From: Gloomspiders
Segment One: The Master’s Fitful Sleep
There is a kind of waking that is not waking at all but rather a slow returning, the way a small boat drifts in toward a shore it has been pointed at for hours, and that is the kind of waking I came to that night. I do not know precisely when I crossed the threshold from sleep into vigil, because the dream did not end so much as it thinned, the way a fog will thin without breaking, until at last I was lying on the narrow cot in my cell with my eyes open to the rafters and a coldness sitting in my chest that I could not name, and the dream still present in the room with me like a guest who has not yet taken his leave.
I have lived in this cell for nineteen years come Lathandus, and I know every beam of it, every knot in the wood, every place where the lime-wash has cracked along the inner wall, and the small spider that lives in the high corner above the door whom I have left undisturbed all these years because she does her work quietly and I do mine. I tell you this because the rafters in my cell are familiar to me as my own hand, and yet that night, looking up at them, I felt that the rafters were not entirely the rafters I knew. There was a shadow along the central beam that did not seem to belong to any object in the cell, and which did not move when I sat up, and which did not have the shape of a shadow so much as the shape of an absence, as though some small portion of the beam had been deleted from the world.
I sat for some long while looking at it, and it did not change, and I did not change, and I think now that we were each waiting for the other to declare what we were.
This is the kind of detail that the brothers above me would say I should not record, because it gives the reader the impression that I am a man given to seeing things, and the order has always preferred its scribes to be the sort of men who write down what is plainly there. But it has been my private conviction, held for many years, that what is plainly there is only ever a fraction of what is, and that the small mystics of attention are the lamps by which the rest may sometimes be glimpsed. So I write it down. I have written down stranger things in my life, and so far the order has not unmade me for it.
The dream itself I cannot tell you in any orderly fashion, because dreams of that sort do not arrange themselves for the telling. They are not stories. They are weather. They come in over the soul the way a low front comes in over the coastal hills before a long rain, and afterward what you remember is not so much a sequence of images as the pressure that lay upon you while they passed.
What I can tell you is that somewhere very far from my cell, in a place I have never been and could not point to on any map I have ever seen, there was a person sleeping. I knew it was a person because the sleep had a person’s shape, the way a coat thrown over a chair retains a person’s shape long after the person has gone, and I knew the sleep was troubled because the troubling of it pressed against the edges of my own sleep like a hand pressed against a thin wall. Whether this person was a man or a woman, whether they were old or young, whether they were a saint or a sinner or one of those who are neither and only weary, I could not say. I only knew that they were dreaming, and that their dream was building something.
I have read, over the years, a number of treatises on the nature of dreams, by which I mean those long, dry parchments the order keeps in the lower library for the use of scribes who cannot sleep, and most of them are the work of men who clearly slept very well. They write of dreams as the digestion of the day, as the soul’s settling of its small accounts. They do not write of dreams as forges, and yet I tell you that what I felt that night was the working of a forge. There was a heat in it, and a beating rhythm, and the slow conviction that something was being made.
The thing being made was not yet a thing. That is the part I find hardest to set down, because I do not have a good word for it. I tried, lying there, to find a word. I have tried since. The closest I have come is to say that what was being made in that distant dreamer’s mind was the possibility of a thing, the cleared place where a thing might come to stand, the way a farmer clears a field in autumn for a crop he will not sow until spring. There was no creature yet. There was only the field, and the field was being prepared with a long and patient cruelty that the dreamer himself, I think, did not understand he was performing.
That is what frightened me. Not the field. The patience.
For consider it, friend. A nightmare that knows it is a nightmare is a small matter, in the end. It comes and it goes, and you may rise in the morning and wash your face in the basin and find that the world has not been altered by it, and the bread you break at the table is the same bread it was the night before. But a nightmare that does not yet know what it is, a nightmare that is still becoming itself in the slow forge of someone’s distant suffering, is another matter entirely. It is not over when you wake from it. It continues, in its own quiet way, in the rafters of the world. It does not need you to attend to it. It is patient. It will wait until it is ready, and then it will step forth.
I do not know how I knew this. I am not a man given to certainties of that sort. But I knew it the way you know, when you walk into a room, that someone has been weeping in it, even if the weeper is gone and the windows are open and the chairs are all in their proper places. The room remembers. And my cell, that night, remembered something that had not yet happened.
I lay back down for a while, after a time. I tried to pray. I have prayed in that cell perhaps ten thousand times across these nineteen years, and the words come to me ordinarily as easily as breath, but that night the prayers would not settle. They started and they faltered and they started again, and at last I let them go, because I have learned that prayer forced is no prayer at all, only the noise of a man trying to drown out something he is afraid to hear. I lay quiet, then, and listened.
The monastery at that hour was as still as a monastery ever is, which is to say not entirely still. There is always the creaking of old wood as the building gives back the warmth of the day, and there is always the slow ticking of the water-clock down in the cloister, and there is always, far below, the sound of the river running past the foundations on its long course to the sea. These sounds I know as I know my own breathing, and they have been a comfort to me on many a sleepless watch. That night they were a comfort still, but a different kind. They were the sound of a world that did not yet know what was being prepared for it, and there is a tenderness in such a sound that I have rarely felt so sharply.
The cold in my chest did not lift. I want to be honest about that. I have read accounts of the saints in which the dread that comes upon a man in the dark is dispelled by the recitation of a particular psalm, or the lighting of a particular candle, or the firm intention of the will, and I am sure those accounts are true, for the saints. I am not a saint. I lit no candle. I recited no psalm. The cold sat in my chest the way cold water sits in a stone basin, taking on the shape of the basin and staying there, and I let it stay, because it seemed to me that night that the cold had come for a reason and that I was meant to keep it for a while before passing it along to whoever else would carry it.
After a long time, I rose.
I lit the small clay lamp at my bedside, which gives a thin yellow light that is more honest than it is bright, and I took down from its shelf the small bound book I have kept these nineteen years. It is a poor book by the standards of the upper library, sewn together from offcuts of vellum that the senior scribes did not want, and bound in a leather that was once part of a saddle, and it has nothing in it that any of my brothers would consider important. I keep in it the small things, the things that have no place in the official chronicles. I keep in it the days when the river ran higher than it should have. I keep in it the dreams of the dying, when I have sat with them and they have told me. I keep in it the names of birds I have seen and could not identify. I keep in it the times I have been wrong about something I believed, so that I will remember to be wrong with more humility the next time.
I opened it to the first blank page, and I dipped my quill, and I sat there for a long while with the quill not quite touching the vellum, because I did not know what to write. I knew that I should write. I knew that the cold in my chest was the sort of cold that wanted to be set down. But the words for it had not come to me yet, and I have learned, over these many years, that you cannot force the words for such things any more than you can force the prayers. You can only sit, and wait, and let the small wick of the lamp burn down a little, and trust that what is meant to be written will arrive in its own season.
It arrived at last as a single line, and it arrived in my own hand without my quite deciding to put it there, the way the small unbidden truths sometimes do.
I wrote: Somewhere a man is dreaming, and the dream has begun to build.
That was all. I looked at the line for a while, and the line looked back at me, and I capped the inkhorn and closed the book and laid it on the small table beside the lamp, and I did not blow the lamp out. I sat with it. The wick burned down a finger’s breadth before I moved again, and in that time I thought of many things, none of which were the things I would have chosen to think about if the choice had been mine.
I thought of my mother, who died when I was eleven, of a fever the apothecary could not name, and I thought of the way she had held my hand the last night I sat with her, and the way her grip had been so light at the end that I had not at first realized she had stopped breathing. I thought of my older sister, who lives still, by what I am told, in a city I have not visited in thirty-one years, and of the long, plain letters she used to send me when I first took my vows, and of how I had let the correspondence fall away because I had been too busy with the small important nothing of being young in an order. I thought of the brother who had slept in this cell before me, whose name was Lerial, and who had hanged himself one winter from the rafter above the door, the very rafter where the small shadow had sat earlier that night, and I thought of how no one in the order ever spoke his name now, though he had been a good and gentle man for forty years before whatever it was that he could not bear took him.
I thought, in other words, of the dead, and of the failed, and of the ones whose suffering I had not been able to interrupt. This is a thought-pattern I know well, and I do not generally indulge it, because it serves no one and least of all the dead themselves, but that night I let it run. It seemed to me that whatever was being made in the distant dreamer’s mind was being made out of exactly this material, the unanswered grief of the world, the small unwitnessed agonies that accumulate in attics and in cells and in the corners of forgotten farmhouses, and that to look away from that material was perhaps the way the field had been cleared so neatly in the first place. There are crops that grow only where no one has looked, friend. There are harvests that come up only in unattended ground.
I do not say this to be morbid. I say it because I think it is true, and because I think the saying of it, even in this small private book, is a kind of attendance, and attendance is what I have left to offer.
The lamp burned down another finger, and the cold in my chest did not lift, and at last I heard the small first bell of the morning office from the chapel below, the one that is rung by Brother Vaer who is the oldest of us now and who insists on ringing it himself though his hands are not what they were and the bell wavers under him. The wavering of the bell was a great comfort to me. It was the sound of a man who is old and tired and faithful, ringing a small bell against the long dark of a world he cannot fix, because that is the work that has been given him. I thought, listening to it, that the work given to me that night had been to keep the cold in my chest until the bell could come and take it from me, and that this was perhaps not so different from Brother Vaer’s work, or from anyone’s work, in the end.
I rose, and I washed my face in the basin, and the water in the basin was cold also, but it was an honest cold, the cold of stone and well-water and a winter night drawing toward dawn, and I let it be cold against my face for a long moment before I dried myself. I put on my outer habit. I took up my prayer-beads. I did not, I want to note, open the book again. I did not read the line I had written. I did not need to. The line had been written, and the writing of it had been the whole purpose of my being awake at that hour, and now the purpose was complete and I could go down to the chapel and join my brothers and sing the small dawn psalms with them as I have sung them ten thousand mornings before.
But I will tell you this. As I passed the door of my cell on my way out, I looked up once more at the rafter where the shadow had sat, and the shadow was gone, and the rafter was only a rafter again, with the small spider’s web high in the corner above it and the lime-wash cracking along the beam where it has cracked these many years. And yet I could not shake the conviction that the shadow had not departed so much as it had moved on. It had taken what it needed from my cell, and it had gone somewhere else, to take a little more, and it would keep going, from cell to cell and from cot to cot and from corner to corner of the world, until it had taken enough.
I closed the door of my cell behind me, gently, as one closes a door on a sleeping child, and I went down to the chapel, and I sang the dawn psalms with my brothers, and the cold in my chest did lift, a little, in the singing, the way cold water in a stone basin will warm by very small degrees if you set the basin in the sun. But not entirely. Not entirely. There was a portion of the cold that I understood I would be carrying for some time, perhaps for a long time, perhaps until whatever was being built in the distant dreamer’s mind stood up at last and walked, and I could see it clearly, and call it by a name, and decide what was to be done.
That morning I did not yet have the name. I had only the line, in the small book, in the small cell, in the small monastery beside the river that runs to the sea.
Somewhere a man is dreaming, and the dream has begun to build.
I have lived long enough to know that there are sentences which, once written, change the shape of the days that follow them. That sentence was such a one. I did not know it then. I know it now. But knowing it now does not unwrite it, and unwriting it is not what I would do even if I could, because the writing of it was the keeping of a small faith with whatever was suffering in that distant sleep, and a small faith is not nothing. It is, in fact, very nearly everything we have to offer one another, friend, across the great cold distances that separate the cells of the world.
The bell rang again, the second bell, and I took my place in the choir, and I lifted my voice with the others, and the dawn came on in the long thin gray way that dawns come on in that country, and the river ran on past the foundations of the monastery on its old course to the sea, and somewhere very far from there a man turned in his sleep and the small shadow at the rafter of his dream took on, for the first time, the suggestion of a leg.
Segment Two: A Rumor at the Crossroads Forge
It was upon one of those uncommonly fine mornings in the latter weeks of Lathandus, when the air carries that particular sweetness which the country folk hereabouts call the second blooming, that the small bell above my forge door rang out with the brisk and rattling enthusiasm peculiar to a customer in some species of difficulty, and I, being then in the midst of drawing out a length of horseshoe stock and having a mouthful of nails wedged firmly between my teeth in the manner that all smiths of any honest practice will recognize, was obliged to spit the nails into my apron pocket before I could so much as offer a civil greeting to whoever had come pelting down the road at such an hour with such a clatter as preceded him.
Now, you must understand that my forge sits at what is called, with that good old common sense which the country folk possess in larger quantities than the city folk give them credit for, the Three-Stones Crossroads, on account of three large weathered stones which stand there at the meeting of the four roads, set up I am told some hundreds of years ago by a person now forgotten for purposes also now forgotten, and the crossroads being what they are, my forge has been a place of considerable comings and goings for the better part of the last decade, since I came up out of the southern hills and set up my anvil here and built my small house behind it and married my wife Tessa who is the finest soul I know upon this moon. The crossroads draw travelers as honey draws flies, and travelers who have been on a road for more than a day or two will eventually, with the inevitability of a stone rolling downhill, develop in their conveyances some small mechanical complaint which only a smith can address, and so I have heard, over these years, more stories than any one man has a right to hear, told to me over the music of my hammer by people who very often do not know they are telling them at all.
The bell rang, then, and I went to the door wiping my hands upon my apron, and beheld in the yard a tinker of perhaps fifty years, a man of that lean and weathered cast which speaks of a life spent largely upon roads not entirely friendly to the comfort of those who travel them, with a hat the brim of which had been mended in three places and a coat the elbows of which had been mended in many more, and behind him a wagon of the sort tinkers favor, which is to say a wagon built upon principles of compromise between cargo and habitation, with little doors and little drawers and little hanging pots making a chorus of small percussive complaints as the whole conveyance tilted heavily to one side upon a wheel that was not where a wheel ought to have been, the axle below it having parted from itself in that abrupt and complete fashion which iron exhibits when it has at last decided it is done with being iron and would prefer, henceforth, to be two separate pieces of iron.
“Well met, friend, well met,” said I, by way of opening pleasantries, and the tinker pulled off his much-mended hat and held it against his chest with both hands in the way that a man does when he has been driven by some larger feeling than mere courtesy to the gesture, and said in a voice that was a little hoarser than the morning warranted, “Smith, I will tell you plain, I have been driving this rig three days on a cracked axle and praying to every god whose name I could remember that it would hold me to a forge, and here you are at the crossroads as I was told you would be, and if you can put me right by sundown I will count it the best coin I ever spent.”
“By my forge,” I returned, with what I hoped was the proper note of professional reassurance, “I will have you on the road again before the evening bell, or my name is not Goradd Ferralume, which it has been these forty-three years and is unlikely to alter on a Conjursday in Lathandus.”
The tinker laughed at that, a thin and grateful laugh, and I led him round to the side yard where my second anvil stands beneath the broad open shed I built for just such cases as wagons too large for the main forge floor, and we set about the slow careful business of unloading sufficient weight from the broken side that the axle might be drawn out without further damage to the wagon’s frame. He was a methodical fellow, this tinker, and the small drawers and doors of his conveyance opened to disclose contents of a remarkable variety, including but in no wise limited to several copper kettles of varying ages, a quantity of woolen bolts, three sealed jars of what he informed me was salted river-fish from a place I had never heard of, a great brass scale with its weights neatly cradled in a velvet-lined box, a stack of cheap tin spoons bound up with a leather thong, and at the bottom, wrapped with a tender care that struck me at the time and strikes me still, a small wooden case which when laid upon the bench gave forth the unmistakable clinking of glass vials packed in straw.
“Apothecary’s stock,” he said, observing my glance. “I do not trade much in it. I carry it as a favor to an old healer in the south who pays me by the journey to deliver to the villages along my route. I have done it for eleven years now.”
“It is a kind work,” I said.
“It is a paid work,” he corrected me, but he smiled when he said it, and I marked then that he was not so hard a man as the road had perhaps tried to make him.
We got the wagon braced upon the stout timbers I keep for the purpose, and I crawled beneath it with my small forge-lamp burning at my hip to inspect the damage to the axle, and the damage was, as I had suspected from the angle of the tilt, the very devil of a damage, the iron of the axle having sheared cleanly through at a point of old fatigue some six inches inboard of the wheel-hub, the break itself showing in the lamp-light that pale gray crystalline face which any smith will recognize as the long, patient, treacherous work of a flaw that has been growing in the metal since the day it was forged and which has only at this moment chosen to declare itself. I made a small sound of professional appreciation, and the tinker, hearing it, called down from above, “Is it bad, then, smith?”
“It is not good,” I called back. “It is not, however, beyond the reach of a man with a hammer and a forge and an afternoon. I will draw you a new section and weld it true and you will be the better for it, though I cannot promise that the wagon overall will be improved by my labors, since the rest of the iron is of the same lot as this and likely of the same quality, which is to say of the quality that does not entirely deserve the name of iron.”
He laughed again, the small grateful laugh, and I came up out from under the wagon and clapped the dust from my hands and made my way to the forge proper, where my apprentice Hettie, who is twelve years old and the daughter of a widow from the next village and who is more useful to me at her age than most men are at thirty, was already at the bellows-pole and had brought the fire up to a fine working heat in anticipation of my requirements, for she is that sort of girl who watches a wagon limp into the yard and knows already what iron is wanted before her master has so much as called for it.
“Good girl,” I said to her, and she pretended not to hear me because she is at that age when praise is an embarrassment, and I took down a billet of my better stock and laid it in the coals, and the bellows wheezed, and the coals went from red to orange to that particular yellow-white which is the smith’s working color, and the tinker, having nothing else to occupy him while I worked, drew up a stool to the door of the forge and sat himself down to watch.
Now, friend, here is a thing I have learned in the practice of my trade, and I share it with you in case you should ever find yourself wishing to know what your fellow man is thinking without the impertinence of asking him outright. There is no more effective device for the eliciting of a story than the steady rhythm of a hammer upon a billet of hot iron, by which I mean to say that a man who has been holding a story too long within himself, who has been waiting for a place to set it down, will find his tongue most powerfully loosened by the company of a smith at work, because the work fills the silence with its honest noise and the silence consequently does not press upon the speaker the way it does in a parlor or a chapel, and the smith himself is occupied and so the man who speaks does not feel he is being studied, and the story comes out of him with the unforced ease of water finding the low ground in a field. I have heard births and deaths and elopements and embezzlements and ten thousand petty griefs in the warm yellow light of my forge, and I have never once had to ask after any of them. They come of themselves, as wagons come of themselves down a road that leads to a crossroads.
The tinker watched me work the new billet for perhaps a quarter of an hour without speaking. He watched in the manner of a man who knows what good work looks like and respects it. I drew out the rough shape and laid it back in the coals, and I drew it out again and worked the upset, and I laid it back, and Hettie pumped the bellows in the steady rhythm I had taught her, and the iron sang under the hammer, and outside the forge the morning slipped on toward noon with the long slow shadow of the great oak in my yard creeping back toward its trunk.
It was at perhaps the third heating that he began to speak, and he began without preamble of any sort, as men in such moods always do.
“I have come from a village,” he said, “called Holm-on-the-Mire. It is up north and east of here, three days’ wagon-travel along the lower road, on the edge of a piece of country that some people call the Embrace and some people call worse names than that. I have stopped at Holm-on-the-Mire twice a year for eleven years. They have a healer there who pays me my regular price. They have a tavern there with a beer I have always thought poorly of, but the woman who keeps it has always been civil to me, which is more than I can say of many tavern-keepers between here and the eastern coast.”
“Aye,” said I, between blows, for I knew the country he meant, having traveled in it as a younger man with my uncle’s drove-pack, and I remembered the long flat fens and the low wooded ridges that ran up at last to the dark stone country at the edge of the dungeon they called by that ugly soft name, The Maelstrom’s Embrace. I had not gone within twenty miles of it myself even in my youth, the elder smiths having a saying about the country round it which I had taken to heart and not regretted.
“This trip,” said the tinker, “I came to Holm-on-the-Mire on the second day of this week, that being Evoday, and I drove my wagon up the main lane as I have done these eleven years, and I want to tell you plainly, smith, that the village was wrong.”
He stopped, and I did not press him. I struck the billet twice more and laid it back in the coals and reached for my long tongs and shifted it where the heat was best, and Hettie pumped the bellows, and the tinker, watching the iron blush back to working color, gathered himself.
