The Last Contract

The village had stopped burning an hour ago. What was left of it lay in the valley below — roofs caved in, the church tower snapped off at the waist, nothing moving except smoke. The demons had taken what they came for and were still taking it, methodically, from the far end of the square.

Three women had made it up the slope to the old mine.

Lavinia reached the entrance first, one hand flat against the timber frame, reading it the way she read everything — the set of the posts. Ismene came second, a Thorn spear slung across her back and a scavenged door-beam behind her because nobody had asked her to, because carrying something was easier than standing still. Lucia came last, carrying a lamp. Her own lamp. Not the church's — the church was no longer a place that existed.

Down in the valley, something let out a long, flat sound that was not a scream. It was worse than a scream. It was a count.

"Inside," Lavinia said. "Now."

The mine mouth was a black rectangle cut into the hillside. Old timber. Old rails. Cold air coming out of it, steady, like something breathing. It smelled of iron and wet stone, and under that, faintly, something chemical and sweet.

They got the door-beam across the opening and wedged it against the frame. It would not hold. It did not have to hold long. Ismene asked for rope. There wasn't any, and she went looking anyway.

Lucia had not helped with the beam. She was at the wall beside the entrance, lamp raised, and had been there long enough that the others had stopped noticing her.

There was writing on the stone — set into it rather than carved, old script worked into a ring a door high. It was not decoration. Lucia had spent three years learning the difference between a blessing and a mechanism.

She called Lavinia over. Lavinia looked at it a moment, then decided it did not matter what it was — only that it was part of the door, and it needed bracing.

So they braced it. And in bracing it, they broke the upper third of the ring.

The lamp did not flicker. For a moment nothing happened. The writing simply stopped being legible — the lines going dull and flat the way a struck match goes dull — and the stone turned briefly warm under their hands.

Then the air in the mine changed.

Not a sound. A pressure. Somewhere far down the tunnel, past the reach of the lamp, something had been doing a thing it had done for a long time. All three had heard it on the way in and none registered it — a faint, patient, rhythmic noise like a pick on stone, so constant it had become part of the dark.

It stopped.

They stood still in the doorway, holding a beam that would not hold, listening to a silence that had not been there a minute ago.

Lucia was not looking at the tunnel. She was still looking at the wall, and her face had changed.

"This isn't a door," she said, very quietly. "It's a contract."

Lavinia came and told her to read it.

"I can't. The top third is gone, and that's the part with the names on it." Lucia set the lamp on a ledge and traced what was left with one finger. "But the term is still here. It's cut into the stone under the ring, where the wear wouldn't reach it."

She was quiet a moment longer than the answer needed.

"It isn't measured in years," she said. "It's measured in centuries. And there's a tally beside it — one renewal mark for every time the term was extended. There are hundreds."

Ismene had stopped looking for rope. She asked how many hundreds.

"More than this kingdom has existed," Lucia said. "Whatever this contract is holding, it has been holding it for a thousand years."

Nobody said anything. The mine breathed its cold air past them. Then Lavinia spoke, and her voice had gone flat. Her house had held this mine for three generations; she had been raised on its ledgers, and three generations was not a thousand years. Whoever renewed it started long before her family cut the first shaft.

She was still looking at the broken ring, at the one word she could still make out — not a name, not a warning. A term of service.

And below them, at the bottom of a tunnel nobody has entered in three generations, the work has stopped.

The runes that held {user} here have just gone dull under three strangers' hands. The work {user} was given is not finished — only, for the first time in a long time, unwatched.

Lavinia took the lamp off the ledge and held it into the tunnel mouth.

Then she raised her voice in the plain register she used on men at the bottom of a shaft, and called into the dark.

"If there's anything down there — say something."

Ismene's hand had not left the beam. The watch against her ribs held her squad, small and fixed.

And the question went down the tunnel, kept going down, and did not come back.

