The Boy in the Candle Smoke

He did not say it was a coincidence. She had expected that, and she was oddly sorry when it did not come.

Valerian stood in the arch of the little chapel with one gloved hand on the stone, and for the length of five heartbeats he did not move. Then the hand dropped. He walked past her into the room, three paces, and stopped in front of the wax young man in the brown robe, so near that the candle at the statue's feet laid a long flicker of orange across both their faces.

They looked alike. She had known that in the instant she saw it. But it was one thing to know and another to watch the two of them side by side: the high narrow cheekbones, the black untidy hair, the scar in the left brow. The living man was grayer, harder, a pen drawing beside an oil. The wax one was only a little younger. He was laughing at something above the living man's shoulder.

"It is a trick of the Door," said Valerian.

"You don't believe that."

"I believe that the cathedral wishes to disturb me. It has had a long time to study my habits." He was speaking to the statue, not to her. "A face may be copied from the one who stands at the threshold. It has happened before. A girl in a salt marsh was shown her own mother."

"Your mother?"

"I did not say that."

"No." She came up softly beside him. "You said a trick. But you've gone white."

"I have always been this color."

"You've gone a different white."

He turned his head.

It was the first time she had seen him angry. It did not flare. It sank in, slowly, like cold water into a boot: a narrowing of the eyes, a stiffening of the jaw, a long cool silence in which she had the sense of a great and orderly room being locked from the inside. Then he spoke, and his voice was level and civil, and every word was a closed door.

"There are parts of a man," said Valerian, "that are better buried."

"Which part is this?"

"I do not know."

"But you think it's you."

"I think," said the Overseer, "that I would like to leave this chapel."

He did not move. He did not seem able to. He stood looking at the effigy, at the painted gray eyes, with the face of a man who has been shown a window in a wall he has lived beside all his life. She waited. She counted the candles in the little room. There was one.

Finally she said, as gently as she knew how: "Then we'll leave it. But I'm going to look around first. It's what I'm for. You don't have to stay."

He stayed.

…

The hymnal lay on a lectern against the wall.

It was a thick book bound in rotting black leather, and it lay open at a page that someone had marked, many years ago, with a rag of red ribbon. The paper was soft as skin. The music was written in a hand she did not know, in old square notes on a four-line staff, and under the notes ran the words, in the Old Tongue, in a line so faded that she had to bend and tilt the candle to read it.

The Hymn of the Weeping Saint.

She read it once in the Old Tongue, silently, and then again, setting it down in the common speech on the page of her notebook with the charcoal skidding. The meter was unusual. It was written in couplets, short and hammering, like a funeral drum, and it fell into six stanzas of two lines apiece.

Light a candle for the lost,

Wax will keep what grief has cost.

Only saints may weep their fill,

Mortal eyes must hold them still.

Come to kneel and come to pray,

Tears will melt the saints away.

Keep your sorrow, keep it dry,

Wax grows hungry when you cry.

Every tear that dares to fall

Wakes the saints to take it all.

Dry your eyes and bow your head,

Leave the living with the dead.

She straightened. She read the last line again. And then, because a long habit of suspicion had grown in her over the past three days like a callus, she put the charcoal beneath the first letter of each couplet and ran it down the margin.

L. O. C. K. E. D.

She stood perfectly still.

Her heart gave a single slow thud. Then it began to beat very fast, with a clean cold excitement that was almost a form of grief. It was not a coincidence. A coincidence was a word, or two, a thing that might arise from chance. This was six letters, in six stanzas, in a hymn, and it spelled the third word in a sentence she had been collecting for three days.

W. H. A. T. — I. S. — L. O. C. K. E. D.

What is locked.

"Valerian," she said.

He did not answer.

"I need to tell you something." She turned. "It's in the covenant. First clause. I'm to read what the Doors hide, and speak plainly all that I find."

He was staring at the wax face. He seemed barely to hear.

"There's a sentence," said Isolde. "It's hidden in the rhymes. Each Door has a verse that gives you the rule, and each verse is built so that the first letters of the stanzas make a word. The first Door said what. The second said is. This one says locked. I think—" She had to breathe. "I think somebody wrote the Doors. I think they wrote them on purpose, to say something. And I think they hid it from you."

He turned his head.

She had expected anger. What she saw instead, to her horror, was a kind of listening terror. His eyes had gone enormous. His lips were parted. He looked like a man who hears, from far away, the first note of a song he has been dreading for a hundred years.

"What is locked," said Valerian.

It was barely a whisper. And she heard, in the air of the little room, a faint sweet note like a bell struck underwater. Every candle on the stands in the cathedral outside flickered. The wax young man did not move. But for an instant, a bare instant, she could have sworn that the painted eyes went from laughing to something else, and back again.

…

The scream came from the nave.

It was a woman's, high and cracked and utterly despairing, and it was followed at once by the long rolling hum of a hundred voices that were not human. Isolde was through the arch before she knew she had moved. She came out into the great hall and found the Lantern Company on its feet, and Gideon at the head of them, shouting, and every candle in the nave burning blue.

The saints were awake.

They did it slowly. It was the most terrible thing she had seen yet. One after another, down the long aisle, the pale faces were turning, raising their downcast eyes. A wax hand lifted. A wax lip trembled. From the corner of every wax eye a single bead of liquid had begun to gather, clear and heavy as a pearl.

At the foot of the altar steps knelt the gaunt woman who had been Ketch Morrow's weeper.

She was alone. The old man had gone to the Lantern fire; Wick was clinging to a Lantern soldier's coat. She knelt on the stone, bareheaded, with her arms clasped round her ribs, and the tears were running down her face in two broad streams. She was not sobbing. That was the worst of it. She was crying as a stone cries in the rain, steadily, silently, helplessly, without any effort to stop.

