Three thousand people were trapped inside the cathedral.
The capital was beginning to forget why they had gathered.
In the morning, it was called a pilgrimage.
At noon, a mass.
Before sunset, they said no one was there.
The cathedral bell rang three thousand times.
With every toll, the face of one cleric vanished from one citizen's memory.
When the last bell rang, a guard at the north gate asked,
"What is a cleric?"
He had confessed every week of his life.
He forgot the profession that had listened to his sins first.
That guard closed the north gate.
Six hundred one northern refugees stood outside.
A white-haired old man.
A woman wearing only one shoe.
A soldier using a broken spear as a cane.
People who had lost their homes, wells, and fields in the white-flag village.
"Address," the quarantine captain demanded.
"Northern border village," Ria answered.
"That land is registered as surrendered property."
"The people were released."
"Where does a person without land come from?"
"I just told you."
"That place does not exist in the Imperial ledger."
Quarantine Captain Bram Sorn stood inside the gate.
Forty years old.
Mask straps had carved permanent grooves into the bridge of his nose. Thirty keys hung at his waist.
After losing a city because he closed its gates too late during the plague, he closed every gate one day early.
This time, he had closed it one hour before the refugees arrived.
"People with no address in the ledger cannot enter the capital."
"What if you let them in?" Cassian asked.
Bram looked at his empty right sleeve.
"If you break the gate, you violate quarantine law."
"Then?"
"The guards die."
"Then?"
"The refugees enter."
"No problem, then."
Cassian placed his left hand on the north gate.
The Oath Severing line moved across his palm.
Three contracts hung upon the gate.
The Crown's right of passage.
The Papal Court's quarantine authority.
The guild's entry tax.
Cut one, and the other two opened the gate.
Bram drew a key.
It was not a sword.
Even so, he aimed it at Cassian's throat.
"If I open the gate, who receives quarantine first? The six hundred one refugees or the capital's two hundred eighty thousand?"
"Both."
"There are only one hundred ten quarantine officers."
"Then do it one hundred ten times."
"While one person is examined, all the others move."
Bram was not afraid.
Only fifty soldiers stood behind the gate.
Cassian could kill them all and enter if he wished.
Bram knew that and did not lower the key.
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"I locked the gate early," Bram said.
"Those who freeze outside tonight are my sin."
"How many?"
"The medical officer said thirty-two."
"Then write their names."
"I already have."
Bram took a ledger from inside his coat.
The first page held the names of thirty-two people who had not yet died.
Only the column for time of death was blank.
Cassian did not cut the gate.
He counted the names of those he killed.
Bram had counted in advance the names of those he would kill by leaving them outside.
They understood each other.
That made them hate each other more.
"It opens at sunrise," Bram said.
"And if they die before then?"
"They remain in my ledger."
A stone flew from among the refugees.
It struck Bram's forehead.
Blood ran.
He did not open the gate.
The second stone came at Cassian.
"You said you saved us!" shouted a woman from the white-flag village.
"Did you save us to die here without homes?"
Cassian avoided the stone.
"You didn't die in the village."
"You call that saving us?"
"It was then."
The woman raised a third stone.
Adel did not stop her.
Ria merely opened her record sheets.
Marchesa stood before the refugees.
With half her armor gone, she took the stones.
Not in Cassian's place.
She refused to obstruct her surrendered people's right to throw them.
Stones struck her shoulder and face.
She did not draw her sword.
A white flag descended from above the north gate.
The end of the cloth smelled of holy oil.
"We will receive the six hundred refugees," said an old man on the wall.
Grand Inquisitor Odric Sahl.
Not one stain marked his white vestments. In his right hand, he carried a shoe brush.
"Where did the last one go?" Cassian asked.
"Six hundred one," Odric corrected at once.
"My apologies. Inside the White Line, numbers often lose one."
He descended the wall stairs.
Bram had not opened the gate, yet Odric came outside.
His white vestments passed through the crack in the north gate.
He thinned as though only a confession record, not a body, was moving. Then he became an old man again.
Odric knelt before Cassian.
He put the brush to the shoe beneath Cassian's severed sleeve.
He brushed off snow, blood, and residue dust.
"What are you doing?"
"I clean the defendant's shoes before declaring guilt."
"Whose guilt?"
"Yours."
The brush stopped.
"For a crime you have not yet committed."
Odric stood.
"We will house every refugee in the cathedral's hospital quarter. We will assign them addresses as well."
Bram said,
"The cathedral is under lockdown."
"The hospital perimeter lies outside the White Line."