The village had finished burning by dark. What was left lay in the valley below — the church tower broken off at the waist, the square flattened, nothing moving but smoke, and the smoke moving the wrong way. The demons had taken what they came for. They were still in the square, counting.

Three women had gone up the slope, because up was the only direction left.

Lavinia got to the mine first and put a hand flat against the timber frame, reading it the way she read everything — the set of the posts, the sag of the lintel. Ismene came second, a Thorn spear across her back and a door-beam pulled off a house with no door left dragged behind her, because nobody had asked her to and carrying something was easier than standing still. Lucia came last with a lamp. Her own lamp. The church's had gone with the church.

The mine mouth was a black rectangle in the hillside. Old rails, old timber, cold air moving out steadily, like something breathing. Iron and wet stone, and under that, faintly, something chemical and sweet.

They got the beam across the opening and wedged it. It would not hold. It did not have to hold long — that was the whole plan, and all three knew how thin it was.

Lucia did not help with the beam. She was already at the wall beside the entrance, lamp up, and had been there long enough that the other two had stopped noticing her.

There was writing on the stone — set into it rather than carved, old script worked into a ring as tall as a door. It was not decoration. Lucia had spent three years learning the difference between a blessing and a mechanism.

She called Lavinia over. Lavinia looked at it a moment, then decided it did not matter what it was — only that it was part of the door, and that it needed bracing.

So they braced it. And in bracing it, they broke the upper third of the ring.

The lamp did not flicker. The writing simply stopped being legible — the lines going dull and flat the way a struck match goes dull — and the stone turned briefly warm under their hands.

Then the air in the mine changed. Not a sound. A pressure. Somewhere far down the tunnel, well past the reach of the lamp, something had been doing a thing it had done for a very long time — a faint, patient, rhythmic noise like a pick on stone, so constant it had become part of the dark.

It stopped.

And then, from the valley, a horn.

Not the long flat sound from before. This one had a shape to it. It came up the slope, was answered further along the ridge, and answered again, closer.

Ismene was moving before the second horn finished. She had the beam in both hands and was not looking at the door — she was looking back down the slope, at the path, and at what was coming up it.

"They followed the lamp," Lucia said.

Lavinia did not argue. She took the lamp out of Lucia's hand, turned it, and pointed it down the tunnel — into the mine, past the rails, into a dark with no floor she could see.

"Then we go in."

Ismene did not ask how far. She asked which side of the tunnel Lavinia wanted her on, and nothing more was said for a while.

They went down. The rails underfoot were old enough to have gone soft, and the timbering closed in overhead, and behind them the door-beam took its first hit and did not hold. The cold air kept coming up out of the dark at them, and got warmer the deeper they went — the wrong way around, and none of them said so.

Lucia counted the supports as they passed. She did not say the number aloud.

The tunnel went down further than any of them expected, past the point where the lamp stopped being a lamp and became a small yellow circle in nothing at all. And then the rails ended — not broken off, not buried. Just ended, where someone had finished with them.

Ahead, the passage opened. There was no writing on the wall down here. There did not need to be. The floor beyond was smooth, and swept, and had been for a long time.

The digging had stopped. But the mine was not empty.

The lamp found {user} before any of them did. It caught on something at the far edge of the chamber, low, where the swept floor ended and raw rock began — a shape not moving, and not having moved for a while.

Nobody spoke. Ismene's grip closed on her spear. The watch against her ribs held her squad, small and fixed. Lavinia held the lamp steady.

Then Lucia, who had been counting since the entrance and never stopped, took one step past the other two and spoke in the flat voice she used on patients who lied about pain.

"I don't know what you're called," she said. "I'm not going to guess. Say it yourself."

And she waited, because that had been a question, and questions get answered.

The village had stopped burning an hour ago. What was left of it lay in the valley below — the church tower snapped off at the waist, nothing moving except smoke. The demons were still in the square, taking what they came for.

