Chương 129: 119. Chreía

The abbot at Cluny would not let me speak with the man who kept the keys, because a lay brother is beneath the conversation. I have watched that house for eleven years. The abbot decides who is holy yet the brother with the keys decides who comes in. — Codex of the Long Watch, Field Observation, 11th Century, Burgundy Sarah put her left hand on the jeweller's bench before he asked for it.

Fotiadis was at the bench in the window with the leather hammock slung underneath to catch the filings, exactly where he had been sitting twenty hours ago, as though the interval between measurement and delivery had gone by without him moving. The torch was lit, a thin blue needle of flame standing under a charred soldering block, and the shop was warmer than it had been the morning before. He killed the flame with a turn of his finger and wiped his hands down his apron.

"Eleni's daughter," the old man said, without standing.

"It is done." Sarah picked up the nearest bracelet and turned it under the light. Four chains of dark iron ran from a flat wrist band up to a ring, gathering halfway into a thicker plaited chain that lay across the back of the hand.

"The work is good," she said.

"I have been making chains since before your mother was born," Fotiadis said. The old man took Sarah's hand in both of his, worked the band over her wrist and ran the ring onto her middle finger. He turned the whole hand over twice, watching the chain gather and fall.

"Make a fist." She made a fist for him. The plaited chain took up the slack across her knuckles and the ring stayed where he had put it.

"Now the other one." Sarah put on the other bracelet and something about the ring displeased Fotiadis. He carried it back to the bench, filed the inside of it for twenty seconds and gave it back. Arthur held the shutter open on the way out and looked at the two dark bracelets on Sarah's hands.

"Buying jewellery during the apocalypse," he said, on the street outside.

"It is a medical instrument."

"With chains and a ring." Sarah did not respond. She did wiggle her fingers in Arthur's face. • • Steve was in the courtyard with Harrow when they came through the gate. He had been there a while, by the looks of it. A few tin cans sat on the low wall at the far end, fifteen metres away, and Donna stood next to them.

"Again," she said, and flicked the can off the wall. The can tumbled through the air in a flat arc. Steve raised the rod and fired. The lance left the tip clean, travelled straight for the first three metres and then bent. A small correction, a foot or two to the left, tracking the falling can through the last half of its arc. It struck the tin a metre above the ground and punched through it.

"That is four out of five," Steve said, turning the punctured can in his fingers.

"The one I missed was the longest throw."

"The projection bends," Arthur said.

"That will be useful."

"It does bend, though I cannot tell you how far the correction will hold. I will need open ground to find the limit."

"Now he has a wand that cheats," Donna said, looking at Arthur. Donna tossed the can into the scrap pile by the wall, and they went inside. They had cleared the kitchen table after breakfast, and Sarah laid both bracelets on the wood, side by side. Arthur turned the pouch out over his palm and caught the wolf core as it came. He set it on the wood in front of Sarah. Yiayia watched from her chair by the window.

Petros stood by the door with his jacket over his arm, dressed to leave an hour before he had anywhere to go.

"What do you want out of it?" Steve had the pencil out.

"This will be your first time binding and the intent is the most important part." Sarah picked up the bracelet for her right hand and set the core against the thicker chain across the back. She held it there with her thumb and closed her eyes. Arthur watched her face change into the clinician's, the same focused absence he had seen over compound fractures and arterial bleeds. She was diagnosing a deficit and designing the instrument that corrected it.

"I need the healing channels to hold to an injury," she said, her eyes closed, her voice level and precise.

"The energy stays where I direct it. It does not flood the patient and it does not spill. I want what leaves my hand to arrive. All of it." The core sank into the iron. The dark violet bled out of the stone and into the drawn links. The chains stayed chains, but they had a sheen now, like a bracelet made of purple gold sitting in sharp contrast to her pale hands.