“Wrong how, I will tell you,” he said. “It is wrong in the way a tune is wrong when one of the strings has gone out of tune and the player has not yet noticed. You walk down the lane and at first you cannot say what is amiss. The houses are where they were. The chickens are still in the yards. The smoke is still going up out of the chimneys. The bell in the chapel-house was rung as I came in, and the woman at the tavern came out and waved at me from her doorway as she has done every spring and every autumn for eleven years. But there were no men in the lane, smith. Do you understand me? There were no hunters at the well, and there were no foresters at the long bench by the granary where the foresters always sit at midday to eat their bread, and there were no boys throwing stones at the crows in the field beyond the chapel, because the boys had been kept inside. I did not at first understand what I was seeing. I thought perhaps it was a saint’s day I had forgotten, or a death I had not heard of, or some small village business of the sort that one only learns at the tavern.”
He paused, and rubbed at his face with the heel of his hand, and I noticed for the first time that there was a small tremor in the hand, very slight, the sort of tremor that a man may carry for days after a fright and not know that he carries.
“I went to the tavern,” he continued, “and I unloaded the bottles for the healer onto the bench in the back as I have always done, and the tavern-woman, whose name is Aldys and who has known me, as I said, these eleven years, came out to me with my mug of the bad beer as is the small custom between us, and she sat down across the bench from me and she looked at me, smith, the way a woman looks at a man when she has been carrying a weight by herself and has run out of room in her arms for it. And she said to me, very quiet, as though the saying of it were a thing she should not be saying at all, she said, the hunters do not come back, tinker.”
I had set my hammer down upon the anvil and I was not aware that I had set it down. I picked it up again, with what I hoped was no obvious haste, and I struck the billet a measured blow, and another, and the iron rang in that particular way iron rings when it is well at temperature and the strike is true, and I said, with what I hoped was the proper note of the smith’s idle interest, “How do you mean, friend, the hunters do not come back?”
“I mean,” said the tinker, “that they go out into the wood, as hunters do, and they do not come back, and the wood I am speaking of is the wood that runs up against the stone country at the edge of the Embrace. She told me that it began perhaps two months ago. One man at first. A forester, a man of perhaps thirty, who had gone out on a Conjursday at dawn and had not returned by the evening of Evoday, and the search was raised, and they found nothing, not so much as a dropped knife or a torn coat. They thought he had fallen, or been taken by a bear, or had perhaps simply walked off, men do walk off sometimes for reasons they tell no one. They mourned him quietly and went on. Then a second man, a fortnight later. Then two together. Then four. The last party that went out, smith, was eleven men, all armed, and they went on the understanding that they would stay together and turn back at the first sign of anything wrong, and they have not been seen now for sixteen days.”
The fire in my forge popped at that moment with a small sharp sound, as fires will do, and I confess I started slightly at the sound, and Hettie at the bellows looked up at me with her bright watchful eyes, and I gave her a small reassuring nod, and she lowered her gaze and pumped the bellows, and the iron in the coals brightened.
“Sixteen days,” I said.
“Sixteen days,” said the tinker. “And the village, smith, the village does what villages do, which is to say it goes on. The bell is rung in the chapel-house and the chickens are still in the yards and the smoke still goes up out of the chimneys, because there are women and children and old men who must be fed and warmed regardless of what has been taken from them, and a village that stops moving is a village that dies, and they know it. But the lane is empty of the men who are not there to walk in it, and the long bench by the granary is empty of the foresters who are not there to sit on it, and the tavern-woman, who has poured me my bad beer these eleven years, sat across the bench from me and told me her brother was among the eleven who went out and did not come back, and she did not cry while she told me, smith, which was the part that I have not been able to stop thinking on. She did not cry. She told me as one tells a fact about the weather. The hunters do not come back.”
I struck the billet, and I struck it again, and I shifted my grip on the tongs, and I struck it a third time, and the iron flowed under my hammer the way good iron will when one is paying it the proper attention, and I confess that I was not paying it the proper attention, friend, I was paying it enough attention to keep from spoiling the weld but no more than that, because there was a great deal of my attention that was now elsewhere, was now standing in a lane I had never seen in a village I had never visited and listening to a woman I had never met tell me, in a voice that did not cry, that the hunters did not come back.
“Did she tell you,” I asked carefully, “what they thought had taken them?”
“She did not tell me what they thought,” said the tinker, “because they do not know. But she told me a thing that the searchers had brought back, and she told it to me because she said she could not keep it in her any longer and I was a man passing through who would carry it away from the village and not leave it there to fester. She told me that the last search party, the one that went out after the eleven and turned back when they came to the edge of the stone country, that search party brought back a coat. It was the coat of one of the eleven, a man named Berrick, whom Aldys had known since they were children. The coat was found upon a stone at the very edge of the wood, folded, smith. Folded. Not torn, not bloody, not flung down. Folded, as though Berrick had taken it off and laid it there himself in the manner that a man lays his coat upon a chair before going to his bed.”
He stopped, and he looked at me, and I looked at him, and Hettie pumped the bellows once, and stopped, because she had felt the change in the room, and the iron in the coals lay there brightening unattended for a long moment.
I do not know that I can tell you, friend, what passed in me at that moment. I am a smith, and I am not given to the fancies that afflict those of more delicate temperaments. I have been in country that frightened me, and I have stood with my hammer in my hand against men who meant me harm, and I have buried a child of my own, which is a thing I will speak of only this once and will not return to, and I have on the strength of these and other experiences cultivated in myself what I had always supposed was a tolerable degree of steadiness. But there was something in the picture of that folded coat upon the stone at the edge of the wood that put a finger upon my spine in a place I had not previously known I had, and pressed.
It was not the violence implied. Violence I understand. A bear takes a man, there is blood. A pack of wolves takes a man, there is a torn coat. A man falls from a height, there is a broken body at the bottom of it. These are the grammars of the world, and I have read them in my time. But a coat folded, smith. A coat folded as though laid aside for the evening. That is a grammar of a different kind. That is a grammar that suggests the man went of his own accord, walking, and laid aside the coat because he no longer felt the need of it, because something had happened to him by then which had made the coat irrelevant, the way a man going at last to a long-anticipated sleep lays aside the things of his waking life. And I thought, standing there with my hammer over the dying heat of the billet, of what could possibly be in a wood that would persuade a hunter, an armed and warned and forewarned hunter, to walk to it and to lay aside his coat at the threshold like a guest at a door.
“Hettie,” I said quietly, “give me three pumps and rest.”
She gave me three pumps, and the iron came back to color, and I lifted it and laid it upon the anvil and struck it true, and the ring of the hammer in the yard was the same ring it had been all morning, the honest ring of work, and the tinker watched me work, and after a long while he spoke again, more softly than before.
“I am telling you this, smith,” he said, “and I will tell you why I am telling you. I am telling you because I have carried it three days down the road on a cracked axle and I have not been able to sleep for the carrying, and because the woman who told me to take it away from her village deserves that I should not be the only one who knows. The order I have it in I do not understand. The story is not a story I can hand to a constable, because there is no crime that I can name, only an emptiness in a lane and a folded coat upon a stone. The healer in the south who pays me for the bottles is an old woman who does not need another grief upon her, and I will not give her this one. But you, smith, you sit at the Three-Stones Crossroads, which is a place where many roads meet and where many people pass, and a story laid down here is not laid down in the dark. A story laid down here will go where it needs to go.”
I struck the billet, and I struck it again, and I made the weld, and the weld was a true weld, the iron flowing into iron the way a good weld flows when the temperature is right and the hammer is true and the smith has not let his attention wander far enough to spoil it, and I drew the piece off the anvil and laid it on the cooling table and stepped back and wiped my brow with the back of my wrist and looked at the tinker, who was sitting on the stool by the forge door with his much-mended hat upon his knee and his hands folded over the crown of it and his eyes upon me very steady, very quiet, the eyes of a man who had given over a weight at last and was waiting only to be told that the weight had been received.
“I have received it, friend,” I said to him, slowly, “and I will not let it lie in the dark. You have my word as a smith, which is the only word I have that I count as worth giving, and you may take that word and sleep with it tonight, as is your right.”
He nodded once, and he put his hat upon his head, and he stood up off the stool, and he said, “I will be at the inn down the road tonight if you have need of me before I go on in the morning. The healer’s bottles must reach the south by the new month, or I would stay longer. But I am at the inn tonight, smith. If you have need.”
“I will not have need,” I said, “but I thank you for the offer of yourself, which is more than a tinker is generally obliged to offer to a smith, and I will remember it.”
He left me, then, and walked out into the yard to oversee the cooling of the new axle-section in the wind, and Hettie at the bellows looked at me, and I looked at her, and I saw that she had heard every word, because Hettie hears every word that is spoken within fifty feet of her bellows whether she wishes to or not, and I saw further that she had understood enough of what she had heard to be troubled by it, because she is twelve and not stupid, and I went to her and put my great rough hand upon her small clean shoulder and said, “Lass, you will not speak of this to your mother. You will not speak of this to anyone. You will let your master carry it for the present, and when he has decided what is to be done with it he will tell you what part of it is yours to carry, and not before. Do you understand me?”
“I understand you, Master Goradd,” she said, in the small grave voice that she uses when she has been spoken to as an adult and is determined to be worthy of it.
“Good girl,” I said again, and this time she did not pretend not to hear me.
I went on with the work, then, because work was what was wanted, and a smith who lets a job sit half-done in the forge because he has heard a hard story is a smith who has forgotten what the forge is for. I drew the new axle-section true and fitted it to the old stub and made the second weld and let it cool slow and even, and I built up the wagon’s wheel-hub and packed it with fresh grease from my own jar, and by the time the sun had begun to slip toward the western roofs the wagon stood once more upon four good wheels and the tinker, who had spent the latter part of the afternoon in the side yard repacking his small drawers and doors, came to me with the coin in his palm and we shook hands as smiths and tinkers shake hands, which is to say with a grip that has been earned by both parties and is not exchanged lightly.
He drove out of the yard at the long slow pace that a tinker drives when the load is precious and the road is poor, and the wagon’s small pots and kettles set up their chorus of small percussive complaints, and the great oak in my yard threw its long late shadow across the road behind him, and I stood at the gate of the forge for some long while watching him go, and I did not move until the wagon had gone over the small rise to the east and the sound of its kettles had been swallowed by the evening, and only then did I turn and walk back into the yard and look up at the sky, and the sky was a clear pale fading blue with the first of the evening stars beginning to put forth its small white light, and I thought, friend, I thought, what a poor and beautiful world it is that we live upon, in which a man may lay his coat upon a stone at the edge of a wood and not come back for it, and another man may carry the news of it three days down a road with a cracked axle, and a third man may receive it in his forge at a crossroads on a fine morning in Lathandus, and all three of these men may be doing, in their separate ways, the same small honest work, which is the work of refusing to let a hard story lie in the dark.
I closed the forge for the night earlier than was my custom, and Hettie went home to her mother across the fields with her small lunch pail swinging at her side and her small grave eyes thinking thoughts I could not see, and I went into the house behind the forge, where my wife Tessa had laid out the supper she has laid out for me every evening of the eight years of our marriage, which was bread and broth and the small soft cheese she makes herself from the milk of the brown goat in the side yard, and she looked at me as I came in and she saw at once, as she always sees at once, that something was sitting upon me, and she did not ask. She has never asked. She has only ever waited, the way a good fire waits for the kettle to be set upon it, and the waiting has been the medicine for more griefs in our small household than I could number.
I sat down to the supper, and I ate the bread, and the bread was good, and I ate the broth, and the broth was good, and I ate the cheese, and the cheese was good, and at last, when the bowl was empty and the lamp was burning steady on the table between us, I said to her, “Tess, there is a village three days east of here from which the hunters do not come back, and I have heard the story of it today, and I do not yet know what is to be done about it, but it has put a finger upon my spine and pressed.”
She looked at me a long moment, and she said, in her quiet practical way, “Then you will think on it, Goradd, and you will know what is to be done in the morning, or in the morning after that, and I will pack the small kit if you find that you must go.”
“I have not said I must go,” I said.
“You have not,” she agreed. “But you have said that the finger has pressed, and I have known you eight years, and I know what the finger has done before.”
I had no answer for that, friend, and I gave none, and I reached across the table and took her hand, which is small and rough and the most truthful hand I know upon this moon, and I held it, and she held mine, and the lamp burned on between us in the small yellow honest light that I have come to think of as the proper light of the world, and outside the window the dark gathered upon the crossroads as it has gathered upon all crossroads of all worlds since the first crossroads was ever laid down, and somewhere very far to the east of us, upon the edge of a stone country called by an ugly soft name, a coat lay folded upon a stone where its owner had left it, and the wind moved over the folded coat, and the wind did not move it, because some things are too heavy now to be moved by wind.
Segment Three: The Webs Beneath the Floor
There is a particular kind of cellar in this world, and I have stayed in a great many of them, so I consider myself something of an authority on the subject, the sort of authority who is never invited to give lectures because authorities on cellars are not generally what universities are looking for, but an authority nonetheless. The particular kind of cellar I mean is the kind that the keeper of a riverside inn rents out at a reduced rate to a traveler who has explained, with the right combination of cheerful honesty and slightly worrying enthusiasm, that she prefers the cellar to the upstairs rooms because the cellar has the spiders.
The keeper of the Bent Reed, whose name was Old Pell and who had the face of a man who had seen most of the river’s moods at least twice and had stopped being surprised by any of them, had looked at me when I made this request as though I had asked to be charged extra for the privilege of sleeping in a barrel. Then he had shrugged in the slow, philosophical way that innkeepers shrug at travelers from foreign parts, and had said, well now love, the cellar it is, and we will not charge you more than two coppers the night seeing as you are taking off our hands a room that nobody else will go near on account of the damp, and I had said, oh petal, you are doing me the favor not the other way round, and we had shaken on it and that had been three weeks ago and we had got on famously ever since.
I had got on famously, that is to say, with Old Pell, and with the cellar, and most importantly with the spiders, of whom there had been at my best count one hundred and forty-three, give or take a few that lived in the small dark crack behind the pickle-barrel and would not come out for any consideration short of a small fire, which I was not willing to start in a cellar full of pickle-barrels, because while I am many things, love, I am not so far gone that I would burn down an inn to count its arachnids.
I had a notebook for them. I had three notebooks, in fact, because I had filled the first two and Old Pell, who had come to take a quiet sort of interest in the project the way an old man will take a quiet interest in anything that does not require him to leave his chair, had given me a third out of the stack his late wife had used for her tavern accounts, and the third had her old reckonings in the back which I had carefully not touched, only writing my spider notes from the front and stopping at the page where her tidy column of barley-and-ale figures began. She had had a beautiful hand, Old Pell’s wife. I did not know her name. I had not asked. There are some questions you do not ask the keeper of a riverside inn at the beginning of a three-week stay, and the name of his dead wife is high on that particular list, somewhere just below what happened to the fingers on his left hand.
In the notebooks I had been keeping what I privately considered to be a thoroughly respectable scholarly record, which is to say a record that no respectable scholar would have anything to do with, because respectable scholars in my experience prefer their subjects to be either very far away or very dead and these spiders were neither. They were right here. I had given them names. I had not given them names like Reginald and Eustace, which is what people who give names to spiders generally do because they think it is funny, and it is funny the first time and slightly less funny the second time and by the third time it is just a small embarrassing thing you have done with your afternoon. I had given them names like the kind of names that spiders, in my private opinion, ought to have for themselves if they ever got around to choosing names, which was names like Sevenstep, and Pale Belly, and the Old Gentleman in the Corner, and She Who Eats On Wednesdays. I had a name for each of them and I had a small drawing of each of them and I had notes on where each of them preferred to sit and what each of them ate when, and I had a working theory, on which I had been quietly building for the last eleven days, about the social structure of the cellar’s spider population, which I was beginning to suspect was not actually composed of one hundred and forty-three independent spiders at all but rather of about twelve loose families with a flexible system of cousinship that allowed for shared web maintenance under certain conditions, and the conditions were not random, love, that was the thing, the conditions were not random, they had to do with the moisture in the air and the time of day and possibly, just possibly, the river outside.
I am telling you all of this so that you will understand, when I tell you what happened on the morning of the twenty-second day, that I am not a person who walks into a cellar and notices in a vague way that the spiders seem fewer than usual. I am a person who walks into a cellar and notices that the Old Gentleman in the Corner has not occupied his usual rosette of web above the third support-beam, and that Sevenstep has abandoned the long single-thread bridge between the cheese-shelf and the barrel-rack which she had been maintaining for nineteen days with the patient industry of a woman who knows that good infrastructure is its own reward, and that the cluster of small juveniles I had been calling, in my notebook, the Choir, because they all hung in a roughly semicircular arrangement near the high vent and turned, when disturbed, all in the same direction at the same moment like a small chorus practicing for an unimportant festival, were gone, all of them, every single one, leaving behind only the faint ghost-prints of their feet upon the dust at the edge of the vent where they had stepped off and not stepped back.
I had been on the third stair from the top when I noticed the first absence. I stood there for a long moment with the small lantern Old Pell lent me each evening in my left hand and my third notebook in my right hand and my mouth slightly open in the way that one’s mouth goes slightly open when one’s brain has registered a fact that one’s manners have not yet caught up with, and I went on standing there for some seconds, and then I said, aloud, to nobody, to myself, to the absent spiders, ain’t this a thing now.
I came down the rest of the stairs slowly. There is a way of walking into a room when you have realized something is wrong with the room before you have realized what, exactly, is wrong, and the way of walking is slow, with your weight set carefully so that you can change your mind about being in the room at very short notice, and that is the way I came down. The cellar at the bottom of the stairs looked, at first glance, exactly as it had looked every morning for three weeks. The pickle-barrels were where the pickle-barrels were. The cheese-shelf was where the cheese-shelf was. The long low rack of bottled river-fish, of which Old Pell was vaguely proud and which I had never seen anyone order, was where it had been. The damp patch on the south wall, which I had been mentally calling the Continent because it had a coastline that resembled, with some imagination, the western edge of the second-largest of the eastern island nations, was where it had been, and had even extended a small new peninsula in the night the way damp patches will when the river is up.
But the webs.
Oh, love.
The webs were still there. That was the first thing. I want you to understand that. The webs had not been swept down, the webs had not been torn out, the webs had not been so much as nudged. They hung where they had always hung, from beam and barrel and rafter and corner, in the same patterns I had drawn into my notebook over and over again, and the patterns were precise, love, the patterns matched the drawings down to the small loose strand at the third bottom-right joint of the structure I had named the Snowflake That Couldn’t Be Bothered, because the spider who built it had a long ongoing argument with symmetry that I had been documenting with some pleasure.
The webs were exactly where the webs had been. The spiders were not.
This is, I want to say plainly, not how spiders work. Spiders maintain their webs. A web is not an abstract piece of art, love, it is a working stomach, and a working stomach requires a working owner, and a spider who has decided to leave home generally leaves home in the only way she knows how, which is by eating the silk on her way out and starting fresh somewhere else, because silk is expensive and silk is reusable and a spider’s small ancestral wisdom is that you do not leave good silk behind, you eat it and you walk away with it inside you. A whole cellar of intact, unmaintained, ownerless webs is not a thing that occurs in the ordinary business of the world. A whole cellar of intact, unmaintained, ownerless webs is the kind of thing that a person sees once, perhaps, in the cellar of a riverside inn at the wrong end of a particular week, and after which the person can never quite see cellars in the same way again.
I came down off the last stair and I stood in the middle of the cellar floor with the lantern raised at about shoulder height in the way one raises a lantern when one would like to see something but would also like to give whatever-it-is a sporting chance to be elsewhere by the time one’s eyes get to it, and I turned slowly, the way you turn when you want to see all of a room without the room being able to claim that you only saw part of it.
The cellar was empty of spiders. Every web was full and every web was empty. The Choir was gone from the vent. Sevenstep had abandoned her bridge. The Old Gentleman in the Corner had vacated his rosette, leaving behind the small dim spot in the center of it where for nineteen days his body had cast its small dim spider-shaped shadow. The pickle-barrel crack, in which the unsociable ones had lived and out of which they had refused to come for any consideration, was open and dark and had nothing in it. I held the lantern close to it and I peered in and I called, softly, the way you would call to a cat under a bed, are you in there, loves, and the crack did not answer me, which was about what I would have expected from the crack on any morning, but the silence of the not-answering had a quality this morning that it had not had on any of the previous mornings, and the quality was the quality of a silence that was paying attention.
I straightened up. I will say that I straightened up, because what I actually did was more in the nature of a sudden small jerk in the upright direction, the sort of jerk one performs when one has been crouched over a crack in a barrel-rack and has just become aware that one is being looked at by something one cannot see. It was at this point that I noticed the second thing, which was the hum.
