence and then filled the absence in. She put one hand flat on the reset pelvis and Frank heard it go a second time, and the crack came back off the tiered stalls, and every seat in the chapter house was occupied and not one of them moved.

And it healed as fast as she opened it, and she opened it again, and the whole exchange had the terrible unhurried quality of a woman working through a long piece of arithmetic on paper.

And she was losing.

Frank saw it before anyone. He saw it because he had spent two hundred years learning to read the quarter-inch inclination of that head, and there came a moment, perhaps forty minutes in, when the rhythm of it changed by a fraction — when she gave a step she did not need to give.

She could not close it out. She could hold it for as long as she liked and she could not finish it, because the thing in front of her had been given, in a moment and for nothing, a body that came back faster than she could take it apart.

Then she stopped.

She simply stopped, in the middle of it, and stood, and let her hands fall to her sides — and Channard, who could not stop, who had not once been taught to stop, went straight through the space where her defence had been and got her by the throat and lifted her off the flags.

Somewhere up in the stalls one of the Order stood up, and then sat down again.

Frank came off the doorframe.

He had no plan. He had no weapon and a hip that had been in three pieces four hours earlier and no idea in his head at all, and he crossed forty feet of the chapter house at a dead run, and the last thing he saw before he reached them was one ordinary brown eye swivelling in the ruin of the grip to find him.

She was not frightened.

She was watching to see what he would do.

And Frank Cotton, in mid-stride, in the fourteenth hour of the worst night in four hundred years of the Order's history, understood, in the two strides he had left, that he was being examined — that she had put herself into that grip in order to examine him — and that if he did the obvious thing he would fail.

He went past her.

He went past both of them, and up the two steps at the head of the chamber, and out through the small door behind the chair that led to the passage that led — he had walked it a thousand times in two centuries — to the refectory.

Twenty-Nine · The Lesson

He had twelve minutes and he used them.

The room where the things were kept had not been opened in two hundred years and the door came off its hinges under his shoulder. He took what was nearest. He did not choose; there was no time to choose and it did not matter what it was, and afterwards he could not have said what he carried back up the passage in his arms except that some of it was hot.

He set the long table in the refectory himself, at a dead run, with his hip screaming.

Cloth. Candles — he lit nine of them and left the other ninety. Plate at one end and plate at the other. And down the centre of it, laid out in a hurry and still, even in a hurry, arranged, because he had watched it done once two hundred years ago and had never got the picture out of his head: the birds, and the rib of beef standing in its own fat, and the bread torn open and breathing, and a dish of something dark and glossy he did not recognise and did not have time to want.

Then he stood at the head of the table and shouted, in the direction of the chapter house, the only word he could think of that would carry:

"CHANNARD."

Nothing.

"PHILIP."

It came down the passage like weather.

It filled the doorway of the refectory. One arm was longer than the other by a foot and the shoulder had been rebuilt twice and got the socket wrong both times; there was a hole through the left side of the chest that Frank could see the far wall through; the drawn spine stood clear of the back at the neck and turned when the head turned, half a second late. And all of it was closing as he watched — the night's work of an entire Order going shut like a mouth. It had her by the throat still. It had brought her with it.

Frank stood at the head of the long table with the candles going and his hands at his sides.

"You've had a very long night," he said, "and I imagine you're hungry."

The thing in the doorway did not move.

"That's not a figure of speech," said Frank. "Look at it. Look at the table, Philip. When did you last eat?"

He saw it look.

That was all he needed and he had known it would be enough, because he had spent two hundred and twenty years reading initiates and this one was the easiest text he had ever been handed. A man who had built an apparatus in the top room of his own house rather than be enrolled. A man who had gone twelve years without telling one living soul what he was doing. A man who had asked to be admitted as a colleague.

"Sit down," said Frank.

And it sat.

It let go of her — she went down onto the flags and did not get up, and Frank did not look at her — and it came the length of the refectory and it sat, in the chair at the far end, because being invited to the table was what it had wanted since it was a boy and because it had never in its life been taught to distrust an invitation.

Frank sat down at the other end. The chair took him the way it had taken him two hundred years before: welcome, and a bright sting under the welcome, and by now he no longer separated the two even as a matter of description.

"Eat," he said.

It ate.

Frank watched it, from forty feet away, down nine candles, and did not touch anything on his own plate.

"Good?"

The sound it made was not a word.

"Yes," said Frank. "It's the best thing you've ever had. It will be. I want you to notice that, Philip — I want you to notice it properly, because in about four seconds you're going to want to say it stopped being good, and it won't have. That is the lesson, and everyone gets it wrong the first time."

The apparatus in its mouth went.

Frank watched the first second of it from forty feet down nine candles and had the whole of it.

The thing that had been Philip Channard came up out of the chair so fast the chair went over behind it, and both hands went to its face, and it stood there in the candlelight pulling at its own jaw with a grip that took the skin off in strips, trying to get at what was inside its mouth, and every strip it took off grew back under its fingers before it could take the next.

The fork had done what the fork did. The metal went through the tongue and the soft palate and the floor of the mouth and then kept going, sprouting, a thicket of tines finding the ducts and the roots of the teeth and the wet hinge of the jaw. The best food it had ever tasted was still in there, beef and salt and the dark glossy thing, running with the blood, and the two flavours would not separate.

The table went twenty feet in the air and came down. Plate burst. A bird hit the flags and burst with it, glaze and cavity and a smell that was still, obscenely, good. The candles went over and kept burning.

Channard went to his knees in the wreck with both hands hooked in his own mouth, trying to pull the meal out of himself, and every pull seated the metal further, and the pleasure would not stop.

He tore his own mouth trying to choose.

The jaw went first, unhinged left and then right, hanging, a door off a latch. Leviathan put it back. He tore it off again. The realm, tireless, uninterested, closed the cheeks, reset the teeth, rebuilt the tongue around the metal that was still there, and he screamed through the repaired mouth and tore it a third time. He was trying to empty the sensation out of the body by opening the body. It would not empty. The food was still good.

Through all of it Frank sat where he was with his hands flat on the wood.

"Eat," he said.

It could not. It could not hold the two things at once. The thing that had been Philip Channard came apart down the middle like a man trying to walk in two directions.

It came apart on the flags of the refectory among nine burning candles.

Not physically. It was in perfect physical repair; Leviathan saw to that, tirelessly, the whole time. It simply stopped being able to do anything at all, and lay in the wreck of the meal with the best food it had ever tasted going cold around it, opening and closing its ruined mouth, and it was still doing that four hours later when they came and took it away.

Frank sat at the head of the long table for a while.

Then he got up and went down the room and knelt on the flags beside her, and she was already sitting up.

She looked at the thing on the floor. Then at the table. Then at him.

"Twelve minutes," she said.

"About that."

The Priest got to her feet, unhurried, with her hand at her throat, and Frank understood, all at once and far too late, that she had been able to stand up for some time.

"You could have finished it," he said. "In the chapter house. You gave a step."

"Yes."

"Why?"

And she looked at him for a long moment without a trace of appetite anywhere in it.

"Because I did not need to know whether I could beat it," she said.

Thirty · The Guest

Nobody had ever taken her coat before.

That was the first thing, and Tiffany turned it over for a long while afterwards and never got to the bottom of it. The tall one in the corridor put out a hand for the cardigan she was carrying, and waited, and when she gave it up he folded it over his forearm the way they do in a restaurant, and carried it, and gave it back to her four hours later warm.

She had been handled for twelve years. She knew every kind of hand there was. There was the hand that steers you, and the hand that means not now, and the bright fast hand of the agency staff who have six to do before the shift ends, and the hand that is kind and is also a decision made about you by somebody in an office. She had catalogued them all before she was fifteen and none of them had ever asked her for anything.

The tall one had asked her for her coat.

⁂

They gave her a room and it had a shelf and a jug in it, and she liked it immediately and was faintly ashamed of liking it.

The floor was wonderful. She got her shoes off inside a minute — nobody stopped her; nobody said anything at all — and stood on the stone in her socks and then took the socks off too, and the cold came up through her feet and so did the other thing, the small bright bite every fourth or fifth step, and Tiffany stood in the middle of a cell at the end of the world going up and down on the balls of her feet, finding it, losing it, finding it again.

It's on a cycle, she thought. It isn't random. Every fourth. Sometimes fifth.

She spent about ten minutes establishing that. Nobody came. Nobody wrote it down.

Frank Cotton found her doing it and stood in the doorway and watched, and Tiffany did not stop, because she had worked out by then that she was not in trouble and she wanted to finish the count.

"Every fourth," he said, "and every fifth in the north runs, and I could not tell you why and neither can anybody here."

She looked up.

"I asked, when I was new," he said. "I asked six of them and got six different answers and all six were guesses dressed up. I found that intolerable for about nine years."

Tiffany put her socks back on, and sat on the shelf, and waited to see whether he would keep talking.

Everybody kept talking. That was the arrangement everywhere she had ever been. You sat still and did not speak and eventually the other person filled it in, and you got to keep whatever you had and they went away pleased with themselves.

Frank Cotton sat down on the floor opposite her with his back against the wall and did not say anything for a very long time.

That was harder.

⁂

They fed her, which she had not expected, and it was ordinary food and it was good, and one of them sat with her while she ate and did not watch her eat.

They gave her a bell.

That was how she came to think of it afterwards and she was never able to explain it any better. She had spent twelve years inside somebody's timetable — the drug round, the hour of the day room, Marcelle on Sundays, the trolley — and she had liked the timetable, and she had also known every minute of every day exactly whose timetable it was.

Here there were seven bells and the hours between them were not the same length and nobody had decided that. The tall one said so plainly when she looked a question at him: nobody rings them, and no one knows why the fourth hour is long, and it has been that way since before this Order existed. Then he went away and left her in a corridor with nothing to do and nowhere she was expected to be.

She walked for most of an hour.

Nobody followed her. She checked twice, in the way she had learned to check without turning her head, and there was nobody, and she went further and further out into a building with no edges and understood, somewhere around the fifth bell, that if she did not come back nobody was going to come and get her.

She came back. She wanted to see what the drawers were.

⁂

She was there four days and she was not once asked what she wanted.

Everybody had always asked. They asked constantly, endlessly, with enormous patience, and they asked in the way you ask a locked door — as a formality performed at the front of a decision that has already been taken. Do you want to come and sit with the others, Tiffany. Do you want to try the new one. Do you want Marcelle to do your hair.

Nobody here asked her anything.

They also did not open her.

