Mercy House

The Mercy House had once been something else.

No one remembered what. A storehouse, perhaps... or a school, or a hall of judgement, or something for which the living no longer had a word. It was one of the Makers' buildings, a long, low hall of the same grey poured stone as the Spillway, its roof flat, its windows wide and square and long since stripped of whatever had filled them. The Chantry had hung oiled cloth over the windows and painted the Flame over the doors and filled the hall with cots, and now it was a house of mercy, where the sick of the Sump came to be prayed over before they died.

Teo pushed the cart through the side gate and into the pyre-yard.

The pyre-men were already at work. There were six of them, big, silent men with lime-burned hands like his own, and they took the bodies from the cart without a word, the way they did everything. The smoke of the morning's first fires was rising in a thick grey column against the wall. It climbed and climbed, past the Sump and past the Shelf, until the wind at the top of the Spillway caught it and smeared it across the sky.

Teo watched it rise, and then, because he could not help himself, he said:

"They're all from around Saint Orlen's."

One of the pyre-men glanced at him. His name was Garrow, and he had spoken perhaps eleven words to Teo in two years.

"So?"

"So the whole Sump is sick with sin, but only four streets of it are dying."

Garrow looked at him for a while. Then he looked at the body in his arms.

"Pray harder, cart-boy," he said — and turned away.

Teo sighed.

'Well. Twelve words.'

He left the cart by the gate and went into the Mercy House to have his tally marked. He was not supposed to keep a count, of course. But the Chantry kept one, which was a contradiction that Teo had thought about a great deal and never once mentioned aloud. The deacons called it "the reckoning of mercy," and it was not counting, because it was holy.

Inside, the hall stank of lye and sickness. The cots ran in two long rows under the cloth-covered windows, and almost all of them were full. Acolytes in white moved between them with buckets and cloths and the small brass bowls of blessed oil that were the Chantry's medicine for every illness. There was a constant low sound, a mixture of moaning and prayer and the dreadful, wet noises of the flux, and Teo had long since stopped hearing it.

What he did hear, however, was a voice, sharp and clear, coming from the far end of the hall.

"...I don't care what the deacon said. She needs water — now. Bring it."

An acolyte was kneeling by one of the cots, holding the hand of a woman whose face had gone the colour of old candle wax. The acolyte was young, perhaps three or four years older than Teo, with a long dark braid pinned up under her white cap and the kind of straight back that one only got from growing up somewhere with chairs. Shelf-born, then. Teo had seen her around the Mercy House for most of the summer. He did not know her name.

A second acolyte, a plump boy with a frightened face, was hovering nearby.

"Sister, the deacon said... the deacon said that water only feeds the flux. It flows out as fast as it goes in. It's wasteful. He said to fast them, to purify..."

"She is not wasting it. She is dying of the lack of it. Look at her."

"Sister Mira..."

"Bring it, Cobb."

The boy fled.

The woman on the cot stirred. Her lips moved, and Teo realised with a strange sinking feeling that he knew her. Her name was Dessa. She sold fried bread from a tray on the corner of Saint Orlen's Square, and she had a daughter about ten years old who sometimes helped her, a skinny little thing with a voice like a gull.

...He had not seen the daughter.

Teo walked over before he could think better of it.

'...What am I doing?'

Sister Mira looked up at him. Her eyes were very dark, and very tired, and they took him in all at once: the grey cart-man's smock, the lime-cracked hands, what that meant.

"Not yet," she said quietly.

"I know." Teo crouched down beside the cot. "Dessa. It's Teo. From the cart. Where's Nell?"

Dessa's eyes found him with difficulty. Her voice was barely a breath.

"...Home. Told her... stay home..."

"Good. That's good."

"Water," Dessa whispered. "Please."

Sister Mira's jaw tightened. She took a ladle from the floor, filled it from a basin, and held it to the woman's lips. Most of it ran down her chin. Some of it... maybe... went in.

Teo watched her do it, and something in his chest twisted.

'She's going to die. The water won't matter. They always die by the time they get here.'

And yet... the acolyte kept trying. Again and again, a little at a time, holding the woman's head up with one hand. As if it mattered. As if it might.

Cobb came back with a full bucket and a frightened look over his shoulder. A moment later, a deacon in a red-trimmed robe came sweeping down the hall after him, his face thunderous.

Teo stood up and stepped back, bowed, and quietly made himself absent. He was very good at that. In the Sump, one learned to be part of the wall when the Chantry raised its voice.

He heard the deacon's rebuke behind him, low and furious, and he heard Sister Mira answer it, not loudly, but without bowing her head. He heard the words "disobedience" and "penance" and "the Archdeacon's own instruction." And then he heard nothing at all, because he had reached the door and gone out into the yard.

He did not go back for his tally. Instead...

He walked to Saint Orlen's Square.

It was a small, crooked square, as such things went in the Sump, paved with cracked Maker stone and hemmed in on all sides by tenements that leaned against one another like drunkards. In the middle of it stood the Saint Orlen's pump: an iron post as tall as a man, with a long, curved handle and a wide stone trough beneath. The Chantry had blessed it thirty years ago, when the old well had been dug deeper. Its water was the sweetest in the Sump, everyone said. Cool, even in summer. People walked from three streets away to fill their buckets there rather than drink from the river.

Teo stood at the edge of the square and stared at it for a while.

Then he climbed the stairs of the tenement on the corner, to the narrow room at the top where Dessa and her daughter lived, and knocked.

The door opened a crack. A small, fierce face looked out at him, pale and streaked with dried tears.

"Go away," Nell said. "I'm not dead."

"I can see that."

"You're the cart-man. You only come when people are dead."

Teo sighed and crouched down so that his eyes were level with hers.

"I'm not here for that," he said.

Nell stared at him with naked suspicion. Then her lower lip began to tremble, and she said, very quietly:

"...Is Mama?"

Teo did not answer.

He did not need to — not really. He had been doing this for two years, and he had learned that there was a kind of silence that said everything, and that children always heard it first.

Later that day, when the cart came back up Tallow Row, it was carrying one more body than he had expected, and a ten-year-old girl was walking beside it with one hand on the wheel, refusing to let go.

Thirty-two.