Chapter 51 The Book of Hands

The stair was narrow, and it smelled of cold stone and tallow, and Margaret climbed it with the machine against her hip and her father's key folded flat in her pocket, and at the top of the stair there was a door, and beyond the door there was the church, small and dark and smelling of pine resin and snow, and beyond the church there was the city, lying under a sky the colour of wet slate, its windows shuttered for the blackout, its harbour already stiffening with the first ice of the year. Brennan shut the door behind them and put his shoulder to it, the way a man puts his shoulder to a thing he has decided to be responsible for, and Edith went along the pew ends lighting candles until the east window came up out of the dark like a page coming up out of a cipher. Erik Halvorsen climbed the last three steps slowly, one hand on the rail. In the candlelight his age was no longer something he wore; it was something he carried, like a sack of grain up a hill. He set his machine on the vestry table with both hands, carefully, the way a priest sets down a thing that has been in his family longer than he has. "You looked at the wall," he said. "Now you must look at the book." "There is no book," Margaret said. "I have read everything the loom ever wrote. Your ledger. My father's keys. The chain's archive. There was never a book." "There is always a book," Erik said. "The chain kept records so that the truth could be buried. The loom keeps records so that the reading can go on after the reader." He crossed himself, absently, an old habit arriving late to a man who had stopped believing in its address years ago, and took from the vestry drawer a volume bound in grey boards, unmarked, thin as a hymnal, and laid it on the table between the candles. "We called it the book of hands. When a reader dies, or tires, or is taken, the hand that takes up the work signs this book. It has been signed since 1919." Margaret did not touch it at first. She had spent her life learning that the most dangerous documents are the ones that look smallest — a key folded into a binding, a prophecy folded into a photograph, a name written where no name should be. She opened it under the candle and read. The entries were short. A name; a city; a year of taking up; a line or two in each hand, and every hand was different, and every hand was careful. A reader in Riga who had signed in 1921 and handed over in 1934, "on account of my eyes." A reader in Trieste whose entry ended with a date and nothing else. A reader in Vienna whose successor had written, beneath his name: *He read well. They shot him anyway.* Twenty years of it, and then the current entry, in Erik's tired, upright script, dated the winter of 1924, Helsinki. And above Erik's entry, one page earlier, in a hand she knew better than any living hand — the hand from the margins of books, the hand from envelopes, the small patient script that had written her name on forty lines of road — a single line. *Chosen. Refused. Paid.* Margaret read it four times. The church was very quiet around her, the quiet of a building that is used to being spoken to without answer. "My father," she said at last, and her voice held, because she had trained it to hold, because a woman who deciphers for a living learns early what her voice is for. "The loom chose him. Before the Blitz. Before me." "He was the best reader I ever met," Erik said, "and the only one who said no. It was 1940. The war was six months old and everyone believed it would end the way the last one ended, with paperwork. We believed the loom needed seating before the peace, so that the threads would not scatter into the hands of men like Hale." He turned the pages gently, past names and cities, past the small careful hands of dead readers. "He heard the whole of it, the way you have heard it. Then he wrote his refusal in this book, and he built the third key instead, and he went home to London, and eight weeks later the fire came for him." "The fire was scheduled," Margaret said. "The fire was always scheduled. December the fifteenth was chosen by men who wrote their murders as prophecy." "Yes," Erik said. Nothing in his face moved away from her. "The refusal was paid for. That is what the entry says, and that is what happened, and I would rather you heard it from a man who watched it happen than from your own imagination, which will be crueler than the truth." He closed the book but did not take it back. "You asked the wall for names. Here is mine. I signed this book in 1924 because I believed that order was holy and that a thread held tight is kinder than a thread let fall. I wove prophecies for twenty years, and I have spent the last four of them building the one prophecy that cannot hold anyone, so that I could sign this book again, on the third of March, in the column for leaving. That is all the date ever was. The day I put the weight down." "And if nobody picks it up," Brennan said from the door, where he had been standing with his coat still on and his eyes on the dark windows, "on the day after?" "Then the threads do not wait," Erik said. "A reading engine that hums without a hand drifts toward whatever hand feeds it paper. There are men in this Baltic already collecting readers the way other men collect debts. When Finland makes her peace — and she will make it soon; the legations can smell it, they are burning their files a drawer at a time — every service that means to fight the next war will come north looking for the loom. The book must have a hand in it by the date, or the date closes, and what opens afterwards will not be ours to choose." Margaret stood with the book open in her hands and the machine humming faintly on the vestry table, and she understood that the question had never been whether she believed in the loom. The question was who would hold it on the morning after she refused to. "I am not my father," she said. "And I am not you. I will not write fates, Erik. Whatever you are asking, the answer begins there." "Good," Erik said, and for the first time since they had come down the stair into his room he smiled, briefly, like ice cracking in a sun that never quite climbs. "That is exactly where it should begin." Far off across the frozen harbour, so distant it might have been traffic, there came a sound like a heavy drawer closing, and then another, and then a long rolling silence. Edith lifted her head. Brennan was already at the window, shading the candle with his hand. "Engines," he said. "High up. A great many of them." Erik listened, with his head tipped toward the ceiling, like a man hearing weather a season early. "They are early," he said. "Bring the machines down."