She worked out on the second day that this was unusual, because she had seen what they did in the room with the black slab — not by being shown, by walking into a corridor at the wrong hour and being neither hurried past nor invited in — and she stood in the doorway for a while and looked at a man on the stone with his chest laid open in one sheet from the collarbone down and four chains going up into the dark, and she was not frightened, and the reason she was not frightened was that everybody in the room was concentrating.

She knew concentration. It was the only thing in her life she had ever been given for free.

Somebody came and stood beside her in the doorway, and did not send her away, and said, after a while: "Not you."

Tiffany looked up.

"You have nothing to prove," it said, "and there is nothing in you that wants to be opened, and there is no argument you have been carrying about that we could settle. There would be no work in it. It would only be an injury."

And it went in and washed its hands in a bowl by the door and got on.

⁂

The last thing, which she thought about in a back room on Camden Passage the following summer and in a corridor at four in the morning after that, was this.

On the third day one of them found her in the room with the drawers, up a ladder on rails in the twelfth gallery with an account in her hand that she could not read a word of, and did not tell her to come down.

It came and stood at the bottom of the ladder.

"That one is four hundred and six years old," it said. "The hand is Custos's. He does not write them any more; he rules the lines and files them and lets the younger ones write." A pause. "Would you like to see one you can read?"

She would.

It was gone about twenty minutes and came back with a sheet in English, and gave it to her, and went away again — went away, entirely, not to a chair by the door, not to a window in a corridor — and Tiffany sat down on the third rung of a ladder in the twelfth gallery of the Order of the Gash and read four hundred lines about a woman from Valencia who had gone somewhere and come back and tried very hard to say what it had been like.

She was still reading it when the sixth bell went.

Nobody came to take it off her.

Thirty-One · The Choice

They gave him the disposal, which he had not expected, in the chamber, three days later.

"There are two," said Custos. He had a bandage on his forearm that he had not explained and that nobody had asked about. "The doctor, and the girl. They came through together and they are yours to settle."

"Mine."

"You brought one of them in and you put the other one down. Nobody else has a claim." Custos squared the ledger. "It is not a reward, Cotton, before you decide it is one. It is simply that you are the one holding them."

Frank looked down the chamber at the two of them.

Channard was in the second worn place, upright, held by nothing at all — it did not need holding any more — and it had not spoken in three days and had not stopped moving its mouth.

The girl was standing on the flags with her hands at her sides. She had a cardigan on, and she was barefoot, and she was standing perfectly still on stone that Frank knew for a fact was biting the soles of her feet every few seconds, and she had not shifted her weight once in four days. She had been in the realm for four days and had not made a sound, and Frank had established, from Antiphon before the ninth gallery and from three of the initiates since, that she had not made a sound in seventeen years either.

She was looking straight back at him.

"The doctor first," said the Priest.

"Keep him."

There was a small movement in the stalls.

"He's not finished," said Frank. "That's not mercy and I'd like nobody to write it down as mercy. He built an apparatus in the top room of his own house because he could not stand the thought of being taught, and he has just been comprehensively taught, in twelve minutes, by a man who was a novice in this Order for nine years and never got a lesson that cheap." He looked at the thing in the second worn place. "Put him at the beginning. The actual beginning — breathing, attention, the difference between a sensation and an opinion. Eight months of it before anybody puts a hook in him. He'll be no good at it. He'll be no good at it for a very long time, and we will not stop, and nobody will be unkind to him."

Custos wrote it down.

"And the girl," said the Priest.

Frank came down off the step and crossed the flags and stood in front of Tiffany, and the whole chamber watched him do it.

She did not flinch. He noticed that. Four days, no language, a corridor full of things that had come out of the wall of her own day room, and she stood on the flags of the chapter house with her chin up and looked at him.

"You solved it," he said.

She nodded, once.

"Why?"

She looked at him for a while. Then she raised her right hand, and turned it over, and moved her fingers slightly — the small unmistakable gesture of a mechanism giving under a thumb — and put the hand down again.

Because it moved.

Frank Cotton stood in the middle of the chapter house of the Order of the Gash and found that his hands had gone cold and his mouth had gone dry and his heart was going like a man's who has just missed a step on a stair, and he could not for the life of him work out what any of it was for.

"Send her back," he said.

The chamber did not stir. He was aware of Custos's pen stopping.

"She has no thesis," Frank said, to the room, more loudly than he needed to. "She came here because a mechanism moved under her thumb, and there is nothing in this Order that would improve her and nothing in her that we need. She is complete." He turned. "Send her back. Tonight. To the room she came out of, with the lamp in it."

Nobody objected. Nobody ever objected.

He walked out of the chamber with his hands shaking and could not think why, and he was halfway down the north passage before it came to him, and when it came it arrived whole and hot and with his own name all over it:

I did it. Twenty years — a hundred, two hundred, three hundred — thirty thousand accounts and the whole life of this Order and four hundred and eighty-one years of nothing new, and a girl in a hospital in London threw a box out of a window with a broken hand and I have never in two centuries been able to work out how, and tonight I did it. I had something in my hand and I put it down.

He put a hand out and held the wall of the passage.

I can decline.

It cost him nothing.

Behind him, in the chamber, the Priest watched him go and said nothing at all.

Part Four

The Door

Thirty-Two · The Wound

It took him another ninety years to say it, and he did not plan it, and that is the only reason it worked.

He had planned everything else in his existence. The case in his ninth year had taken two years to build and had been answered in four words. The account of the world had taken a year to live and two hundred and six lines to write. He had spent three centuries learning that anything Frank Cotton constructed in advance, she had already read.

So the thing that finally did it came out sideways, in an ordinary session of the chamber, about a boy.

The boy was four hundred years in and had made a case. It was not a good case; it was the corridors again, badly counted, and Frank sat at the head beside her and listened to it with the particular weariness of a man hearing his own youth performed by somebody with worse numbers. When it was over the Priest said yes, and gave the corrected figure, and the boy sat down.

And Frank heard himself say, into the silence afterwards, in front of seventy of them:

"Why don't you go?"

The chamber did not move.

"I'm asking seriously," he said, and he found as he said it that he was — that it had been sitting under his tongue for three hundred years and had chosen its own moment. "Fourteen doors. You have known about them longer than anybody alive. You agreed with me, in my ninth year, in that spot, and it cost you nothing, and I have spent three centuries working out why it cost you nothing.

"It cost you nothing because agreeing is free. Going is not."

He stood up.

"You cannot go," said Frank Cotton. "That is the whole of it, isn't it. You went further than any of us, once, and you came back, and whatever you found finished the wanting. You've been telling novices for six hundred years that the sorting stops and that's the work — well, it stopped. It stopped in you. And nobody told you that when it stops, the going stops with it, because there is nothing left to go for.

"You can see the doors perfectly well. You could open any one of them this evening. And you will never open one, not in another thousand years, because you cannot want what is behind it and you have not been able to want anything since before there was a word for it.

"So you send us. You have been standing in this room for twelve centuries sending other people through doors you cannot walk through yourself, and you have called it teaching, and every one of us has called it teaching, and it is not teaching."

He turned to the stalls, and then back.

"It's a woman at a window watching other people go out."

Seventy of them sat in the stalls and looked at the flags.

And the Priest of the Order of the Gash, who had answered seven challengers in twelve hundred years without ever taking a moment to do it, sat in a chair that was no better than any of the others —

— and paused.

It was not long. Afterwards Frank could not have put a number on it and never tried; a second, perhaps two. But there were seventy people in that room who had between them something in the region of forty thousand years of watching her, and not one of them had ever seen it, and the sound of seventy of the Order of the Gash going absolutely still is a sound Frank never heard again in his existence.

Then she said:

"Yes."

"Don't." His voice cracked and he let it. "Don't do that to me. Not this time. You have done it seven times and it works every single time and I am asking you not to —"

"I am not agreeing in order to defeat you," said the Priest. "I am agreeing because it is true, and because you are the first one to say it in this room, and because I have been waiting for somebody to say it for four hundred and eighty-one years."

She rose.

"Now sit down, and listen, because you are owed the other half and nobody else in this room can give it to you.

"You are right about me. You are also a fool, and the two are unconnected, and I want the second one entered as carefully as the first.

"Your restlessness is an attachment. You believe it is the opposite of one — you think that because you cannot rest, you are free of the thing that holds the rest of us still. It is the same thing wearing a different coat. Boredom is a sensation, Cotton. It is a sensation exactly like heat and exactly like the hooks, and it arrives, and you sort it, instantly, every single time, and you have not once in three hundred years sat inside it without needing it to become something else.

"You did not surpass this path. You failed at it, in the first eight months, the way Whelan failed — and unlike Whelan you were clever enough to dress the failure as heresy and take it to the chamber, and I let you, because a failure that talks is worth a dozen that go quiet."

Frank stood on the flags with his hands at his sides and let her finish.

"And here is the part I have never said to you," she said, "and I have wanted to for three hundred years, which is as close to wanting as I get.

"You will never bring me proof. Consider it. If you go through a door and find an end to it, you will not want the end — you will be standing at it inside a month asking what is on the other side, and you will call that evidence that it was not really an end. And if you find no end at all, you will call that evidence. There is no observation you could make, anywhere, in any corridor, that would come back and tell you that you were wrong. Your position cannot fail.

"That is not a philosophy. It is an appetite with a vocabulary."

Somewhere above them a bell that was not any of the seven went once, and stopped, and nobody in the room acknowledged it.

"So," said the Priest. "You are right that I cannot go, and I am right that you cannot stop, and neither of us can become the other without losing the only useful thing we have. That is not a disagreement. It is a shape, and we have been standing inside it since your ninth year, and I am tired of it in the only way I am still able to be tired of anything."

She stepped down from the head of the chamber onto the flags.

"Custos."

"Priest."

"Enter it. The office passes to Cotton at the second bell."

The room came apart. Not visibly — nobody stood, nobody spoke; but Frank felt seventy people move inside their own skins at once, and Antiphon, in the back row, put a hand over its mouth.

"You can't —"

"I can, and it is not a reward, and if you take it as one you will be no good to me." She was already walking. "You wanted somebody to go through a door. There is nobody in this Order who will do it while I am sitting in that chair, because I have been sitting in it for as long as there has been an Order and everybody in this room, including you, has arranged their entire existence around what I will and will not sanction.

"So I am getting out of the chair."

She stopped at the small door behind it.

