Brother Ansgar's book was a ledger bound in oilcloth, held shut with a rubber band, and he laid it on the vestry counter beside the dead man's feet with the air of a person putting down something that might go off.

"It's the tithe register," he said. "Every grain of salt that comes to the chapel, weighed and logged. Miners give a pinch on the first of the month. Widows give a spoonful. The salt guild gives two sacks a year because the law says they must. It is, I want to stress, a perfectly boring book." He undid the band. "And then there are these."

He turned to a page near the back. Sefa leaned in. So did Teodor, who had put on a pair of rimless reading glasses from some inner pocket and looked about ten years older and a great deal more dangerous.

The columns were in Ansgar's cramped brown handwriting. Date, giver, weight expected, weight found. For three hundred pages the last two columns matched to the gram. Then, in the spring, there began to be small discrepancies, circled in red. Nine of them. Eleven. Twelve. And then, on the last page, a line written so hard that the nib had torn the paper.

*Received from L. Marsh, aged 61. Expected: 4 g. Found: 31 g. Crystal structure: wrong.*

"What is wrong with the structure?" said Teodor.

"It doesn't cleave," Ansgar said. "Salt cleaves in cubes. You tap it, it breaks in squares. This one broke in curls. Like a, like a, oh, I'm sorry, I don't have the right word."

"Like handwriting," said Sefa.

Ansgar blinked at her through the wired glasses. A flush climbed his neck. "Yes," he whispered. "I, yes. I thought I was mad."

"You're not mad."

"I put some of it in a cup," said Ansgar, in the tone of a man confessing to a dreadful public indecency. "I know I shouldn't. I only wanted to see if it would dissolve differently. Warm water, an enamel cup, I breathed in the steam. And then I was standing in a kitchen I have never been in, watching a woman put a blue bowl on a table. For nineteen seconds. I counted. She called me Lenny."

"Lenny Marsh," said Teodor slowly.

"The salt is a memory," Ansgar said. "It's someone's memory, taken out of them and left in the grain. I don't know how. I don't know who takes it. I only know that when the salt comes through the chapel it is heavy, and that when I breathe it, someone's life gets into me." He swallowed. "Lenny Marsh couldn't remember his wife's name when I saw him last week. She sat there beside him holding his hand. She's been dead eight years. He had, I think, forgotten that, too."

Nobody spoke. The little fridge hummed.

Sefa found she had pushed up her left sleeve without deciding to. She did not hide the bloom. She laid her forearm on the steel counter, in the light, beside the dead man's boot, and let the white lace of it lie there between the three of them like a document.

Ansgar made a noise like a kettle starting.

Teodor said nothing. He looked at her arm for a long time, and then at his own thumb, and then at the page with the circled weights, and Sefa watched his careful, literal mind arrive at the end of its thought and refuse, for one clean second, to go any further.

"Miss Tamarak," he said, "I think you had better tell me what you do."

"I fix phones."

"I cannot be lied to. You know that."

"I know." She kept her eyes on the bloom. "And I'm telling you something else that's true. If I say it out loud, you'll have to put it in your report. You'll have to, Teodor, you're built that way. So don't ask me yet. Ask me at six."

He breathed in, through his nose, and out. Then he took off his reading glasses, folded them, and put them away.

"At six, then," he said.

She loved him a little for it. She filed that thought carefully in a drawer and shut the drawer.

"Brother," she said, "how much of the salt in the dead man's mouth have you got?"

Ansgar went white. "Oh no. Oh no, Sefa, you can't, it's dangerous, you don't know what you'd, I only did it with a pinch from a stranger, and this is a, a corpse, it's a corpse, it's a, it's wrong."

"It's mine," said Sefa.

She hadn't known she was going to say it. It felt true as she did, the way a key feels true when it turns.

"I think a man walked in from the Glass Road carrying what I left behind," she said, "and I think he swallowed it so no one could take it off him, and I think it killed him. The letter says he knows where I put them. I think he was carrying them in his mouth. And I think I'd like one of them back."

Teodor's hand came up, half a gesture, and stopped.

"If it is the case that this might be unsafe," he said, "then I would like to point out, as the representative of the Orlei customs service, that I cannot recommend it. And if it is going to happen regardless, I would like to be standing very close."

"That's the nicest thing anyone has said to me this month."

"It is the only thing I can say. I'm unable to say anything else."

Ansgar did it with shaking hands. He found the enamel cup on the shelf under the candles. He ran the tap in the corner until the water was almost hot. He scraped a pinch of white from the dead man's tongue with a clean horn spoon, so little that it hardly weighed on the scale, and let it fall. It did not sink. It spun slowly on the surface, curling out into a pale spiral, and a thin thread of steam rose from the cup.

"Hold it close," Ansgar whispered. "Breathe in once. Slow. And if you don't like it, if you, oh, if it hurts, just open your eyes."

Sefa took the cup in both hands. It was warm, and ordinary, and smelled of nothing at all.

She breathed in.

Rain.

It was a hard, grey, slanting rain on a long flat road of fused sand, the kind of rain that does not so much fall as march. She was cold. She was wearing the coat she wore now, but it was newer, and she had a blister on her left heel. She knew, with the certainty of a dream, that she had been walking for six days. Ahead of her on the road stood a bus shelter made of glass, and in the shelter sat a man in a tobacco-coloured coat, holding a rolled-up map over his head against the water.

"You're the one," he said. His voice was soft and tired, and had a trace of some northern accent she couldn't place. "They said there was a girl in Tuzlag who could write a thing true."

"Who said?"

"Everyone I've paid."

She watched herself sit down beside him. She watched herself take off the pack, and take out a thermos, and pour a grey cup of tea into its lid. She was so tired that her hands shook. And she watched, with the helpless horror of a woman reading her own diary, as she said, "I don't take work from strangers."

"You will," said Ruben Achterberg, "when you hear what I'm carrying."

The memory slid. The road tilted. There was a second voice now, off to one side, a woman's voice, warm and unhurried and kind, saying from a long way away in the rain, "Drink, dear. You've walked so far. Drink, and let me look at your arm."

A hand came into view. A broad brown hand, with a ring on every finger and a silver bracelet shaped like a salt-rake. It held out a cup of tea.

Sefa saw herself take the cup. She saw herself smile.

And the woman bent down to be level with her, and the face came into the grey light, soft, handsome, fifty or so, with a headscarf the colour of mustard and eyes that were the kindest eyes she had ever seen.

She was looking at Haldis Orrefors-Kumalo, the Brine-Master of Tuzlag.

The steam thinned and went out.

Sefa came back to the vestry in pieces, first the cold steel under her elbow, then the hum of the fridge, then Teodor's hand under her other arm, holding her upright, and Ansgar's frightened face a foot from hers.

"Four seconds," Teodor said. His voice was perfectly steady and his fingers were not. "You were gone for four seconds. You said a name."

"Whose?"

"Haldis," he said. "You said it like a person says the name of a fire."

She was going to answer. She was, in fact, drawing breath to answer, when from the chapel beyond the curtain came the unmistakable sound of the great front door scraping open, and a warm unhurried voice, which she had last heard in the rain, said to the empty nave:

"Good morning, Brother. I heard there had been a death on the Quay. I thought you might want company for the vigil. I've brought sweet tea."