Chapter 33: Terrible Company

Three dead. Nine hurt. The gate off one hinge and a hole in the west range roof where somebody had gone through it in the dark.

That was the whole account of the worst night in the Hall's four hundred years, and Chan-i read it out in the yard at the eighth hour in the flat voice, because somebody had to, and there was nobody left senior enough to make him stop.

Mo Yeongsu, elder, sixty-one.

Pak Doseong, rite-keeper, thirty-four, at the gate.

Yeo Han, number, eleven years old, who had gone toward the noise.

"Girin lives," said Chan-i. "The leg does not. Physician says he'll walk on two sticks by the spring and not before, and never on the road."

Nobody said anything.

"That's the account," said Chan-i, and folded the paper, and then stood there holding it because there was nothing after that on the page.

They laid Elder Mo on the flat stone at the ninth hour.

Doha went to the head of it, because it was his to do and because nobody else was going to make him not.

He stood there for five seconds.

Then for eleven more.

Then he put his hand flat on the old man's chest, which was not necessary and which he had only done once before in his life, and held it there while the whole Hall waited.

"Nothing," said Doha.

Chan-i's head came up.

"Say that again."

"There's nothing in him." Doha's voice did something on the second word and he let it. "There's — he's not doing anything. He held a door for nineteen minutes with one hand and his heels in the stone and he held it until they walked away, and then he sat there and finished."

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Su Han made a sound at the back of the yard.

"He got what he wanted," said Doha. "He wanted the door shut. The door was shut."

He took his hand off Mo Yeongsu's chest.

"There's no knot in this man," he said, "and there never will be."

That was when the Hall of the Ninth Rite finally, entirely, came apart, and it was not the deaths that did it, and afterward nobody was able to explain that to anybody who had not been standing in the yard.

Su Han confessed at midday in front of everyone, because Grandmother Ok made him.

He did it well. He did not weep and he did not explain more than the facts, and when he had finished, he knelt on the flagstones and put his forehead on them and stayed there.

"Stand up," said Grandmother Ok.

"Hallmistress—"

"Stand up, you are forty years old and I will not have a man kneel in this yard where a child died last night." She waited until he was on his feet. "You cast a device for the man who did this, four years ago, in exchange for a promise that he would empty your chest, and he did not, and you have known for three days that he never intended to."

"Yes."

"Did you open the gate?"

"No, Hallmistress. On my life."

"I know you didn't. The gate was opened by Sixteen, who is fourteen years old, at knife point, and who has been sitting in the kitchen since the fourth watch not being able to speak, and who will be looked after." Grandmother Ok's hands lay on the arms of her chair. "One hundred and ninety-one."

Su Han said nothing.

"You never asked to slow down," she said. "Not once in nineteen years. I have your record in front of me and I checked it at dawn, because I wanted to be certain before I said this: you have never in your life refused a body. Not one. Not the bad ones, not the far ones, not the ones nobody would have blamed you for."

"That doesn't—"

"It doesn't excuse it and I am not excusing it." Her voice was perfectly level. "I am accounting for it, which is different, and which this Hall is supposed to be good at. You did the work of two men for nineteen years, and you got frightened, and a man who understood exactly how you got there offered you the only thing you wanted, and you gave him a bell. That is the whole of it. Nobody in this yard is entitled to be surprised."

She looked around.

"Anybody who is surprised," said Grandmother Ok, "may come and tell me their number."

Nobody came.

"What happens to me?" said Su Han.

"You'll dig," said Grandmother Ok.

"Hallmistress?"

"You will go with them to Sesan, and you will not read, and you will not perform, and you will not touch a rope. You will dig, and you will carry, and you will do it under Baek Chan-i's hand, and when there is a body to be washed you will fetch the water and hand it to somebody else." She sat back. "Forty-one graves. It will take two years and it will probably kill somebody, and you are going to open every single one of them with your hands, and when it is finished you may come back and ask me again."

Su Han bowed very low.

"And Su Han," said Grandmother Ok.

"Hallmistress."

"When you are at three hundred and eighty," she said, "come and sit with me and we will be terrible company for one another."