"I am not leaving," said the Priest. "I do not retire and I cannot be killed and I have nowhere to be. I will be here, in the fourth row, at the second bell, every day, for as long as this takes — because you going through a door and coming back with something, and you going through a door and not coming back at all, are both answers, and I have a great deal of time."

She looked back at him once.

"Go on, then," she said. "Be right at me."

Thirty-Three · Ordinary Time

The coroner released her father's papers in the March, and Kirsty went and got them because there was nobody else, and that was the last decision she made for eleven months.

There were four boxes. Two of them were the shop's — invoices, a lever-arch file of guarantees for machines that had been sold on years before — and one was photographs, and one was the drawer out of the desk in the front room, tipped in whole, by somebody who had been told to clear the house and had reached the end of the afternoon.

She put them in the hall of the flat in Kentish Town and stepped over them for eleven months.

That is the entire content of the first year and she has never dressed it up. She got a job. She was good at it and it did not require anything. She collated order forms and ran the guillotine on Thursdays and learned the machines, and the man who owned the place, whose name was Gordon Aitcheson and who had buried a wife, worked out inside a fortnight that she did not want to be asked anything and never once asked her anything, and she would have died for him.

She did not drink, particularly. She did not stop eating. She was not, in the language people wanted, falling apart — she was up at six and in at seven-fifteen and her rent was never late, and that was the problem, and nobody could see it because from the outside it was a young woman coping extremely well.

What was actually happening was that Kirsty Cotton had put everything down.

She had a system for the nights. She had worked it out inside a month and she used it for eleven and she could have used it for fifty years. You do not lie in the dark. You get up, and you put the light on, and you do a thing with your hands — she rewired two lamps and stripped a chest of drawers she did not want — and at some point the shape goes out of the room and you can go back. The system worked. That was the trouble with it. It worked every single night and never once got any easier, and she went on doing it, and it did not occur to her for the best part of a year that a system you have to run every night at three in the morning is not a system, it is a condition.

She told exactly one person anything.

Marie on the folding table, in the November, at a Christmas do in a function room above a pub, four drinks in, sixteen minutes. Kirsty gave her the top of the house and the smell in it and the thing that had been standing under the bulb, and Marie listened all the way to the end without her face doing anything, and then put her hand over Kirsty's hand on the table and said, "You want to see somebody about that, love."

She was being kind. She meant it entirely kindly and she was, on the evidence available to her, completely right.

Kirsty went to the toilets and was sick, and came back, and had another drink, and did not mention it again to anybody who had not been in that house.

⁂

The boxes got opened in the December because the hall was too narrow to get a bike past.

She did the invoices first because they were nothing, and the guarantees, and she was on the floor with her back against the radiator making three piles and getting on with it. Photographs took the longest. There is no way to do photographs quickly. Her mother at a table somewhere with her hair up. Her father in a paper hat. Herself at eight in a swimming costume on a beach with her uncle's arm round her shoulders and her uncle's face doing the thing it did.

She put that one in the pile to keep. She has never been able to explain that either.

The shoebox was not her father's.

That was the thing. It was hers, and it had gone into the fourth box with everything else off the top of the wardrobe when the house was cleared, and she had not opened it in a year and a half and did not know what was in it. Her own shoebox, out of her own room, in among the guarantees.

Bus tickets. A school photograph she was not in. A Kodak envelope with nothing in it. Three sets of keys to doors that no longer existed. All the small useless deposit of a person who does not throw things away, and Kirsty went through it on her knees on the hall floor with the radiator going, and came to a business card near the bottom with the corners gone soft.

Dr Philip Channard, MB BS, MRCPsych. Consultant. And a telephone number.

She had gone down in the lift with it in her hand and she had not the faintest recollection of what she did with it after that. She had assumed for a year and a half, on the rare occasions she thought about it at all, that she had put it in a bin at the hospital.

She had not put it in a bin. She had taken it home, and put it in the box with the bus tickets, and she had kept it through a funeral and a house clearance and a move to a flat in Kentish Town, and had carried it up two flights of stairs in a cardboard box and stepped over it every day for eleven months.

And the thing that went through her, sitting on the floor of the hall, was not fear and it was not hope.

It was that she had never once, in a year and a half, actually decided to stop.

She had told herself she had. She had told Marie she had. Every night at three in the morning she had got up and put the light on and rewired a lamp and gone back to bed believing she was a woman getting over something, and the whole time there had been a card at the bottom of a shoebox on top of a wardrobe with a telephone number on it, because some part of Kirsty Cotton that did not consult her had been keeping it in case.

She cried for about forty minutes on the floor with the card in her hand, and it was not like the lift, and it went on until it stopped.

Then she washed her face and rang the number.

⁂

The switchboard put her through to a secretary who said Dr Channard had left the hospital the year before last and was now at a private institution and no she could not give out the number, and Kirsty said thank you and put the phone down.

Then she went to the library on the Wednesday, which was her half day, and looked him up.

It took her about ten minutes. That is not a boast and she never made anything of it; the man had published, and the Medical Directory is on an open shelf, and any competent person with an afternoon could have done the same. What is worth putting down is that she went on the Wednesday and the Wednesday after and the one after that, and by the fourth she had the Institute, and the name of the town, and a bus route, and had read four of his papers with a dictionary open beside her because she had left school at sixteen.

And she did not go.

Not for ten months. She had the address in her purse and she did not go, and she has been asked about those ten months by exactly two people and gave two different answers and neither of them was true, and the true one is this: she was not frightened of the Institute.

She was frightened that she would get there and find a perfectly ordinary man in a perfectly ordinary office who would be delighted to see her, and would remember her, and would ask how she had been getting on — and that she would be all right after that. That she would come out onto the pavement and get the bus back and find that it had all been closed, decently, by a professional, and that there was nothing further to do, and that the rest of her life would be the print shop and the system for the nights, forever, and that she would have to be grateful for it.

She went in the October, on a Thursday, having taken the day.

She got as far as the car park.

She stood at the edge of it by the sign with her bag over her shoulder and looked at a low brick building with the lights on in the day room, and there was a girl visible through the glass at a table with something in her hands, sitting very straight, absolutely still except for her fingers.

Kirsty watched her for a while. She could not see what was in the girl's hands from that distance and she did not need to.

Then she got the bus home, and went in on the Friday, and ran the guillotine, and said nothing to anybody.

It was another five months before she went back and walked across that car park and through the doors and gave her name at the desk, and everything that happened afterwards to a great many people happened because she did.

Thirty-Four · Four Months

Two years had passed on Earth since a girl in a day room had turned the last panel of a puzzle box and gone through a wall.

That was the first thing they had to get straight and it took them most of a month, because Harry had a source who insisted on it and Kirsty could not make it work in her head. Two years of it — two winters, a bedsit in Kilburn, a job in a print shop, a course she did not finish — and something in the region of four hundred on the other side of the wall.

It had been a good deal longer than that since Lodovico Street. Fifteen years, for her; a whole adult life, got through at the ordinary speed, with a job in it. Nobody had aged on the other side of the wall at all.

"It isn't a rate," Harry said, for the fourth time, in the back room of the shop on Camden Passage that he was using because the man who owned it owed him. "That's what you keep doing. You keep trying to make it a rate. It isn't. Sometimes it's the other way about."

"Then how do you plan anything?"

"You don't." He turned a page. "That's rather the point of them."

Kirsty had found Tiffany in the March.

She had gone back to the Institute because of the card. That was all it was — a card in a shoebox with a fountain-pen hand on it, and a name that had been in three newspapers in the November when the top floor of a house in Highgate had been found to contain something that five officers could not agree on the description of, and a doctor who had not been seen since. Kirsty had gone up there on a Tuesday to look at the building, as people go and look at buildings, and had stood at the edge of the car park for a while, as she had once before, and this time had gone in.

Marcelle had told her about the girl. Marcelle told everybody about the girl. She had come back — that was the phrase, she came back, said in the tone people use for weather — after four days missing that had taken the whole place apart, and she had been found sitting in her own room at half past three in the morning with the lamp on, unmarked, entirely calm, having got in past a locked fire door and two night staff.

"And she's the same?" Kirsty had said.

"No," said Marcelle, and had not elaborated, and after a moment had said: "She looks at the door now."

They had known each other about ninety seconds when Tiffany took Kirsty's hand and turned it over and put two fingers on the old fracture across the back of it, the one that had never set quite right, and looked up.

Kirsty had said, "Yes. That's how I threw it."

And Tiffany had smiled, which Marcelle said afterwards she had not done in four months.

She could not tell them anything, and it very nearly killed the whole enterprise. She had no language and she would not use a pen — she had been given pens for seventeen years by people who wanted her to explain herself and she had a settled and immovable position on pens. What she could do was recognise, and recognising turned out to be enough, because Harry D'Amour had four crates of material in a lock-up in Bermondsey and no way of knowing which nine per cent of it was true.

Harry did not teach her to read the accounts. That was never the arrangement and he said so on the first afternoon, out loud, to a girl who had not spoken since she was three.

"I can't teach you this," he said. "I've been at it twenty years and I can't do it. What I can do is put things in front of you." He had the first crate open on the table by then and the packing straw all over the floor of the back room. "You look at them. If one of them does anything, you put your hand on it. That's the whole of the job and it's more than I've got."

Tiffany sat down and put her bag under the chair.

Kirsty, in the doorway with two teas, understood at that moment that Harry D'Amour had just told a mute girl in a cardigan that he was the junior partner, and had meant it, and that he had not looked round to see whether anybody had noticed him do it.

⁂

There were four crates and they came from three countries and one of them cost him a car.

The material was not a library. That was the first thing that had to be got past, and it took Kirsty most of the first fortnight and it never entirely stopped irritating her — that four hundred years of the most consequential documents on earth had reached them as a heap. A German gentleman's cabinet in eleven pieces with a false floor. Two rolls of microfilm from a seminary in Ohio that had been sold as something else. A ledger in a language Harry could name and not read. Forty-one photographs of pages, taken badly, by somebody in a hurry, in 1958.

They worked in the back room of the shop on Camden Passage from ten in the morning until the light went, six days a week, from the March to the July.

The method was Harry's and it was as crude as he had promised. He put a thing on the table. Tiffany looked at it. If nothing happened she moved it to her left, and Harry took it away, and put down the next one. If something happened she put her hand flat on it and left it there, and Harry stopped everything and wrote down the time.

She moved about nine hundred things to her left in the first month.

⁂

Kirsty did the reading.