Now, friend, here is something I will tell you about hums, because I have learned a great many things in my life and most of them have been the wrong things at the wrong time, but a few of them have been the right things at moments when the right things were exactly what was wanted, and one of those right things is about hums. Hums are everywhere. The world hums. The river hums against the foundations of an inn, and the wood of an old building hums in slow long subsonic ways as it settles through its centuries, and the small lights of bodies hum in their own private frequencies, and the wind in a rafter hums, and the breath in a chest hums, and there is not a moment of any day in which a person with a still enough mind cannot hear, if she chooses, the great soft chorus of the world’s hums going on around her like a kitchen with a great many small kettles all simmering at once. The thing about hums, however, is that you learn the hums of a place. You learn them by being in the place. After three weeks in Old Pell’s cellar I knew the hums of that cellar the way I knew the curve of my own right thumb. There was the slow groan of the south support-beam at the change of the tide. There was the high thin whisper of the vent when the wind off the river caught it the right way. There was the rumble of Old Pell’s heavy boot upstairs at half past four every morning when he came down to start the kitchen fire, and there was the small clink of his kettle on the hob at twelve past five, and there was, at irregular intervals between, the small private hum of the cellar’s spiders themselves, which most people do not know about but which is real, love, oh, it is real. Spiders hum. Not loudly. Not in any way that the inattentive will hear. But when there are one hundred and forty-three of them at work in a confined space, the combined whisper of their small claws against silk, and the slight thrum of strands under tension being plucked by passing air, and the smaller still thrum of the spiders themselves breathing the way spiders breathe, all of which is technically not a hum but adds up to one in the way that a great many small not-hums will add up to a hum given enough of them, that combined whisper is a real and reliable presence in a real and reliable cellar, and I had learned it. I had got so used to it that I had stopped hearing it, which is what one does with hums one has learned, the way one stops hearing one’s own clock.
The cellar’s hum that morning was not the cellar’s hum.
The old hums were gone. The south beam was not groaning. The vent was not whispering, though the river was up and the wind was right and it should have been. The small private chorus of one hundred and forty-three working spiders was, of course, also gone, because the workers were not at work and the silk was not being plucked and the small claws were not stepping. All of that I had expected to notice, and I had noticed it, and a part of my brain had been ticking it off on a small list as I turned slowly with the lantern.
What I had not expected to notice was that something else was humming in the place where all those hums had been.
It was not loud. I want to say that. It was not in any way the kind of hum that a passing inn-keeper would have heard if he had clattered down the cellar stairs in his boots and looked around for a missing barrel. It was the kind of hum that you only hear because the room has gone so quiet that the hum has nowhere to hide. It was coming from the webs.
The webs were humming.
I want you to imagine, love, the sound a single fiddle-string makes if you draw a bow across it very slowly with very little pressure, so slowly that you do not produce a note so much as the suggestion of a note, the ghost of a note, the thing a note is before a note has decided to be itself. Imagine that, and imagine it coming from a great many sources at once, scattered across the cellar in every direction, all of them at slightly different pitches that did not quite agree with one another but did not quite disagree either, the way a room full of people humming quietly to themselves will produce a kind of accidental chord that nobody composed and nobody is responsible for and yet there it is, in the air. The webs were doing that. Every web. Every strand. They were vibrating at a pitch that I had never in my life heard a web make, and they were vibrating in concert, and the concert was wrong.
I will tell you why the concert was wrong, because this is the part where it gets interesting, and I want you to be interested, because I was interested, oh I was so interested, love, I was so interested that I did not at first notice how cold my hands had become around the handle of the lantern. A vibrating web is not a strange thing. A vibrating web is what webs do when they are working. The strands take in the small movements of the air and the small thumps of trapped insects and the small steps of the spider herself, and they translate all of those movements into the language of vibration, and the spider sits at the heart of her web and reads the language, and that is how a spider, who is not very clever but is patient beyond any virtue of cleverness, knows what is happening in her small kingdom without having to look. Vibration is the spider’s news. A web hums because a web is listening.
But a web only listens when there is a spider at the heart of it to do the listening. A spider gone, the web does not vibrate, because there is nobody home to translate the vibrations, and the strands fall slack, and the silk goes quiet, and the small kingdom shuts down for the season the way a workshop shuts down when the master has gone to bed. That is how webs work. That is how webs have always worked. That is, I am quite confident, how webs work in every cellar of every inn upon every river of this entire moon, including, until this morning, the cellar of the Bent Reed.
The webs in the cellar of the Bent Reed, this morning, were humming.
There was no spider at the heart of any of them. I checked. I went around the cellar with the lantern, holding it close to web after web, looking for the small dark body that ought to have been at the center, and there was nothing. Not a body. Not a shed skin. Not so much as a leg. The webs were empty, and the webs were singing, and I want to tell you, love, in the small flat honest way that I try to tell important things, that the singing was getting under my skin in a way that singing is not supposed to get under one’s skin, because the singing was, I realized, exactly the kind of singing you might produce if you wanted to listen to a room without having to be in it.
I sat down. I sat down on the third stair from the bottom, because my knees did a small unannounced thing of their own, and I sat with the lantern in my lap and the notebook in my hand and I let the cellar hum around me for some long minutes while I did the thing I do, which is to say while I started to put pieces together sideways, because sideways is the only way I have ever been able to put pieces together. I cannot put pieces together in straight lines. I have tried. People have tried to teach me. Straight lines are for people whose pieces are all the same shape, and my pieces have never been all the same shape, my pieces have always been the sort of pieces that you get when you have spent eleven years going through other people’s pockets metaphorically and three years going through other people’s pockets literally and a great many years besides that hanging around in libraries you were not technically allowed to be in, and the pieces I have are the pieces that are.
The pieces I had, that morning, on the third stair from the bottom, were as follows.
One. The spiders were gone, all at once, in a single night, without eating their webs.
Two. The webs were intact and were humming at a pitch and in a manner that I had never heard a web produce and that did not seem to be produced by any source of vibration in the cellar itself.
Three. Old Pell, three weeks ago, when I had first come to the inn with my notebooks and my odd quiet questions about local spider populations, had said to me in passing, with the small offhanded air of a man making conversation about nothing important, that the spiders in his cellar had been better company this spring than the spiders in his cellar had ever been before, and when I had asked what he meant by that, he had said, well love, I do not know that I can say exactly, only that there seem to be more of them than there used to be, and they seem to mind their business more particularly than they used to. I had thought at the time that this was the sort of remark old innkeepers make about anything that has been around their inn for a season or two. I now found myself thinking about it differently.
Four. The river had been up unusually this spring. Three weeks of unusually. I had noted this in my second notebook, because the river being up changed the moisture and the moisture changed the spider behavior, but I had not, until this moment, asked myself the question that I now found myself asking, which was, what else does the river bring up when it is up. Rivers in this country, as I had reason to know from a great many other people’s pockets in a great many other inns, were not simple things. Rivers in this country drained out of the lower hills, and the lower hills drained out of the upper hills, and the upper hills, here and there, drained out of countries that you did not necessarily want to know about, including, if I remembered my geography rightly, and I usually did, because geography is one of the few things I have ever been able to think about in something resembling a straight line, the country at the edge of which sat the dungeon some people called the Embrace.
Five. There had been, two nights ago, what I had at the time taken for a particularly bad dream. I had not written it in any of the notebooks, because the notebooks were for spiders and not for dreams, but I want to put it down now, because the pieces are not making sense without it. Two nights ago I had dreamed, briefly, of a wide dark room with no floor and no ceiling, only walls of webbing that ran off in every direction farther than the eye could go, and in the middle of the room a person, or possibly a place where a person ought to have been, sleeping. The person in the middle of the room had not been doing anything. The person in the middle of the room had been the most still thing I had ever seen in any dream, and yet the room around them had been alive, the webs had been singing the way the webs in the cellar were singing this morning, oh, love, exactly the way they were singing this morning, and the singing in the dream had been listening to the person in the middle of the room the way a doctor listens to a patient’s chest, and the listening had been gathering, the listening had been adding up, the listening had been preparing, in the slow patient way of something that has all the time in the world, for something the person in the middle of the room did not yet know was being prepared for them.
I had woken up at the time and told myself it was the cheese. I told myself that now, sitting on the third stair from the bottom in a cellar full of humming empty webs, and I will tell you, love, with the small flat honesty I owe you and myself and the dead spiders and the gone spiders and the spiders that had never been spiders to begin with, that telling myself it was the cheese did not, this time, work.
I put the pieces together sideways. I cannot put them together for you in the straight line, because they did not arrive in a straight line, they arrived in the order one’s pieces arrive in when one is sitting on a stair in a cellar with cold hands and a lantern in her lap and a notebook in her hand and a small prickling sensation along the back of her neck of the kind that, in my long experience, is not pleasant in any sense of the word but is also, and I want to be honest about this, not unwelcome, because it is the prickling that lets you know you are, for the moment, in the right place. I have spent a great deal of my life in the wrong places. I know the difference.
The pieces went, sideways, like this. The spiders had not died and had not been killed. They had left. They had left because something had told them to leave, and something had told them to leave because something else needed the webs for a different purpose, and the different purpose was listening. The webs of the cellar were listening to something. They were not listening to the cellar, because the cellar was not interesting, the cellar had only Old Pell upstairs and his kettle and his pickles and me, and none of us, at that moment, was interesting enough to justify the deployment of one hundred and forty-three spiders’ worth of abandoned silk as a listening apparatus. The webs were listening to something else. They were listening, and I do not have a way of saying this that does not sound mad, but I am going to say it anyway, because I have learned over the years that sounding mad is a small price to pay for being right, the webs were listening to something elsewhere. They were one node, oh love, they were one node of a great many nodes, scattered through the cellars and the corners and the dark damp places of who-knew-how-many inns and houses and warehouses and forgotten passages, all of them listening, all of them humming at the same wrong pitch, all of them part of a single great straining ear that was being held against the chest of the world, and the ear was waiting to hear something, and what the ear was waiting to hear was the small thing in the middle of the dream-room, the person who was not yet awake, the person who was being slowly and patiently made into the thing that the ear would, eventually, hear.
I sat with that, for a while. I did not move, because the pieces had only just gone into place and I did not want to jog them. I sat on the third stair from the bottom with the lantern in my lap and the notebook in my hand, and the webs hummed around me at their wrong pitch, and the river ran past the foundations of the inn the way rivers do, and somewhere upstairs Old Pell was clinking his kettle on the hob at twelve past five, and I will tell you, friend, that I was scared. I do not often admit to being scared, because the admission tends to be received by other people as an invitation to give me advice I have not asked for, but I was scared, in the way I am scared when I have understood something true that I would rather have left ununderstood. The fear was not, however, the only thing in the room with me. The other thing in the room with me was the small bright delight of a problem I had not previously known existed, and the delight, oh, the delight was the delight of the hunter who has just realized that the thing she has been tracking is, against all expectation, also tracking her, and the hunt has therefore become a great deal more interesting than she had planned for it to be on a Conjursday morning in Lathandus.
I stood up. I am not sure my knees were entirely consulted, but they did the thing they were asked to do, and I stood up off the third stair, and I went to the largest of the webs, which was the Snowflake That Couldn’t Be Bothered, and I took my third notebook and I tore out a page from the back, from one of Old Pell’s wife’s tidy columns of barley-and-ale figures, and I will say to her, wherever she is, that I am sorry, love, I am sorry I tore the page, but I needed it, and I do not believe that she, of all the people who have ever kept a tavern’s accounts, would have grudged me a page on a morning when the cellar was full of humming nothing. I held the torn page up to the web, close, not touching, and I watched the page.
The page moved. Not in any way that would have been obvious to a person who had not been watching very closely. The page moved with the small irregular tremor of a sheet of paper held in still air that is not, in fact, still. The page moved because the web was moving the air around it. The page moved because the web was vibrating, and the vibration was traveling out of the silk and into the air, and the air was carrying the vibration in tiny invisible waves and the waves were striking the page and the page was answering. I held the page there for a long moment, watching the small tremor, and I will tell you what the tremor was, friend, because this is the part where I knew, the way one knows things, that I was not imagining any of this. The tremor in the page was not random. The tremor in the page had a pattern. The pattern repeated, slowly, in long and short, in the way that a message tapped on a wall by a prisoner in one cell to a prisoner in another cell will repeat slowly in long and short, with the patience of someone who knows that the listener may not be paying attention yet and must be given many chances to catch on.
I caught on.
I will not tell you what the pattern said. I do not know that the pattern said anything that could be put into the words I have. I will tell you only that the pattern was patient, and the pattern was old, and the pattern was not native to any spider that had ever lived in any cellar of any inn upon any river of this moon, and the pattern was, in some sense that I felt rather than understood, the same pattern that had been hanging in the air around the person in the middle of the dream-room two nights ago, the same patient slow listening pattern, and now the pattern was here, in Old Pell’s cellar, on a Conjursday morning in Lathandus, and the pattern was, I had no doubt, also somewhere else, and somewhere else, and somewhere else, in cellars and corners and damp places I would never see, all listening, all waiting, all patient.
I tucked the page back into the notebook. I did not throw it away. I had a feeling, in the same sideways way that I have feelings about things, that I might want to look at it again later, when I had more pieces, and the time for looking at small tremoring pages would be a time when I was not standing alone in a humming cellar with cold hands.
I came up the stairs slowly. I locked the cellar door behind me with the small key Old Pell had given me three weeks ago, and I went into the front room of the inn, where Old Pell was at the hob with the kettle exactly as I had known he would be, because the kettle had clinked at twelve past five and Old Pell did not vary his mornings even slightly, and Old Pell looked up at me from the hob and said, in his quiet practical way, well now love, you are pale this morning, did one of your spiders bite you, and I said, no, petal, no, none of them bit me, none of them are down there to bite me, they are all gone, all of them, in the night, every one. He looked at me for a long moment, and his face did the thing his face did when he was deciding whether a piece of news was a piece of news he was going to take in or a piece of news he was going to politely decline, and at last he set the kettle down on the hob with a small care, and he said, ain’t that a thing, and I said, ain’t it now, and we looked at each other across the front room of the inn in the small gray light of the morning, and I do not think either of us was entirely sure what was being agreed between us in that look, but something was being agreed, and the something was the kind of something that is agreed between two people who have both, at different points and for different reasons, learned to take the unusual seriously when it presents itself.
He poured me a mug of the morning’s first tea, without asking. I sat down at the small table by the window. I did not open the notebook. I held the mug in both hands, and I looked out the small thick window at the river, which was up, as it had been up all spring, and which was carrying past the inn its usual cargo of small drifting things, leaves and bits of branch and the occasional small fish belly-up because the river had its small unkind moods like any river, and I will tell you, friend, with the small flat honesty I am trying to keep with you, that I was thinking very fast and not in straight lines, the way I think when I am at my best, which is also the way I think when I am at my worst, because the two are very hard to tell apart and I have given up trying.
I was thinking, sideways, that I needed to leave the Bent Reed.
I was thinking, sideways, that I needed to leave the Bent Reed not because the Bent Reed was unsafe, although I had now developed the firm conviction that the Bent Reed was at the very least unusual in ways that would not improve with my continued residence in it, but because the something that the webs were listening for, the something that was being prepared in the dream-room, the something whose preparation had reached the point where one hundred and forty-three spiders in a riverside cellar could be politely relieved of duty so that their silk could be put to a different and patient purpose, the something was not going to wait for me, and I was not going to wait for it, because I had spent my entire life waiting for the next interesting thing to happen, and the next interesting thing had just happened, and waiting for further interesting things in the same cellar would be a kind of greed I did not think I could afford.
I was thinking, sideways, that I needed to go upriver. I was thinking this because the river was up, and the river had been up all spring, and the river ran out of the lower hills, and the lower hills ran out of the upper hills, and the upper hills, here and there, ran out of the country at the edge of which sat the dungeon some people called the Embrace, and if the webs were listening for the something in the dream-room, the something in the dream-room was, I was very nearly certain, somewhere in the upriver direction, in the patient slow heart of a place where patient slow listening would have grown without being interrupted for a very long time.
I was thinking, sideways, that I would not be going alone, although I did not yet know whom I would be going with, only that the going was the kind of going that is not done alone if one has any sense at all, and although the question of whether I had any sense at all was an open one that had been kept open by a great many friends of mine over the years, I had at least enough sense to know when a sideways thought was telling me a true thing, and the sideways thought was telling me a true thing.
I finished the tea. I thanked Old Pell. I went back to the cellar, alone, one last time, because I was not going to leave the notebooks. I packed them into the small leather bundle in which I keep the things I would not like to lose, and I packed the small set of tools I keep for the small set of jobs I sometimes do for small sets of payment, and I packed the chalk-marker that had been mine for longer than most of my other possessions, and I came back up the cellar stairs and closed the door behind me for what I suspected without quite knowing was going to be the last time, and I said to Old Pell at the hob, petal, I am off, and I am sorry to be off so suddenly, but I have heard a thing this morning that I cannot pretend I have not heard, and I have a sideways feeling that staying would be the wrong shape of staying, and Old Pell looked at me from the hob and he did not seem at all surprised, which was, I think, the thing I will remember most of him in the years to come, that he was not at all surprised, and he reached into the small drawer beside the hob and he took out a small wrapped parcel of bread and cheese that I had not seen him prepare and that he must have prepared sometime that morning before I had even come down to the cellar, and he handed it to me across the front room and he said, well now love, you are off and that is your road, and the road you are taking is upriver, I think, although you have not said so, and I do not need to ask. Take the bread. Take the cheese. Pay me a copper if you must, but I would rather you took it as my gift, because I have known for some weeks that the cellar was changing under us, and I have been quietly grateful that there was someone in it who was paying attention, because attention paid in the right place at the right time is, in my experience, the only useful thing a person can do, and you have done it, love, and that is worth a parcel of bread and cheese.
I paid him the copper anyway, because pride is a small awful thing and mine had not gone away, and I took the parcel, and I said, petal, you are the best innkeeper I have ever lodged with, and that is not faint praise, because I have lodged with many, and he laughed, the small dry laugh of an old man being teased by a younger woman about something serious, and I went out of the Bent Reed onto the river road with the bread and cheese in one hand and the leather bundle on my back and the lantern returned to its hook by the door, and the morning was still gray and the river was still up and the small drifting things were still drifting past on it, and I stood for a moment on the river road and I looked upriver, and the road went upriver in long flat patient bends, the way roads go beside rivers, and at the far end of the road, far past where my eye could go, was a country I had not been to in years, and beyond that country was another country I had never been to at all, and beyond that, sitting in its slow patient listening like a great quiet animal that has been holding its breath for a long time, was the place I now believed I had been quietly invited to come and visit, and I stood on the road, friend, and I felt the small prickling at the back of my neck that I had not yet got around to thanking for being the prickling that lets one know one is, for the moment, in the right place, and I said, aloud, to nobody, to myself, to the absent spiders, to the listening webs three weeks behind me in the cellar of an inn called the Bent Reed, oh petals, oh my loves, ain’t this just the most wonderful and terrible thing.
And then I started walking.
Segment Four: The Letter That Was Not Signed
The letter came on a Transmuday in the early afternoon. The wind was out of the north and the sky was the color of beaten tin and the small port town where I had been living without being known was going about its small port business as it had gone about it every day of the eleven weeks I had been there. I was on the low roof of the cooperage above the alley behind the rope-walk because I had been watching a man for nine days and the man was a man who had killed a child in a city to the south and had not paid for it and on the ninth day a man like that will begin to relax and a man relaxed is a man whose habits show. He did not know I had been watching. No one knew I had been watching. That was the point.
The boy came up the alley with the letter at half past one by the cooperage bell. He was small and quick and he had the loose-jointed walk of a boy who has run a great many errands for a great many people and has learned to look as though he is running none in particular. He looked up at the roof once. He did not look at me. He looked at the place where I was as if he had been told only the place and not what was in it. He set the letter on the third stone from the corner of the cooperage wall and he put a small flat river-stone on top of it to hold it against the wind and he went back down the alley the way he had come and he did not look up again.
I watched him go. I watched the alley after him for the time it takes a man to walk three streets and then I watched it another time of equal length to be sure. The man I had been watching for nine days came out of the rope-walk and went up the lane toward the harbor and I did not follow him. I let him go. I would find him again. The letter changed that. I did not know yet that the letter changed that but I felt the change in the way the air changes before a storm comes in off the water. The body knows before the mind does. I had learned to trust the body. The body had kept me alive longer than the mind had.
I came down off the roof by the rain-pipe and I went to the third stone and I picked up the letter and I put it inside my shirt against my skin and I went home. Home is a word I use loosely. I had a room above a sail-maker’s shop and I paid for it in copper and I had not put anything in it that I would not be willing to walk away from in the time it takes to walk down a stair. The sail-maker was an old woman who did not ask my name and I did not give it and the arrangement had suited us both for eleven weeks. I went up the back stair and I closed the door and I sat down on the edge of the cot and I took the letter out of my shirt and I laid it on my knee.
