The chamber the woman had been admitted to was not the working chamber. The working chamber was the chamber in which the man at the table had received his small careful summons of three weeks earlier; she had, on her arrival in the small stone house, been shown not into that chamber but into a smaller one at the end of the corridor, which she had not, in her three years of service, known to exist.
The smaller chamber was very plain. It had a low table of unworked wood, two chairs of the same wood, a single lamp in a bracket on the wall, and on the floor, beside the table, a man.
The man was kneeling.
He was not kneeling for her. He was kneeling because he had been told to kneel, two days ago, by the hand that had brought him from the small stone cell beneath the working chamber to the smaller chamber at the end of the corridor, and he had not, in the two days, been told to do anything else. He had not eaten in two months. He had not slept in eleven weeks. He was, by every measurement her own hand had been taught to take, willing-dead.
She had heard the term used in the small careful private language of the work for three years. She had not, in three years, met one. She had handled, in three years, the dead the work had raised; the bound dead, the chained dead, the dead Drexel had brought up from the cemeteries of three villages and used in the small steady ways the work had required. The bound dead were instruments. They walked because the staff walked them. They were not a person.
The willing-dead were a different category. The willing-dead were dead who walked because they wanted to. The wanting was the difference.
She studied the man on the floor.
He was a knight. She knew this from the small careful list the master had set on the corner of the low table for her to read on entering. He had been captured, eighteen months ago, in a skirmish on the eastern downs.
She set the list down.
She sat in the chair across from the empty chair. She did not sit in the empty chair beside the table; the empty chair was the chair the master had left for her, but she had, in her three years of service, learned that the master's chair was not a chair she sat in unless the master had, by a method none of his lieutenants ever explained aloud, given her permission. She had not, this evening, been given the permission. She sat in the chair across from it, and she looked at the man on the floor.
"Grendar."
She used his name. The man on the floor lifted his head, very slightly. His eyes met hers.
"Yes."
The voice was soft. It did not draw breath. It came up out of the kneeling chest the way a voice came up out of a chest when the chest had agreed, by long private decision, to keep operating after the chest had stopped requiring it.
"Do you remember me."
"I do not."
"Do you remember being told you would meet me."
"I do."
"Do you know what you have agreed to."
"I have agreed to the work."
She nodded once. She had been given the small careful instruction by the master, three weeks earlier, about how to address one of the willing. She gave the instruction now, in the small flat sentences the work required.
"Grendar. You will travel north."
"Yes."
"You will carry, in a leather case, a single instrument. You will not open the case. You will not, on the road, allow the case to leave your hand. You will not be questioned at any town gate, because no town gate will know to question you. If a town gate questions you, you will not answer; you will continue. If a town gate does not permit you to continue, you will continue anyway."
"Yes."
"You will reach the cathedral on the eastern hill of the country called Krypton, by the road I will describe to you in detail when you are next in this room, and you will leave the case at the gate of the cathedral, and you will turn, and you will walk back south, and you will continue walking south until your body fails."
"Yes."
She watched him for a long count after the yes. She did not, in the watching, soften her face. She did not, in the watching, harden it. She had been told by her master, in the small careful three-week instruction that had preceded this evening, that the willing-dead did not require, and would not register, the small private softenings a living lieutenant might be tempted to give.
"Do you have a question."
The man on the floor considered the question. The considering was not the considering of a man in life. It was a pause, in which the yes did not come at the speed yes came.
"I do."
"Ask it."
"When the body fails, what will the body be."
She did not, on the question, look away. She had been warned, in the master's three-week instruction, that one of the willing-dead might, in his last meeting before the work, ask one question of the work, and that the question, if it came, would be a question the master had not given her an answer for.
She gave the answer she had, on her own, decided to give.
"It will be a body that has done the work, and that the country it falls in will, in time, return to the earth in the small ordinary way."
"Will it be remembered."
"Not by name. The work does not, in its nature, remember by name."
"Will it be remembered at all."
She did not answer.
She let the silence sit for a long count. The man on the floor did not, in the silence, repeat the question. He waited. The waiting was the waiting of a thing that had been given permission to ask and had been given, in the same permission, the small careful instruction that the answer might not come.
"Grendar."
"Yes."
"I cannot answer the second."
"I understand."
She rose.
She did not, on rising, bid him stand. The standing would, when it was required, be required by the master, in the working chamber, on the day the case was given. She walked to the door. She opened it. She left the smaller chamber. She did not look at him as she went.
She closed the door behind her.
In the corridor, she stood for a moment. The lamp at the corridor's end gave a small steady light against the bare stone wall. She did not, in the moment, allow herself any of the small involuntary expressions a living woman in her thirty-second year might have permitted herself.
She had, three years ago, been a daughter of a Counted House. She had, three weeks ago, walked into a Counted House and made a man with her own face's old portrait on his wall sign three documents he had not, that morning, intended to sign. She had, this evening, given a willing-dead knight a set of instructions for a journey north that ended in his body failing on a southern road.
The two were the same kind of game.
She had not, in three years of service, allowed herself the comparison. She allowed herself, in the corridor, the smallest part of it.
She walked the rest of the corridor. She entered the working chamber. The master was at the table. He did not raise his head. She set the small folded list of three documents she had brought, from the smaller chamber, on the corner of the table, and she walked, without speaking, to the eastern instrument on its stand.
She read the angle.
"He will go."
She said it without weight. She had not, in three years, addressed her master in any other tone. The master did not raise his head. He gave her the small flat motion of the hand that he gave at the close of any of her reports. She took the list back from the corner of the table. She left the chamber. She went, by the small narrow stair at the back of the house, to her own small narrow chamber at the top, and she packed, on the bed, the small leather case she had been packing every season for three years.
The dead who chose were a different kind of dead from the dead who had been chosen for. She had been giving instructions, for three years, to the second kind. She had, this evening, given her first to the first. The chronicle did not, on its higher register, register the difference as an action. It registered it as a category.
The larger event of the night was the master's hand, which had not, on her departure from the working chamber, returned to its writing. He had, after her motion of the hand, sat for a long count without writing.
He had begun, by his own hand, to spend the willing.