That was how the division fell out and nobody proposed it. She was the one who could sit for six hours with a dictionary and a legal pad, and she did, and by the end of the second month she could get the sense of a fourteenth-century account in bad Latin at about the speed of a slow child, and by the end of the fourth she was correcting Harry.

"That's not he opened it."

"It's near enough."

"It isn't." She turned the page round. "It's it opened. Different verb. It's the same one in the Lyon fragment and you've got that wrong too."

Harry looked at it for a while.

"Well," he said. "That's not nothing, is it."

She had left school at sixteen. She thought about that a good deal, at the table, in the lamplight, with her finger under a line — that she had spent a year and a half assuming her life had been finished in an upstairs room on Lodovico Street, and it turned out that what had actually happened was that she had been handed a subject.

Nobody had ever handed her a subject before.

⁂

Tiffany pulled the first one out of the pile in the ninth week, in the middle of the afternoon, out of a stack Harry had already been through twice.

She did not do anything dramatic. She put her hand flat on a photograph of a page, and left it there, and waited, and after about four seconds Harry stopped mid-sentence and came round the table so fast he took the chair over.

"That one?"

She did not move her hand.

It was plate nineteen of the forty-one, and it was a diagram, and Harry had looked at it perhaps two hundred times over eleven years and had catalogued it as a devotional object — a mandala, a rose window, the sort of thing that turns up in the material constantly and means nothing. It was not a rose window. Tiffany got a pencil off the table — she would not touch a pen and never did, but a pencil laid against a diagram was not being asked to explain herself — and put a small mark, very lightly, at the outer edge, and then another about a third of the way round, and then a third, and looked up.

Three marks. Harry looked at the three marks for a long time.

"It's a mechanism," he said.

She waited.

"It's a mechanism. It's not a picture of anything, it's an exploded — " He sat down on the floor. He actually sat down on the floor of the back room with the photograph in his hand. "Twenty years. Twenty years and a man in Prague and eleven of the best days of my life on that plate, and it's a diagram of a thing coming apart, and you got it in four seconds because you weren't looking at the picture, you were looking at the joins."

Tiffany did the thing with her mouth that meant she was pleased.

⁂

She pulled the second one out eleven days later and it took Harry until the middle of June to believe her about it, because the second one was not a diagram and was not a page. It was a description of a room, in a ledger, in a language he could name and not read, and there was nothing in it that looked like anything — and Tiffany would not move it to her left, and would not be persuaded, and put her hand flat on it every single morning for nine days running until he got a man in Bloomsbury to translate the middle third and stopped arguing.

And then it stopped.

Whatever else was in those crates would not come. They went through the fourth one twice and the second one three times, and by the end of June Harry had begun to do the thing he did instead of panicking, which was to go very quiet and very polite.

He got bad-tempered about it exactly once.

It was the fifteenth of July and he had been up two nights and he swept about a third of the second crate onto the floor, and stood there, and then apologised to Tiffany specifically and at some length and helped her pick it up.

She let him finish. Then she sat down at the table and squared the two pieces up side by side in front of him, the plate and the translated page, and put one finger on the gap between them, and left it there.

Harry looked at the gap for a long time.

"I know," he said. "I know there's a piece missing. I've known since April."

She did not take her finger off it.

"I don't know where it is," he said, "and I'm not going to pretend to you that I do."

She did not take her finger off the gap for a long while after that either.

⁂

By the end of August the second pile was a foot thick and had a shape.

And the shape was wrong.

"They're not demons," Kirsty said.

It was raining and it was late and the three of them had been in the back room since two, and she said it flatly, to the table, in the tone of somebody conceding a point they have been losing for a fortnight.

Harry did not answer for a while.

"No," he said.

"Everything in that pile — everything she's kept — it's records. It's minutes." Kirsty pulled one of them over. "This is a list. This is a list of things somebody did and how long it took and what they found out. There's a methodology, Harry. There are footnotes."

"I know."

"They're not punishing anyone."

"No."

"Then what happened to my father?" She had not meant to say it and it came out with a crack in it and she pushed on through, because if she stopped she would not start again. "What happened to those six men? What's happened to her, what's she got in her head that she looks at the door for — because if they're not demons then it's worse, isn't it, it's —"

She stopped.

Tiffany had put her hand flat on the foot-thick pile.

Then she raised the other hand, and made a small gesture — the fingers turning over, the sense of a mechanism giving under a thumb — and then she pointed, deliberately, at each of the three of them in turn, and then at the pile again, and waited.

Harry got there first.

"Every single one of these," he said slowly, "starts with somebody opening it."

"Yes," said Kirsty. "I know. They told me that. She stood in a room in a hospital and told me that, and I thought it was a boast."

"It isn't a boast." Harry sat back. "It's a constraint. Kirsty — it's the only thing that's ever stopped them."

The rain went on outside.

"Then that's the thing to break," said Kirsty.

She had thought about it for a long time before she said it and she said it carefully. "Not the boxes. There'll be more boxes; there's always another box, that's what all of Bermondsey says. The connection. The thing on the other side that lets a wall come open in a hospital in north London because a girl in a cardigan turned a panel." She looked up. "You can do that. Can't you. That's what you've been not saying for four months."

Harry D'Amour rubbed his face with both hands.

"There's a way," he said. "It's not mine, it's four hundred years old and it's in three pieces and two of the pieces are in that pile because she pulled them out. It's not a spell, before you ask. It's not a —" He made a gesture. "It's a configuration. It's a very large one and it has to be worked in the right place and it has to be worked by hand, and I can read it and I cannot for the life of me do it, and I have been sitting here since April trying to find a way to tell you both that."

Nobody said anything.

Tiffany reached across the table and took the topmost sheet out of the second pile, and turned it round, and looked at it for perhaps five seconds.

Then she put her finger on a place near the centre of the diagram and looked up at Harry and made the gesture again.

It moves.

⁂

Kirsty said the thing nobody wanted said two nights after that, on the pavement in the dark, with the shop shut behind them and Tiffany already gone to the bus.

"So it's her."

"Yeah."

"And you're going to let it be her."

Harry got a cigarette out and did not light it.

"I'm going to tell her what it is," he said. "All of it, everything I know and everything I don't, and I'm going to tell her the bit where I can't do it and neither can you and I'm not going to dress that up. And then she's going to decide." He put the cigarette away again. "That's the difference, Kirsty. That's the entire difference between us and them and it isn't a big one and it's all there is. They take persistence and call it consent."

"And what do we take?"

"An answer," said Harry. "To an actual question. Asked out loud, in a room, by somebody who'd take a no."

He looked at the dark shop window.

"And I want you to remember I said that," he said, "because I've a horrible feeling about how this is going to look afterwards, and there won't be anybody left to say it but you."

Thirty-Five · The Frontier

He opened four of them in his first century, and the accounts are in the twelfth gallery under his own hand, and they are the first original entries the Order of the Gash made in seven hundred and ninety-one years.

Frank Cotton took the chair, and inside twelve years he had the fourth door off its frame, and he went through it himself — not a novice, not a volunteer, himself, which no holder of the office had done in twelve hundred years — and he came back.

He was on the flags inside the fourth door for nine days before anybody could get him up, and he was not unconscious, and he did not stop talking for the whole of it, and none of what he said was in a language.

He tried. That is in the account too, and it is the only part of it that reads like a man rather than an instrument: four lines, in the middle of two hundred, where the hand changes — gets larger, and slower, and presses hard enough to come through onto the sheet underneath — and the words stop arriving in the order words arrive in. Custos left them exactly as they were and refused, twice, to have them tidied.

Antiphon read the whole thing in the gallery on the night it was entered, and came out, and sat down on the floor of the passage with its back against the wall.

"It's real," it said.

"Yes."

"Cotton — it's real. Nobody's written one of these since —"

"Seven hundred and ninety-one years. I know. I counted nine of them myself."

He opened the ninth door in his fortieth year and the second in his sixty-first, and the twelfth in his ninety-fourth, and each one produced an account, and the accounts got longer and better, and for about twelve years the Order of the Gash was the thing it had told itself it was for twelve centuries.

People came out of the fifth gallery and stood in the corridors talking. Frank saw it and did not know what he was looking at for a long time, and then placed it: it was the way a company behaves when the work has come in.

She sat in the fourth row at the second bell every single day and said nothing whatsoever.

⁂

And then it stopped being enough.

It did not stop suddenly. That is the part he had not been able to imagine in three hundred years of arguing for it — he had assumed, insofar as he had thought about it at all, that either the doors would deliver or they would not.

What happened was that the fourth door was the best thing that had ever happened to him, and the ninth was very nearly as good, and the second was good, and the twelfth was a room he had been in before.

He stood in front of the sixth in his hundred and thirtieth year with his hand flat on it and did not open it, and went away, and came back in nine years and did the same thing, and knew.

Because it was not the doors. It had never been the doors. It had gone the way the beef went, the way the fortnight on Oxford Street went, the way Antwerp had gone in nine weeks when he was thirty-one.

Smaller. Not worse. Smaller, like a room you go back to.

He went and found Antiphon and said, "How many of us are there?"

"Here? Nine hundred and forty."

"On the other side. On their world. Now."

Antiphon looked at him for a while.

"About five billion," it said.

⁂

He did not put it to the chamber.

It broke them, and he understood perfectly well that it would, and he did it that way deliberately because he had spent three hundred years watching excellent cases be agreed with and filed.

He announced it.

He came down onto the flags at the second bell in his hundred and forty-first year in the office and told seventy of them what was going to happen, in about four minutes, without numbers, and the difference between that morning and every other morning in twelve centuries was that nothing in the room was waiting for anybody's permission.

"It was never the corridors," he said. "I want that entered, because I was wrong for three centuries in this room and I would like the correction under my own hand.

"I said we had stopped exploring and I was right. I said the doors were the frontier and I was wrong. I have opened four. They are extraordinary and they are in the gallery and any of you may read them, and I am telling you as the man who went through them that ten more would not save this Order, and a hundred more would not, because the constraint has never been where we can go. It is how many of us there are to go, and how alike we are, and how long we have been the same eight hundred people going through the same kind of door and writing it up for each other.

"Novelty does not live in the corridor. It lives in the person walking down it.

"There are five billion of them."

He let the chamber have that.

"Not a bedsit at a time. Not at the pleasure of a bored thumb in a junk shop. All of it — the whole boundary, everywhere, at once. Five billion, at the first bell, and of five billion perhaps four hundred thousand who can hold two things at once, and of those a thousand who will go somewhere none of us can imagine because they are not us and never have been.