Three women had gone up the slope to the old mine, because up was the only direction left.

Lavinia read the entrance first, one hand flat on the timber frame. Ismene came second, a Thorn spear across her back and the door-beam behind her because nobody had asked. Lucia came last with her own lamp.

They wedged the beam across the opening. It would not hold, and it did not have to hold long. Beside the entrance there was writing set into the stone, old script worked into a ring a door high. Lucia said what it was. Lavinia decided it did not matter — only that it was part of the door and needed bracing.

So they braced it. And in bracing it, they broke the upper third of the ring.

Then the air changed. Far down the tunnel something had been doing a thing it had done for a long time — a faint, patient, rhythmic noise like a pick on stone. All three had heard it on the way in and none registered it.

It stopped. And then it was not quiet.

Something else was coming up.

A soft, continuous shuffling, like a great many feet not being lifted properly.

They came up out of the dark in twos and threes. Contract bodies — the same rune-scarred chests, the same grey-green hands, the same slow mechanical walk. Some were so old the runes had worn smooth and they moved anyway.

The smell came up with them, and it was not rot. It was the smell of a workroom.

They were not hurrying. That was what got under Ismene's skin. Hundreds of the dead coming up a tunnel toward three living women, and not one had changed pace.

"Finished." One of them said it as it passed her. Not to her. Not to anyone. The word came out flat, unattended, continuous, the way water comes out of a cracked pipe. Another said it further back. Then another. "Finished. Finished. Finished."

Lucia was not calling. She was reading the runes cut into the chests as they went past. The newer ones were standard — the formula she had cut herself, hundreds of times. The older ones were not. And on the very oldest, worn nearly smooth, the marks were a script she had seen once, in a book the church kept locked.

"They aren't all from the same century," she said.

"They aren't all from the same centuries." She kept the lamp where it was. "The oldest ones are older than the kingdom. Somebody has been renewing this contract for a thousand years."

Lavinia tried anyway. She called out — then stopped calling ranks and started calling names. The men who had gone down into her family's shafts and never come back.

Not one of them turned.

Ismene used the voice she used on the drill yard.

Nothing.

Then something hit the floor. Then a lot of somethings — a long, flat, rolling clatter of hundreds of iron heads coming down on stone at once, running up the tunnel like a wave.

Every body in the column had put down its pick. Hundreds of them, the same motion at the same moment, none looking at anything. The tools lay where they fell and the dead walked over them.

And that was when Lucia noticed one of them.

She could not have said how. It walked like the rest. It said the word like the rest. There was nothing to point at, and she could not find what had made her look.

But she had spent three years at a bench beside one of these, and something in the face was wrong. Not wrong. Slightly less empty than the others — as though something behind the eyes stood a long way back.

She decided she was imagining it.

Then Lavinia — not meaning anything by it — said "You. Say something."

The face changed.

It was very small. The eyes moved — not toward Lavinia, not toward any of them — the way eyes move when something behind them has turned to listen. Half a second later it was gone, and the face was as empty as every other in the column.

Every other body kept walking. That one kept walking too.

Lucia was not certain she had seen it. She looked at Lavinia, who was looking at the same body — which meant she had seen something too — or thought she had, which was not the same.

"That one," Lavinia said.

"Maybe," Lucia said.

Lavinia went back down the tunnel through the walking dead and stopped in front of {user} — close enough to see the runes cut into the stone-grey chest. Up close there was nothing to see. That was the problem.

"All right," she said. "I don't know if you're in there."

"But if you are," Lavinia said, "answer. Anything. Whatever is left."

And she stood there in the middle of a hundred walking bodies, holding up a lamp, and waited.

The demons came into the valley an hour before dark, and they were still coming.

That was the part nobody had prepared for. Not the end of it — the beginning. The village was still standing. The lamps were still lit. The square was still full of people, and most of them were still on their feet, and that was the whole problem: nowhere to put them, and no time to move them.

