Chapter 26: Himself

"Put it back," said Chan-i.

"I don't know how."

"Put it back, Doha—"

"There's no back, it doesn't go backwards, the technique is one direction, it's a—" Doha's voice broke in the middle. "Chan-i, it's coming apart. I can feel it thinning. There's — it's got about a quarter hour and then it's gone and it's gone forever, and there's a woman somewhere who died in a room forty years ago and this is the last of it—"

"Then let it go."

"She was calling somebody."

"Let it go," said Chan-i, "because there are three living people on this hill, and if you're still holding it in a quarter hour when it starts looking for somewhere to be, it goes into the first fresh death it can find, and that means one of us has to not die for fifteen minutes, and I want you to look at your own hands and tell me how confident you are."

Doha looked at his hands.

They were shaking, and they were the hands of a person who had just been driven around inside his own body by a technique he had not consented to, and in about eleven hours it was going to happen again.

He looked at Yeo Chunsam.

The Ninth Bell lay on the grass with his ankles where Girin had dropped them, twenty-three years old, empty.

"No," said Chan-i.

"He's the only jar on this hill."

"No."

"Chan-i—"

"Do you know what you're saying?" Chan-i came around in front of him, and there were tears on his face and his voice was perfectly steady, which was somehow worse than shouting. "You are standing on a hillside proposing to put a stranger's death into a dead boy so you don't have to feel bad about a woman you never met. That is the entire thing. That is what they do. That is what Nam Gyeol does and it is what Yeo Chunsam did to two hundred and eleven people in that village and every single one of them had a reason and every one of the reasons was good—"

"I know," said Doha.

"Then let it go!"

"I'm going to," said Doha.

He was.

He stood on the slope above Sesan with his hands open and a woman's last word coming apart in the air in front of him, and he did not do anything at all, for a quarter of an hour, while Chan-i held onto the rope and Girin stood with his back to both of them and Hong Yeohwa sat down on the grass and put her hands over her ears without appearing to know she had done it.

It took fourteen minutes and forty seconds to thin out.

It was not a held breath let go. It did not untie. It simply got smaller, and less, and less specific, until at some point Doha could no longer say whether there was anything there or whether he had begun remembering it instead.

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He never found out who she was.

He would think about that on and off for fifty years, and the seam count would go up by hundreds, and it would remain, obscurely, one of the two or three worst things he had ever been part of, and he had done nothing at all.

They came off the slope at midday.

"Twice more before we're home," said Doha. "Maybe three. It was eleven hours between hearing it and the first one, and it'll shorten."

"Then you don't sleep near the cart," said Chan-i.

"Chan-i—"

"You don't sleep near the cart, and you don't walk on the side of the road where the ditches are, and if we pass a farm with a dog that died this week we take the long way." Chan-i was tying the loops off with quick hard movements. "You are a loaded crossbow with the trigger tied down with string. I'm not being cruel. You'd say the same to me."

"I would," Doha admitted.

"And there's the other thing, and I'm going to say it once." Chan-i straightened. "You went around the hole."

"I didn't decide to."

"I know. That's why I'm saying it once and not asking you to fix it." Chan-i looked at him. "That was a wrong performance. In front of a live knot. Which feeds it."

Doha stood on the road with the rope around his shoulders.

"How much?" he said.

"You tell me. You're the only one who can hear it."

So Doha shut his eyes, on the road out of Sesan, and listened to the thing tying itself into the middle of his chest, and found the hole in it, and found something else that had not been there in the morning.

"It's shorter," he said slowly. "The whole thing's shorter. It's — the hole's the same size, but everything around it's got tighter. Like a wet knot drying."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning eleven hours was the first one," said Doha, "and I don't think we get eleven again."

They got nine.

It happened at the second watch, at a wayside station on the river road, and it went better because they had planned for it: Doha in the middle of an empty yard with forty feet of nothing in every direction, roped at four points to two posts and Girin, doing five beats of somebody else's rite in the dark with nothing whatsoever within reach.

Twenty-two seconds. Nothing to harvest. The pull came up empty and the technique finished and let him go.

He knelt in the dirt afterward and breathed.

"That's fine," he said. "That's fine, that's — we can do that. As long as there's nothing in reach it just runs and stops. We can do that all the way home."

"Doha," said Hong Yeohwa.

She was standing at the edge of the lamplight with her arms folded, and she had been extremely quiet for about a day and a half.

"When it went off on the hill," she said, "you told Girin to put my brother's — to put the body down, and get away from you."

"Yes."

"Why?"

Doha did not answer.

"Because it takes the nearest one," said Hong Yeohwa. "Yes? Whatever's closest."

"Yes."

"And a living person's own gi fights it. Your elder said that in the cold room. A living man can't hold a knot, that's why they need fresh dead." She had not moved. "But you're not asking whether it can take one out of a living person. You're asking whether it can take one out of you."

The wayside yard was very quiet.

"I've got five," said Doha.

"Yes."

"They're not knots. They're seams. They're — there's nothing left to untie, they're just what's left over." He was talking too fast and knew it. "You can't lift a seam out. It's not a shape any more, it's just a wanting, it's gone into the—"

"Has anybody ever tried?" said Hong Yeohwa.

Doha opened his mouth.

He thought about Grandmother Ok, three hundred and eighty-one, nineteen left, spending them like the last of the oil.

He thought about a walled orchard with washing on a line.

He thought about a man who had walked out of the north gate eleven years ago with a bell in his head that nobody could account for, and who had spent every year since building a technique for taking things out of people, and who had two hundred and six of somebody else's seams sitting in his own chest the entire time.

"Oh," said Doha.

He sat down slowly in the dirt of the wayside yard.

"Oh, he's not building a library," he said.

"What?"

"The jars. The village. Forty-one in a field, eleven paces from a house — he doesn't care about the field, he's never cared about the field, that's why he gave a twenty-three-year-old bad instruction and let him bury them anywhere." Doha's hands had gone cold. "Chan-i. Chan-i, get up. He's not collecting techniques."

Chan-i was already up.

"He's practising," said Doha. "Every single one of them is practice. He's been taking things out of dead people for eleven years to get good enough to take something out of a live one."

"Out of who?" said Girin.

Doha looked up at him, in the lamplight, at a wayside station on the river road, forty li from home.

"Himself," he said.