"That is the frontier. It has been standing on the other side of that wall for twelve hundred years and we have been going at it with a thimble."

And from the fourth row, in a voice that did not have to be raised, she said:

"No."

Frank turned.

She was sitting where she had sat every day for a hundred and forty-one years, with her hands in her lap, in a stall no better than any of the others.

"On what grounds," he said.

"Consent."

"They would consent. Nobody is dragged — nobody has ever been dragged, it is the one thing we have, and I am not proposing to drag anyone. I am proposing to stop hiding the door."

"There is no version of what you have described in which the offer can be refused," she said. "That is not a flaw in the plan. It is the plan. You have proposed removing the only thing this Order has ever been prevented by, and you will call it exploration, and it will be entered under your hand, and in nine hundred years nobody will be able to tell the difference between us and the thing every one of them has always assumed we were."

"Then stop me."

It came out of him harder than he intended, and it landed in the room like a dropped plate, and afterwards he was not sorry.

"You can, presumably. You have contained seven of us and never lost. So contain me. Come out of the fourth row and put me in the fourth corridor and take the chair back and we can all go to the second bell tomorrow exactly as we did this morning."

She did not move.

And Frank Cotton stood on the flags in front of seventy of them and watched the woman who had taught him everything he knew decline to answer, and understood, the way he always understood things where she was concerned, which was four hundred years too late to be any use —

She could take him. She had never been in doubt about that and neither had he.

What she could not do was take him and leave anything standing. She had put him in the chair herself, in front of this room, and every one of them had watched her do it. She had spent twelve centuries making an institution in which the office was the thing that was obeyed and the person in it was incidental — whoever leads is serving the Order — and it had worked, it had worked perfectly, it was the finest piece of engineering any of them had ever seen.

And now the office was his, and she was a woman in the fourth row.

If she came out of that stall and put her hands on the sitting Priest of the Order of the Gash, the Order would not have been saved. It would simply have been revealed — to itself, permanently, in front of everybody — as twelve hundred years of one person's preference wearing a chair.

"No," she said. "I will not stop you."

She stood up, and went out through the small door behind the chair that was no longer hers, and Frank watched her go and found, to his own considerable disgust, that he had nothing in his chest at all, which is what winning an argument leaves you.

Thirty-Six · The Offer

She came to Kirsty in the print shop.

That was the detail Kirsty could never make anybody understand afterwards, on the very few occasions she tried. Not a hospital at two in the morning. Not a house with the boards up. A print shop on a Wednesday in October at twenty past four, with the guillotine going in the next room and a radio on and nine hundred order forms to collate, and Kirsty came back from the toilet and there was a woman standing between the racks.

Nobody else saw her. The guillotine went on going.

"You have been busy," said the Priest.

Kirsty did not scream. She was proud of that for years, in a small mean way, and she was also aware that she did not scream because she had been half expecting this since April and had rehearsed it in the bath.

"You're not supposed to be able to do this."

"I am not. There is a considerable amount of ill feeling about it and I have entered it myself in the fourth hand." She looked, briefly, at the racks; at the order forms; at the radio. "Two years. You went back for your father's papers and then you did nothing for the best part of a year and then you went to the Institute because of a card in a shoebox. I have wondered about those ten months a great deal."

"I was ill."

"Yes."

Kirsty put her back against the rack.

"If you've come for the girl —"

"I have not come for the girl. The girl was released and she will not be recalled; that is settled and it is not mine to unsettle." Her hands came off the rack and went to her sides. "I have come because a man I taught for four hundred years intends to open the whole boundary at once, everywhere, and take five billion people into a curriculum, and I cannot stop him."

The radio played. Somebody in the next room swore at the guillotine.

"You're lying," said Kirsty.

"Frequently. Not now."

"You are the head of it." Kirsty heard her own voice go up and pulled it down. "He's yours. You made him. You stood in a hospital room and told me he'd come back and you were right about every single thing, so don't stand in a print shop and tell me you can't —"

"I can take him," said the Priest.

Kirsty stopped.

"I have taken seven of them in all the centuries since and I have never once lost, and I could put Cotton in the fourth corridor this evening and hold him there until the numbers stop meaning anything." Her hands were loose at her sides. "And it would finish us. Not him — us. I gave him the office. I did it in front of seventy of them, deliberately, because he was right that we had stopped and because there was no one in that room who would go through a door while I was sitting in the chair. That was mine. I chose it.

"And an Order in which the office is the thing that is obeyed cannot survive the sight of me reaching over the chair to take back what I put in it."

"That's pride."

"It is the only reason any of it has ever worked." She did not blink. "You may call it pride. I have called it worse."

Kirsty stood in the racks with nine hundred order forms behind her.

"Then what do you want from me."

"He will not stop for me. He has never stopped for me — he stopped for you." She did not move at all. "Once. In a chapter house, in front of seventy of us, with a girl in a cardigan standing on the flags. He put something down and let it go, and he did it because two years ago a girl with a broken hand threw a configuration out of a window and he has never in four centuries been able to work out how. You are the only event in Frank Cotton's existence that he has not been able to file."

"And what do I get?"

"Nothing you want."

"Try me."

"You would have to come in," said the Priest. "Not as a visitor and not as an ally. There is no version of this in which you stand outside and help — you would not last four minutes on those flags and he would know, instantly, that you had been fetched. You would have to be of the Order, actually and entirely, with everything that costs. The bells and the small room. The instruction. All of it, and it would take a very long time, and it would not be pleasant, and you would be doing it while he watched."

"And after?"

"There is no after. That is the honest answer and I would rather give it to you now than have you find it out."

The guillotine went in the next room.

Kirsty Cotton, with a fracture across the back of her hand that had never set right, looked at the woman between the racks and thought, with the guillotine going in the next room — she has said all of this before. Not this speech. But she has stood in a room and told somebody exactly enough of the truth to get them to do what she needs, and she has done it seven times, and every single one of them thought they were being trusted.

"I'll think about it," she said.

"Of course."

"That's not a yes."

"No," the Priest agreed, and was already not there. "It never is, the first time."

Thirty-Seven · The Battle

They went in on the ninth of November at four in the morning, through a configuration Harry had bought in Antwerp, in the front room of a rented house in Highgate six doors down from the one with the good locks.

Kirsty had not given her an answer.

That was deliberate and it was the only card she had. She had spent three weeks turning it over and had arrived at a position she could not entirely defend and would not abandon, and that was this: if I say yes she has me, and if I say no she has me anyway, because she will simply wait. So I will go and do the other thing first, and if the other thing works there is no offer left to accept.

Harry had thought this was madness and had said so, twice, and had come anyway.

They came out into a corridor that was not level. That was the first thing — the flags ran slightly downhill in a direction that kept changing, and the grey overhead light that had not varied in twelve hundred years was going through a slow cycle like something breathing. Somewhere a long way off something very large was being emptied — that was the nearest she ever got to it — and every few seconds the sound stopped dead, for exactly as long as it took her to notice that it had stopped, and then went on.

"He's started," said Harry.

They found Frank at the boundary.

He had gone north, past the doors he had already taken off their frames, out to where the realm stopped being architecture, and he had built in the open. It went up out of the light and kept going, and she could not find the top of it, and after a moment she understood that she was not going to and stopped looking. It was, Kirsty saw with a lurch, the same shape as the black and gold box on the table of a hospital side room, opened out and out and out until the smallest visible component was the size of a house — and Frank Cotton was standing at the centre of it with his hands moving, unhurried, working panels the size of doors.

And a third of the Order was fighting him.

Only a third. Kirsty did not understand what she was looking at for a long time and Harry never explained it to her, and it was this: nine hundred and forty of them, and the office was his, and something in the region of six hundred and thirty stood in the corridors that morning and did nothing at all, because the sitting Priest of the Order of the Gash had told them what was going to happen and no one in twelve centuries had been taught what to do about that.

The ones who fought him fought without a word, with the economy Kirsty had read about in a foot-deep stack of transcript and had never quite believed — and the rest of them lined the corridor and watched. Seven hundred, in rows, standing at the intervals they would have stood at for the second bell. She recognised one of them. She had read four hundred years of his handwriting in a back room on Camden Passage. He was in the third rank with his hands at his sides, and eight feet from him a colleague came apart against the wall and went on coming apart for some time, and he watched it and did not move.

And the ones who fought were losing.

"Right," said Harry D'Amour, and put the case down, and rolled his sleeves.

He was not a fighter. He had told her that in April and she had not believed him, and standing in the north corridors at four in the morning she found out it was true and that it did not matter, because Harry D'Amour did not fight. He held. He got his back to the frame of the fourth door and put up something Kirsty never saw and could feel from twenty feet — a pressure across the corridor at chest height, the way you feel a big speaker through the floor — a line, across the throat of the corridor, that Frank's apparatus could not reach past and that the Order could not come through either.

Behind it, Tiffany knelt down on the flags and opened the leather case.

"Twenty minutes," Harry said through his teeth. "That's what I've got in me. Twenty."

Kirsty ran.

She had one job and had known it since the print shop. She went along the wall of the great space with the light going through its slow breathing cycle, and she was forty yards from him when something came out of the dark on her right and hit her across the hip and took her off her feet and slid her ten feet along flags that were not level.

Julia had a body and a grudge and no thesis.

She was very fast and completely untrained — four hundred years in the Order and she had never got past the first eight months, and everybody knew it, and she had been left in the fifth row at the second bell for four centuries with all of her intact and nowhere to put it. She got Kirsty by the hair and put her into the wall twice and was talking the entire time, and it took Kirsty most of the second impact to understand that it was not directed at her.

"— he wouldn't even take me —"

Then Tiffany hit her.

Kirsty did not see where she came from. Tiffany had been on the flags with the case open a few seconds earlier and now she was between them, in a cardigan, with a piece of the fourth door's frame in both hands, and she swung it into the side of Julia Cotton's head with the whole of her body behind it.

Julia went down. She came up — of course she came up; the realm sees to that, tirelessly, and Julia had been coming up for four hundred years. She came up still talking and got a hand into Tiffany's hair, and Tiffany let her, and did the thing she had been doing since she was six years old.

She got her thumb into the join.

Everyone in the corridor afterwards described it differently and Kirsty only understood it a year later, in Bermondsey, going through the second pile. Julia had been assembled out of a gap under a floor and four drops of blood and four centuries of instruction she had never been able to hold, and she was, in the most literal sense available, put together — a made thing, joined, by hands and by something that was not hands. And a girl who could take the back off a wristwatch with a butter knife, and who had not once been asked what she wanted, and who had never in seventeen years been given anything of her own except the small clean event that happened in her hands when a thing gave —

Tiffany found the panel and turned it.