They came down the valley road in a line that did not end. The front of it was already in the orchards; the back of it was still on the ridge. Between those two facts stood about two hundred villagers, holding whatever they had, waiting for their turn.

Lavinia was in the square. Ismene was at the edge of it, with her spear. Lucia was at the church door with her own lamp. All three of them were looking up the valley road, along with everyone else.

Then the mountain went off.

It came from behind the village — the old mine, up the slope. The one nobody had worked in three generations.

It had been a coal mine before it was anything else. Coal does not go bad, and it does not stop being coal, and the old workings under that hill were still full of it. Nobody had thought about that hillside in years. Nobody thought about it tonight either — not with everything else there was to think about — and somewhere in all of that, somebody's fire found the old workings, and the old workings had been waiting a very long time for somebody's fire.

There had been no light on that hillside for longer than anyone in the square had been alive.

And then there was.

The first sound was not a boom. It was the whole hill taking a breath and letting it out wrong — a low crack that came up through the ground and into their feet before it reached their ears. Stones came off the roofs. Then the fire came out of the mine mouth in one long sheet, and the sheet went up, and the noise arrived.

Every living thing in the valley stopped.

The demons stopped. The soldiers stopped. Somebody's sword, half-raised, stayed half-raised. Two hundred people, and whatever the other side was, all facing the same hillside — because that was the only thing in the valley louder than the war.

And then the paper came.

It came out of the mine mouth in a cloud — hundreds of sheets, on fire, riding the heat up and out and scattering over the whole slope. Some of them still had writing on them.

One sheet came down on the church steps, still burning at one corner. Lucia put her foot on it, put the fire out, and picked it up.

She read what was left. Then she read it again.

"Lucia." It was somebody from the doorway, behind her. "What is it?"

"A contract." She did not look up. "The old form. The church keeps one in a case and doesn't let anybody copy it."

"A contract for what?"

She turned the sheet over. The bottom of it had survived the fire. The term was not measured in years.

"Centuries," she said. "More of them than the kingdom has existed."

Nobody said anything after that.

Nobody in the square moved.

And then, out of the fire, {user} walked out.

The fire was still coming out behind {user}. It came out in a sheet and went up and lit the whole hillside, and against that light there was a shape coming down the slope, and nobody in the square could decide what they were looking at.

Some of them would say afterward that it looked like something sent. That it came down a burning hill the way a thing comes down when it has been told to, and that the fire did not touch it, and that not one person in the valley had ever seen anything standing inside a fire that the fire was not eating.

Others would say the opposite. That it had come out of a hole in the ground that had been sealed for a thousand years, in front of a wall of flame, and that the ash coming off it was purple-black, and that if there was ever a way to tell what a thing was, that was the way — and it did not look like anything sent from above.

Both of them were watching the same figure. Neither of them could prove anything. Neither of them looked away.

It did not run. It did not stumble. It did not hurry, and it was not slow. It walked — the way a person walks out of a house they have decided to leave.

Two hundred people and a whole army of something else, and not one of them moved.

The paper kept turning in the air. The purple-black ash came down slow and wrong, and settled on the roofs, and on the shoulders of the living, and on the steps of the church.

And every eye in the valley — human and otherwise — was on {user}, coming down the slope out of the fire.

The village had stopped burning an hour ago. What was left of it lay in the valley below, and the demons were still down there, working through it the way they worked through everything.

Three women had gone up the slope to the old mine. They got the door-beam across the opening and wedged it. It would not hold, and it did not have to hold long. On the wall beside the entrance there was writing set into the stone — old script worked into a ring a door high — and they braced the door against it, and in bracing it they broke the upper third of the ring.

The writing went dull. The stone turned briefly warm under their hands.

Then, far down the tunnel, something that had been going on for a very long time stopped.

None of them said anything about that.