There was no envelope. The letter was folded in thirds and sealed with a small dot of black wax that had no mark pressed into it. The folding was clean. The folding had been done by someone who had folded a great many letters and had stopped thinking about it. The wax had been dropped from a low height. The hand that had held the candle had been steady. These were the things I noticed before I broke the seal. I have been told that there is a kind of person who does not notice such things. I have not met that person. I think she is a story people tell themselves about other people so they will not have to do the noticing.
I broke the seal with my thumbnail and I unfolded the paper on my knee.
There were three things inside. The paper itself was rough mill stock of a kind made in the river towns north of here. It had the small brown fleck near one edge that came of the bark not being entirely beaten out of the pulp. I had seen the stock before. I had used it once. The first thing on the paper was a map fragment drawn in brown ink with a fine reed. It showed a piece of coastline I did not at once know and a river running inland from it and at the head of the river a piece of stone country sketched with the small repeating mark that mapmakers used for high broken ground and at the heart of the stone country a circle and inside the circle no name but the small letter X which is the letter a man draws when he does not want the place named and only wants it found. The map fragment was not large. It was perhaps the width of my hand and the length of my palm. There was no scale and there was no compass rose. The compass rose was not needed. The river ran the way the river ran. A man who could read a map could find the place. A man who could not read a map had no business with the place.
The second thing on the paper was a sketch. The sketch was small and it was done with the same fine reed and the same brown ink and the hand that had drawn it had been the same hand that had drawn the map. The sketch showed a creature. I will tell you what the creature was. It was not a spider. It had the suggestion of a spider in the way the legs came off the body but the legs were too many and the legs were of unequal length and the body was wrong. The body was wrong in the way a thing drawn from a description is wrong. The artist had not seen the creature. The artist had been told about the creature by someone who had seen it and the artist had done his best and his best had produced this. The eyes in the sketch were not drawn as eyes. The eyes were drawn as small black points and there were nine of them and they were arranged in no pattern I had ever seen on any living thing. Below the sketch there were three small words written in the same hand. The words were phases through walls. There was no comma. There was no period. The hand had not paused. The hand had set the words down and gone on.
The third thing on the paper was a name. The name was written below the three words and the writing of it had been done with more care than the rest of the letter. The pen had been lifted between letters. The hand had wanted me to read the name correctly. The name was Elandor the Swift. There was nothing after it. There was nothing before it. The name sat alone on the paper at the bottom of the page like a stone set down in a field by a man who knew that the field would not move and that the stone would stay where it was put.
That was the whole of the letter.
I read it once. I read it the way I read everything which is to say I read it once and I read it all at once and I did not go back over it because going back over a thing is a habit that makes a man miss what is in front of him. I sat on the cot with the paper on my knee and I did not move for perhaps a minute. The sail-maker’s shop below me was quiet. The wind off the harbor came in the window and went out again. The light on the wall above the cot moved a small distance as the cloud went off the sun.
I will tell you what I felt because I am told that not telling is a kind of dishonesty and I have tried in my life to not be dishonest about the things that matter. What I felt was cold. The cold did not come from outside. The cold came from a place inside that had been waiting for the cold to come and the cold had come and the place had received it. I have felt that cold before. I felt it the first time when I was nine and I felt it again when I was fifteen and I have felt it perhaps a dozen times since and every time the cold has come it has come with the same word and the word is yes. The cold is not fear. I want to be plain about that. The cold is the body’s answer to a question the body has been asked and the answer is that it will go. The answer is that it will do the thing. The cold settles in and the cold becomes the floor a man stands on while he does the thing and after the thing is done the cold leaves him and he is warm again or he is dead.
I was not afraid. I want to be plain about that also. I was not afraid because there was nothing in the letter to be afraid of. There was a map and there was a creature and there was a name. There were two things to do. The first thing was to go to the place on the map. The second thing was to find the man named on the paper. The order of those things I did not yet know but the order would come.
There was a third thing in the letter that I did not at first see and that I saw on the second long look. There was a watermark in the paper. It was very faint. It was a small mark of a kind I had seen once before in my life and only once. I will not tell you what the mark was. I will tell you only that it was the mark of a person I had known a long time ago and that I had thought dead these many years and that I had had reasons to think dead that were as good as the reasons a person ever has for thinking a person dead. The mark on the paper said that I had been wrong about the reasons. The mark on the paper said that the person was not dead and had been keeping themselves not dead in some place I had not looked for them in and that this was the way they had chosen to tell me they were not dead and that they had work for me. The mark said all of that without saying anything. A mark like that can carry a great deal of weight on a small piece of paper.
I did not let myself feel anything about the mark. I had had a great many years of practice in not letting myself feel anything about that person and the years had been useful and I did not intend to lose the use of them now. I made a small note inside myself that the mark was there and I set the note in the place inside where I set such notes and I went on.
I read the three words again. Phases through walls. The hand had not paused. There was a reason the hand had not paused. The hand had not wanted me to think about the three words longer than was necessary because the three words were the sort of thing that a person could spend a long time thinking about and could spend the time poorly. The three words were a fact and the fact was that the creature in the sketch did not respect the walls between rooms and a man who hunted such a creature would have to plan as though there were no walls. I had hunted men in cities and I had hunted men in country and I had hunted one man on a ship at sea and I had not hunted a thing that went through walls. I had not hunted anything that was not a man. The cold inside me did not flinch from the three words. The cold inside me accepted the three words the way the cold accepts whatever it is given and it gave the three words back to me as a small list of practical considerations which were these. The hunt would be at close quarters. The hunt would be at night or in a dark place. The hunt would require a light source that could not be carried in the hand because the hand would be occupied. The hunt would require that I move at all times as though something were already behind me because at some point something would be.
These were not unpleasant considerations. They were the considerations a thing has when a thing has been given a task to do. I noted them. I set them in the place inside where I set such notes. I went on.
I read the name again. Elandor the Swift. The name was not unknown to me. I had heard the name twice. Once in a tavern in a city to the south where a man had told a story about a hero who had taken a vow before an order of priests and had ridden out to hunt a creature in a forest and had come back without the creature’s head but with a story he would not tell. I had not believed the story at the time because the man telling it had been drunk and had been the kind of drunk who lies in order to be looked at. I had filed the name and I had gone on. The second time I had heard the name had been from a woman in a market in a smaller town further west who had been selling small carved tokens of the kind that travelers buy as charms against the road and one of the tokens had been a small flat piece of bone with a name cut into it. The name had been Elandor the Swift. The woman had told me that the token brought luck to those who carried it and that the man whose name was on it was alive and was a hero of a particular order and was the sort of man who turned up where he was needed and went away when he was not. I had not bought the token. I had filed the second hearing of the name and I had gone on.
Now the name was on a piece of paper in my hand and the paper had a watermark on it that should not have been on any paper in this part of the world and the map showed a place that I had heard of only in the way people hear of such places which is to say as a name they would prefer not to say. The Maelstrom’s Embrace. The mark on the map was inside the country of the Embrace. The man whose name was on the paper had gone there or was going to go there or had been told to go there and the person who had sent the letter was telling me that the man was going there and that the creature was there and that I was to be there also. The letter did not say what I was to do when I arrived. The letter did not need to say. The letter said only enough to bring me. The rest the letter trusted me to find.
I will say a thing now that I do not say often. I sat on the cot and I held the letter on my knee and I felt the small bleak satisfaction that I have felt three or four times in my life and that I have come to know as the body’s recognition of its proper work. There is a kind of peace that comes to a person when they are at last asked to do the thing they have been shaped to do and the thing matches the shape. I had been a long time without that peace. I had been keeping it off by doing other work that approximated the shape but did not fit it. The man in the rope-walk who had killed the child had been honest work but had been small work and I had known it was small work even as I had been doing it. The letter was not small work. The letter was work of a size that I had begun to think might not exist for me any longer. The size was correct. The cold inside me sat in the size and was at home there.
I took the letter and I crossed the small room to the iron stove against the back wall and I opened the door of the stove and I put the letter on the small bed of coals that I kept burning for the boiling of water and the warming of the room in the evenings. The paper took the flame as paper takes flame. It curled and it blackened from the edges and the map went last because the ink had been the heaviest there. I watched the map go. I watched the river run into the stone country and I watched the X at the heart of it brighten orange for a moment and then go gray and then go black and then go to ash and the ash drift down through the grating into the small pan below. The name went the way the map went. The sketch of the creature went the way the name went. I watched the three words go. Phases through walls. The words burned the way words burn which is to say they burned exactly like any other words and they took with them the small mark in the paper that should not have been there. I watched the mark go. I did not let myself feel anything about its going. The note that the mark had been there was in the place inside where I kept such notes and the note would still be there in the morning and in the morning after and I did not need the paper any longer.
I closed the door of the stove. I rose from the stove and I went to the small wooden chest at the foot of the cot and I knelt and I opened it. The chest had in it the things I would take and the things I would not take. The deciding had been done a long time ago and I had only to act on the deciding now. I took the twin blades from the chest and I laid them on the cot. I took the veil from the chest and I laid it beside the blades. I took the cloak from the chest and the boots from the chest and the small ledger from the chest and I laid them all on the cot in the order I would put them on or pack them. I closed the chest. There was nothing else in the chest I would take. There were small things in the chest that I had kept for sentimental reasons that were not reasons at all and I left them in the chest. The chest itself I would leave in the room. The room I would leave to the sail-maker. The sail-maker would find the chest after she came up to clean the room and she would open the chest and she would find in it the small things and she would do with them what she did with such things. I trusted her. Trust is a word I do not use lightly. I had taken eleven weeks to give her the small portion of it I had given her and I did not take it back now.
I dressed for the road. The veil first across the lower face. The cloak second across the shoulders. The blades third in the twin sheaths at the small of the back. The boots fourth. The ledger went in the inner pocket of the cloak against the breast. There was a small pouch at the belt for the few coins I would carry. I took those from a small loose board in the floor where I had kept them. The coins were not many. They did not need to be many. A person traveling on the work I was traveling on did not buy much. A person traveling on the work I was traveling on slept where it was useful to sleep and ate what was useful to eat and the coin went only for the things that could not be acquired without it. I knew what those things were. I had a list of them in my head and I had had the list there a long time.
I sat once more on the edge of the cot before I left. I sat for perhaps the time of a slow breath drawn in and let out. I will tell you why I sat. I sat because there is a way of leaving a place which is to walk out of it and there is a way of leaving a place which is to mark in oneself that one is leaving it and the two are not the same. The first is the way a man leaves who intends to come back. The second is the way a man leaves who does not. I have done both in my life. The second is the better way when the work ahead is the kind of work that does not arrange for a man’s return. I did not know whether the work ahead would arrange for my return. I had no reason to think it would and I had no reason to think it would not. The sitting was the marking. I sat. I looked at the room. The room had the cot and the chest and the iron stove and the small thick window that looked out at a piece of harbor and a piece of gray sky and a piece of the slate roof of the building across the lane. The room had been kind to me in the way rooms are kind to people who keep their bargain with the room which is to say the room had asked nothing of me and I had asked nothing of the room and we had got on. I gave the room a small acknowledgment that I had been there and the room received it the way rooms receive such acknowledgments which is to say without any change. I rose.
I went down the back stair. The sail-maker was at her bench at the front of the shop and her needle was going in and out of the heavy canvas in the slow patient way her needle had been going in and out of heavy canvas these forty years and she looked up at me as I came past and she saw me dressed for the road and she did not ask. She set down the needle and she said only that she hoped my road was kind and I said only that I hoped the same of her work and she nodded and I nodded and that was the whole of it. I went out the front door of the shop into the lane.
The lane had the wind off the harbor in it. The wind off the harbor had the smell of pitch and the smell of salt and the smell of the small bad oil they used in the lamps along the quay. The smell was a smell I would not smell again for some time and possibly not at all and I noted that and I did not let myself feel anything about it and I went on.
I went out of the port town by the south gate because the south gate would be expected if I were to be expected and the south gate I therefore took for the first two miles only and then I left the south road and I cut east across a piece of fallow and I came onto the east road three miles further on at a place where there was no waystone and no inn and no eye to see me come onto the road. The east road would take me to a small fishing village by evening and from the small fishing village I could take a coast boat north for two days and from the head of the coast I could take the river road inland for four days and from the head of the river road I could walk the stone country in three days and the place on the map would be at the end of the three days. I had the journey in my head. I did not write it down. Writing it down is for people who expect to be alive long enough to follow what they have written. I have known a few such people. I am not one of them. The journey lived in my head and would live there for as long as I lived and that was sufficient.
I walked the first hour of the east road at a pace I could keep for a day and a night without stopping if I had to. I did not have to. I would stop. But the pace was a pace that did not depend on stopping and a pace that does not depend on stopping is a pace that a person can carry into work that has not yet shown its shape. The wind was at my left shoulder. The light was beginning to go thin along the western edge of the sky in the way the light goes thin in the late afternoon in Lathandus when the wind is from the north. I will tell you what I thought as I walked. I will tell you because the telling is part of the marking and the marking is part of the going.
I thought about the man Elandor the Swift. I thought about him in the way I think about men I have been told a thing about and have not yet met. I thought about him as a problem of distances and times and the likely places along the road into the Embrace where a man like him would have stopped and the likely days he had left ahead of me. I thought that he was perhaps three weeks ahead of me. I thought that three weeks was a long time on roads of the kind he would be taking but that three weeks could be made up if I did not waste any of mine. I thought that I would not waste any of mine. I thought about what I would do when I caught him. I had two possibilities for what I would do when I caught him and the two were not the same. The first possibility was that I would help him do the thing he had gone to do. The second possibility was that I would do the thing he had gone to do in place of him because he had not been able to do it. The letter had not told me which. The letter had only told me his name. I had a small private opinion that the second possibility was the more likely one given that a letter had been sent at all but I held the opinion lightly because opinions held tightly are the opinions that get a person killed in this work and I had not lived this long by getting myself killed for opinions.
I thought about the creature in the sketch. I thought about it as a problem of architecture rather than as a problem of biology because the three words below the sketch had already told me what mattered about it. A creature that goes through walls is not a creature that one fights in a corridor. A creature that goes through walls is a creature that one fights in a place chosen for the fighting and the choosing of the place is the half of the fight that comes before the fight. I thought about what places in a dungeon would be the places where a creature that goes through walls could be made to fight in a way that did not give it the use of the walls. I thought about chambers with stone too thick for the phasing if the phasing had a limit which it always did. I thought about places where a creature whose eyes were used to no light could be made to fight in light. I thought about chokes where many legs were less useful than fewer legs. I built three or four small architectures in my head and I held them lightly the way I had held the opinion about Elandor lightly and I went on.
I thought about the watermark. I had said to myself that I would not let myself feel anything about the watermark and I had meant it and I did not. But the thinking of it was not the same as the feeling of it. The thinking of it was a question of who had sent the letter and the question of who had sent the letter was a question that bore upon the work because the sender of a letter who has chosen a particular hunter has chosen the hunter for reasons and a hunter who does not know the reasons is a hunter at a small disadvantage to a hunter who does. I did not know the reasons. I would not know the reasons until the reasons showed themselves. They would show themselves. They always did. In the meanwhile I could only do what the letter had asked which was to go.
The light went on going thin. The fields on either side of the road went from the late green of Lathandus to the dim early gray of evening. The wind off the harbor fell off behind me and a smaller wind came up out of the east which is the wind that comes up at evening in this country and which has the smell of cut hay in it at this time of year. I walked. I did not stop. The first stop would be at the small fishing village and the small fishing village was perhaps two hours further along the road and I had time for the two hours and I had the pace for them.
At one point a wagon came past me going the other way. The driver was an old man with a thin beard and a thinner hat and he raised his hand to me as drivers do on the road in this country and I raised mine to him and we did not speak and he went on past. He had not looked at me twice. The veil was up across the lower face and the cloak was set to fall right and the boots made no sound on the packed earth of the road and there was nothing in me for him to look at twice. This was as it should be. A person who is going to a place to do work of the kind I was going to do does not give the road anything to remember her by. The road forgets such persons quickly. The road would forget me.
I came at last over the small rise that gives onto the fishing village and the lights of the village were beginning to come on along the small curve of the bay and the boats were drawn up on the strand and the smoke was going up out of the chimneys in the slow gray columns of an evening with no wind to speak of and I stopped on the rise for the time of a slow breath drawn in and let out. I will tell you what I did then. I did the same marking I had done in the room above the sail-maker’s shop. I marked that I had come this far. I marked that the road from this point would not be the same road. I marked that the work I was on was a work I had taken without anyone having seen me take it and that this was the way I had wanted it. I marked that there had been no one to tell. I had thought before I left the room whether there was anyone to tell. I had thought of the sail-maker and I had decided that the sail-maker was not someone to tell because she would not have wanted to be told and would have been kinder to me for not being told. I had thought of two or three other people I had known across the years and I had decided that none of them were people to tell either. There had been no one. The not having of anyone to tell had not been a sadness. It had been the precise condition that the work required and the condition had been there and the work had been there and the two had met and the meeting had been clean.
I stood on the rise above the fishing village in the dim early gray of the evening and the small bleak satisfaction sat in me the way the cold sat in me and the two were the same thing under different names. I had been called to a work of the right size. I had answered. I would go. I would find the man whose name was on the paper or I would find the place where the man whose name was on the paper had been and the work would be done either way. The creature with too many legs would not have all of the legs at the end. The thing being prepared in the heart of the Embrace would meet someone it had not prepared for. I did not know yet whether that someone would be me or Elandor the Swift or both of us together or someone else neither of us had yet met. The not knowing did not trouble me. The not knowing was the shape of the work.
I went down the rise into the fishing village and I took a coast boat the next morning and I went north along the coast for two days and then inland up the river road for four days and then on foot into the stone country for three days and at the end of the three days I came to the place that had been marked X on a piece of paper that no longer existed and I did not yet know that four other people were coming to the same place by four other roads. I would learn that later. I would learn it on the threshold and not before. In the meanwhile I walked alone as I had walked alone all my life and the cold sat in me where it had sat since the afternoon in the small room above the sail-maker’s shop and the wind out of the north was at my left shoulder for the first part and at my back for the middle and in my face for the last and I went on through all of it and the going was the answer and the answer was sufficient.
Segment Five: The Hero’s Vow at the Black Gate
The sun was a red coin set into the western rim of the world when Elandor the Swift came at last to the place that the maps named with a softer word than it deserved.
He came on foot. His horse he had left three days behind him in the care of a charcoal-burner’s wife who had taken the reins from him without comment and had given him in return a heel of black bread wrapped in a cloth and a long flat look that had said all that needed saying about where the road went from her cottage and who walked it. He had thanked her in the old form and she had not answered, only set her hand against the gelding’s neck in the way of a woman who knows she is being given a creature into her keeping and that the giving will not be undone. He had not looked back at the cottage. Looking back was for men who reckoned on coming back. He had reckoned on no such thing in many years.
The road from the charcoal-burner’s had climbed three days through a stone country that grew less kind the higher he climbed. The trees had thinned and gone scrub. The scrub had thinned and gone moss. The moss had thinned and gone bare gray rock veined with the white of old quartz, and the wind had picked up across the bare rock with the long indifferent voice that the wind in such country always has, and at the end of the third day, as the red coin sank toward its setting, he had come over the last shoulder of the last ridge and had seen below him what he had come to see.
The mouth of The Maelstrom’s Embrace lay in a hollow of the stone that was wider than any hollow had a right to be, as though the world had drawn back from the place a step or two and had not entirely returned. The hollow ran perhaps a furlong across at its widest, and the floor of it was a litter of pale fallen blocks and dark twisted roots that had grown out of nothing he could see, and at the far side of the hollow, set into a sheer face of stone that lifted higher than the eye liked to follow, was the gate.
It was not a gate built by hands. He had heard the stories of it told in the houses of his order, told by men whose voices had grown quieter as they told them, and he had supposed in the way of a young man hearing old men’s tales that the tellings had been embellished by the long carriage of the years. He saw now that the tellings had been spare. The gate of The Maelstrom’s Embrace was an opening in the cliff that had the rough shape of a mouth and had not been carved to have that shape, only had it because the stone had broken in the way the stone had broken when whatever had broken it had broken it. The opening was perhaps thirty feet high at its peak and perhaps twenty wide at its base, and there was no door across it, and there had never been a door across it, and the dark within the opening was not the dark of an unlit cave at evening but the dark of a thing that had been making dark for a very long time and had got good at it. Out of the dark came a slow breath of cold air that crossed the hollow and climbed the slope to where Elandor stood, and the air had the smell of wet stone and dust and something else under those that he had no name for and did not wish to give a name to lest the naming bring him closer to it.