Julia came apart in the middle of a sentence.

It was not an explosion and there was no blast. She simply stopped being joined. The arm that was in Tiffany's hair released at the shoulder and kept its grip and fell, dragging a rope of hair with it. The jaw let go of the skull and swung down on one hinge and hung there while the sentence went on trying to come out of a throat that was no longer under it. The seam down her front — the one the Order had opened and closed for four hundred years and had never quite got to lie flat — parted the whole way, and the four hundred years came out of her: the packed grey coils, the liver, the long braid of vessel that had been assembled out of six men in an attic on Lodovico Street and had held, until now, because somebody had turned the right panel.

She went down on the flags in six separate places at once.

The pieces were still hers. The hand at the end of the fallen arm opened and closed on the stone. One eye, in a head lying on its side facing the wrong way up the corridor, tracked Frank and found him and stayed on him. The mouth went on working around the shape of he wouldn't even take me, and there was no air behind it and it kept going anyway.

Leviathan did not come. Not for her; not there; not while the north corridors were coming open at their seams and the whole realm had its attention elsewhere. She lay in the breathing light in her pieces and waited to be put back and was not put back, and the mouth kept working the whole time.

Tiffany stood over her for one second.

Then she went back to the case, and knelt, and did not look at any of them again.

Kirsty got up off the wall with her mouth full of blood, and ran.

Thirty-Eight · The Joins

Everybody assumed she was frightened, and she was not, and it was not courage.

Kirsty had asked her four times in four different ways over four months and had got the same answer every time, which was nothing at all — not a shake of the head, not a hand on the table, nothing. There was no way to put it. What Kirsty would have had to be told was that Tiffany had been inside that building already and that the floor of it ran on a cycle of four, sometimes five, and that she wanted very much to go back and check.

Everybody wanted her to be brave and she was only curious, and the difference mattered to her a great deal and to nobody else at all.

Harry had asked her in the last week of August, properly, out loud, in a room, with the door shut and Kirsty made to sit down and stay. He had taken forty minutes. He had told her what the third piece was and that it was her, and what he thought it would cost and that he did not know, and he had said the sentence you can say no and we will go home and I will not raise it again and then stopped talking and let it be quiet for a long time.

Nobody had ever done that.

Harry D'Amour had asked her a question he did not know the answer to, and had been willing to lose.

She had written YES and underlined it, and had not been able to make her face do anything sensible, and had gone and stood at the window until it passed.

⁂

The corridor was not level and she liked that.

She came along it behind Kirsty with the case in both arms and did the thing she had done since she was six years old, which was to take the measure of a place through her feet. The flags ran downhill in a direction that kept changing. Fine. The light went through its slow breathing and it was not regular — it was long, then short, then long, then long — and Tiffany had that in about ninety seconds and filed it and stopped thinking about it.

The bite of the stone was every fourth step and sometimes the fifth.

It had been every fourth step and sometimes the fifth the year before, in a corridor on the other side of the building, and nobody in twelve centuries had thought it worth an entry, and Tiffany had counted it in her socks in a cell with a shelf and a jug and had never had anybody to tell.

She knelt down on the flags and put the case flat and opened it.

Above her and behind her the corridor was coming apart. She was aware of it the way you are aware of weather. Harry had his back to the frame of the fourth door with a pressure across the throat of the corridor that she could feel in her teeth, and he had said twenty minutes and his voice had already gone, and somewhere out in the great space a thing the size of a district was turning at four different speeds.

Nineteen pieces, out of two sources three hundred years apart, and the third part of the thing was her. She laid them out in the order she wanted, which was not the order they had come in and never had been.

⁂

There is no good account of what she did because there is no vocabulary for it that is not either mystical or condescending, and both are wrong, and the nearest anybody ever got was Harry, on a pavement, badly: it's like writing down how to catch a ball.

What can be said is that Tiffany did not think of the thing in front of her as sacred and did not think of it as dangerous.

She thought of it as jointed.

Four hundred years old, out of two documents that had never been in the same country, let alone the same room — and that was the difficulty everybody before her had broken on, because they had all begun by assuming the two had to be reconciled. Harry had spent five weeks on it and had got further than anyone in a century. A man in Prague had spent nine years on it and died of it.

They did not need reconciling. Tiffany could see, with the nineteen pieces laid out on stone in front of her, that there were not nineteen pieces. There was one piece with eighteen false edges in it, put there by copyists across three centuries who had each been handed a fragment and had each, honestly and carefully, finished the fragment off — a clean border on it, squared, made whole — and every one of those borders was a lie somebody had added out of tidiness.

She began taking the edges off.

It took most of the nineteen minutes and it was not difficult and it was the happiest she had ever been. Her hands were cold. There was a lot of noise. At about the eleventh minute something came down the corridor behind her and hit Harry's line hard enough to shift him a foot and he swore and did not break, and Tiffany did not look round, because she had four false edges left and because he had asked her to do this and had meant it.

The pieces went together the way pieces do when the shape is right — not clicking, nothing so satisfying as clicking, but giving, each one settling half a millimetre into a place that had been waiting for it since before any of the three men were born.

The last panel was under her right thumb and she knew what it was going to do before she moved it, in the way she always knew, which nobody had ever been able to get out of her because it was not a thought.

She put her thumb on it.

And the floor answered.

⁂

That is the part that got written down wrong afterwards by everybody, including people who were there, and Kirsty spent years failing to correct it and gave up.

Tiffany did not discover that Leviathan was a machine. She would not have known what that meant and would not have cared; she had no theory about it and had never had a theory about anything, and the question of what the thing under the building was had not entered her head at any point in nineteen minutes or in twenty-two years.

What happened was that she treated the floor the way she treated a wristwatch — as a thing with a join in it, because everything has a join in it — and put her thumb where the join was and turned.

And it moved.

For a quarter of an inch, under the whole weight of the north corridors, exactly the way the back comes off a watch when you have found the seam: not resisting, not consenting, simply doing the thing it had always been going to do for anybody who ever thought to try it in that particular way.

Nobody had. In twelve hundred years, out of thirty thousand accounts, not one of them had come at it like that, because every single person who had ever knelt on that floor had knelt to it.

Tiffany was not kneeling to it. She was kneeling on it, with her sleeves pushed up, because it was the most comfortable way to work.

⁂

And then it noticed her.

She had about a second and a half, and what she did with it was not fear and was not prayer.

Tiffany, who had not spoken since she was three, who had never once been asked a question by anybody who would have taken a no, who had walked out into a building with no edges at the far end of the world and counted the floor of it and had nobody at all to tell —

She looked up, to see what it was going to do.

Thirty-Nine · The Last Configuration

Harry had said it was a configuration and not a spell, and Kirsty had thought at the time that he was being pedantic, and he had not been.

Harry could read every line of it and had told them in a back room in July, with complete honesty, that if he tried to work it himself he would get about twelve minutes in and kill everyone in the building.

She did not hurry. That was what Kirsty saw when she looked back — the one glimpse she got, over her shoulder, at forty yards, with the light going through its cycle and Harry's line singing at the throat of the corridor: a girl in a cardigan kneeling on the ground in the middle of the worst night in the whole life of this Order, taking her time.

Kirsty felt it before she heard it. The downhill direction of the flags stopped changing. The breathing light stopped breathing and stood still, and every single thing in the north corridors — the Order, Frank, the apparatus the size of a district — stopped at exactly the same instant, in the way a room stops when a phone rings in the night.

And the connection between the Leviathan dimension and the world moved.

Kirsty had no instrument for it and neither did anybody else there. What she had was her feet, and what her feet reported was that the floor of the world was not the bottom of anything.

It gave, a quarter of an inch, the way a catch gives.

Then Leviathan noticed.

She was on the ground. She found that out afterwards; she had no memory of going down. Everyone in the corridor was on the ground, the Order included — nine hundred of them flat on flags they had walked for twelve centuries.

What she remembered was that the light stopped. Not went out. Stopped, in the middle of its slow breathing cycle, and held, the way a chest holds at the top of a breath. Her own heart stopped with it, and she lay there feeling it not beat and could do nothing about that either. Every hair on both her arms stood up and stayed up. And a pressure came down on the corridor that was not sound and was not weight and had, unmistakably, a direction, and the direction was down, and underneath.

The nearest she ever got to it in words was this: something enormous, that had never been interested in any of them, becoming interested for about a second and a half.

It was not anger. Something had got in through the wall of it.

And Leviathan closed.

Tiffany did not scream, because she had not made a sound in seventeen years, and she did not burn or fall or come apart. She was there, kneeling on the flags with both hands on the working, and then the space where she had been did not have her in it, and had never had her in it, and the nineteen pieces went down onto the stone with a small clatter that Kirsty heard quite distinctly across forty yards in the silence afterwards.

That was all.

And it was the only permanent thing that happened to anybody that night, in a realm where a man could be opened forty times and be whole by the seventh bell; and Kirsty Cotton lay on the flags of the north corridor and understood, before she had even got her breath back, that there would be no drawer for it. Nobody would enter it in the fourth hand. There was nothing to enter.

The apparatus went out.

All of it, the whole enormous grinding thing, four hundred years of preparation and fourteen hours of work — the panels stopped where they were and the boundary that had been coming open along its whole length let go and settled shut, and Frank Cotton stood in the middle of the largest configuration ever assembled by anybody with his hands flat on a panel the size of a door and nothing at all happening under them.

He did not look at it.

He was looking at the empty flags where the girl had been.

Forty · Not Further

Kirsty came up out of the dark on his left with a piece of the fourth door's frame in her hand and Frank took it off her without looking.

"Did you see it?" he said.

"Frank —"

"Did you see it." He was not shouting. He turned and his face was doing something she had never seen on it in the attic or the launderette or anywhere else. "Not her. Not — the floor. Kirsty, the floor gave."

"She's dead."

"I know."

"She's not — " Kirsty's voice went and she made it come back. "You don't understand what that means here. There's nothing left. There's no drawer, there's no account, there's nothing to put in one. She came in here to shut you down and there is nothing left of her at all and you're standing there talking about the floor."

"Yes," said Frank Cotton.

So she stopped trying to make him feel something, and did the other thing instead. The thing she had worked out in a back room in Bermondsey in August, over a foot-deep stack of somebody else's records, and had carried in her mouth for three months without knowing whether she would ever get to say it.

