They ran.

It was not a thing either of them had done in front of the other, and for the first fifty metres Sefa was too busy breathing to notice that Teodor Ilves-Nakamura ran like a man giving evidence: elbows in, back straight, each stride exactly the same length as the last. He did not complain. He did not speak. When a goat stepped out of an alley by the water tank he went round it in a perfect arc and said "Excuse me" as he passed.

The Orlei bell struck four as they crossed the market, and the chime came down on them from the tower, three bars of a lullaby that every person in the square was walking beneath, and Sefa felt it in her teeth.

The chapel doors were shut. She hit the side one with her shoulder, and it swung inward onto cool air and candle smoke and a silence that was not the usual one.

The nave was empty. Bunmi's canvas bag lay on the front pew with the biscuit tin beside it. Pico stood in the middle of the aisle with his back to them, completely still, in the way he never was, his hands hanging at his sides. Bunmi was at the vestry curtain. She turned her head when she heard them, and her face was the colour of old candle wax.

"Don't let him see," she said, nodding at Pico. "Too late. He's seen."

"Where's Ansgar?"

"In there. He won't come out."

Sefa went past her and pulled the curtain back.

The chair was still wedged under the door handle, and the door was still shut. The little steel-topped room was lit by one tube light, and it hummed. Brother Ansgar Dlamini sat on the floor against the wall with his knees up and his arms around them, his glasses pushed up into his hair, shaking in small continuous tremors, like a rabbit that has been picked up.

On the counter, under the tarp, where a man had lain, there was a shape.

It was the shape of a man. It was the right length and breadth, a shallow rise at the chest, a slope at the knee, but the tarp had sunk into it, and as Sefa watched, one corner slid and fell, and what was under it caught the light. A pale, glittering, granular drift, as fine as flour in places and in others as coarse as rock salt, heaped on the steel in the contours of a body. Where the head had been, a slight roundness remained. Where the hands had folded, there were two small mounds.

The coat lay flat on top of it like a collapsed tent. The wedding ring had fallen from its chain and rested, small and gold, in a little white crater where his heart had been.

"It happened at ten to four," Ansgar whispered. "I was sitting there. I was reading the psalm for the dead because I didn't know what else to do. I heard a sound like sugar being poured. I looked up and the tarp was moving. He went down and down and down. It took about a minute. It didn't hurt, I don't think. It didn't hurt him. I think he'd been gone a long time." He gulped. "I'm sorry. I didn't touch it. I kept the chair on the door. I did the psalm to the end, because it seemed rude to stop."

Teodor had stopped on the threshold. His hand had gone to his top pocket, to the glass pen, and he was holding it between two fingers as if he might need to write something down and could not remember how.

"The deceased," he said, "is no longer in a condition in which he can be said to be a deceased."

"Teodor."

"I am sorry. It's the only way I can say it."

Sefa went and stood by the counter. She made herself look, and then made herself look longer. She reached out, and touched the edge of the pile with one finger. It was cold and dry and faintly gritty. A few grains clung to her skin. She lifted her hand, and under the tube light they were not cubes. They were curls.

Her arm itched under the sleeve, a long low prickle from wrist to elbow, like frost forming.

"Is that what happens?" she said.

Nobody answered.

"Ansgar. Is that what's going to happen to me?"

The monk lifted his face. His eyes behind the crooked glasses were swollen and wet and enormously gentle. "I don't know," he said. "I only weigh them, Sefa. I've never watched one go. Everybody who's carried the bloom has always died away somewhere else, in a hospital, in a ditch, at home. This is the first time anyone has stayed in front of me long enough to see."

"It takes the whole body."

"It takes everything that was in it." He swallowed. "Do you understand what I'm saying? Lenny Marsh's tithe was thirty-one grams. Thirty-one, from a living man, from a pinch. A man weighs seventy kilos. Whatever was in this one, everything he had ever kept, every day he'd walked through, every day he had been given to hold and not lose." His hands made a helpless gesture toward the counter. "It's all in there. Not only his own. I think, I think he was a, a kind of vessel. I think this is a library."

Sefa's mouth was dry as paper.

*He knows where I put them. All of them. Every one, back to the first.*

She had not understood. She had thought it was a map. She had thought it meant a secret address.

It meant him.

"He ate them," she said, slowly. "Not just a pinch. He took them in. He carried my days, and maybe more than mine, in his own body, so they couldn't be taken off me, so no one could open him up and breathe them. And I told myself he was a courier." Her laugh came out cracked. "I made him a safe. I made a man into a safe, and left him on my friend's barge."

"Child," said Bunmi, from the curtain.

"He's seventy kilos of me. Of Mama, perhaps. Of anybody Haldis has ever bottled. And I let a boy feed him rice."

There was a small stifled noise from the nave. Pico. Teodor turned and went out with an air of controlled urgency, and she heard his voice in the aisle, low and clear and unexpectedly kind, saying something about the biscuits.

Sefa made herself think. It was like trying to hold a fish in cold water.

"The twenty-four hours," she said. "Annex six. The chapel of record keeps the deceased until six tomorrow morning. If he's not a deceased, what is he? Teodor!"

He was back in the doorway before she finished. His face was very white and very composed.

"I have been considering that," he said. "And I am afraid I have bad news."

"Go on."

"Annex six covers 'the unclaimed body of a foreign national.' There is no body. There is no foreign national." He drew in a long breath. "There is a mineral deposit of unknown origin lying on guild lease. And under the lease agreement, as I read it this morning on the stairs, in the light of a different question, Clause Fourteen provides that all salt, brine, crystal, or saline deposit found upon the leased ground, of whatever origin, belongs to the guild."

Nobody moved.

"It is a very old clause," Teodor went on, steadily. "It was written for flood-wrack. I did not think it would ever matter. I think, Miss Tamarak, that at some point in the last ten minutes the Brine-Master of Tuzlag became the legal owner of Ruben Achterberg."

Bunmi swore, richly, in two languages.

"We take it," said Sefa.

"I beg your pardon?"

"We take as much as we can carry." She was already dragging the canvas bag from the pew. "Pico, the satchel. Ansgar, the horn spoon, the jars, the empty ones, all of them, and a funnel if you've got one. Bunmi, the tin. We scoop it. We hide it. We put it somewhere that isn't guild land."

"It's theft," said Teodor.

"It's rescue."

"It would be theft," he said, in an unsteady voice, "and I should have to report it. And I cannot say it is not." He looked at the white drift on the steel, at the little gold ring in the crater of it, at her face. Then he took off his customs jacket with its brass buttons, folded it into a pad, and laid it on the counter. "But I find that I am, at present, unable to see anything. I have a terrible deficiency in my eyesight this afternoon. I believe it is the light."

They worked fast. They worked in silence, with the speed of people who knew that a clock was running. Ansgar scooped and Pico held the jars and Bunmi funnelled salt into the biscuit tin and the satchel and a pillowcase from the vestry linen cupboard, and Sefa filled her own coat pockets until the cloth dragged. Every handful was cold and heavy and curled between her fingers like a sentence.

She had half-filled the third jar when the great front door of the chapel scraped open.

There were footsteps in the nave. Many, measured, unhurried, and the creak and rattle of a handcart. A voice she did not know called out, pleasantly, in the accent of the capital, "Hello? Guild Salt Recovery, Clause Fourteen. We've an order of collection for the Bone Quay deposit. Is anyone about?"

Teodor did not move. His fingers had closed on the glass pen. When he spoke it was a whisper, and she saw the terrible effort in his throat.

"It's a valid order," he said. "I can't say it isn't."