ARTIFACT CREATION DETECTED BINDING LAW ENGAGED Vessel: Hand-Chain (Transmuted Ether-Iron) Core: Lykanthropos (Refined-Grade) Intent: Undiminished Transfer KNITBONE — REFINED Channel Coherence: Enhanced Transfer Rate: Enhanced Signature: Persistence"Knitbone," Sarah said.

"Channel Coherence, enhanced. Transfer Rate, enhanced." She turned her hand over under the lamp.

"Less Ether loss on the way across. And I think it would let the healing continue once I've started it without constant focus." Steve looked at his focus rod and then at Sarah's wrist, running the parallel.

"Same architecture as Harrow. Focus the output to the point of intent instead of flooding the channel." Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon. Correct, Archie said. The dispersal rate should fall below six percent at contact range.

"Knitbone," Steve continued, since the word had already taken him somewhere else.

"Symphyton. The botanical name for comfrey, from symphyō, to grow together. Dioscorides prescribed the root for broken bones in the first century.

"They packed it into fractures for two thousand years, a poultice laid on the skin over the break, and it worked well enough that the name stuck to it in half the languages in Europe. Boneset. Bruisewort. Knitbone."

"It is in the cupboard," Yiayia said.

"For the children's hands," Eleni explained from the stove.

"And for my knee, when it is cold."

"He is telling us about our own plant," Yiayia said to her daughter, and sat back down.

"Steve," Sarah said.

"We know what comfrey is. I trained in a country where it grows on the roadside."

"I am saying the etymology is remarkable."

"You are explaining my own pharmacopoeia to me."

"Right," he said without the smile leaving his face.

"Yes. I withdraw the lecture." A laugh went round the kitchen. It was easy and familiar. The Yueshen candidate carried a restorer of comparable skill. Across seventeen integrations, the most reliable predictor of a party attempting an engagement it should have declined is the presence of a capable healer, Archie said unhurriedly. The margin you have just acquired does not make you safer. It makes you bolder. The result of such gambles is assessed afterwards.

• • The house was the same plain door on the same quiet street, and a man he did not recognise let him in. The room was as he had left it. People with dead looks in their faces and the screeners, sitting close, holding hands and pretending to listen. Lefteris came to him at the door and took both his hands.

"You came back," he said.

"I am glad you came back. I was not sure you would." He did not walk Petros to a chair in the ring. He put a hand on his back and guided him down the side of the room, past a crying woman and to the inner door, and the two men standing in front of it moved. Neither of them looked at Petros as he went through, and nobody in the ring of chairs turned round to watch him go. They went through a corridor that smelled of plaster to a smaller room at the back.

The room had a table and two chairs, with bread and water set out.

"Sit. Please." Lefteris sat down first, and rolled his sleeves back down and buttoned them.

"Kostas tells me you fix everything on that harbour that is broken."

"Some of it."

"I told you the first night that you came here because you were awake," Lefteris said.

"I think you have been awake a very long time, and the waking has cost you." He paused.

"I am here to tell you that the cost was worth paying. Every night you lay in that house counting what your sister took from you and wondering why it was always you who stayed. That is not weakness, Petro. That is preparation." Petros kept his eyes on the table, pretending that the words landed where they were supposed to land in a hollow man.

"Everything in this city is finished, Petro," Lefteris said, motioning around the room.

"The Council is finished and has not been told. The Church is finished. The old way of being a man, work and wait and be decent and take what you are given, that is finished, and every person out there in that room knows it in his body and cannot get it out of his mouth."

"And you have the new way."

"The place we serve," Lefteris said, and the word serve carried a weight, "honours the ones who come to it. The worthy are lifted. Lifted out of what they were. Out of the street and the name and the body that carried all of it. They become something the city cannot touch." He said it with certainty.

"Your suffering has a purpose, Petro. You were strong enough to carry it all here. Give yourself to the sacred place and the sacred place will honour that." He held Petros's eyes across the table.

"Everything you have carried was not waste. The suffering was the qualification." Petros had walked in meaning to sit quiet and let the man work. He had said as much at his mother's table and he had meant it. Then Lefteris said give yourself, and the word came up out of him on its own.