He stood on the shoulder of the ridge for a long while. He let his eyes go down the slope and across the hollow and up to the mouth of the gate, and he let his eyes come back, and he did it again, and he did it a third time, because there is a discipline to the looking at a place before one enters it that the brothers of his order had drummed into him in the years of his learning, and that discipline had kept him alive in seven cities and four dungeons and on one ship at sea when the ship had been the worse choice and he had nevertheless walked off it living. The looking found him nothing he had not expected to find. The hollow held no movement. The mouth of the gate held no movement. The wind moved in the scrub at the edges of the slope, and a single bird, late and lost, went over the hollow high up and did not call, and there was no other living thing in any direction that his eyes could reach.
He came down the slope at last in the long slow stride of a man who had not hurried in three days and was not about to begin. His boots set down on the bare rock with the small dry sound of leather on stone, and the wind took the sound and carried it nowhere in particular. Halfway down the slope he stopped, and he set the haft of his walking-staff into the cleft of a leaning block, and he leaned the staff there, because the staff would not go with him further. He had carried the staff from the charcoal-burner’s cottage as a thing that helps a man up a hill, and the hill was at its end now, and the staff was not a fighting staff and would have been only weight in the corridors below. He left the staff. He marked the leaning block in his mind the way a man marks a stone in a field he means to return to. He did not let himself dwell on whether he would return. The staff had its own business now.
At the foot of the slope he came onto the floor of the hollow and the floor of the hollow was not what it had looked from above. From above it had looked a litter of fallen blocks. Up close the blocks were old. He laid his hand on the first he passed and the stone was cold beyond the cold of stone, and the surface of it was scored with small marks at irregular intervals that were not the marks of any tool he knew. He did not pause to study them. There would be time for studying or there would be no time at all, and either way the studying could be done in there as well as out here. He passed the first block and he passed the second and he passed a great twisted root that had grown out of a crack in the floor and had not produced a tree above it but had only sat there knotting itself for years uncounted, and he came at last to the threshold of the gate.
He stopped at the threshold. He did not cross it.
A man learns, if he lives long enough in the work that Elandor had taken upon himself in his eighteenth year, that there are thresholds and there are thresholds. There is the threshold of a tavern door, and a man crosses that threshold without thinking, because the thinking belongs to other doors. There is the threshold of a hall in which a king sits, and a man crosses that threshold with care, because a king is a small dangerous thing that the law of the land has agreed to call great. There is the threshold of a sickroom in which a friend lies dying, and a man crosses that threshold with the slow respect of one who knows that he is entering a place where time is not running as it runs elsewhere. And then there is the threshold of a place such as the one at which Elandor now stood, which is the kind of threshold that one does not cross without first speaking aloud what one has come there to do, because to cross it in silence is to grant the place the right to forget that one came under one’s own name and on one’s own errand, and a place such as this will take that grant and make of it what it wishes.
He drew a long breath, then, and he set his feet flat upon the bare stone at the very lip of the gate, and he looked into the dark of the opening, and he did not flinch from the looking. The dark looked back. He let it. He had been looked at by many things in his life and he had not yet developed the habit of refusing the look. The dark in the gate was not a face but it had the patience of a face, and the patience was the patience of a thing that knew it could wait longer than any man had to wait.
He spoke. He spoke aloud, and the speaking was as a strange thing in the silence of the hollow, for he had spoken to no one in three days, and his own voice came out of his throat older and harder than he had remembered it being, with the dryness of long road in it and the small rasp that the wind off the bare rock had laid into him as he came up.
He said, hear me.
It was the opening of the vow, and it was the only opening, and there were no others that the order accepted. There were men of his order, old men now in the cloister-houses far behind him, who held that the words of the vow were a thing borrowed out of a more ancient time and that a hero of any age could improve upon them by the speaking of his own better words at the threshold of his work. Elandor had heard them argue it, by the fire in the long hall on winter evenings, and he had listened, because he had been young and they had been old, and he had said nothing of his own, because saying things had not been his manner even then. But he had marked, in his own mind, what he had thought. He had thought that a vow that had served the men who had come before him deserved to serve the men who came after, and that the changing of words for the sake of changing them was the small vanity of men who had begun to forget what the words were for. The words were not for the man who spoke them. The words were for the place that received them. And no place such as the one before him cared about the cleverness of any one man’s tongue. The place cared only that the proper form had been kept, and that the man who kept the form had meant it.
He said, hear me. I am Elandor, called the Swift, brother of the Order of the Pale Star, sworn in my eighteenth year and unbroken in the swearing for nineteen years thereafter. I come to this place under no banner but my own and at no man’s command but my master’s, and my master’s command is this, that I should descend into the depths that lie behind this gate and should there seek out the foulness that has been making itself in this place, and should look upon the foulness without turning away, and should name it for what it is, and should, if the strength is in me, cut its making short.
He stopped. The wind in the hollow took the words and laid them down, somewhere, and did not return them to him. He let it. The words had not been spoken for him to hear. He drew the next breath.
He said, I do not promise victory, for victory is not a thing within any man’s giving, and the swearing of victory is the swearing of a lie. I promise only this. I will not turn back at the gate. I will not turn back at the first dark. I will not turn back at the first sound. I will not turn back at the first wound. I will turn back only if I am borne back by hands stronger than my own, and if those hands are the hands of the dead, then I have done my work and the work is sufficient. If those hands are the hands of a creature of this place, then I have failed my work, and let my failing be a small lamp set in the dark for the next who comes, that he may see by the failing where the danger lies and may, by that seeing, fare better than I fared.
He stopped again. The wind in the hollow took the second giving of words and laid them where it had laid the first. There was no answer from within the gate. He had not expected an answer. He had spoken into the dark not for the dark’s answering but for the dark’s hearing, and a thing such as the dark within the gate hears in its own way and answers in its own season and not in the season of any man.
He said, then, the third part of the vow, and this was the part that the old men in the cloister-house on winter evenings had argued most about, because this was the part that named those who had gone before and that called them to bear witness, and the old men had said that the calling was a heavy calling and that no young man should bear it lightly, and Elandor had agreed with them then, and he agreed with them now, and he bore it.
He said, I name now those who came this way before me and did not return.
The wind dropped. He noticed that it dropped, and he did not give the dropping any meaning he did not have a right to give it. The wind drops in stone hollows at evening for reasons of stone hollows and evenings, and not for reasons of vows spoken at gates. He noted the dropping and went on.
He said, I name Brother Maercus, who came in the year of the Long Frost, and who carried the blade Hopebearer, and who was nineteen years old, and who left behind him in the cloister-house a small book of psalms in his own hand which the brothers have kept these forty-one years upon a shelf where the morning light falls on it. I name Brother Tolric, who came in the year of the Burning of the Eastern Vines, and who was a man of forty when he came, and who had been a captain of horse before he took our cloth, and who had a wife in a village by the sea who did not know what had become of him and who lived out her life thinking him faithless. I name Sister Annevra, who came in the year of the Three Storms, and who was the only sister our order has ever sent to such a place, and who chose to come of her own will and against the counsel of every brother she had, and who left behind her a song in a tongue none of us have ever been able to learn, which the brothers sing on her feast day each year by guess at the melody, and which is sung wrongly, every year, and which she would, I think, forgive us.
He paused. He had thought when he began that the listing would be the easiest part of the third giving, and he found it the hardest. The names were old names. He had not known any of these. He had been a boy at his mother’s hearth when the youngest of them had come this way, and the oldest of them had been dust before his grandfather was born. But the order kept its rolls, and the rolls had been put into his hand on the eve of his departure, by a brother whose name he would not say aloud here because that brother was alive and the speaking of a living man’s name at this gate was not a thing one did, and the brother had said to him, learn these, Elandor, learn them as you would learn your own grandfather’s name, for you will need to speak them at the threshold, and a name spoken there is a name kept, and a name kept is a hand at your shoulder when the dark presses, and you will have need of hands at your shoulder.
He had learned them. He had learned them on the long road from the cloister to the charcoal-burner’s cottage, walking and saying them under his breath in the way a man learns the songs his mother had sung him as a child. He had learned them so that he could say them here, at this threshold, in the order in which they had come, with the small details of their lives attached to them like the small bright tokens that a soldier ties to the haft of his spear before a battle, so that if the spear be found upon the field after the battle the tokens will tell who the spear belonged to and what manner of man he had been. He went on with the listing.
He named Brother Vasco, who had come in the year that the Old Bridge fell. He named Brother Inrik, who had come in the year of the False King. He named Brother Holm and Brother Holmen, who had been twins, and who had come together against all the rules of the order, and who had argued the rule down by saying that two of them would do the work better than one and that the order was not so rich in heroes that it could afford to refuse two for the principle of one. He named Sister Pollet, who had been a healer in a port city before she took the cloth and who had carried with her into the gate a small wooden case of physic-bottles that had been her grandmother’s. He named Brother Aramin, who had been blind in one eye since a childhood accident and who had refused the dispensation that would have kept him in the cloister, and who had said to the brothers as he left them, I see better with my one than most see with their two, and let no man think the lack of the one a lack of my fitness. He named the last of them, Brother Olen, who had come only two years before Elandor himself had taken the cloth, and who had been the brother who had taught Elandor the small set of knife-throws that Elandor still carried in his hands, and whose voice Elandor could still recall if he closed his eyes, low and patient and given to small dry jokes that he had told even at the worst moments of training, and whose face Elandor could still see, lean and dark-eyed, in the firelight of the cloister-house on the last evening before he had walked out and not returned.
There were twenty-three names altogether. The naming took him some long while. He did not hurry it. The wind that had dropped did not return, and the silence in the hollow grew thick as he spoke, and he had the distinct sense, by the seventh or eighth name, that the silence was not the silence of an empty place but the silence of a place that had been emptied for the purpose of his speaking, that something in the gate had drawn back its breath in order to let his words come into the dark without obstruction, and that the drawing back of breath was not a courtesy but a study. The dark wished to know who had been sent. The dark was being told. He did not let the knowledge of this study trouble his speaking. He spoke each name in the same level voice in which he had spoken the first, and he gave each its small bright token, and he went on.
When he had named the last of them he stopped, and he said the closing of the third part of the vow.
He said, I name these, and in the naming I bind myself to them, that what was begun in them shall be carried in me as far as I am able to carry it, and that if I fall in the carrying, let my fall be the next stone they laid before me set down at last in its place, that the road of our order may be a road, and not a scattering, and that those who come after may walk upon it more easily for the stones we have laid down.
He closed his eyes for the duration of one slow breath. He did not see the dark in the gate during that breath, and he had a small private hope that the dark would not be there when he opened his eyes again, which was a foolish hope and which he knew to be foolish even as he held it, and which he forgave himself for holding because there is in every man, even the man at the gate of a thing such as the one before him, a small foolish hope of that kind, and the having of it does not diminish the man if the man does not act upon it. He opened his eyes. The dark was there. He had known it would be. He drew his breath, and he said the last part of the vow, which was the part that was his alone.
He said, I am Elandor. I am here. I am ready.
That was all. The form did not require more. The form, in fact, forbade more, because the form had been laid down by men older and wiser than Elandor and they had understood that the last part of the vow ought to be small, because the man who spoke it would be at the threshold of work that did not need him to make speeches, and the work would receive him better if he had not exhausted himself in his speaking before he came to it. Elandor had always thought this part of the form a fine part, and he thought it a finer part now that he stood at a threshold and had use of it.
He set his right hand to the hilt of the Whisperedge of the Faithful Hand, which rode in the sheath at his right hip in the way it had ridden there for the eleven years since the order had given it to him. He had drawn the blade ten thousand times in practice and perhaps two hundred times in earnest, and he knew the weight of it as a man knows the weight of his own arm, and the small balance of it at the cross-piece, and the way the hilt warmed under his palm in the first instant of holding. He drew it now, slowly. The drawing made the small dry whisper of steel against the lined wood and oiled leather of the sheath, and the sheath gave the blade up to him, and he held the blade out at arm’s length before the gate.
The blade caught the last light of the red coin in the western sky. The coin was almost gone now. There was perhaps a sliver of it left above the western rim of the hollow, and the sliver laid a single long thin ray across the bare floor of the hollow and onto the steel of the blade, and the steel took the ray and gave it back, and for the duration of one breath the blade was a line of fire in his hand. He looked along the line of fire, and the line of fire pointed into the dark of the gate, and the dark of the gate received the pointing without comment, and Elandor felt then, all at once, the thing that had been gathering in him since he had stood on the shoulder of the ridge and seen the hollow below him.
It was not fear. He wished, for the smallest part of a moment, that it had been fear, because fear is a thing a man knows what to do with. He had been afraid in his life perhaps a hundred times and he had a method for the use of fear which had served him, and the method was to set the fear down at his feet like a pack and to step over it and to keep walking and to come back for it later, when the work was done, and to take it up again if it was still there, which it usually was not. He had the method ready. He went looking in himself for the fear to apply the method to it. The fear was not there. The fear had not come.
What had come was something he did not have a method for, because it was not the sort of thing one had methods for. It was a fierce, lonely exhilaration. It was the feeling a man has at the top of a long fall, in the half-instant after he has stepped off the edge and before the falling has begun in earnest, when he is no longer on the high ledge and not yet on the way down, and the world is very wide and very still around him, and he can see for a great distance in every direction, and he is alive in a way he is almost never alive in the ordinary running of his days. It is not a happy feeling. He would not have called it a happy feeling. But it had in it a brightness that happiness rarely carries, the brightness of a thing recognizing itself at last in the proper element. He had been made for thresholds such as this one. He had been shaped for them from the inside out, by every choice he had ever made, beginning with the choice his eighteen-year-old self had made before the master of his order on the day he had asked for the cloth and the master had asked him in return what he thought he was doing. He had not been able to answer the question then. He could answer it now. He had been walking, all his life, toward this hollow and this gate and this last sliver of red sun on the edge of his blade, and the walking had been long, and the walking was now over, and what came next was the falling.
He let the exhilaration sit in him for the small space of one slow breath, and he did not try to put it away, because there was no method for putting it away and the attempt would only have made him foolish. He let it be. It was his. It belonged to no one else and would belong to no one else, and the fact of its being his alone was the part that gave it its bright lonely edge. There was no other man in the hollow to share it with him. There were no brothers at his shoulder. The hands at his shoulder were the hands of the twenty-three he had named, and those hands were not hands he could feel, only hands he had agreed to feel, and the difference between the two was the difference that he had taken the vow of his order in order to keep on bearing.
The sliver of sun went. The line of fire on the blade dimmed. The blade was steel again, gray steel held out at arm’s length, and the dark of the gate before him was a dark that no light reached. He stood for one more breath holding the blade where it was, and he let the dark see the blade, and he let the blade see the dark, and they were introduced.
Then he lowered the blade, and he set its tip against the stone of the threshold at his feet, and he made the small ritual mark, which was a single line drawn in the dust before the gate from his right boot to his left, and that mark was the signing of the vow, and the vow was complete. He sheathed the Whisperedge with a single clean motion. The blade went home into the sheath with the small dry whisper of its drawing in reverse, and the sheath received it without complaint, and Elandor took his hand from the hilt and let the hand fall to his side.
He stood for a moment longer at the threshold. The wind had not returned. The hollow was still. The hands at his shoulder, the twenty-three hands that he had agreed to feel, were as present as the hands of men long dead could ever be, and that was as present as he had any right to ask. He nodded once, to no one, and he stepped across the line he had drawn in the dust, and he was through the gate.
He had taken perhaps four paces inside before the dark closed behind him. He did not look back. Looking back is for men who reckoned on coming back, and he had not reckoned on it, and he did not reckon on it now. The wind out in the hollow gave one small low cry as the dark closed, and the cry was the sound a stone hollow makes when the wind catches it the wrong way at evening, and it was no sort of farewell, and Elandor had not asked for one. He walked forward into the dark of The Maelstrom’s Embrace at the same long slow pace at which he had come down the slope, and his right hand rested upon the hilt of the Whisperedge as it had rested upon ten thousand evenings of practice, and his left hand was open and ready, and the fierce lonely exhilaration sat in his chest the way a small bright coal sits in the bed of a forge that has been banked for the night, and he carried the coal inward, and the dark of the corridor received him, and the corridor went on, and on, and on.
Far behind him, in the hollow, the walking-staff leaned against the cleft of the leaning block where he had left it. The bird that had crossed the hollow high up did not come back. The red coin of the sun went finally beneath the western rim of the world, and the hollow filled with the long gray dusk that is the dusk of stone country in Lathandus, and the gate stood open as it had stood open these many years, and the line in the dust before the gate, which Elandor had drawn with the tip of his blade, was the only sign that any man had come to the threshold that evening and had given his name to the dark and had gone in.
Within the cloister-house of the Order of the Pale Star, three weeks behind him by the road he had taken, on a small shelf in the long hall where the morning light fell, Brother Maercus’s book of psalms lay open at the page it had been opened to that morning, as it was opened to a new page each morning by the brother whose duty it was to keep the books of the dead, and the page that had come up that morning was the page that bore, in Brother Maercus’s clean young hand, the psalm that began, into the dark I go, and the dark is not the end. The brother who had opened the book had paused over the page, and had felt a small unaccountable cold in his chest, and had wondered for a moment whether he ought to tell the master what he had felt, and had decided in the end that he would not, because the cold had been a small one and the master had a great deal on him already and a brother’s small cold was not a thing to bring to a master at the start of his day. He had closed his eyes for one breath above the page, and he had opened them again, and he had gone on to the next of his duties, and Brother Maercus’s book had lain open in the morning light, and far away the long gray dusk had closed over a hollow in stone country at the edge of a place that the maps named with a softer word than it deserved, and Elandor the Swift had walked on into the dark of the Embrace, and the order had kept its rolls, and the rolls would, in the fullness of time, be updated as the rolls were always updated, either with the name of a brother returned, which was rare, or with the name of a brother lost, which was less rare, and the keeping of the rolls would go on, as the keeping of all such things goes on, in the small steady way that orders such as his had been keeping their things in the long quiet centuries since the first of their thresholds had been crossed.
Segment Six: Five Roads to One Mouth
I came up over the last ridge in the gray of a morning that had no particular intention of becoming a day, and I stood for some long while on the shoulder of the stone looking down into the hollow below, and I will tell you what I felt, friend, although the telling will not be exact, because what I felt was not the kind of thing that submits to the exactness of telling. What I felt was the small quiet recognition that I had walked the right way. I had been walking, by then, eleven days from the monastery. I had set out on the morning of the day after I had written the single line in my small book, which I have written about elsewhere and will not repeat here, and I had told no one in the order where I was going, because I had not been certain where I was going, only that I was going, and the not-telling had been a kindness to the brothers, who would have argued with me, gently and persistently and out of love, and who would in the end have been unable to keep me, and who would have spent the eleven days that followed in worry that I did not wish them to spend. I had left a note for Brother Vaer, who is the oldest of us and who rings the morning bell, asking him to ring my office in my absence and to keep my cell aired against my return, and Brother Vaer, who has seen many small odd departures across his long years and who has stopped being scandalized by any of them, would, I knew, do as I had asked without putting any questions to anyone. The note had been the most that I could in good conscience leave behind, and I had left it, and I had gone.
The road had taken me down out of the river country and east across two long valleys and up into the dry stone uplands, and from the uplands it had taken me three more days into the higher stone, and at the end of the higher stone it had brought me, at last, to the ridge where I now stood, and below the ridge was the hollow, and at the far side of the hollow was the gate of which I had read in our chronicles only twice in nineteen years, both times in entries written by brothers who had not seen the thing themselves and had passed on what others had told them, and both times in language that I had taken at the time of reading to be the careful overstatement that brothers of our order are sometimes given to. I saw now that the language had not been overstatement. It had been the closest these brothers had been able to come to a thing that did not lend itself to the words we keep on the shelves of our scriptorium, and the failing of their words had been the failing of all words before such a thing, and the failing was not their failing. The thing was what it was. The gate stood in the cliff face at the far side of the hollow, an opening of the kind that the stone had not been broken into so much as the stone had broken away from, and the dark within the opening had the patience of a thing that does not require any man’s belief in it in order to go on being what it is.
I stood on the ridge with the wind out of the north on my left cheek, and I prayed the small prayer that the order teaches us to pray at the sight of a place that we have come to and that we did not expect to come to in this life, which is a prayer of two clauses only, and which is for me the only prayer I ever pray with confidence that the words are exactly the words wanted, because the prayer is old and has been worn smooth by the praying of it across our centuries, and a worn prayer is a prayer whose edges have stopped catching on the heart that prays it. The clauses are these. I am here, Lord. I am ready to be wrong.
The wind took the clauses and laid them somewhere. I did not need them returned. I went down off the ridge in the long careful step that an older man takes on bad footing when he has come too far to be permitted by his vanity to fall, and the slope went down before me in a series of stone shelves that the wind had been working on for as long as winds have been working on stone in this country, which is to say since the world was young, and by the time I came to the lip of the hollow I had been forty-five minutes coming down a slope that a younger man would have come down in twenty, and I was not ashamed of the forty-five. I was, in fact, grateful for them, because the long coming down had given me time to look about, and the looking about was how I came to see the others.
