Chapter 30: Hold The Door

They had come for two things, and they got one of them.

The bell went out of the lead box in the west range in the first minute and a half, taken by a woman who knew exactly which room and exactly which shelf, and who was gone over the low part of the wall before anyone reached the corridor.

The other thing was in the ossuary, and the ossuary held.

It held because of Mo Yeongsu.

The ossuary was one door and eleven steps and a low vaulted room with two hundred years of the Hall's unfinished business in it, and it had one entrance because Guhwa had built it that way four hundred years ago on the theory that a thing you might one day need to seal should have as few holes in it as possible.

Elder Mo got to the door thirty seconds before the Bells did.

He had one hand.

He shut the door, and dropped the bar, and then — because the bar was old and the door was older and there were at least three men on the other side of it — he sat down in the fourth rite with his back against it, on the top step, and put his heels into the stone.

They worked on that door for nineteen minutes.

Doha heard the last part of it. He came around the corner of the ossuary with Girin over his shoulder and the whole world going white at the edges, and there were four men at the door with a beam, and there was blood coming out under the bottom of it, and from the other side, in the flat, unhurried voice of a man reciting a fee ledger, Mo Yeongsu was saying:

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"—Chan-i is better than I was at his age. Doha is something else entirely and not a replacement. Su Han is adequate and will improve if someone frightens him—"

The beam hit the door.

"—and I want it noted that I made a joke," said Elder Mo, "and nobody laughed."

The door held.

The men at it turned around, saw a seventeen-year-old with an ox-driver over one shoulder and a thirty-year-old spade in his free hand, and one of them said something to the others, and then they left, at a walk, in good order, because the man who had sent them had told them what they were and were not there for.

By the time Doha got the bar up, the elder had been dead for about four minutes.

Doha sat down on the eleven steps beside him.

"I laughed," he said. "Later. I laughed later. I told Chan-i about it in Sohari and he laughed too."

That was a lie, and he told it anyway, and he would tell it for fifty years.

Nam Gyeol was in the yard at dawn.

He had not come in with the four at the gate. He had come in afterward, alone, through the front, at a walk, and by the time anybody understood that the man standing in the middle of the yard was the Second Bell, he had been standing there for some minutes with his hands where everyone could see them.

He was forty-four. He was not large. He had the flat, patient, slightly stooped build of a man who had spent nineteen years lifting and washing and wrapping, and he was dressed in grey, and it was Hall grey, and the sight of it did something to the forty rite-keepers in that yard that Doha would not have believed if he had not been standing among them.

"Ok Sanhwa," he said.

She was in her chair. They had carried her down. Her hands were on the arms of it.

"Six," she said.

"I'm sorry about Mo Yeongsu."

"You will find," said Grandmother Ok, "that you are about to be extremely sorry about a great many things, and that it will not constitute a payment."

Nam Gyeol inclined his head, and it was the Hall's bow, very low and slightly too long, and every person in that yard watched him do it correctly.

Then he looked at Doha.