"It won't work," she said.

"It nearly did. The boundary was —"

"Not the machine." She got in front of him. "The plan. Five billion. It won't work and you already know it won't and I can prove it to you out of your own filing cabinet."

Frank's hands came off the panel.

"Go on, then."

"I've read them." Kirsty was shaking and did nothing about it. "Four months. Harry's got four crates and she pulled out everything that was real and I read the lot, and I want you to understand that I did not read them to find a weapon, I read them because I was trying to work out what you people were. Thirty thousand accounts. And Frank — they're all the same account."

"That is precisely my —"

"They're the same account because they're all doors." She was talking fast now and she did not stop. "Every single one. Somebody goes through a door, and something happens to them that they can't say, and it's written down. That's thirty thousand of them across twelve centuries and it is one experiment run thirty thousand times with different people in it.

"And you opened four more. The real ones. The first in five hundred years, and you went yourself, and they were extraordinary — and by the twelfth you said it was a room you'd been in before. You told the whole chamber. It's in your own hand.

"So look at what you're actually proposing. You're not proposing a new experiment. You're proposing to run the same one five billion times." She jabbed a finger at the apparatus. "Five billion people going through five billion doors and every single one of them coming out the other side unable to say what happened, and the accounts piling up in the twelfth gallery until nobody can lift the ladders. That's not further, Frank. That's more. It's the same distance travelled by a bigger crowd."

Frank Cotton said nothing.

"You did this on Earth already," said Kirsty. "Two hundred items on a list. You told her. Method, money, no compromises, nobody in the history of the world ever went at it harder — and you got to the bottom of the page in a year, and the answer wasn't a longer list. You know the answer isn't a longer list, you found that out on a terrace in Spain, and you have spent four hundred years building a machine to get yourself a longer list."

She was crying by then and went on talking through it.

"She was right about you. I hate it and she was right. You'll never bring anybody proof, because you can't tell the difference between further and again, and you never could, and it's why she's been able to steer you since the day you walked in."

The north corridor was very quiet.

Frank Cotton stood in the middle of his apparatus and looked at his niece, and for the second time in his existence — the first had been in an attic under a bare bulb with six men inside him and a broken window behind her — he had nothing.

She was thirty-four years old. He worked that out while she was still talking, and it went through him worse than anything she had actually said: fifteen years for the girl who had thrown a box out of a window, four hundred for the man she was shouting at, and no possible way of setting those two figures beside each other. She had had time to build a life and finish grieving. He had had time to build an Order. They had been standing at opposite ends of the same afternoon for four centuries, and neither of them had ever once managed to make the other one make sense.

She was right, and it took him about a second and a half to know it, because he was not a stupid man and had never been able to lie to himself for long.

More is not further.

He had been wrong for four hundred years, in a way so simple and so total that a girl with a foot-deep stack of his own archive had taken it apart in ninety seconds, and there was nothing left of the plan at all.

And then, in the silence, with his hands hanging at his sides, Frank turned his head and looked at the flags where Tiffany had been.

"Oh," he said.

Kirsty saw it happen. She was four feet away. She watched it arrive in him — the head coming up, the eyes going to the empty flags and staying there — and she was still taking it for grief four hours later, and she never afterwards forgave herself for that.

"It isn't the doors," said Frank.

"Frank."

"It was never the doors. It's — " He put his hand out towards the empty flags, almost gently. "There are fourteen doors and I have been through four and they are all inside the room. Every one of them. Thirty thousand accounts and every single door in every single one of them is a door in the same house, and the house is this, and the house is Leviathan, and nobody has ever once —"

He stopped.

"We found it," he said. "We didn't build it. We came here because the work could be done here and we have been doing the work here for twelve hundred years and not one of us — not Custos, not her, not me — has ever asked what it is. It's the floor. You don't ask about the floor. It's the condition of everything else."

He turned and looked at Kirsty, and there was nothing in his face at all except that it was working very slightly around the mouth, the way a man's face works when he is doing sums he cannot afford to get wrong.

"And a girl with no language and no thesis and nothing at all to prove knelt down on it tonight and made it give."

"It killed her."

"Yes," said Frank. "That's the second half. That's how I know it's real."

He was quiet for a moment.

"Four hundred years," he said. "We knelt to it and it did nothing, and we wrote down that it had done nothing, and we called that the nature of the thing."

He turned and looked back down the corridor at the empty flags.

"It answered her."

Kirsty said nothing.

He stopped, and started again, lower.

"How many other ways are there to ask?"

He was smiling. Not much. Kirsty had watched this man kill, and watched him bargain, and had never once been frightened of his face until then.

He was walking now, back down the length of his own dead apparatus, and Kirsty went after him.

"Everything in this realm comes back. Everything. That is the entire reason we are here and it is the one fact about this place that has never had an exception in as long as there has been an Order — and it had one tonight, and it had it at exactly the point where somebody touched the connection." He was not talking to her any more. "Do you understand what that means? There is exactly one thing in the universe that can end me, and it is the one thing nobody in this Order has ever looked at, and it has been under our feet the whole time."

"Frank. Frank. She was twenty."

He stopped.

And to Kirsty's astonishment — to her horror, actually, because she had come in here with a piece of a doorframe in her hand and no expectation of being answered at all — Frank Cotton turned round and looked at her properly.

"I sent her home," he said. "Four hundred years ago. She stood on the flags in a cardigan and I looked at her and I said she was complete and I sent her home, and it is the only decent thing I have done in my entire existence, and I did it because it cost me nothing."

He was quiet for a moment.

"Did anybody get her name?"

"Tiffany," said Kirsty.

Frank nodded slowly.

"Then she's the first original entry since me," he said, "and I am going to write it myself, and it will be four lines long, because that is all there is — and every single thing this Order does from now on is going to start from those four lines."

Forty-One · Enough

The nineteen pieces were still on the flags where they had come down.

Kirsty went back for them. She could not have said why: there was nobody else to do it, and she could not make herself walk past them, and picking things up off a floor was the only action left in the world that she knew how to perform.

She knelt in it. Some of what was on the flags was Julia and some of it was the men from the Edgware Road, four hundred years and two worlds away, and Kirsty knelt in all of it with a broken hand and gathered nineteen pieces of four-hundred-year-old brass and iron into her lap one at a time.

The last one she did not put with the others.

It was the size of a matchbox and heavier than it had any business being, and one long edge was worked with the same fine repeating figure that ran round the black and gold box she had thrown out of a window in Lodovico Street when she was nineteen years old. She turned it over. She ran her thumb along the edge, the way she had watched a girl in a cardigan do it a hundred times in a back room on Camden Passage.

The panel gave.

It moved under her thumb about a sixteenth of an inch, smoothly, with a small definite click, and stopped, and waited — the way a mechanism waits, with no opinion at all about who was holding it or what had just happened to the person who had solved it.

Kirsty sat back on her heels in the wet and looked at it.

You are not evil, she thought. You are a catch.

She looked up.

The north corridor went away from her in both directions in the grey unvarying light, and the flags ran downhill in a direction that had stopped changing, and somewhere above her the chains hung out of the dark in their even intervals, waiting to come down the distance they had been set to come. The hall she had run through had a temperature that arrived on a schedule. The bells were on a cycle nobody rang.

Tiffany had asked it something in the wrong language, and it had answered her.

You cannot frighten it. You cannot shame it, and you cannot bargain with it — she had tried all three that night and watched three people taken apart for it.

But a thing that answers can be spoken to, and there is more than one way to speak. And every way the Order knew had been learned, by men and women who sat down and learned it and wrote it in drawers.

She was still holding the piece when she stood up. She did not put it with the others. She put it in the pocket of her coat, and she felt the weight of it there against her hip, and she went to find Harry.

⁂

Harry had held his line until it was over and then sat down on the flags with his back against the fourth door's frame and did not get up for a long time.

Kirsty found him there. His nose was bleeding and had been for a while and he had not noticed, and there was something wrong with his left hand that he would not let her look at.

"She's gone," Kirsty said.

"I know."

"There isn't — Harry, there isn't anything left, there's no —"

"I know." He put his good hand over his eyes. "I felt it go. That's what the marks are for. That is what they have ever been for and I have never been glad of them."

They sat there together in the north corridor of the Order of the Gash, in the grey unvarying light, for some minutes.

Then she was standing in front of them.

Harry got up. It took him a while and Kirsty tried to help and he shrugged her off, because he was a certain kind of man, and he got himself up off the flags and stood in front of her with his nose bleeding and his left hand hanging.

"Well," he said. "Go on, then."

"You held a line across this corridor for forty minutes."

"Twenty. I said twenty and I got forty and I'm going to be paying for the other twenty for seventeen years."

"Nobody has done that here." She looked at the frame of the door. "There is no drawer for it. I shall have one opened."

"Don't."

"It is not for you," she said, and Harry, after a moment, inclined his head, because that was fair.

"You're going to kill me now."

"No."

"Then you're going to keep me."

"No," she said.

And she told him.

Kirsty was standing a few feet away and she heard every word and never repeated a single one to anybody, not once, not in all the years afterwards.

"There is a woman in Whitby," she said, "who has your telephone number written on the inside of a kitchen cupboard door, because you told her to put it somewhere she would find it in the dark. She has been dialling it since Tuesday. It rings in a room in New York with nobody in it, and it will go on ringing. The thing she is calling about is the thing you told her would not come back."

Harry said nothing at all.

"That is the one you can still reach. You have about a week."

The line across the corridor did not move. Behind it, Tiffany's hands went on working.

"There is a house outside Thibodaux," said the Priest, "with a man in it who has been reading your marks for eleven years. Not hunting you. Reading you. He has the whole of your left forearm off a photograph somebody sold him, and last month he finished the copy, and what he has now is a door in the shape of a man. He will open it in the spring. Whatever comes through it will carry your protection and answer to your name, and every single person who has ever opened a chain because they saw that arm in the gap will open it again."

Something happened in Harry's right hand. It was very small and it did not travel.

"And the third."

"The third is not a place yet. It is eight months off, and it is a child, and there is no one else on your world who has been through a door and come back and is still able to walk into a room." She let that be flat, which was worse than pressing it. "Not one. I looked. I looked for some time, because I would rather not be standing in this corridor saying this to you."

She gave him the names. She gave him the dates. It took about four minutes and she did not raise her voice once, and she did not offer him anything, and she did not ask him for anything either.

She did not exaggerate. That was what broke him, and Kirsty saw it break him, and she had to look at the floor.