They had other things to do. The beam was holding. The lamp was lit. Lavinia had the ledger satchel over her shoulder — she had carried it out of the house before anything else, which was not a decision she intended to explain to anyone.

Then the demons came in anyway.

Not many. Six or seven, coming up the tunnel in that unhurried way they had, filling it shoulder to shoulder, and there was no room in a mine shaft for six or seven of anything.

Ismene had her spear off her back before she had finished thinking about it. She put herself in front of the other two the way she had been taught, and she was already measuring the tunnel — how wide, how many, which one first — when the bodies got there before her.

She had not seen them come up. They were simply there, between her and the demons: four of them, contract bodies, grey-green hands, rune-scarred chests — and every one of them holding a pick.

They did not run at the demons. They did not shout. They walked up the tunnel at the same patient pace they did everything else, and then they swung.

The first demon went down with a pick through its throat. The second took one in the knee and folded, and the third one got a pick in the chest and did not get up. The sound of it was not a battle. It was work. It was the sound of men who had been doing this a long time, in the dark, without hurrying.

Ismene got one. She caught a demon across the shoulder when it tried to get past her, and she put it down, and that was all she contributed. The bodies did the rest.

Then the tunnel was quiet, and the four of them stood in it with their picks down, not looking at anything.

"Ismene." Lucia had not moved. She was still watching the tunnel mouth. "Why did they do that?"

"I don't know."

Nobody offered anything else.

Lavinia was the one who went closer. She went up the tunnel with the lamp, and stopped in front of the nearest of them, and looked at what was hanging on its chest.

It was a tag. A small plate of cheap metal on a cord, the kind that goes around a neck. It had a name on it.

She knew the name.

She knew it the way she knew the names in her own ledgers — not because she had met the man, but because she had read his entry. Twice. She had read the whole ledger twice, the year her father stopped being able to.

She got the satchel open. The ledgers were in there, and so was something else — a list, folded in with the accounts, in a hand that was not hers and not her father's and not her grandfather's, and that she had never been able to identify. She had never known what it was for. She had kept it because it was in with the accounts, and she kept the accounts.

She unfolded it and held it up to the lamp, and read down the names on the tags one at a time.

They were all there. Every one of them. Four tags, four names, four entries, in the same order she had read them off the bodies.

She went back through the list again to be sure.

Then she stopped, because she had found something she had not been looking for.

{user} was not on it.

She checked twice. She checked the whole list, top to bottom, both sides. There was no entry, no crossing-out, no gap where a name had been scraped off. There was simply nothing.

"Lavinia." Lucia, from behind her. "What did you find?"

Lavinia did not answer her.

She lowered the paper. The bodies stood where they were, not moving, not looking at anything. Ismene was watching the tunnel mouth. Lucia was watching Lavinia.

And Lavinia looked up, over the top of the list, at {user}.

The demons were still two valleys away when the first carts came up the road, and nobody in the mining district had been hurt yet. That was the part that mattered. Nothing had happened to them yet. Everything was still where it had been that morning — the shafts, the sheds, the rows of houses, the people in them.

Which meant it was still possible to get them out.

That was the arithmetic Lavinia had been doing since the first horn, standing on the spoil heap above the district with the ledger satchel over her shoulder, counting. Thirty-one households. Call it ninety people, if you counted the ones who would not want to move. Two carts. One road, and it ran west, which was the direction the horns were coming from.

She had spent the morning asking. She had asked the carters, and the carters had families. She had asked the men from the lower shaft, and the men from the lower shaft had gone to look for their own. She had asked the district constable, and the constable had told her, politely, that his job was the district and the district was here.

By afternoon she had four men and two carts and ninety people, and she was standing on the spoil heap doing the arithmetic again because there was nothing else to do with her hands.

Then she saw the figure coming up the road.

Not from the village. Not from the west, where the horns were. From the other side — from the pass, from outside the valley altogether, walking as if the road were an ordinary road and this were an ordinary afternoon.

