unclaimed-recollection / 06 - The Second Line.md# 06. The Second Line > **Narrator:** Sevran Hallow · **Setting:** Aurevia and the Reach > Sevran spends a night at the Old Port and an Exchange hotel with Odran.  It was Old Ostrel who noticed the time. He looked up from the Long Table at the lamps coming on along the yard, and said in Kandren, "Ah. It is late," as one might mention that it had begun to rain. Then he wrapped bread for us in a cloth, and would not hear of our paying, and told me twice to come back. I said I would. I meant it. I have noticed that I mean most things I say, and that this is not always wise. Odran said very little on the train. I have come to read his silences as I read the chimes, by their length and the note they end on. This one was the kind that is deciding something. When we changed at Glasswater he said, "We will go to the Old Port tonight." "I thought you did not go there." "I do not. That is why." He held the door for a woman with a pram. "You should see a spread of places. If something is going to come back, I do not know which place it will be." "Of course," I said. "It is your duty as my guide." "Mm," said Odran. I was grateful. I want that stated first, in case the rest of this sounds like anything else. A man was assigned to carry me through a city I do not know, and he has carried me for weeks, and he is now carrying me to a harbor because it might help. I am told explorers are often looked after by their crews, and I imagine this is what it is like. That is what I am. Anka said so first, in the infirmary, and the doctor repeated it, and Odran has never contradicted it. An explorer, hurt in a ruin, who lost what he knew. It fits. I have no other shape to try beside it. The Old Port is the oldest working thing in the city, they say, and I believed it as soon as I stepped off the train. The buildings lean into the water as if listening. There is a promenade along the harbor wall, laid in a pale stone that glows a few steps ahead of you and fades behind. I stopped at the edge of it. The light came up under my boot, and ran ahead, and waited. "Pathstones," Odran said. "They answer feet." "Do they follow everyone?" "Everyone." I walked a long way, and the light kept ahead of me like a patient animal. I had the bread in one hand and the notebook in my coat, and I was happy, which I did not expect. * * * We ate at a dockside counter where a Hanevi crew was landing the day's catch. The fish was on ice in long wooden trays, silver and still wet, and the woman behind the counter had a voice as wide as the harbor. She spoke in the quick rounded Aurevian that I catch one word in three of. "She says it came in this morning," Odran said. "She says you look thin." "I have been told so. Please tell her I am grateful for the observation and that I intend to correct it." Odran said something short. The woman laughed and put two more fillets on my plate. I noticed the shortness. *Observation* and *intend* had become something smaller on the way across, though what arrived was warm, and so was the result. I let it go. I have been letting it go for weeks now. It is a kind of generosity I am learning to give him, one coin at a time, and I have found that the coins come back. He is better at it than he was. I want to note that too. He used to hunt for a word like a man feeling for his key. Tonight he reached for three, and found them all. And I, standing at a counter with fish juice on my fingers, had said a whole sentence before I had finished thinking it. We are both improving. It is a curious feeling to progress in company, like two people learning to row the same boat. I did not tell him. I ate the fish. It was very good.  * * * At the end of the promenade there is a place where the wall steps down toward the water. A few people stood there, speaking low, and I understood why when I reached the edge. The harbor was calm. It was the hour just after sunset when the water takes the sky and holds it. And under the sky, under the glass of it, lay streets. They were pale. Roofs and lanes and a long arch that must once have been a gate, all of it lying a few meters below the surface in the clear green dark, as plain as a map. Small lights moved among them where the harbor boats passed over. A square, with a tower leaning in the middle. A bridge that began on one side and ended in nothing. "The Drowned Quarter," said Odran. His voice was careful. "Part of the old harbor. You can see it on calm days." I stood and looked. I could feel him looking at me. It is not a sound, that kind of looking. It is a pressure, like standing beside a lit stove. I waited for something. I want to say plainly that I did. I stood at that wall with my hands open and tried to feel what a man ought to feel at the sight of a drowned city, and what I felt was the sound of the water against the stone, slow and regular, and that I liked it. *Air itu tenang, y debajo las calles esperan.* I did not say it. It was a small thought, and it was only mine. "I am sorry," I said, after a while. "There is nothing." "Do not be." He said it quickly, and then more slowly, as if he had thought better of the speed. "It was only a place to stand." I understood that he had hoped. I understood also that it would have been unkind to say so. I turned away from the water, and he turned with me, and we walked back along the light.  * * * The hotel was in the Exchange, three streets from the harbor, and I will say only that I have never walked into such a quiet room. The floor was polished to the color of tea. A man in gray stood behind a counter of dark wood. Odran touched his cord to the desk leaf and spoke for some time, with the working Kandren he uses when he is not translating me, and the man bowed and gave him a key. "A room on the fourth floor," Odran said. "With two beds." I took the stair. I turned the thing over in my mind on the way up, because it was a small question and I did not want to waste it. The room was clean and bare, with a window on the harbor and a lamp on a table. There were two beds, a hand's breadth apart, each with a gray blanket folded square. "Odran," I said. "May I ask something?" "Mm." "I saw the number the desk gave you. I have been watching what the Guild pays for, and what you spend. A room with one bed is less than a room with two. I would have been content with one." I set the bread on the table. "At