It was all true.

"You're lying," Harry said, when she had finished, and his voice had nothing in it.

"You know that I am not. That is why you said it."

Harry looked at the floor between his boots for a while.

"You could have just killed me."

"Yes."

"Why didn't you?"

"Because I do not need this door defended," she said, "and there is nobody else on that world who will do the other thing, and it is going to want doing for a very long time." She stepped aside. "You may go, Mr D'Amour. Nobody will follow you and nobody will come for you. If you spend the rest of your life trying to shut this connection you will not succeed, and it will not be wasted, because you will not be here to do it."

Harry looked at Kirsty.

He was forty-something and had been hit a lot and had just been given the choice between the girl in front of him and three things on the other side of the wall that only he could reach, and Kirsty watched him work it out, and watched him hate it, and never once afterwards held a second of it against him.

"Come on," he said. "We're going."

"I'm staying."

"Kirsty —"

"Harry." She had known for about ten seconds and found she was completely calm. "There's three of them and one of you and you're already late."

"That's not a reason."

"No. Here's the reason." She wiped her face with the back of her broken hand. "I came in here to shut it and I've done the opposite. I stood in that corridor and told him his plan was wrong, and I was right, and he listened — and then he turned round and looked at the place where she died and worked out something better. Something worse. I gave him that, Harry. Me and her between us, in about four minutes."

Harry did not answer.

"So I'm not leaving it. I'm going to go in and learn every single thing they've got, and I'm going to find out what he's going to do with what I handed him, and then I am going to take it off him." Her voice did not shake. "And if that takes four hundred years then it takes four hundred years, and I'll be the only one in here who remembers her name."

Harry D'Amour stood in the corridor with his hand hanging and his nose bleeding, and he had been through a door and come back diminished and had made his peace with never knowing the rest, and he had just been handed a reason to leave that he could live with.

"Enough," he said at last, to nobody in particular.

He said it the way a man says a word he has been using for a decade and has only just heard.

Then he picked up the empty leather case, because it had been Tiffany's for four months and he was not going to leave it on the floor, and he went out through the wall of the world, and did not look back; and he was as good as his word: he spent the rest of his life at it, and not once got to the bottom of it, and never knew that the door had been held open for him.

Forty-Two · The Fifteenth Door

He brought it to her himself.

That was not required. He was the Priest of the Order of the Gash and she was a woman in the fourth row, and there was no procedure anywhere in twelve hundred years of the drawers that obliged the holder of the office to walk down to the fourth gallery with an account in his hand and stand in front of somebody while they read it.

Frank did it anyway, and never afterwards pretended he had not known why.

She read the four lines.

They had taken him nine days. Two hundred and six lines had taken him a fortnight in his twelfth year and these four had taken him nine days, and Custos had come and looked at them twice and gone away without saying anything either time.

"It gave," she said.

"A quarter of an inch. Maybe less. Everybody who was standing up felt it and nobody who was lying down did." He kept his hands at his sides. "And there is not one line anywhere in that room about what it is. Twelve hundred years of us writing up the furniture."

"No."

He heard his own voice going up and did not stop it. "The house is the thing. That's the fifteenth door. That's the only one that was ever further and it has been under this Order's feet since before there was an Order, and the reason nobody has been through it is that the one person who ever put a hand on it stopped existing in about a second and a half."

He stopped.

"It's real," he said. "That's how I know. Everything here comes back. Everything. She didn't."

The former Priest of the Order of the Gash stood in the fourth gallery with four lines in her hand.

And Frank Cotton watched her read it, and watched her hand not move on the page, and understood.

He had been waiting four hundred years for it. He had never wanted to defeat her. He had wanted to bring her something, and to stand there while it landed, and to watch the woman who had answered seven challengers in twelve centuries without moving her hands look up from a page and want to go.

She read it again.

Then she said, quite steadily:

"It is the first real question anybody has asked in this Order in six hundred years."

"Yes."

"I can see all of it. The whole shape. I could tell you where to start and I could tell you the four ways it will kill you and I could probably tell you which of them it will be." She squared the sheet at the edges, the way Custos squared a ledger. "And I do not want to go."

The gallery was very quiet.

"I have known that about myself for six hundred years," she said, "and I have never been able to find out whether it would survive something genuinely new, because there has not been anything genuinely new. Now there is. It is in my hand. It is the best thing this Order has produced since before your language existed."

She held the account out to him.

"And it is a page," she said.

Frank did not take it.

"That's not —"

"It is exactly what I told you it would be, in the chamber, in front of seventy of them, and you did not believe me because nobody ever does." Her voice did not change by a semitone. "The wanting does not come back, Cotton. That is the finding. It is what I brought back through the door six hundred years ago and could never say, and I have spent every day since sending other people out because I cannot go and because it is the only way anything gets found.

"You have just done the thing I have been trying to make somebody do since before this realm had a fourth gallery. I engineered every hour of your existence to produce it. I put you in that chair to produce it. And it has arrived, and I have read it, and I feel precisely nothing, and I would like you to look at me while I tell you that, because you are going to be standing where I am standing in about four hundred years and there will be nobody left to warn you."

She put the account into his hand and closed his fingers on it.

"Go on," she said. "You have somewhere to be. I never will."

⁂

He founded it that night, and it went into the drawers under his own hand, and it is the only piece of doctrine the Order of the Gash has ever adopted that was written by a sitting Priest rather than accumulated by four thousand people over twelve centuries.

It runs to a single line.

No revelation shall be permitted to become doctrine.

Antiphon read it in the gallery and laughed out loud, alone, for quite a long time, and then stopped laughing.

Custos read it and ruled a line under it and entered it in the first hand, which he had not used in three hundred years, and squared it with two fingers, and said nothing to anybody about it ever again.

Frank Cotton read it back once, in his own writing, in a room with thirty thousand drawers in it, and felt nothing whatsoever go wrong.

Forty-Three · The Slab

The room was exactly as it had been described to her, in a stack of transcript a foot deep, in a back room on Camden Passage, with the rain going.

Black stone, and long, and set at a height that meant you had to make a decision to get onto it.

Kirsty undressed and folded her things and put them on the ledge that had been left for exactly that purpose, with a piece of a broken configuration still in the coat pocket, and stood in the cold with her arms at her sides for a moment — thirty-four years old, unremarkable, with a fracture across the back of her hand that had never set right.

Then she got up onto the stone and lay down on her back.

The cold came up through her shoulder blades and the backs of her thighs and the base of her skull, and it was not the cold of a cellar. She had read about it. What she had not read about, because nobody had ever thought to write it down, was that it was also the most comfortable thing she had ever lain on.

That was the part that frightened her — not the chains, which she had expected, and not the cold, which she had expected. It was that the stone met her back like a good bed at the end of a long day, and hurt, and did both at once and did not choose, and had been doing it to everybody who ever lay on it for twelve hundred years.

Two sides of the same coin, she thought. All right, then. Show me the other one.

Frank was standing beside her.

She had not heard him come in. Nobody ever heard any of them come in; she was going to have to get used to that, along with a great many other things, over a period of time she had stopped trying to estimate.

"You have three questions," he said. "You may ask two."

"That's not why I'm here."

"No. But the form is the form." He looked away down the length of the chamber for a moment. "She said that to me on this stone four hundred years ago and I have wanted to say it to somebody ever since, and now I have, and it was smaller."

Kirsty lay on the black stone and looked up at the chains coming down out of the dark of the ceiling, some of them ending in hooks and some of them ending in nothing.

"Where is she?"

"Fourth row. Second bell. Every day." He said it evenly. "She is not being punished and she has not resigned and there is no procedure for what she is. She will be there when you are four hundred years old."

"And you're the Priest now."

"I am."

"Then here's the other one." Kirsty turned her head. "I know what you're going to do. I worked it out on the way down here and I want you to know I worked it out, because I am not going to spend four hundred years being handled. You're going at Leviathan. You're going to spend however long it takes finding a way through the one thing in this place that can actually kill you, and you're going to send people at it, and they are not going to come back — not the way everyone else comes back, not at all, there'll be nothing left of any of them.

"And you'll write it down. Four lines at a time. And in six hundred years there'll be a gallery full of people who stopped existing, and somebody will stand on those flags and say the Order has ossified, and you'll agree with them, because you'll be right."

Frank Cotton looked down at her for a long moment.

"Yes," he said.

"I'm going to stop you."

"I know. She told me." He did not smile. "You have been entered under the second hand. It is in the drawers already, in four lines, and I read it this morning."

And Kirsty laughed — one, cracked, at the ceiling — because of course. Of course there was a drawer. The thing had a drawer for everything; that was what it was; and somewhere in the twelfth gallery there was an account of a man who had made an excellent case and been agreed with, and now there would be one of a girl who had come in to burn it down, and the second bell would go tomorrow exactly as it had gone this morning.

"Does it work?" she said. "Ever? Has anybody ever actually —"

"That's your third question."

"You said I could ask two."

"You did. That was three, and I am giving it to you, because you are going to be here a very long time and you would have it inside a century anyway." He put his hands behind his back. "No. Not yet. Seven of them, and none of them, and I am the closest anybody has come and I only got here because a girl in a cardigan did something I had not thought of."

Kirsty lay in the cold.

"I want to ask you something else," she said. "Not a question. Something else."

"Ask."

"Why didn't you do it?" She was looking straight up now, at the chains. "Five billion. I told you it wouldn't work and I was right and I know I was right, but that's not the same thing, is it — you could have done it anyway. Four hundred years of wanting it and a machine the size of a county and I stood in a corridor and talked at you for four minutes and you stopped. Nobody made you. You had your hands on it."

Frank did not answer for long enough that she heard a chain move somewhere up in the dark.

"Because it would have worked," he said. "That's what nobody understands about it and I am not going to be able to explain it to you tonight. It would have worked perfectly. Five billion of them, and every corridor open, and the galleries full inside a century — and not one of them would have opened anything."

He put his hand on her face.

The palm was dry and warm and it fitted, and it asked her for nothing whatsoever, and it went through her exactly the way it had gone through him on this same stone four hundred years earlier, and Kirsty's eyes filled before the first chain moved.

"Consent is necessary," said Frank Cotton. "Someone must open the box."

He was quiet for a moment, and when he spoke again it was in a voice Kirsty had heard once before, coming out of a woman between the racks in a print shop, and it did not seem to belong to him and it was entirely his own.

"After all — we are not monsters."

And he took his hand away, and above them, in the dark of the ceiling, the chains began to come down.