There were four of them. I want to be exact about this, because the seeing of them was the central event of that morning, and the central event of, perhaps, more than that morning, and I do not wish the telling to suffer the small distortions that telling will introduce when the teller is in a hurry. There were four of them, and they had come into the hollow by four different roads, and not one of them, so far as I could see, was aware of the others.
The first I saw was a small wiry person at the eastern lip of the hollow, on the rim opposite the gate, who had come up out of what I take to have been the upper river country, by the angle of her descent and the look of her gear, and who was standing very still in the place a person stands when she has only just realized that the place she has come to is not the place she had imagined while she was coming to it. She had a leather bundle on her back and a small leather case at her belt, and her hair was a thick dark braid that the wind was disturbing, and her face, from where I could see it, was not the face of a person frightened, though she had the right to be frightened. Her face was the face of a person calculating, which I find is the more accurate face for the situations in which calculation can do any good and frightening cannot. She held in her right hand a small piece of chalk-like substance which I did not at the time recognize but which I have since had explained to me, and she was turning it slowly in her fingers, the way a person will turn a thing in her fingers when her hands are thinking on her behalf while her mind looks at something else. She did not see me. She had not, I think, seen any of the others either.
The second I saw was a tall lean man with silver-blond hair who had come down off the western shoulder of the hollow, by a path that wound down past the leaning block where, I noticed only later, a walking-staff had been set in the cleft of the stone and left there as a sign by someone whom I will come to in a moment. He was standing perhaps thirty paces from the threshold of the gate, just within the hollow itself, and his right hand was at his hip in the small unselfconscious way of a man who has been carrying a blade at his hip for so many years that the hand goes there without his thinking. He, too, was not looking at any of the rest of us. He was looking at the gate. The gate had his entire attention. I marked, as one marks such things, that the line of him from heel to crown was the line of a man who had been at exactly this kind of threshold before, or at thresholds enough like it that this one held no surprises for him in its general shape, only in its particulars. He had a scar at his left temple that I could see from across the hollow because the light was striking it, and he had the slight forward set of his weight that the masters of arms in our cloister-house used to call the runner’s stance, and I knew, with the small immediate certainty that comes upon one at such moments, that this was the man whose name had been carried to me in a way I had not asked for and could not refuse, although the carrying of his name to me is a matter I will set down in another place if I set it down at all. I did not yet know him to look at, but I knew, looking at him, that I had been told to come and meet him here.
The third I saw was an androgynous, gaunt figure in dark close-fitting layers who was already inside the hollow and was already very near the gate itself, and who I had not seen approach because they had come, evidently, by a path along the southern wall of the hollow that ran in the shadow of an overhang, and who moved with the kind of stillness-in-motion that I have only ever seen in two people in my life, both of them men whom I had been warned about in advance and both of whom had turned out to be every bit what the warnings had said. This person had a half-veil of soft dark cloth drawn across the lower face, and the eyes above the veil were a pale gold that caught the dim morning light unsettlingly well, and the eyes had gone directly to the lean man with the silver-blond hair and had stayed there for the duration of perhaps three breaths and had then gone past him and onto the gate. The veiled person did not approach the lean man. The veiled person did not approach anyone. The veiled person had simply come to a stop in the middle distance and was now standing as a stone stands, and I had the distinct impression, watching them, that they had been a stone for some little time before I had noticed them, and that I was the slow one for not having noticed them sooner.
The fourth I saw was a short broad red-bearded man who had come up the trail from the south, the trail that comes out of the lower hills by the long way past the charcoal-burners’ country, and who was at that moment standing perhaps fifty paces from the gate with his hands on his hips and his head tilted slightly back in the way of a man who has just gotten his first proper look at a thing he had heard about for many years and is taking the measure of the thing against the measure he had been carrying in his head. He had a short hammer at his belt and a heavy canvas apron rolled and tied at his hip and a pair of tinted goggles pushed up on his brow, and there was about him the unmistakable solidity of a man whose calling has trained him to look at any object whatsoever, including a gate of nightmare in a hollow of stone, with the practical eye of one who would like, at some point, to take its dimensions and consider what could be done. He was, of all of us, the most visibly present in the hollow, which I think was a matter of his temperament rather than any choice. Some men cannot help being present where they are. They walk into a room and the room becomes the room they are in. He was such a man. He had not yet seen any of the others either, and his face was open and curious and undefended, which was the face of a man who had not, perhaps, fully reckoned with the kind of country he had walked into.
I stood at the lip of the hollow and I watched the four of them, and I thought.
I have been a brother of my order for thirty-eight years come this Helmus, and in those thirty-eight years I have had occasion to think, perhaps more than is good for me, about coincidence and providence, which is a question I will tell you the brothers of my order have not settled and will not settle in my time, and which I have given up expecting to settle in my own private heart, and which I have at last come to make a small peace with by the simple expedient of no longer trying to draw the line between the two. The line, I have come to think, is not a line. The line is a fold. On one side of the fold the world is a great deal of small accidents pressed close together by the long working of time and circumstance, and on the other side of the fold the world is a slow patient hand laying out small accidents in the place where they need to be in order that the next small accident may find them, and the fold can be turned this way or that way according to where the heart of the man doing the looking happens to stand on the day he looks, and the world does not seem to mind much which way he turns it. The world goes on either way. The fold is for our use, friend. It is not for the world’s use. The world does not need to know how it works.
I had spent eleven days walking under a sky that did not know me, in country that I had not been in since I was a boy with my father’s flock, and I had been moved to come by a feeling I could not name and a line I had written in a book that no one but I had read, and the line had been written because of a dream I had had on the night before I wrote it, and the dream had not asked me to come anywhere, only had laid in me a small cold that had not lifted, and I had carried the cold for one day and then a second day and on the morning of the third day I had risen from my cot and packed the small bundle that brothers of our order pack when they have decided to be somewhere else for a while, and I had walked out of the monastery without speaking of it, and I had walked east because east was where my feet had wished to go, and east had brought me, eleven days later, to a ridge above a hollow at the far end of which stood a gate that I had read about twice in my life and had never thought to see.
I had come, in other words, by coincidence. There was no commandment laid on me. There had been no vision. There had been no voice. There had only been the cold in my chest and the line in my book and the eleven days of walking. If you had asked me, on the third morning, why I was walking east, I could not have told you. I could have told you only that east was the direction the cold seemed to point, and that I had learned, in thirty-eight years of slow attention to the small movements of feeling in my chest, that such pointings are sometimes the only road-signs given to certain travelers, and that a man who has been given such a road-sign and who turns away from it because it is not also a thunderclap is a man who has misunderstood the kindness of the giving.
But now I stood at the lip of a hollow, and I looked down into the hollow, and I saw four other people in it, who had come by four other roads, and not one of them, I would have wagered the contents of my modest cell, had been commanded to come either. Each of them had come because of something at their own elbow. The wiry person with the leather bundle had come because of something she had seen in a cellar. The lean man at the gate had come because of a vow he had taken in his eighteenth year and had been keeping since. The veiled person near the gate had come because of a letter, the contents of which I could not have known and did not need to know in order to know that the letter had been the road-sign at their elbow. The red-bearded man down the trail had come because of a story told to him in his forge by a tinker, and I knew this without having been told it because I had been a confessor for thirty-five years and you learn, in that work, to see in the face of a man how he has come to be where he is, and the red-bearded man had on him the unmistakable mark of one who has come because somebody else’s grief had walked into his forge in the form of a broken axle and he had agreed without knowing he was agreeing to carry the grief somewhere it could be set down.
Five of us. Five roads. One mouth.
I want you to consider what that meant, friend, because I considered it then, standing on the lip of the hollow, and I have considered it many times since, and the considering has not exhausted the thing. Five separate persons, none of whom had known of any of the others, none of whom had been told that anyone else was coming, none of whom had set out under any banner, none of whom had been promised that they were part of any company, had come by five entirely separate roads to the threshold of the same dark mouth on the same gray morning. There was no general call to which we were responding. The order to which I belong had issued no proclamation. The hero in the runner’s stance was, so far as I could tell, on a private vow taken in private circumstances. The veiled person had received a letter from a single hand. The wiry person was acting on her own quiet investigations. The smith had been pulled in by a tinker’s confession. And I, who knew the most about callings and orders and the long careful business of how brothers and sisters of an order are dispatched to particular places in the world, had received no calling of any kind that an inquiry by my master could have substantiated, only a feeling in the chest and a line in a small book.
If I had stood there on the ridge and told you, three days into my walking, that I would arrive at this hollow at this hour on this day and would find four other people at the threshold ahead of me, you would have heard a brother of my order making a story up about himself, and you would have been right to set the story aside. The probability of such a convergence is a thing that can be calculated, I am told, by people who calculate such things, and I am not such a person, but I have spent enough time in the company of such people, in the years when I taught novices in the lower scriptorium and had to read for them what some of the philosophers had written about the order of the world, to know that the calculation produces a number very near to a certain other number which we are not in the habit of calling by its name. The probability, in plain country language, was none. There was no way for the five of us to have come this way independently and to have arrived together this morning at this gate, and yet there we stood, the five of us, in the unhurried and slightly bewildered postures of five people who had each made the journey alone and were each now, one by one, beginning to notice that the journey had not, in the end, been quite as alone as it had felt.
I watched the wiry person, who I now know to be the woman called Maelis, become the first of us to notice the others. She had been turning the chalk in her fingers, and she had been calculating, and at a certain moment her chin lifted and her gaze went across the hollow, and her eyes caught on the silver-blond hero first, and on the veiled figure second, and on the smith third, and on me, finally, last, and I saw her face do the small clean rearrangement that the face does when a person who has been operating on the assumption that she is alone has just discovered that she is not. It was not a frightened rearrangement. It was a delighted one. The delight had under it a quick edge of caution, but the delight was the larger part, and I watched her give the delight room to spread across her features for the duration of perhaps two breaths, and then I watched her bring it back under control and look at each of us again with the appraising look of a person who has decided that the strangers in the hollow are worth knowing properly and is now beginning the long slow work of knowing them.
The silver-blond hero noticed second. He noticed because Maelis had moved, very slightly, and he was the kind of man who noticed movement in his peripheral vision before he noticed faces, and his head turned toward her without his hand leaving his hip, and his face was a face that I could not at first read because it had been trained, I think, to be a face that was not read easily, and I will not pretend that I read it then. I will only say that he saw her, and he saw the veiled figure, and he saw the smith, and last he saw me on the lip of the hollow, and his hand at his hip did not move from the hilt but it did, very slightly, relax. He had taken the measure of us all in the space of perhaps four breaths, and the measure had been a measure that did not require his blade to come out of its sheath, and the relaxation of the hand was his small acknowledgment of that conclusion. He did not move toward any of us. He did not speak. He stood where he was and let himself be seen, and the standing and the letting were, I think, his way of saying to the rest of us that he was not the one who had come here to do the introductions, and that the introductions, if there were going to be any, would have to be done by somebody else.
The veiled figure noticed third, or perhaps I am wrong about this and the veiled figure had noticed long before any of the rest of us and had simply been holding the noticing inside in the way that they evidently held a great many things inside. At any rate the moment of acknowledgment, for them, was small. The pale gold eyes above the dark veil went across each of the four other faces in the hollow, and they rested on each face for perhaps the length of one breath, and they came at last to mine, and the eyes did not flinch from my eyes, and I did not flinch from theirs, although the eyes were the kind of eyes that a man of my profession would have liked to know more about before meeting them at close quarters. The veiled figure did not move and did not speak. They had registered our presence. That was all they were willing to do. The rest, they were willing to let happen around them, in the way that a stone is willing to let things happen around it.
The smith noticed fourth, and the smith’s noticing was the most generous of the four noticings, because the smith was the most generous person of the four, and his face when he saw us went through a quick small sequence that I confess gave me a great deal of comfort. His face went through, first, surprise, the simple unguarded surprise of a man who had assumed he was the only fool walking up to the gate this morning. Then his face went through, second, relief, the relief of a man who had been carrying the weight of a story alone and was now seeing that he was not, in fact, going to be the only one to carry it. Then his face went through, third, a quick canny appraisal of each of us, and I marked that the appraisal lingered slightly longer on the veiled figure than on the rest of us, which was the appraisal of a man who has not lived as long as he has lived without learning to mark which people in a hollow are the ones to keep an eye on. And then his face went through, fourth and last, the small open friendliness that I think is his natural condition when nothing in particular has been laid against it, and he raised one large rough hand toward each of us in turn, in the way of a smith greeting unfamiliar travelers in his yard, and he said, in a voice that carried surprisingly well across the hollow without his needing to raise it, well met, friends, well met, well met, and well met again, that is four well-mets all together, and I will not say five until the brother on the ridge has come down off it, because a man should not be greeted across a slope, it does not give him his proper place in the greeting.
I confess I smiled at that. It was the first time I had smiled in eleven days, and the smile surprised me. It surprised me in the way that a single thrush singing surprises a man at dawn in a country he had thought empty of birds. I came down off the ridge, then, the last short way into the hollow, and I came down at the careful pace I had been keeping, and the smith waited for me to come, and as I came he looked at each of the others and gave them a small nod which they did or did not return as their natures permitted, and by the time I had set my feet upon the floor of the hollow there were five of us, four standing close and one a little apart, and the gate before us, and the wind that had earlier dropped was back again, and was moving in the small ways the wind moves in a stone hollow when it has decided that things have begun.
I will not, here, set down the conversation that followed our convergence. The conversation belongs in another place, because the conversation was the conversation in which we began the slow work of becoming a fellowship, and that beginning deserves its own telling. I will set down only what I thought, standing at the foot of the slope with my four strange companions in my eye and the gate beyond them at the far side of the hollow, because the thinking is the part that is mine to give.
I thought, friend, this. I thought that I had spent thirty-eight years of my life trying to draw a line between coincidence and providence, and that the line had at last refused to be drawn. The fold had turned in my hand. I had been moved out of my monastery by a feeling in the chest and a line in a book, and the feeling and the line had brought me to a hollow, and in the hollow had been four others whom no feeling and no line of mine could possibly have known about, and yet there they were, and there I was, and the five of us had been gathered. I did not, standing there, know who had done the gathering. I did not know whether the gathering had been done at all, in the sense in which a hand does a gathering, or whether the gathering had been a kind of slow accumulation of separate currents in a place where the currents had been drawn for separate reasons by the same hidden weight at the bottom of the world, and the separate reasons had pulled us each, and the same weight had pulled us all, and the difference between the doing and the accumulation had collapsed at last into a single thing that no language of mine was equipped to call by its proper name.
I think now, having had years to consider it, that the language is not equipped for the calling because the calling is not a thing that any language could have been equipped for. The calling is what the world does when it gathers. The world gathers. That is what it does. It gathers small accidents and small purposes and it lays them down beside each other and at certain moments, for certain reasons, in certain hollows, the small accidents and small purposes come to look very much alike, and the looking alike is the doing of the gathering, and the doing is what we call providence when we are in the mood to be reverent and coincidence when we are in the mood to be modest, and the world does not seem to mind, as I have said before, which mood we are in when we look. The world goes on gathering. The world will go on gathering for as long as there are hollows and gates and small ridges from which a man may look down and see, in the gray of a morning that has no particular intention of becoming a day, four other persons converging upon the same dark mouth by four roads not his own.
I felt, standing there, no great mystical exultation. I want to be honest about that. I felt, instead, the quiet small wonder that I have come to think is the more reliable response to such moments. It was the wonder a man feels when he discovers, on a long walk, that there are footprints in the path ahead of him, and that the footprints are not his, and that some of them are quite small and some of them are quite large and some of them are odd in shape, and that all of them are walking in the same direction he is walking, and that not one of them, when he kneels and looks closely, looks back. The walkers ahead of him have not turned around. They have only gone forward. He has only to go forward also, and he will catch up to them, or they will turn back to meet him, or they will all of them, in their own time and at their own pace, come to whatever it is they are all walking toward.
I felt that. I felt the wonder of that. I felt, beneath the wonder, the same small cold that had been in my chest these eleven days, the cold that had brought me to the ridge, and the cold was, I noticed, very slightly lighter than it had been on the ridge, because the carrying of it was now to be shared, and the sharing of a cold is the only known mercy for it. I did not yet know whether the four others would consent to share my cold with me, or whether they had colds of their own that they would prefer to keep, and which I would in any case be obliged to respect, because no man may demand of another that his cold be taken up. But the possibility of the sharing was there, in the hollow, in a way it had not been there for eleven days. The possibility was enough. The possibility was, in fact, more than enough.
I went forward into the hollow then, the last few paces to where the smith was standing, and I raised my hand to him, and I said, well met indeed, brother, that is now five well-mets, and I am sorry I made you wait for the fifth. He laughed in a single short bark that warmed the hollow in a way the gray morning had not been able to do for itself, and he extended his great rough hand and I extended my own, and we clasped, and the clasping was the clasping of two strangers in a country where strangers had no business expecting anything of each other, and the clasping nevertheless had in it the easy goodwill of two old neighbors meeting at a fence, which I have come to think is the small generous miracle that the world performs upon people of certain temperaments when they meet at certain hours in certain hollows under certain morning skies.
The wiry person had come closer now, and so had the silver-blond hero, in his own careful way, and the veiled figure had not come closer but had not gone away either, which I took to be the form their consent would take. We stood, the five of us, in a rough circle that was not quite a circle, and the gate was at the heart of our not-quite circle, and the gate did not move and did not speak, and the gate did not need to, because the gate had its own role in our gathering and was performing it perfectly by remaining what it had always been.
I will tell you what I thought as we stood there. I thought, the fold has turned. I thought, I no longer know what to call what has brought us here, and I no longer mind not knowing, because the not knowing is the proper condition for the going forward, and going forward is what is asked. I thought, somewhere a man is still dreaming, and the dream has gone on building, and the building has reached the part where the building requires its breakers, and the breakers have been gathered, and the breakers are these. A hero with a vow. A scholar with a notebook. A killer with a letter. A smith with a story. And me. An old brother with a cold in his chest and a line in a book. We were not, on any reasonable assessment of the situation, an adequate party for the work that lay below us in the dark. We were, on any reasonable assessment, the wrong five. But the world had not asked for our assessment. The world had gathered us, and it had laid us down beside each other on the floor of a hollow in stone country at the edge of a place that the maps named with a softer word than it deserved, and the laying down had been done, and the only question that remained was whether we would, having been laid down, lie still, or whether we would, having been laid down, get on with one another.
I had a strong suspicion which it would be. The smith was already trying to learn the wiry person’s name. The wiry person was already trying to learn his back. The silver-blond hero was watching the two of them with the small careful patience of a man taking the measure of allies he had not asked for. The veiled figure was watching all of us in a way that suggested they had already taken our measures and had merely been waiting for us to take each other’s.
I lowered my head for the briefest of moments, and I said, under my breath, in the small private language that brothers of my order use when they do not wish to be heard even by themselves, I am here, Lord. I am still ready to be wrong.
And the wind moved in the hollow, and the gate stood open, and the five of us, having been gathered, began the slow strange work of becoming the company we had been gathered to become, and the gathering, whatever name was the proper name for it, went on with its quiet work around us as it has gone on with its quiet work in every hollow of every world since the first hollow was ever stood in, and I, who had spent thirty-eight years trying to name it, gave up the naming for that morning at least, and watched, and was glad.
Segment Seven: The First Drawing of Lots
There is a particular kind of social occasion, love, and I have been to a great many of them, so consider me an authority on this also, the sort of authority that universities are still not interested in, although I do think the field is underserved, the particular kind of social occasion at which five strangers who have never met before and who have all arrived at the same place by entirely different routes are obliged to sit down in a circle and figure out what to do with one another before the evening becomes unworkable. I had thought, before that morning in the hollow, that I had seen most of the variants of this particular social occasion. I had been wrong, love. I had been wrong in the way one is wrong about the depth of a puddle until one has stepped in it. The variants I had previously known had all involved at least one of the parties wanting something out of the others, which is the lubricant of the entire genre, and without which the genre does not work, and which means that the genre has rules and the rules are roughly the same rules as the rules of haggling, only with more pretense. The variant in the hollow had none of that. The variant in the hollow was its own creature, and the creature was wearing five faces at once and was looking at itself out of all of them, and the looking was making each of the faces uncomfortable in slightly different ways, and the uncomfortable was, I am going to tell you, also somehow a little bit lovely, the way certain awkwardnesses are lovely if you have the right angle on them.
