GAZETTEER · THE VALE

The Hush-House

The Mourners' chapter in the Underbridge — a narrow terraced house hung with quieting bells where the order keeps the city's burial rolls, takes commissions for closings, and lends bellbearers to funerals up and down the gorge. The busiest and quietest house in the poorest quarter, because the Lean Years bury more people than they feed.

Grief is the one trade a collapsing world never slackens, and in the Underbridge the Mourners work it out of a narrow terraced house hung with the small bronze quieting-bells of their order. The Hush-House keeps the burial rolls of Highbridge — every death named, every closing recorded — takes commissions for the singings that see a body properly gone, and lends its bellbearers to funerals up and down the gorge. Old Mourner Ithal keeps the place and rations the order's too-few trained closers with a tired fairness, because in the Lean Years the dead badly outnumber the mourners. The Hush-House does its most important work hand in hand with the Long-Water Shrine down at the waterline: Vashka's divers bring up what the river took, the Mourners close it, and between them a drowning becomes a death a family can bear. It is the quietest house on its street and by far the busiest. A newcomer comes to have a companion or a stranger properly closed, to buy a quieting-bell, or to ask after a name in the rolls — and finds an order that treats the poor dead of the Underbridge with exactly the care the great chantry on the terrace reserves for the rich ones, which is the Mourners' whole quiet argument with the world.

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