Pinecliff we share the one bed, and it has been perfectly good." I watched him stop. It was not a long stop. He had his satchel in one hand, and for a moment it seemed to weigh more than it had. "That is the house," he said. "Yes." "A hotel is different." He put the satchel on the far bed, and then, with some care, moved it to the chair. "They do it this way. Two beds. It is how a room is arranged." I looked at the beds. I looked at him. I had a small question in my mouth, and it was about whether this was the rule of all hotels or only of this one, and whether the rule was the city's or the Guild's, and why it should cost more. I did not ask it. I have learned that there is a kind of question that sits on the tongue like a seed. Some of them I plant. Some I keep. This one I put away, in the place where I keep the small corrections I let Odran have. He had told me how a hotel is arranged. I did not know how a hotel was arranged. It would have been strange to insist that I knew better. "I see," I said. "Mm." "Thank you for the room." "It is nothing." He sat on the near bed and began to unlace his boots, and did not look up. "Sleep. We have the Collegium in the morning."  * * * I did not sleep. I lay on my back with the gray blanket up to my chest and listened to the harbor through the window. Odran breathed in the other bed, slow and level, a man trained by years of trains to sleep anywhere. I counted the chimes I knew. I got as far as the Pinecliff three and stopped. I thought about what I would do when it came back. I thought of it as one thinks of a distant shore. I did not hope for it or fear it, I only turned it over. The doctor says that when memory returns it often returns all at once. I will know my name, and my crew, and the place I come from. I will go home, wherever that is, and thank everyone, and Anka will sign something, and the Guild will close a file. And I will not be assigned to anyone. That was the part I kept returning to. I had not expected it to be the part. I would stand on some platform in the morning light and have no guide, and no one to say *mm,* and no kitchen with a chair that has no satchel on it. I would simply be a man with a past, as other men are. I decided that it need not be so very different. Pinecliff is a day from the city by rail. I could visit. I could bring Resa something, a tin of tea, a jar from a shop. She would put a bowl in front of me and say nothing, and the old light would warm. I could sit in the head chair for an hour. People visit those who looked after them. It is a thing that is done. And if I had been an explorer, then I would be one again. A thing in me would remember how. I might find a crew. I might even ask Odran whether he would walk out with me once, on some small, ordinary charter, a survey perhaps, a week in the Region. He would say *mm.* He would not say no. I turned the notion over, and it was light as a leaf, and I held it a while. Across the room, he turned in his sleep and said something I did not catch. It was one word. I will not guess what it was. * * * The Collegium stands on a wide stone stair, with a pair of tall doors that open on their own. Inside it smells of clean metal and boiled linen. A clerk took Odran's cord at a desk and found my name on a list, and I was surprised to see it, written out by a stranger in a neat hand. *Sevran Hallow.* The list had a column beside it for *attended,* which was empty. "They asked for you," Odran said, low. "The same doctor who saw you in the first week. She wanted a second reading." "To see whether it has changed." "To see that you are well. And that you came." I thought about that second part for the length of a corridor. A wooden bench. A window. A man across from us with his arm in a sling, reading a leaf with a frown. "If I did not come," I said. "The Collegium would tell the Guild." He kept his eyes on the floor. "The Guild would tell me. You are my assignment. A requested appointment is not a thing you skip." He said it as one recites a rule. "It would be my problem." I considered him. I understood that this was another reason, set beside the first. I understood that he had not meant to say it, and had said it anyway, because he did not like me thinking only the kind one. "I would not have run," I said. "I know." "Where would I run to?" He looked up then. For a moment the face he wears for the Guild slipped, and what was behind it was only tired and fond. "I know that," he said again, more quietly. "The form does not." The doctor was a thin, dry woman with a pen behind each ear, and she did not waste her welcome. She ran the machine over me, once, from the crown of the head to the soles of the feet, as a mason runs a hand along a wall. It hummed. She read what it said. She read it a second time. "You are well," she said. "I find nothing wrong. Your reading is the same as it was." She wrote something in a field of her form and looked at it a while. "I would like to be able to say more." "There is nothing more to say?" "Not that I can put in a box." She capped her pen. "Eat. Sleep. Come back if anything changes, or if anything returns. Return is the word we use. We do not guess what it will look like." "I understand." "Do you?" She looked at me. It was a brief, sharp, human look, with no particular weight on it. "Good. Most don't." I thanked her. Odran signed the attendance, and the clerk stamped it, and the empty column was empty no longer.  * * * On the steps, in the white noon, I took out the green notebook and opened it. There was one word on the first page, and nothing after it. I had been careful not to add to it, because I did not know what belonged there. But I held the pen over the second line and found that I did know. It was not a thing I remembered. It was a thing I had decided. I wrote it in the old Kandren hand, small and square. "What is that?" said Odran. "It is a word." "I can see that." He had been looking at the street, and not at me, in the way that he looks at things he is most interested in. "Which word?" I showed him. *Pinecliff.* He read it. He did not say anything for the length of one long breath, and the street went by below us, and a train called from the harbor. "Mm," said Odran. "That," I said, "is not no." And the corner of his mouth, which I have been studying these many weeks, did a thing I had not seen it do before, and I put it away with the others.