We had stood around in our not-quite-circle for, oh, perhaps ten minutes, after the old brother in the dust-colored habit had come down off his ridge and said his fifth well-met. Ten minutes is not, on the face of it, a long time. Ten minutes is the time it takes to boil a small kettle, or to walk briskly from one end of a small town to the other end of a small town, or to lose at three rounds of a card game one had not understood the rules of when one sat down at the table. Ten minutes spent in a not-quite-circle of five strangers at the threshold of a place none of them wishes to discuss is a different sort of ten minutes, however. Those ten minutes go very slowly. Those ten minutes have texture. I remember those ten minutes in a way I do not remember most ten-minute periods of my life, because the smallest details kept presenting themselves with a peculiar clarity, the way the small details of a room present themselves to a person who has only just realized she is going to have to explain herself.
The smith, whose name we did not yet have but whom I had already privately filed as the Smith, partly because that was what he so plainly was and partly because I have a habit of filing people by their function before I file them by their names, had been the first to suggest, in a perfectly reasonable smith-shaped voice, that perhaps we ought all to sit down. The suggestion fell into the not-quite-circle the way a small reasonable suggestion will fall into a not-quite-circle of strangers, which is to say it lay there for a moment looking quite alone, and then the old brother nodded slowly and said, in his slow deliberate voice, that sitting was a fine notion and would do the legs a service after the morning’s walking, and that small endorsement seemed to give the rest of us the necessary permission. We did not sit down at once. The veiled person did not sit down at all, in fact, for some long while, but only crouched against a fallen block on the southern rim of the hollow at a distance that I privately measured as exactly the distance from which one could reach the rest of us with a thrown blade and one could not be reached by anyone with a held one, and I noticed that the silver-blond hero, who had been watching the veiled person with the careful peripheral watching of a man who has been to a great many hollows in his time, also noticed this distance and made no comment upon it and did not move to alter it.
We sat. We had no fire yet. The Smith had begun to build one almost the moment the words sit down had left his mouth, in the matter-of-fact way of a man who has been building fires in inconvenient places for so many years that the building of a fire is no longer a decision but a small set of reflexes that occur in his hands before his mind has had to think about them. He had gone about the floor of the hollow with no apparent urgency, picking up the gray gnarled roots that lay among the fallen blocks, and a few sticks of dry scrub that the wind had carried down from the slopes, and he had built a small neat conical pile with the patient irritated competence of a man who has noticed that none of the rest of us was going to do it. The veiled person had watched him build the pile with the same expression with which they had watched the rest of us, which was the expression of a stone watching weather. The old brother had reached into the small bag at his hip and had produced, with the small surprise of one who has not used the thing in years, a flint and steel of an old monastic pattern, and he had handed them across to the Smith without speaking, and the Smith had nodded his thanks and had got the fire going in three strikes and had sat back on his heels in the satisfied way of a man whose hands had just been useful.
The fire was a small fire. It was not a fire that anyone would have admired. It would not have warmed a horse. But it sat in the middle of our not-quite-circle and it crackled in the small honest way that small fires crackle, and the small crackling was, oh, friend, it was the first warm sound I had heard in three days of walking, and I noticed, as I sat down at last on a flat block on the eastern edge of the small fire’s reach, that the entire posture of the others changed slightly at the first crackle, as though the fire had introduced itself and the introduction had given each of us, by some quiet permission, the right to stop pretending we were not, in some small unworthy way, glad of company.
It was at this point that the wind came out of the gate.
I want to tell you about the wind. The wind had been a normal wind, until it was not. There had been a wind in the hollow all morning, the sort of stone-country wind that comes off the ridges and worries at the scrub and goes about its small dry business without anyone paying it much attention. That wind I had no quarrel with. That wind had been a hard companion these three days and I had no reason to hold its hardness against it. But after the Smith had got his fire going and we had each sat down at our cautious distances around it, there came another wind, and this wind was not from the ridges. This wind came out of the gate. It came in a slow steady breath the way the breath comes out of a sleeping animal that one has approached too close in the dark, and it crossed the floor of the hollow and it touched our small fire from one side, and the small fire bowed away from it, the way a small flame will bow from a draft when the draft has more weight than the flame can argue with, and the bowing of the flame was the first I felt the cold of the wind on the back of my neck, and the cold of the wind, love, I will tell you, was not the cold of stone country in the gray of a morning that has not decided to be a day. The cold of the wind was the cold of a cellar full of empty webs humming at the wrong pitch. The cold of the wind was the cold of the dream-room with the still person in the middle of it. The cold of the wind was, in plain country language, the same cold I had been carrying around in the back of my own neck for the eleven days since I had walked out of the Bent Reed onto the river road, and the wind had come out to greet me with my own cold, like an old aunt holding up the dress one had outgrown years ago and saying, well now, look what we still have for you.
I gave a small involuntary laugh at that, which was not the most useful response a person could have given, but which was the response that came out of me, because the laugh was the laugh of recognition, the laugh of a person who has discovered that the joke is on her and that she does not have a way to be cross about it. The other four turned and looked at me. The Smith looked at me with friendly bewilderment. The old brother looked at me with slow careful interest. The silver-blond hero looked at me with the small narrowing of the eyes that means a person is reassessing one’s classification in their head and has not yet finished. The veiled person looked at me with the steady gold gaze of a creature trying to decide whether the small noise I had just made was a tactically relevant noise, and they did not appear to have arrived at an answer.
I said, oh, petals, I am sorry, do go on, I just had a thought, and the thought made me laugh, and the laugh was not at any of you, the laugh was at the wind, and at me, and we will all of us get used to laughing at the wrong things if we are going to be in each other’s company for any length of time, so we may as well start now.
The Smith laughed at that. He laughed in the way I had already heard him laugh, which was a single short warm bark of a laugh that ended almost as soon as it had begun, and which had under it the suggestion of much larger laughter that he was, for present purposes, keeping in reserve. The old brother smiled, not laughing, but smiling in the small thoughtful way of a man who has been told something true by a person he had not yet decided whether to trust. The silver-blond hero did not laugh and did not smile, but the small narrowing of his eyes eased, which I took as the equivalent gesture from a man who, I was beginning to gather, did not have a great many available gestures in his ordinary repertoire. The veiled person did nothing whatsoever, which was, I was beginning to understand, also a gesture, just a very efficient one.
We sat for a moment more in our not-quite-circle around our small bowing fire, and the wind out of the gate did not stop. It went on coming. It did not pick up and it did not fall off, it only kept up its slow steady breathing, and the small fire kept bowing away from it the way a small flame will when the draft is steady, and the cold of it kept settling into the small of one’s back the way a cold will when one has been told one is going to have to sit in it for a while. We were going to have to sit in it. There was no going elsewhere. Elsewhere was the slope we had each come down by, and the slopes did not lead anywhere except back to the country we had each just come out of, and not one of us, I was already certain, was the kind of person who turns around and walks back up a slope having only just got to the bottom of it.
The old brother spoke first. He spoke in the slow gentle voice that I have since come to know and to count among the small good things I have known in my life, but which I was hearing then for the first time, and which I noted at the time was the voice of a man who was capable of speaking very softly and yet still being heard exactly by every person in his audience, which is a trick I have always envied, since my own voice has only ever come in two volumes, which are conversational and embarrassing.
He said, brothers and sister, and now that I have got the word brothers out I want to say at once that it covers all of us regardless of any of the small distinctions of our shapes, because I am old and the word has come to mean something larger to me than the small thing it began as, and if it offends any of you I will choose another word, but if it does not offend you I will continue. None of us, so far as I have been told, has come to this place under any banner, and none of us, so far as I have been told, has been given the name of any of the others before this morning. I have been a confessor for thirty-five years, which I will offer to you as my single small qualification for speaking first, since none of us has been chosen to speak first by any prior arrangement, and one of us must, and old men are often given that office because it does not cost the rest of you anything to give it to us. I would propose that we go around our not-quite-circle, and that each of us say only as much about himself or herself as he or she is comfortable saying, beginning with the smallest possible information, which is what we are called, and that we receive each name without further interrogation, and that we let further information come of itself as the morning permits. I will go first, by way of example, and I will say that I am Caius, of an order I will name if asked but will not name unasked, and that I have come here by eleven days of walking out of country to the west of here, and that I do not know precisely why I have come except that I was moved to. That is all I have for you at present. Whoever wishes to speak next, please do.
I will tell you, love, that I was charmed. I do not say I was charmed lightly. I have been a difficult charm-er throughout my life. I have known charming people and have not been charmed, and I have known unpleasant people and have been embarrassingly charmed despite myself, and the relationship between the charming and the charmed has always seemed to me to operate on its own private and unreliable laws. But Brother Caius, in that opening, had managed the thing precisely. He had said the minimum. He had laid down a rule that minimum was acceptable. He had taken on himself the social risk of going first, which is the risk of being the first to look foolish if no one else follows, and he had thereby given the rest of us cover. It was beautifully done. I have been to many tables of negotiation across my life and I would have paid good money to have had Brother Caius open them.
The Smith went next. The Smith was always going to go next, because the Smith was the sort of man who fills any silence that has been generously offered, in the same way that warm bread fills a room.
He said, well now, well now, that is a fine opening, and I will follow it as best I can. I am Goradd Ferralume. I am a smith out of the Three-Stones Crossroads about six days’ walk south and west of here, and I have come to this place because a tinker stopped at my forge eight days ago with a cracked axle and a story he could not stop telling me, and I have been carrying the story since, and the story said come, and so here I am. That is all I have for the moment. I am pleased to meet all four of you, more than pleased, by my forge I am pleased, because I had not expected to find any company on this road at all and I had quietly been dreading the prospect of being the only fool at the gate.
I laughed again at that. So did Brother Caius, in his small quiet way. The silver-blond hero did not laugh, but the narrowing of his eyes eased a little further, and I began to suspect that this man would in fact laugh, at some point in the unknown future, given the right provocation and the right circumstances and possibly a sufficiently strong drink, but that the conditions had not yet been met.
It was my turn. I knew it was my turn because the rotation of the not-quite-circle had reached me and because the Smith had passed his small social torch to my hand by the simple expedient of looking at me. I will tell you what I did with the torch, love, because the doing of it is one of those small acts in my life that I have replayed in my head a great many times since, mostly because I have wondered whether I did it well or whether I did it badly, and I have arrived at the conclusion that I did it in the way I do most things, which is to say sideways, and that the sidewaysness was, for once, exactly the correct geometry for the room.
I said, oh, petals, well met, well met, and let me catch up to the standard the old brother has set, which is a high one and I will not match it, but I will try. I am Maelis. Maelis Veth, to be precise, though most people who like me get away with just Maelis and most people who do not like me find their own names for me, and I have been called all of them. I have just come from a small inn called the Bent Reed, on a river about ten days south and west of here by my route, where I have been keeping a notebook on local spider populations for three weeks. I will not say I am a scholar, because real scholars get cross when I say that, and they have a point. I will say that I am a person who finds small interesting facts in small unpromising places and writes them down, and that the small interesting facts in the inn at the Bent Reed had begun to suggest some larger uninteresting facts about this entire piece of country, and on the morning of the twenty-second day of my residence in the cellar of that inn the spiders all left at once and left their webs behind humming at a pitch I would rather not have heard, and so I am here. That is all I have to offer at present, and I will offer the rest as occasion makes it useful. Oh, and one more thing, since we are doing introductions properly, I would like to know what each of you carries that you would like us to know about and what each of you carries that you would rather we did not, only the first of those, because asking the second would be impolite, but I have found that knowing the first does most of the work of finding out the second, in time. Right. That is me. Whose turn is it now.
There was, I noticed, a small silence after I had finished, and the silence was the kind of silence in which a person can tell that other persons are revising their expectations of her. Brother Caius’s eyebrows had gone up a very small amount, in a way I would learn over time was his version of a great surprise. The Smith was beaming at me, which was, I think, the only thing his face was set up to do under the circumstances. The silver-blond hero was looking at me with a renewed attention that I could not at the time interpret, but that I have since come to understand was a kind of professional respect from a person who had heard, in my opening, three or four small remarks that I had thought I was hiding inside ordinary conversation. The veiled person was, of course, looking at me with the gold gaze of a stone, and they did not look any more or less at me than they had been looking at me a moment before, but I had the unmistakable sense that I had, somehow, been moved up several places on a list whose existence I had not previously had any reason to suspect.
The silver-blond hero went next. He had been chosen by the rotation of the not-quite-circle and not by his own choice, but I noticed that he did not protest the order, which I took as a small good sign, because people who insist on going out of order at a moment like that are people who are trying to control the room, and people trying to control the room are usually people who do not have a great deal of control of themselves, and that combination, in the kind of country we were sitting in, is a combination one would rather not have to share a cellar with.
He said, in the clipped formal voice that I would come to know as his voice and which I have since heard described, by people who had never actually met him, as the voice of an old nobility, although I knew within the first sentence that the nobility was about three generations behind him and had been considerably warmer in those generations than the surrounding country generally understood. He said, I am Elandor, called the Swift by some who do not have other names ready for me, and by my order Brother Elandor, of the Order of the Pale Star. I have come to this place under a vow I took in my eighteenth year, and I will not name the particulars of the vow at this fire, because the particulars are between myself and my order, but I will say that the vow was sworn at the threshold of work of this kind, and that the work named at the threshold, in the long form of the swearing, has now brought me to this gate. I did not expect to find any of you here. I do not know what to do with finding any of you here. I will say that I am pleased to find Brother Caius here, because the Order of the Pale Star and the order of which Brother Caius has not yet named himself a member have had an old acquaintance, and the acquaintance has been a good one, although I have not myself been part of the visits. I will say that I am pleased to find Master Goradd here, because a man who builds a fire in three strikes of flint and steel is a man whose company I would prefer to most other company in such a hollow at such an hour. I will say that I am pleased to find Maelis Veth here, because I have heard remarks in her introduction that suggest she is a person who has noticed things I have not noticed and that the noticing may be useful to all of us. And I will say that I am, ah, undecided, regarding the person at the southern rim, who has not yet given a name.
The Smith winced sympathetically at the way Elandor had ended his introduction, because the ending had been about as diplomatic as one could be while still saying what needed to be said, and what needed to be said was that one of us at the fire had not yet contributed to the social contract that the rest of us had been agreeing to, and the absence was beginning to be felt.
The veiled person did not move. Then, after a small pause that I will tell you, love, was about the length of three slow breaths and which felt at the time like a small geological era, the veiled person spoke. They spoke in a flat deliberate voice that was the voice of someone who had not used their voice for some days, with unusual stress patterns and no contractions, and the voice was not quite either male or female, and I think that was the voice and not any small disguise upon it.
The veiled person said, I am Vren. I was sent. I will not say by whom. I came alone. I came for one reason, which was the name Elandor the Swift. I have it now. I will not say what I am to do with it. I am willing to share this fire. I am willing to share this gate. I am not willing to share more than that until I have a reason to. That is what I have for you. That is all I have for you.
I will tell you that there was, after Vren spoke, another silence, of about the same length as the silence after my own introduction, but of an entirely different quality. The silence after my introduction had been the silence of revised expectations. The silence after Vren’s introduction was the silence of a great many possibilities being weighed at once, in four separate heads, by four separate people who had each just been told that the fifth person at the fire had been sent specifically because of one of them, and that the fifth person had not committed to whether the sending was a friendly sending or a not-friendly sending. The four of us looked at Elandor. Elandor looked at Vren. Vren looked at Elandor. The fire bowed in the cold breath out of the gate. The wind kept up its slow breathing. I would like to record, for the sake of the historical record, that no one in the not-quite-circle reached for a weapon. I think we all considered it. I considered it myself, and I do not have a weapon, which gives you some sense of how strong the consideration was. But no one reached, and the silence held, and in the held silence I saw something pass between Elandor and Vren that I have since come to recognize as the look that passes between two people of certain professions when they meet for the first time and discover that they are likely to be working in the same room for some considerable while.
The look ended. Elandor said, very slowly, well, then, Vren. I will accept that for the moment. I will tell you that the name has reached you accurately, and I am here, and I am alive, and I propose that the question of what you are to do with the name is a question that may keep until we are not all of us sitting at a small fire in a cold wind at a gate none of us has yet entered. I propose, in other words, that you and I have a great deal of conversation ahead of us, and that the conversation will profit from being undertaken at a time when we are not, all of us, being listened to by a hole in the rock.
Vren said, agreed.
That was the whole of it. Two words. But the two words were, I think, the most important two words spoken in the hollow that morning, because the two words constituted a contract, and the contract was that Vren had bound themselves to not act on whatever Vren had been sent to act on, at least not yet, and Elandor had bound himself to not be paranoid about Vren in the meantime, at least not visibly, and the two bindings together meant that the five of us could now, for the present moment, be five people at a fire, rather than five people at a fire one of whom was perhaps a problem for one of the others. The relief in the not-quite-circle when those two words had been spoken was, I will tell you, almost a physical thing. I felt it in my shoulders, which I had not realized were tense until they came down half an inch. The Smith felt it in his face, which lit up with the smile of a man who has just watched two horses he had thought were going to fight decide to graze together instead. Brother Caius felt it somewhere very deep in himself, because his small attentive nod after the two words was the nod of a man who has just watched a small private prayer of his own be answered without his having spoken it aloud, and I would not be at all surprised to learn that he had in fact prayed it without his lips moving, in the small private language of his order, while the silence had been holding.
It was then, in the small recovery from that exchange, that I made my proposal. I made it, love, because somebody had to make it, and the obvious somebody was not the elderly brother who had just done the social work of opening us all, and was not the smith who had just done the practical work of building us a fire, and was not the hero who had just survived the diplomatic equivalent of being told that an assassin had been sent looking for him by name, and was not the veiled stranger who had just agreed to defer their actual purpose for the sake of the company. The obvious somebody was me. I was the one who had nothing else in particular to do at that moment, and proposals of the kind I had in mind are best made by the person at the table who can afford to make them, which is usually the person who has the least to lose by being told no.
I said, well, petals, this is the part where I am going to say something none of you is going to like, because someone has to say it, and I have been told once or twice in my life that I am, ah, somewhat suited to the saying of things that other people are not going to like. So here goes. We have all of us, by our own accounts, come to this place by entirely separate roads. We have all of us, by my reading of the room, come here on errands that are entirely separate from one another. We have all of us, again by my reading of the room, no particular reason to trust any of the others further than we could throw them, and one or two of us I could throw quite a long way actually because I have been working on my throwing this summer, but the principle holds. Now, by every sensible measure of the situation, what we ought to do is one of two things. Either we ought to nod politely at one another over our small fire and then go into that gate by five separate routes at five separate hours, or four of us ought to go and the fifth ought to do whatever the fifth came to do out here, and we ought to wish each other good luck and not look back. That is the sensible course. I want to be clear that I see the sensible course, because if I do not say I see it then somebody else is going to be tempted to point it out, and that will only delay us.
The Smith was watching me with an expression of growing dread, because the Smith had begun to perceive where my proposal was going, and the Smith was a man of considerable practical intelligence and could see a bad idea coming around a corner with a hat on. Brother Caius was listening with the absolute stillness of a man whose entire profession trained him to listen, and the listening had no particular expression on it because his face had gone, for these moments, into the small neutral attentiveness that he used for receiving anything he was not yet sure how to receive. Elandor was watching me with the renewed attention of a few minutes before, only sharper now, because Elandor had also begun to perceive where my proposal was going, and Elandor was at least as practically intelligent as the Smith. Vren was looking at me with the gold gaze of a stone that had been listening with great interest, which I took as the high compliment it was.
I said, but here is the thing, petals. I do not think the sensible course is the available course. I think the sensible course was available perhaps a week ago, before any of us were within a day’s walk of this hollow, and I think the sensible course closed behind us as we each came down off our separate slopes, the way a door closes behind a person who has only just realized she has walked into the wrong room. I will tell you why I think this. The wind that is coming out of that gate is not a wind. The wind that is coming out of that gate is, I am quite certain, the same listening I have been listening to for the last three weeks in the cellar of a riverside inn, and I am quite certain that it has been listening to all five of us individually for considerably longer than that, and I am quite certain that it knew each of us was coming, and I am at least reasonably certain that it knows we are sitting around this fire at this moment, and I am very, very confident indeed that the moment any of us tries to go into that gate alone the listening will, in its slow patient way, do whatever it has been preparing to do for a long time, and that the doing of it will be quite a lot worse for the one who went in alone than it would have been for several of us together, because several of us together are a problem the listening has not yet had a chance to specifically prepare for. I think, in other words, that the only chance any of us has of actually finding out what we came here to find out, and possibly of leaving again, is if we go in together. I think this is a bad idea by every standard except the one that matters, which is whether it is the least-bad available idea. I propose, therefore, that we go in together. I propose that we do it slowly and carefully, that we do not pretend to be a party in any sense more grand than the practical one of five people moving through a corridor at the same time, that we keep our own counsel about our own errands except where the errands require us to share, and that we agree, for the duration of our being in there, that we will each of us answer for our own conduct and will not, except in cases of clear and present necessity, undertake to answer for anyone else’s. I am open to amendments. I am open to refusals. I am not, I will tell you frankly, open to a long discussion of why this is mad, because I already know it is mad, and the madness is not the relevant question. The relevant question is whether any of you has a better idea.
