“It has no form for a thing that has taken a room, paid for it, and been a neighbour for nine years, and I have twice written a page that I did not know what to call.”
As the houses of Yellow Ward tell it
In the houses of Yellow Ward they tell it low, on the stair or over the copper. There was a man of property in the ward, resident, respectable and long-lived, who kept a good room, paid for it, and was civil to his neighbours. Nobody saw anything. What the houses saw was the women going, year on year, faster than they went from any other ward in the city, and nobody counting.
Twice in living memory the ward put a name to him. The first was a landlord with a rent dispute running against him. The second left the city in 4611 and was never heard of again, and the ward took his going as the proof. It was not proof, but the ward has never much cared for the difference.
Yellow Ward saw it in 4614. A household sent for the Black Lantern Brethren, and their house refused to come, entering in its book two words for the refusal: no finding. By that is meant that nobody had formally judged what, if anything, was present, and lacking such a judgement the house will not move. The ward has read the two words forwards and backwards and every way between. Its houses tell a stranger that eleven times since 4580 the brothers have been in Yellow Ward, and never once explained themselves. The thing, when the houses name it, they name a vampire; no paper in the city ever prints the word.
What is known
Little is known, and the whole of it is a rate of loss, not a thing anyone has seen. For some forty years, by the reckoning of Sabine Rook, the houses of Yellow Ward have lost women faster than the other wards have, and she cannot prove it, for nobody keeps the count. In the casebook of Surgeon Ellis Mow there are a few cases from the ward set down under a description and not under the name of any known illness. Eleven times since 4580 the Black Lantern Brethren have come into Yellow Ward, oftener than to any other part of the city, the nine closed acres east of the Cinders included, and Brother Anselm has offered no reason. In 4614 the house declined to come to one household, and wrote its ground for declining as no finding.
Where the matter lies, the law keeps it. To suppress, that is, formally to destroy, a thing that has standing as a person is to execute it untried, and therefore no house moves until there is a finding, nor can any authority walk into a paid-for room and make its occupant declare what he is. Throughout the realm the charge is nearly always false and nearly always a matter of property, whether a disputed rent, an inheritance, or some household that keeps its door shut and prospers behind it. Sarrum burns its dead within the day.
