Necromancer Name Generator

The story

I had put my best cabinet where he could see it. The little one, in walnut, with a seam so fine that a visitor generally opened the wrong side first. When Ilen came up from the street, she set her traveling case beside it and turned it toward the window. I turned it back. She looked at the lamp on my worktable, then at the cupboard where I kept its oil. ‘Tonight as well?’ she asked. I said she could take the upstairs bed. It had a better blanket than the narrow couch beside my stove. She had a morning carriage to catch, and I had already promised to wake her.

Daven had been dead nineteen years. The lamp held a memory he had willingly set down when he was teaching me how to fix a scene to an object. He had chosen a workshop afternoon because he said ordinary things were more difficult to preserve than grand occasions. He was right about that. There was a falling ash that never reached the floor, a cupboard hinge clicking behind him, and the clove he used to hold against his back tooth. He appeared with one cuff undone. He always appeared with that cuff undone. Nothing I had said during the intervening years had entered that afternoon.

I knew all of this when I laid the lamp before Ilen. I even explained it, briskly, as though she had asked for a lesson. Then I told her the ending word. It was not a name; it was a sound made with the lips closed and the tongue against the teeth. I had asked her to hold it while she stayed. A living caretaker could end the conversation, and I would not be able to keep the scene lit through her word. I demonstrated with the small practice image of an empty cup. The cup vanished. Ilen repeated the word correctly. I wished, at once, that I had chosen somebody with a less exact ear.

The calendar above the stove still had a ring around the eleventh of each month. Once, that had been the evening I allowed myself. Last winter I began calling him on the days between. There was less light then, and I could say I was using the long evenings for study. Ilen touched the six little oil tins drying on my windowsill. ‘Since I arrived on Monday?’ she asked. I said yes. She let the tins stand. Their rims had made six pale circles in the dust. She moved her case away from the cabinet and took off her outdoor shoes.

I welcomed the workshop memory aloud. Clove and hot iron filled the place where my own room smelled of linseed. Daven sat beside an old workbench, looking no older than he had when I was seventeen. His cuff hung open over his wrist. ‘Fasten that,’ he said. In the preserved afternoon, I had done it. I could still remember being proud that he trusted my fingers near the lamp, although my name had not appeared on any of the work we carried out to customers. Now I was sixty-seven, with two swollen knuckles and a house paid for by cabinets bearing Merra Cinder on their backs. My hand moved toward his wrist before I remembered to leave it still.

Behind him stood the first cabinet I had made for a memory vessel. Its door had a pale diagonal seam. I had spent four nights fitting it until the two grains ran together. Daven called it a child’s trick. The following week he sold it to a buyer who wanted to impress his sister, and accepted praise for the neatness of the join. That happened after the stored afternoon. The lamp could show the cabinet, but not the sale. I had told the image about the sale so often that the account had acquired the rhythm of a prayer. It never changed where his eyes rested.

Tonight I brought my walnut cabinet right up to the edge of the light. ‘Look at this one,’ I said. ‘I made it without you.’ He looked toward the position occupied by the pale cabinet in his afternoon. ‘Still trying to hide a crooked board with cleverness,’ he said. I moved the walnut cabinet another inch. Ilen’s knee stopped its door from striking the table leg. I moved it back. Daven asked for his cuff again. In that old room, he had been about to go out. The entire world before him contained a loose button and a young pair of hands that would attend to it.

‘You knew it was good,’ I said. ‘Say that much.’ The clove shifted in his cheek. Ash hung beneath his sleeve. I had not forgotten his next words; I waited for them as if being ready could let me catch them and force them into a different shape. ‘We have work to do, Merra.’ He reached the end of the scene. The lamp settled into the low shimmer that preceded another beginning. I could let it go dark. Instead I fed the wick. Ilen stood up, and I said sharply that she should sit down. I had barely begun.

The cuff appeared. This time I laughed at it. ‘You can wait,’ I told him. ‘You can ask all evening.’ I liked hearing the order without obeying it. I liked imagining his irritation gathering somewhere I could reach. Then I discovered that I had taken the little button from the sewing dish and was rolling it between my finger and thumb, warming it before putting it through a stiff hole. It was a spare matching the buttons on my own coat. Years ago, when I could finally afford good sleeves, I had ordered cuffs like his. The walnut cabinet stood between Ilen and the door, and my niece was waiting for me to move it.

‘Don’t,’ I said when she drew breath. Daven began the order again. ‘Fasten—’ Ilen made the ending word. The sleeve, the workshop and the ash went out together. The missing final syllable seemed to strike the back of my teeth. I called her an interfering girl. She was thirty-nine. She bent to pick up her outdoor shoes and said she would take the upstairs bed if the invitation still stood. I said nothing. She waited until I moved the cabinet, then went upstairs carrying the shoes in one hand. She did not stay to hear whether I could make my anger more impressive.

There was enough oil for another beginning. I knew exactly how to make one. I put my fingers around the lamp’s neck and felt the familiar raised notch beneath its rim. My other hand was still holding the button. I tried to set it down; it slipped, struck the lamp and rolled against the cold walnut door. The little noise was my room’s own. I pulled the reusable wick out of its brass holder. It left a dark stripe across my thumb. Then I lifted the light bowl free and put it beneath the table, where I would have to kneel to fetch it. I stood with the pieces separated, waiting to feel relieved. I was furious. Daven had not said he was sorry. He had not even finished being interrupted.

I woke Ilen before the carriage and made coffee too strong for either of us. We spoke about her road, and the seam in the heel of her traveling shoe. I did not apologize elegantly; I told her she should not have had to move around my furniture in the dark. She said that was true. At the door I nearly explained how much more there was to it. Her carriage was coming. She kissed my cheek and went. Afterward I cut the matching button from my everyday cuff. The cloth would hang loose until I chose something else to do with it. I put the button in a drawer without sorting the other things inside.

At the old hour the next evening, I found the wick in my pocket. I had carried it all day. The lamp’s bowl remained beneath the table, and I could have assembled it in less time than I had spent standing there. I laid the wick in the cold stove. There was no flame to consume it. It lay across a piece of last week’s charcoal, still quite capable of carrying oil. I sat down without retrieving it. Outside, somebody was pulling a barrow over the uneven stones. I wanted the noise to stop. When it passed, I could hear my breathing, and wished for a moment that I could be angry at that too.