Chapter 13: Thessaly's Congregation Names a Heretic

The elder's name was Hobb Calloway, and he had been a wool factor before the burning, which meant he had spent thirty years keeping careful records of things that were not his — weights, grades, bale counts, the invisible arithmetic of other men's wealth. After the burning he kept records of a different kind. He had rescued eleven texts from the ruins of a lower city sept, wrapping them in oilcloth before the ash settled, and for four months he had been lending them out in District Six with the quiet methodical generosity of a man who understood that books outlasted the people who wrote them.

He was not a devout man in any remarkable way. He simply believed that things written down should not be lost.

The Ember Path's formal denunciation was delivered at dawn on a Tuesday, read aloud by a young woman named Sefra at the District Six water point while Hobb Calloway was waiting in line with his allotment jug. Sefra had a clear voice and no apparent malice. She read from a wax-sealed document in the careful syllables of someone who had rehearsed it. The denunciation named Calloway specifically, cited four of the eleven texts by title, and described their distribution as the deliberate propagation of a theology that had, in the Ember Path's formal doctrinal language, participated in the corruption that necessitated the fire's corrective judgment.