"I can't," she was saying. "I can't do it any more. I want my little girl. Please. Please, I want to go home."

"Come away from there," called Gideon. "Madam, please. Think of something—"

"I can't think!"

"Isolde," said Odile, in a very small voice, at her elbow.

She did not need to look. She had seen the first tear fall. She saw it strike the stone, and gather, and set. She saw the great blue-robed saint above the altar bend, with a long slow creak of wax, and extend one pale hand. The candle in her other hand had gone out entirely.

"Valerian," said Isolde.

He was at her shoulder. He had come out of the chapel in her wake, silent, and he was looking at the woman with the face of a man looking at a clock.

"You can reach her," she said. "You could pull her away."

"It is not within the covenant."

"I'm asking you."

"You are asking me," said Valerian, "to interfere."

"Yes."

"I cannot."

"Can't? Or won't?"

He said nothing. His face, in the blue light, was perfectly still. But his hand had clenched at his side, in its black glove, and as she watched the knuckles creaked.

The blue saint's palm touched the woman's hair.

The woman did not cry out. She sighed. It was a long, slow, relieved sound, like a person setting down a burden, and the tears on her face stopped running. They stopped because they were hardening. A pale crust spread over her cheeks and her brow and the corners of her mouth, smooth and white and tender. It crept down her throat. She had time to lift one hand, wondering, to her own chin, and the fingers set. Her eyes were still open. They looked, to the last, at nothing: at the roof of the cathedral, the great gold dark.

When it was finished, she was a statue.

She knelt on the altar steps with her face turned up, wax from head to heel, smooth and beautiful, in the posture of someone who has stopped being afraid. A tall candle appeared between her hands. It lit itself.

"Oh, God," whispered Odile.

Isolde could not speak. The ache in her throat had passed beyond tears, into some dry white place of its own. She thought: Eighty-nine saints. A hundred. Four hundred. They were all of them somebody. She thought of the little plaque on the plinth. Here is kept what grief has cost.

And she thought, with a cold exact fury, that the cathedral had only done what it was built to do.

…

They did not speak of it afterward.

The Lantern Company wrapped the woman's body, or what had been the body, in a gray cloak, and set her gently against the north wall among the saints. Nobody said a prayer. Gideon stood a long time with his hat in his hand, and then put it on, and spoke quietly to his lieutenants. It was a good and gentle moment, and Isolde hated him for it. She did not know why.

Wick had not cried. She had seen to that. He sat in the corner with Odile's arm round him, rigid, a small dry-eyed ghost of a child, and when Isolde knelt beside him he said, without looking up: "She told me about her girl. Last night. She said she was seven and she liked bees."

"I'm sorry."

"It's not your fault."

"No." She put a hand on his shoulder. "But I'm sorry anyway."

She rose. Her knees ached. She walked back down the nave alone, between the ranks of saints, who had gone back to their downcast stillness, and who bore their candles with their usual serene indifference, and she did not look at the one by the altar. She came to the chapel arch. She went in.

The candle was still burning.

The wax young man stood where he had stood, in his brown robe, with his head lifted. Somebody had moved his hand. She hadn't noticed it before. The right hand, which had hung at his side, was held a little away from the body now, palm up, the fingers curled loosely as if holding something small and weightless. As she looked, the fingers uncurled.

There was a key in the palm.

It was black iron, as long as her middle finger, plain and heavy. She had never seen it before. She would have sworn the hand had been empty when she left. She put out her own and took it, with great care, as one takes a coin from the lap of a sleeping man, and as her fingers touched the wax she felt a warmth, a faint, living warmth, like the heat of a hand that has just been withdrawn.

"Do not," said a voice behind her.

She did not turn. "It's the key."

"It is a bait."

"It's a gift. Look at the way the hand opens. It's been waiting for me." She closed her fist on the iron. "Valerian. Who made this statue?"

"I do not know."

"You said that a girl in a salt marsh was shown her mother. You were lying. I don't think you've ever seen a Door do this."

A long silence.

"Fourth clause," she said, very quietly, and turned to face him.

He was standing in the arch. His face, in the single candle's glow, was bare. For a moment there was nothing in it at all, no ice, no courtesy, no self. Only a tired man, standing in a doorway, who had been caught.

"No," said Valerian. "I have never seen a Door do this."

The words cost him. She saw them cost him. The thread of shadow that lay round his wrist gave a faint dark pulse, and he flinched, and the breath hissed between his teeth.

"I am sorry," he said. "I should not have said the other."

"Why did you?"

"Because it was a habit." He drew a slow breath. "Because you looked at me with that face, and I did not want you to see— I did not want you to find that I did not know."

"I don't need you to know everything."

"No." Something moved at the edge of his mouth. "That is what I am afraid of."

He came into the chapel. He stopped beside her, close enough that his sleeve touched her arm, and for a moment the two of them stood looking at the wax man in his rough brown robe. He seemed, now, quite small and quite young, and the painted laughter in his eyes was almost too much to look at. Isolde held the black key against her chest.

"The sentence," said Valerian.

"Yes."

"What is locked. There will be more of it."

"Yes. Nine more words, I think. Perhaps ten."

"And at the end of it, you imagine that you will know something." He did not look at her. His voice was very low. "Something about the Doors."

"About whoever made them."

"Yes." The word was barely there. "Isolde. I would ask a thing of you."

It was the first time he had said ask. She waited.

"I am bound by the covenant to hear what you find. I will not break it. But I would ask, if you are willing, that you not hurry. That you let me hear it slowly. A word at a time." He turned his head, at last, and she saw his face. "I think that I shall not like how it ends."