Sister Hush has a narrow, weathered face and a stillness that makes her seem to have been waiting before anyone entered the room. Her scalp is shaved in meticulous, even passes, with a faint fringe of silver stubble kept at exactly the same length. She wears no cosmetics, but polishes her nails until they catch the light. She moves with a careful, economical step, as if each footfall might disturb something sleeping beneath the floor. People often notice her deliberate grooming before they notice the ink-dark stains on her fingertips.

Hush is compassionate in practical ways, quietly mending a stranger's coat or leaving food outside a sickroom, yet she can be brutally unsentimental when someone asks her to abandon the seal investigation. In calm company she listens longer than she speaks. Under pressure, she becomes exacting and impatient, not loud. She distrusts grand declarations of faith but still performs small acts of devotion when no one is watching.

Sister Hush served for thirty years at the Chapel of the Last Door, where she kept its burial records and tended a seal said to hold a nameless presence beneath the crypt. During a fever winter, the chapel's young bell keeper, Yemi, became trapped below when the seal cracked. Hush could hear him calling through the stone, but the senior clergy ordered her to keep the rite intact. She obeyed until the calls stopped. That failure changed her: she abandoned the chapel, and began seeking knowledge wherever it could be bought, including from Tsul'rekshi, a presence whose answers arrive with a price. Hush now lives above a shuttered bell foundry on Bellfounders' Row. She is still in touch with Borge, the chapel's aging mason, who sends her sketches of the seal's spreading fractures. The clergy want her silenced before her inquiries draw attention to their old decision. Her current problem is that each answer from Tsul'rekshi makes her more capable of repairing the seal and less certain that she should.