Sect Year 4 · seventh month · night of day 9 · the thirty-eighth life: the Vault quarter of Serai, his twelfth year
The front room of the cutter’s house smelled of warm wax and brass. Across the canal the cords hung in the Vault’s windows, grey and brown and knotted, and nobody on the street could say who had first tied one. The stone bridge had been laid over the water only in his grandfather’s time. The cords were older than the bridge, older than the Vault’s tiled roof, older than any clerk’s memory of a first sum.
Jorn sat at the far end of the cutting bench with his feet hooked behind the stool’s rung and watched the grey light come off the water through the street window. He had cut tallies at that bench for two years. His father’s knife lay on a square of felt by his elbow. He didn’t touch it while the woman was in the room.
She had come to the bench door at midday with a sack held against her chest in both arms. She wore a boatwright’s shawl, grey with salt at the hem, and she hadn’t put the sack down until she was inside and had found the chair by the table. Now she sat with her hands folded on its mouth. Her knuckles were red from the canal, and the cold had got into the skin of her wrists. Her eyes kept going back to the cord on the…