"You are telling me to give myself away." His voice was dull and even and it changed without any effort at all, which was the part that frightened him.

"Re, I have given myself away my whole life. My father dies, and I give myself. My mother needs a man in the house, so I give myself. The yard, the boats, the winches, the papers, my sister off saving Africa and me giving myself, every day, for years, and not one person ever said my name for it." He put a finger down on the table. There was heat in his eyes now.

"That is the thing I came here to stop. And you sit there and tell me the answer is to walk up a hill and hand over what is left of me." His finger stayed where he had put it.

"Lifted. Kalá. And who says my name after? I do not want to be a story on a hill, Lefteri. I want to be somebody in the room I am standing in." The lamp ticked in the quiet between them. Lefteris looked at him for a long moment and then sat back in his chair, with something coming up in his face that Petros could not read at first. When he realised what it was, it turned his stomach over. The man was delighted.

"There," Lefteris said quietly.

"Yes. That is it." He pulled his chair closer to the table.

"Do you know how many men have sat in that chair? Every one of them wants to be lifted. Their courage is real, and what they are given is holy. I will keep helping them until there is nobody left in this city who is drowning." He spread his hands.

"And every one of them is useless to me." He let that stand between them a moment.

"Not everyone is called to be lifted, Petro. Some are called to serve the lifting." Petros kept his face dull.

"The lifted are gone, transcendent," Lefteris said.

"They go up, and they are glorious, and they are past us. Past their names. Past their mothers, past this street, past every small thing you and I are sitting here arguing over."

"The god's work in this city needs hands," Lefteris said.

"Someone must find the ones who are ready. Someone must bring them bread and oil and move them out along the coast road past the Council's guards. The Council is afraid because what we do is holy." He leaned in.

"The hand that opens the door is the hand that carries the worthy to the threshold. Men come to this table and ask to be judged, Petro. Tell me that is a small thing to hold." Petros did not answer immediately and kept looking at his hands. The cover called for a pause here, a man offered something he wanted and was afraid of losing it.

"You are offering me your chair," he asked, looking up after a long pause.

"I am telling you the chair has been too heavy for one man for a month, and I have prayed over who to put in it." Lefteris looked to the ceiling.

"And then a man walks into my room who has been eaten alive by his own family and is still standing up straight. You think that is an accident? I stopped believing in accidents in the second month, on that hill, when I saw what I saw."

"And the ones who serve," Petros said.

"They do not ascend? Become more?"

"Not yet." Lefteris smiled, and for a moment he looked very young.

"Not yet. Our turn comes when the work is done, and that promise I will not break. You will stand at the bottom of a hill and send them up, one and one and one, and when all the faithful in the city have gone through the door, they will send for you." He said the next part gently.

"You will not be a man in the queue, Petro. You will be the man who is owed, re." He stood up and put his hand on Petros's shoulder. It came down like a bolt driven through a plank. Petros felt his collarbone take the weight of it. He had spent all his life around people who lifted things. There was nothing in this man's frame, in the clean shirt and the soft voice and the rolled sleeves, that should have put that kind of weight behind a hand laid gently on a collarbone.

"Even those who serve, and wait, must be strong," Lefteris said, from above him.

"The wolf-god does not carry weak hands. Come out with us, and I will show you the place, and the church will make you strong. Power now. Glory later."

"Out with you."

"Tomorrow. The cart goes in the evening with the ones we are taking, and you will walk out with them and see it done properly. See how they are loaded. See the road, and who stops us, and how we get past him." The hand came off his shoulder.

"Then come back and tell me it is a small thing to hold." Petros pushed the chair back and got to his feet. There was a small part of him that had heard you will be the man who is owed and had leaned toward it like a plant. He was going to have to live with having felt it.

"Tomorrow," he said. Lefteris got up and opened the door. The murmur of the ring came back in. The two men standing in front of the door stepped aside for him without being asked.