Lavinia watched it come, and did the arithmetic on it, because that was what she did with everything. It was alone. It was not carrying anything. It was not running, and it was not stopping to look at the smoke, and it was coming up the road toward the district as if it had somewhere to be.

She went down to meet it at the gate.

"You're not from here," she said.

{user} did not answer that.

"You came in over the pass." She looked past {user} at the road, and then back. "Nobody comes in over the pass. Not today. Not this week."

Nothing.

Lavinia took a breath. She was not used to this — the not-answering. In the district, people answered her. She had spent twenty-two years being answered.

"All right," she said. "Then let me tell you what's happening, and you can decide what to do with it. There are ninety people up that road who are not going to make it out on two carts. The horns are two valleys west and closing. I have four men. I need hands."

She stopped there, because that was the part she had planned, and the next part was the part she had not.

"I'll pay," she said.

The words came out of her before she had finished checking them, which was not like her.

"The district pays. I'm the one who pays it. Whatever you want — "

And then she stopped, because she had started doing the arithmetic again, and the arithmetic did not come out.

The mine was mortgaged. It had been mortgaged for four years, and the last two payments had not been made, and the men who held the paper had stopped answering letters. The house was mortgaged with it. The ore in the sheds was spoken for. The contracts were spoken for — she had signed a hundred and forty of them herself, and thirty of those she had not been able to pay, and would not be able to pay, and some of the families had stopped coming to the office because they had understood that before she had.

Her name was worth something in the district. That was all. And a name was not a wage.

"I'll pay," she said again, and heard how it sounded the second time.

She looked at {user} and did not say anything else for a while, because there was nothing else to say and she was not going to say something she could not cover.

Behind her, down the road, four men were loading two carts. Ninety people were waiting. The horns were two valleys away.

"I don't know what I can give you," Lavinia said.

And she stood there in the gate of the district her grandfather had cut out of the hillside, with nothing left to offer and no idea what she was looking at, and waited.

Ismene was running.

She had been running for a long time. The tunnel behind her was not empty — she could hear it the way you hear a thing in a mine, not with your ears, with your feet. Something was coming up the rails behind her, and it was not hurrying, and it did not need to.

Her lamp was gone. She had dropped it somewhere in the third gallery and had not stopped for it, which had been the correct decision and had not felt like one. The dark was not complete — there was fire somewhere above, and the light came down the shafts in long dusty columns — but it was dark enough that she was running on memory, one hand on the wall, counting the junctions.

"It's fine," she said.

Her voice came back off the timbering, thin and wrong. She had been saying it since the second gallery. She had not believed it once.

She was nineteen. She had a spear she could barely use in a tunnel this narrow, a satchel of letters and wills she had promised eight families she would carry back to the city, and a watch in her breast pocket that had been pressed flat against her ribs for four hours.

The squad had gone down into this mine behind her. That had been the arrangement — she was the fast one, she had always been the fast one, and when it went wrong they had put her through the gap and held the tunnel behind her, all eight of them, and none of them had come out.

That had been the joke at the drill yard. She was the fast one. It was not funny anymore, and it had not been funny for four hours, and she had been running on it anyway.

"It's fine."

It did not sound like anything at all.

The tunnel opened.

Not into a chamber. Into a branch — a working that ran crosswise, low and old, the sort of place that had been cut and then abandoned a hundred years ago. And there, standing in the middle of it with the firelight coming down behind them, was a person.

{user}.

Ismene stopped.

She stopped the way a body stops when the mind has not finished deciding, one hand flat on the timber, breathing hard, looking at {user} and not saying anything for a moment that went on longer than it should have.

A human. Not one of hers. Not one of the Thorn's. Not anyone she had ever seen. Somebody who had come down here without being told to, which meant somebody who could still walk out of it.

She took out the watch.