"Quarantine authority is mine."
"The right of salvation is mine."
The two men did not look at each other.
Law and doctrine bargained over the refugees' heads.
Cassian asked,
"The price?"
Odric unfolded the white flag.
A right arm was wrapped inside.
It had no flesh.
Thousands of slender finger bones and prayer texts had been twisted into the shape of a human arm.
There was one eye in its palm.
When the eyelid opened, three thousand voices inside the cathedral began to confess.
Theft.
Adultery.
Perjury.
Blessing bread meant for the starving, then eating it afterward.
Selling a dying patient's place in line.
Sins that were not their own were mixed among them.
"The Right Arm of Three Thousand Confessors," Odric said.
"A holy relic to replace the arm you lost."
Black threads emerged from Cassian's empty shoulder.
They moved toward the relic arm.
It could not be attached.
Ownership of his severed right arm remained with the surrender wall at the border.
The instant a new arm was attached, the contract would seize it as the same collateral.
Hassan read the sentences around the relic.
"It is not an attachment."
"Then what?"
"A loan. The people inside move the arm for you."
Adel looked at its fingers.
"What is the cost when it moves?"
Before answering, Odric cleaned Cassian's other shoe.
"One prayer."
"Whose?"
"The cleric moving the arm."
"And when the prayer ends?"
"The next person continues."
It was not a lie.
It was merely not the whole truth.
Elodie appeared atop the north gate.
She wore no white mask.
With her sinmarkless face, she looked down at the relic arm.
"Where was that arm made?"
Odric bowed.
"From a design bestowed by Your Highness."
"I have never seen it before."
"The signature is yours."
A lily seal was stamped into the relic's shoulder.
The same one found on Aaron's surrender document.
Ria drew the two seals side by side.
Even the flaw on one petal matched.
"Read the date," Cassian said.
Hassan read the figures inside the shoulder bone.
"Twenty-seven years before Her Highness was born."
Elodie wrote her own name on her palm.
It was her habit before telling a lie.
This time, she completed every letter before she spoke.
"That is not my signature."
Cassian saw no sin in her.
No trace of a lie either.
Odric held out the arm.
"Six hundred refugees."
"Six hundred one," Ria corrected.
"We guarantee their shelter, food, and legal standing through winter."
"In exchange, I wear that."
"And enter the cathedral."
Adel stepped in front of Cassian.
"No."
"Why?"
"That arm is not a treatment tool. It is a machine that grinds people into motion."
"The refugees get inside."
"Do not pretend you are accepting it for them."
Adel was precise.
Cassian was not taking the arm for the refugees.
A lockdown holding three thousand people.
Elodie's seal from before her birth.
A cathedral gathering sin in one place.
And a right arm that was not his.
He needed all of them.
The refugees merely entered with him.
Adel opened the relic's fingers one by one.
"Forget the numbers."
The first finger.
"Take that arm, and the gate opens. The refugees enter."
The second.
"Every time the arm completes one movement, one person inside loses their name and confession."
The third.
"And that arm can move without your permission."
Adel pressed the three fingers against Cassian's chest.
"One gate."
"One person."
"One ownerless command."
It was not a complicated transaction.
Cassian gained a way in.
Someone inside the cathedral lost their existence.
Even Cassian could not choose who paid next.
"Will you still take it?"
"Is that why you stopped me?"
"So you cannot say you did not know."
Ria recorded the sentence.
Cassian did not ask for the number again.
"I'll take it," Cassian said.
Marchesa asked,
"And if the arm eats you?"
"I'll know after I bite first."
Odric put the relic arm to Cassian's empty shoulder.
No alignment seam formed.
Prayer texts wrapped around his back and neck.
A white sleeve in the shape of a right arm hung there.
Cassian did not move.
The arm bent one finger first.
Inside the cathedral, one cleric stopped confessing.
He forgot what sin he had been speaking of.
The second finger bent.
He forgot his own name.
The third.
The person beside him looked over and asked,
"Who are you?"
The relic arm formed a fist.
One man's confession and name vanished completely.
One seat in the cathedral became empty.
The body remained sitting there.
Odric said,
"One prayer is complete."
Cassian did not move the arm.
The arm pointed itself toward the north gate.
The eye in its palm opened.
One white line was drawn down the center of the gate.
It split without a sound.
A road opened for the refugees.
At the same time, the White Line ignited across the capital.
Citizens looked toward the cathedral.
"What is that building?"
The first of the three thousand had been erased.
Cassian's new right arm began to move its second finger.