There is a voice in my lord's small glowing tablet, and it is a dead man's voice.
I have seen the tablet before. It is a thing of the Devil or the angels, I have not settled which. My lord touches it and it wakes, and today it spoke, and the words came out in the voice of his father, who is three winters in the ground. I know the man is dead. My lord told me so, dry-eyed, before the tablet ever spoke.
But the voice did not know it was dead. It spoke of small things, of when my lord might come to sup, of the weather, of a debt of no consequence. A living man's chatter, kept in a box like salt pork against a hungry season.
I crossed myself. To hear the dead speak is the business of the priest, and the priest charges a coin and burns a candle and says the Latin so the soul may rest. Here was no priest. Here was only my lord, sitting on the good bench, playing the dead voice again. And again. Wearing at it like a whetstone wears a blade, till there is more stone than blade left.
I thought at first it was a great mercy, that a man might keep his father so. Now I am not sure. A grave you may visit and then walk home from. This box he carries in his pocket, and the dead man in it, everywhere he goes.
The good Lord gave us forgetting the way he gave us sleep, so the living might set the dead down and stand up again. My lord has found a way to never set his father down.
That is no mercy.
That is a man carrying a corpse to spare himself the burial.