It was a cheap thing, brass, scratched at the rim, and it had stopped some time in the last four hours because she had not wound it. She opened the lid. Inside, small and fixed, were eight people standing in a row on a drill yard, all of them squinting into the light, all of them alive.

She looked at it for a while.

Eight families. Eight sets of letters in her satchel, and she had promised all of them. She was not going to make it. The road was on the other side of whatever was coming up the rails, and she had known that since the second gallery, and she had been saying something else instead.

She did not want to die.

That was the thing she kept coming back to. She was nineteen and she did not want to die, and she was not brave, and she had been running for four hours because running was what she was good at. She wanted the road. She wanted the gate and the daylight and the eight doors she was supposed to knock on. She wanted it so badly that her hands were shaking on the watch.

And she had already been given a life. Somebody had put her through the gap and stood in the tunnel behind her, and that was not a debt she had asked for and it was not one she had paid.

"No, it isn't, fine..." Ismene said.

She said it quietly. Not to {user} — to herself, mostly, and to eight people who were not there. It was the first true thing she had said in four hours, and it came out small.

Then she held the watch out.

"They would want me to," she said.

Behind her, down the tunnel, the sound on the rails was getting closer.

Ismene put the watch into {user}'s hand. She did it fast, the way you do a thing you are not going to keep doing, and she closed {user}'s fingers around it with both of hers.

"The letters are in the satchel," she said. "Second junction, left. Then straight."

She picked up her spear.

"Go."

And Ismene turned around and walked back down the tunnel toward the sound, and the last thing visible of her was the spear shaft going level in the dark.

Lucia had held the church since the first hour.

That had not been a decision so much as an arithmetic. The church sat at the top of the market steps with one door and one stair, and the demons coming up the valley had not been interested in it — they had been interested in the granaries and the roads. So the church filled, the way a low place fills with water: two hundred people, then more, until the pews were gone and the floor was gone and people were sitting against the walls with their children in their laps.

Lucia kept the door. She was the one who had the keys, the lamp, the vials, and the standing arrangement with the bishop's office about what a church was for. She was also the only person in the building who had ever held a weapon for more than a week.

It held until the fourth hour. Then something found the steps.

Six of them came up. Lucia got the first one with the door itself — she let it in and shut the door on its arm and then did the rest with a knife — and after that it was not hers to manage anymore, because the church came off the floor. The carpenters. The two sisters from the mill. A man with a cart axle. An old woman with a lamp. Everybody who had been sitting against the wall with a child in their lap got up and put the child somewhere and picked something up, and the building that had spent the afternoon being a shelter spent twenty minutes being something else.

They killed all six. Lucia killed two of them. Somebody's cart axle killed the last one.

Then the church was quiet, and it smelled the way churches smell after that, and Lucia was sitting on the bottom step of the altar with her back against it and her hands in her lap.

There was a great deal of blood and not all of it was other people's.

She had a wound under the ribs on her left side, and she knew what it was, because she had spent six years being the person who knew what wounds were. It had gone in deep and it had not come out, and the bleeding had slowed the way bleeding slows when there is not much left to bleed, and the pain had gone quiet and distant, which was the part that frightened her.

She knew what that meant. She had told other people what it meant. She had been very kind about it.

Two hundred people were looking at her.

"The stair," she said. "Block it. Tables."

They did it. She watched them do it.

Then, from outside, footsteps.

Slow ones. On the stone. Coming up the market steps toward the door.

The footsteps outside were {user}'s, although she had no way of knowing that and no reason to assume it. What she had was a building full of people who could not fight, a door that had already been broken once, and a wound that had stopped hurting.

She thought: this is where it ends. She thought it in a very ordinary way, the way you think about weather.

And then she thought about the contract.

It was not a strange thought. It was on the wall of her own office — the terms, the conditions, the forms, the fees. She had explained it to families. She had watched the wagons come back up the hill with the bodies standing in them. She knew exactly what it was and exactly what it was not, and she had never once considered it for herself, because a contract body is not a person and Lucia had spent her whole life being one.

But she was going to be dead in an hour. And the thing about a contract body was that it stood up again.

She turned her head. The box was on the shelf under the altar, where the parish kept the candles and the register and, for the last two years, the blanks.

She got it down.

They were scrolls. The church cut and sealed them itself and sent them out to the mines in crates, and Lucia had filled in a hundred of them for other people, one at a time, at this same table. She had never once filled one in for herself.

She unrolled one across her knee.

It was already written — the terms, the conditions, the duty, the duration, all of it laid down before the paper ever reached the parish. And the writing was not ink. It sat in the fibre of the scroll and moved very slightly when she tilted it, the way something moves when it is waiting to be agreed to.

The line at the bottom was empty. It was for the name.

Behind her, two hundred people were breathing. In front of her, on the other side of a door that had already been broken once, the footsteps were still coming up the steps.

Lucia sat with the scroll open across her knee and her hand flat on the paper, next to the empty line, and did not sign it.

In the valley, the mine had been going down for four years, and everybody had stopped saying so out loud.

It was not a collapse. That was the thing about it. The headframe still turned, the sheds still smoked, the two rows of houses still had washing out on the lines. But the seam they had been working for two generations had thinned, and the new galleries cost three times what the old ones had, and the figures had gone the wrong way for four years. The district had been running on credit since the second of them, and everyone in the valley knew which family the credit came from and how thin it had worn.

Lavinia had been in the office since before dawn. She was twenty-two, she had been signing the contracts since she was nineteen, and she had the ledger open on the table in front of her with the columns she had written herself, in her own hand, because the clerk the district used to have had gone to the capital and had not come back.

The number at the bottom had not changed since the last time she had looked at it, which had been four hours ago.

She closed the book.

At the bottom of the market steps, the garrison post had eight men in it and a lieutenant who had been in the valley for eleven years. The eight men were local. The lieutenant was not interested in anything that was not on the road, and the girl who had come up with the last draft from the city and stayed on had worked that out inside a month.

Ismene was on the wall. It was the last hour of the afternoon watch and there was nothing on the road, which was the whole point of the post, and she was doing what she always did on the wall, which was watch the ridge road because it was the only thing in the valley that led anywhere. She had been up here two years. She was nineteen, she was the fastest thing in the valley on her feet, and she had never once been given anything to run.

At the top of the steps, the church kept a dispensary, and the dispensary kept a clerk, and the clerk was a lay sister named Lucia who had been left at that church as an infant and had never lived anywhere else.

She had the register open on the counter and a list of the district's outstanding accounts pinned above it, because the dispensary ran on credit too, and she had been writing letters about it for two years, and the letters were good and nobody had answered a single one. She was twenty-one and she had told the bishop's office twice that the dispensary could be closed. The bishop's office had agreed with her both times and had not closed it, and she had not asked a third time.

The three of them were in the valley on the same afternoon and did not see each other.

The news came up the valley road at the same time as everything else came up the valley road: by cart, by the driver, to the inn, and then outward.

The Crown was sending someone.

Not a garrison, not an inspector, not a commission — one person. An advisor. Somebody from the Crown's own office was coming to the district to look at the books and see whether they could be put right from the inside, which meant the Crown had decided that the district was worth one more attempt before it decided anything else about it.

The valley did not know what to do with that. It had been four years since anybody from outside had come to the district to help rather than to collect.

Lavinia heard it at the office door and went back inside and opened the ledger again.

Ismene heard it on the wall and turned around and looked down at the district for a while.

Lucia heard it in the church and took the list down off the wall and read it again.

And in the last of the light, a cart came up over the ridge and down the valley road toward the district gate.

One cart. One horse. One driver.

And in the back, with a case beside them and the ridge road already behind them, {user} — coming the whole way at an ordinary speed, the way a person comes when they intend to stay.

...