There was a silence after I had finished, and the silence was, oh, love, the silence was so awkward that I will tell you the truth, I almost laughed again, only this time I had the wisdom to swallow the laugh, because the laugh would not have helped. The fire crackled. The wind out of the gate kept up its slow breathing. The small flame bowed and recovered. I waited.
The Smith spoke first, after what I would estimate at about four heartbeats. He said, by my forge. He said it in the slow appalled voice of a man who has just heard a proposal he disagrees with on every reasonable ground but who can already feel, in his bones, that he is going to agree to it, and who is, in the moment of his speaking, having a small last argument with himself about it. He said, by my forge, Maelis Veth, that is the worst idea anyone has put to me in eleven years. I built the fire for this circle this morning specifically so that we could sit at it and not be obliged to put our trust in one another any further than the warmth of it could carry, and you have, in the space of perhaps three minutes, proposed that we put our trust in one another a great deal further, and I am cross with you for proposing it, and I am crosser with myself for thinking that you may be right.
He stopped. He looked into the small fire for a long moment. He said, slower and softer, but you may be right.
Brother Caius spoke next. He said, I have not been told to come here by any superior in my order, and I will not pretend that I have any authority by which to commit my order to anything. I will say, however, on my own private authority, which is the only authority any of us at this fire is using, that I came here because something was being prepared in this place and was about to be released into the wider world, and that my own small role in the preparation of its release was to be one of the people who came to look at it and to name it, if it could be named, before it could become whatever it was about to become. I did not expect to find others on the same errand. I think now that I should have. I think now that anything large enough to draw any of us would have drawn several of us, because that is how such things work, and that the not-drawing of others would have been the strange thing, not the drawing. I find that I am, like Master Goradd, cross with you for proposing what you have proposed, and crosser with myself for thinking that you may be right.
Elandor spoke third. He spoke slowly and clearly and without inflection, in the voice of a man who has decided what he is going to say and is now only saying it for the sake of the others, since he himself already knows the conclusion. He said, I took my vow as a hero of my order at the age of eighteen years. I have been a hero in the meaning of that order for nineteen years thereafter. I will tell you what a hero of my order is. A hero of my order is not a man who goes alone. That is a piece of bad literature that the world has decided to repeat to itself because the bad literature flatters certain people. A hero of my order is a man who goes wherever it is necessary to go, alone if alone is necessary, in company if company is offered. The company that is offered here today is unusual company. I do not know any of you. I have no reason to trust any of you. I have, however, been to a great many thresholds in my life, and I have learned at thresholds to take what is given. What has been given at this threshold is the four of you. I will go in with you. I will go in with you on the conditions Maelis has named, which I think are good conditions, and on one further condition of my own, which is that if at any point I judge that one of us is becoming a danger to the others, I will say so plainly and at once, and I will expect to be heard plainly and at once, and to act accordingly. With that condition met, I am with you.
Vren spoke last. Vren said, in the same flat deliberate voice as before, I will go in. I will go in for my own reasons. I will not pretend that my reasons are the same as yours. I will agree to the conditions named. I will add no conditions of my own. I will say only that if Elandor the Swift dies in there, by anyone’s hand or by no one’s, I will hold a small ceremony of my own at the place where he falls, and none of the rest of you are to interfere with that ceremony. That is the only condition I will name. The rest is as you say.
There was a silence after Vren’s last speech which was, oh, love, considerably more awkward than the one after mine. I will tell you what I noticed about that silence. The silence was the silence of four people who had just been told something very strange by a fifth person and had each, in their own way, decided that they were not, this morning, going to ask what the strange thing meant. There was a kind of unspoken vote in that silence, and the vote was unanimous, and the vote was that the asking of the question would happen at some later time, in some other hollow, after we had all of us survived enough together to be permitted to ask one another such questions, and that for the present moment Vren’s small odd condition would be entered into the unwritten contract of our company exactly as Vren had stated it, without comment.
I said, well, petals. I think we have just agreed on something. I think we have just become, for the next little while, the sort of company that one of us a moment ago was reluctant to call a party. I do not propose to call us anything. I do not think we should give ourselves a name, because giving ourselves a name would be to declare to whatever is doing the listening in that gate that we are a unit, and we would, I think, prefer that the listening have to work out for itself what we are. I propose, instead, that we eat the food we have brought, that we share what little of it makes sense to share, that we put out the fire properly, that we do whatever last small things each of us needs to do in private, and that we then go in, in whatever order seems sensible at the moment we go in, which is a moment we will know when it arrives. I am going to suggest that we go in within the hour, because I think the wind out of that gate is getting steadier, and I do not wish to wait until it has finished getting steady. Is that agreeable?
It was agreeable. Nobody said it was agreeable. Nobody had to. We had passed the part of the morning where we needed to say everything to each other, and we had entered the part of the morning where we were going to begin doing things in each other’s presence and seeing what each of us was like at the doing, and the doing was, I would learn over the next few days, the actual introduction. Words are the polite preliminary. The doing is the meeting.
The Smith, without saying anything, got up and went round to each of us in turn and took small careful inventory of what we had. Brother Caius produced from his bag a half-loaf of dark bread and a small wrapped cheese, which he set out without ceremony. Elandor produced a small parcel of dried meat, which he untied with his quiet careful hands. Vren produced nothing, which was, I think, also a kind of declaration. I produced the last of my own bread and cheese from Old Pell, who had given it to me eleven days ago at the door of his inn, and I am going to tell you, love, that it had got a bit hard in the eleven days but it was still better than anything I had eaten on the road since, and I broke it up generously, because there are moments in one’s life when one’s bread and cheese are part of how one introduces oneself, and this was such a moment, and Old Pell’s bread did me proud.
We ate. We did not say much while we ate. The fire bowed and recovered, bowed and recovered, in the slow breath out of the gate, and the gate did not change, and we did not change, but the not-quite-circle around the fire began to feel, by very small degrees, slightly less not-quite. Brother Caius gave a small piece of his cheese to the Smith with a small nod. The Smith gave a small piece of his dried meat, which the Smith had not produced but had apparently been carrying, to Brother Caius with a small wink. Elandor gave a small piece of his bread to me, and I gave him back a small piece of Old Pell’s cheese, and we did not look at each other while we did it, which was, I think, the only way the small exchange was going to work between two persons of our respective dispositions. Vren did not eat. Vren did not take. Vren did, however, after a small pause, accept a small piece of bread from the Smith’s hand, which the Smith offered without comment, and Vren put the bread away into a pocket inside the dark cloak, which I took to mean that Vren intended to eat it at some private hour when none of us was watching, and that the acceptance was as much commitment to the company as Vren was at the moment prepared to give, and that the commitment was nevertheless real.
When we had eaten, the Smith put out the fire with the careful efficiency of a man who had been putting out fires in inconvenient places for as long as he had been building them. He did it with three small handfuls of the cold dry dust at the foot of one of the fallen blocks, scattered evenly across the coals so that the coals went gray without smoking, and he turned the gray over with the side of his boot until the gray was the same color as the rest of the floor of the hollow, and he stood up and brushed his hands on his apron and looked at us, and we all of us, at the same moment, without any signal having been given, stood up also.
We turned together toward the gate. We did not walk toward it at once. We stood there, the five of us, in the cold breath out of the gate, looking at the dark mouth of it, and I will tell you, friend, that the dark looked back at us, and the dark did not, at that moment, have any of the patient amusement that I had felt in its looking at me alone in the cellar of the Bent Reed three weeks ago. The dark had, instead, the small careful attention of a thing that had not, perhaps, considered the possibility of five of us at the threshold at once, and that was now reconsidering its arrangements in the light of new information. I think I am not making that up. I think the dark, in its slow patient listening way, was surprised. I think the dark was, in the smallest sense, having to revise its expectations of the morning. I would have liked to have asked the dark how the revising was going, but I had a fairly firm sense that the asking would not be received in the spirit it was offered, and so I kept the asking inside, where it joined the great many other questions I had been keeping inside since I had walked out of the Bent Reed eleven days ago.
We went forward together. We did not march. We did not form a column. We walked the way five strangers who have just agreed to walk together for a little while walk, which is the way a small flock of unrelated geese walk when they have decided to share a piece of water, which is to say with a great deal of glancing at one another and small adjustments of pace and the constant unspoken renegotiation of distance. Brother Caius was at my left elbow. The Smith was at my right elbow. Elandor was a half-step ahead of all of us, because Elandor was always going to be a half-step ahead, that was the kind of man Elandor was. Vren was a half-step behind all of us, because Vren was always going to be a half-step behind, that was the kind of person Vren was. The not-quite-circle had become a not-quite-formation, and the not-quite-formation moved across the floor of the hollow at the slow careful pace of a small group of people who have not yet learned how to be a small group of people but who are willing to find out.
We reached the threshold. There was, just inside the threshold, a single line in the dust, drawn by something thin and sharp, which I noticed at once and which I did not at the time understand and which Elandor, ahead of all of us, glanced at as he passed it and did not break stride for, and I have since learned that the line was the line he had drawn the previous evening with the tip of his blade, and that the line was the seal of a vow he had taken alone before the gate, and that none of us, by stepping across it without acknowledgment, broke the vow, only added our own small private intentions to whatever the vow had named, and the vow had, in its quiet old generosity, made room for all of us as we came across. I did not know that then. I knew only that there was a line, and that Elandor stepped across it without ceremony, and that I stepped across it after him, and that the Smith and Brother Caius stepped across it on either side of me, and that Vren stepped across it last, and that as Vren stepped across it the wind out of the gate, for the first time since I had sat down at the fire, stopped breathing for the duration of perhaps two heartbeats, and started again, and the starting again had in it, I am not making this up, a small note that had not been in the breathing before. It sounded, for the briefest of moments, like a creature that had not been expected to laugh, laughing.
And then the dark of the corridor closed around us, and the gate was behind us, and we were inside The Maelstrom’s Embrace, and the not-quite-formation moved on into the dark together, and we were, for the moment, alive, and we were, for the moment, together, and the gathering, whatever its name was, had done its work, and the rest of the work, I had a fairly firm sense, was going to be ours.
Segment Eight: The Hammer’s Counsel
We had gone, on that first day within the gate, perhaps three hours into the dark of the upper corridors before any of us spoke aloud what every one of us was thinking, which was that we should stop for the night, although by my forge, friend, I will tell you that the word night had taken on within those corridors a meaning so peculiar and so much its own that I half hesitated to use it, since the dark in which we had been walking since stepping across Elandor’s line in the dust was a dark that had no morning at the other end of it and no evening at the start of it, only the steady featureless dark of a place that had given up the use of either, and to call any portion of it night was, in some sense, to flatter the dark with a description it had not earned. Yet a man must have words for the hours of his life, friend, or he will lose track of the hours altogether, and a person who has lost track of his hours has lost track of much that follows from them, including when he last slept and when he last ate and when he last took the trouble to be kind to a fellow traveler in a small matter that cost him nothing, and so we used the word night, all five of us, by an unspoken arrangement of words that humans arrive at when there is no one in particular available to insist upon the strictness of definitions, and we used it, and it served us, and that was enough.
We had found, at the end of those three hours of careful descent, a small chamber off the main corridor, hardly more than a niche in the stone with a roughly squared floor of perhaps twelve paces by ten, and a low arched roof, and one narrow opening which we had come through, and no other openings of any kind, which was the thing that recommended the chamber to us above any of the other possible stopping places. It is a remarkable thing, friend, how the question of where one will lay one’s head down for the night reorganizes itself when the chief consideration ceases to be the softness of the mattress and becomes instead the number of holes in the room through which an unspecified evil might enter, and how quickly the human mind adapts to this new reorganization, so that within an hour of one’s first descent into such a place one begins to walk past chambers with three openings shaking one’s head, and chambers with two openings considering, and chambers with one opening with a small private cheer rising in one’s chest, as though one had at last spotted a very particular rare bird in a country where one had not known the species was found. Brother Caius, who had walked beside me for much of the descent, had let out, when we came upon the niche, a small dry laugh that I had taken at first for a cough, and when I had looked at him with the question on my face he had said quietly, by way of explanation, that he had spent half his life in a cell smaller than this and had never been so glad to see a small room in his life, and I had laughed in return, for I had been on the verge of saying very nearly the same thing about the modest forge-storehouse behind my own forge at the Three-Stones Crossroads, and the small shared laugh had been, in the cold patient dark of the corridor, the first proper warmth I had felt since we had stepped across the threshold.
We arranged ourselves, by the unspoken arithmetic of a company that does not yet quite know itself, around the inside of the niche. Elandor took up the post nearest the opening, with his back to the corner of the wall and his face toward the corridor we had come down, his right hand never quite leaving the hilt of his blade, in the manner of a man who had been to a great many such evenings and had not yet found a way to leave that hand otherwise occupied. Vren, our veiled companion, did the most remarkable thing, which was to take up the post directly opposite Elandor, against the far wall of the niche, in the position from which Vren could most easily see Elandor and most easily watch the same opening Elandor was watching, so that without ever quite saying so, the two of them had divided the watch between them by the simple expedient of having become the only two persons in the chamber who would be facing the corridor at all times, and the rest of us were thereby left free to do all the other things that needed doing without having to also do the watching, which was a generous distribution of labor that I do not think any of the three of us in the middle of the chamber had failed to notice and to be grateful for, although none of us thanked the two watchers aloud, since to have thanked them would have implied that the watching was optional, and the watching was very clearly not optional, and any thanking would have been a small awkwardness.
Maelis Veth and Brother Caius, having no posts of vigilance to occupy them, set about the small middle work of any company that has stopped for the night, which is to say that Maelis unpacked a careful small inventory from her leather bundle while Brother Caius gathered together what little scrap of dry root and dead scrub the corridor had offered us on the way down and which we had each, in our own small way and without coordination, been collecting at the rear of our packs as we descended, in the manner of careful travelers who know that a fire at the end of a march is worth six fires at the start of it, and the two of them, by the soft gestures of two persons who had only that morning met, set about the building of a very small fire indeed in the center of the floor of the chamber. The fire when they had it going was scarcely larger than a man’s two cupped hands held together. I want to be exact about this, for the fire was central to the events of the night that followed, and a reader who imagines a great roaring blaze of the kind a smith builds in his forge will misunderstand the entire mood of what I am about to relate. The fire was, I say, the size of two cupped hands, and it gave off, beyond the small ring of yellow light it cast around itself, almost no light at all. What it gave off, however, was warmth, and the warmth in that chamber was a thing I will remember to the end of my days, friend, because the warmth was not so much a temperature as a small intimate declaration that we, the five of us, were, for the duration of this small fire, refusing to be entirely surrendered to the larger cold around us, and the refusing of the surrender, even at the scale of two cupped hands, was the entire point.
We ate. We ate sparingly, because we did not yet know how long the food we had between us would need to last, and we ate without ceremony, and we ate from each other’s small parcels as they were passed about, with each of us taking only what was offered and never reaching across the small ring of light for what had not been pushed our way, which was the natural courtesy of a company that did not yet quite trust one another but had agreed, at the gate, that they would behave as a company until the trust could catch up. Maelis Veth, who had a manner of conversation that I had already, by the end of three hours of descent, come to find one of the small good consolations of being in that place, made a number of remarks during the eating about the relative properties of cheeses, which she had had occasion to study, she informed us, in the cellars of inns from one end of the eastern river country to the other, and her remarks were of such a quality that even Elandor, who I had not yet seen actually laugh, allowed the corner of his mouth to rise in the smallest of acknowledgments, twice, which from Elandor I gathered was the equivalent of a riotous applause from a more demonstrative person.
When we had eaten, and the small fire had been fed its small ration of root for the next hour or so, and the four of us in the middle of the chamber had settled into the small slumped postures of travelers who have not lain down in three hours and would not be lying down for some hours more, I cleared my throat in the way a smith clears his throat when he is about to take charge of a small ordinary matter without having been asked to, and I said, well now, friends, well now, I have been turning over in my mind for the last hour a small piece of work that I think will do this company some good, and which I am willing to undertake if you are willing to suffer it. I went on to say that I had brought down with me, in the deep pocket of my apron, the small kit of whetstones, awls, needles, oil, and waxed cord that I never travel without, because a smith without his small kit is, as my old master used to say, a smith only in name, and I had been observing the gear of each of you across the long descent of this afternoon with what I will confess was a tradesman’s professional eye, and I had marked, without any disrespect to any of you, that there were small attentions that might be paid to one piece of equipment or another that I could pay in the next two hours with what I had on me, and that the paying of them might serve us all in the corridors ahead, which by all reports do not improve as one descends. I was, I said, offering to do this work as a small service to the company, in token of being among you on this strange day, and I asked for no payment of any kind beyond the chance to do good work in the slow hours before sleep, which is the only payment a tradesman of my disposition ever truly cares about anyway.
There was a small silence after I had finished. I had not, friend, expected the offer to be received with any great enthusiasm, since the offer involved each of the others permitting me to handle the most personal of their possessions, and a person’s gear after a long road is a personal thing of the most particular kind, and there is no man living who likes a stranger touching the haft of his blade, however well the stranger means by the touching. So I was prepared, when I made the offer, for at least one polite refusal, and possibly two, and I had a small plan ready in the back of my mind to be cheerful about the refusals and to set instead about the small private maintenance of my own hammer, which I had been meaning to give a proper turn at the whetstones for two evenings now and which would have served me as an honest occupation for the next hour without any of the company being involved.
Maelis Veth spoke first. She said, oh, petal, by all means, by my chalk and ledger, do come over and have a look at the satchel. There is a buckle on the back of it that has been making a small noise I do not like for three days now and which I have not had the right tool to investigate, and if you have a small awl or a thin punch I will love you forever and a day. She said this in the easy bright manner that I had already come to know as her ordinary register, and she shifted herself toward me across the floor of the niche, and she set her patchwork satchel between us on a flat stone with the open frankness of a woman who had long ago decided that her possessions were not nearly as private as people generally pretended their possessions were, and the agreement to my offer was, in that one easy shifting, more complete than any formal acceptance could have been. I had not expected her to be first. I had expected Brother Caius to be first, since old men of religious orders are by long training the ones in any company who agree most readily to small generosities, both in the giving and in the receiving. But Maelis had been first, and her being first did the work of setting the tone, and I saw, even as I drew my small kit out of my apron pocket and laid it out on the flat stone beside her satchel, the other three relax by some small immeasurable degree, because the first acceptance had been given easily and lightly, and the rest could now follow without anyone having to bear the small social burden of being the one who decided.
Brother Caius came over second, and he came with the small particular shyness of an old man unused to being attended to, and he set down beside me his Walking-Staff of the Long Road and his Pilgrim’s Beads and the small stole he had been wearing all that afternoon under his outer habit, and he said in his slow gentle voice that he would be most grateful if I could give the staff a small look-over at the foot, where he had been hearing a small irregularity in the strike of it against stone over the last two days, and that the beads themselves needed nothing, but the cord that bound them had been wearing thinner than he liked at the place where his thumb most often rested, and that if I had a piece of waxed thread that would last him to the next time he was at a proper bench he would consider himself in my debt for it. I told him, friend, that I had exactly such a piece, and that the staff would not be the slightest difficulty for me to look over, and that he was very welcome, and the small flush of pleasure that crossed his old face at being attended to in such a small manner did something to my own heart that I will not attempt to describe with the precision the moment deserved, because words of mine would not do the moment justice, and a smith should know the limits of his tools.
Elandor came over third. He came after a small further silence in which he was, I think, conducting an internal conversation about the question, and he came in the careful unhurried way that I would learn over the coming days was his way of doing every small thing that involved permitting another person near his blades. He brought the Whisperedge of the Faithful Hand still in its sheath, and he set it down between us with both of his hands together, in the deliberate manner of a man placing on the bench a possession that was both an instrument and a small piece of his own family history, and he said, in his clipped formal voice, Master Goradd, the blade has been with me eleven years. It has been honed by me each evening of those eleven years, by my own hand, with a small stone of an order’s pattern that I will show you. I will not ask you to put another stone to the edge, because the edge is what I have made it, and I would not have another’s stone touch it for any small concern of a single evening. But the cross-piece has been working loose for the better part of a year, and I have not been able to set my own forge to the matter, and the leather of the grip, which was bound by my master the year I took the cloth, has begun to slacken in the third lap from the pommel, and if you would tighten the cross and rebind the third lap I would be in your debt for both. I would also, if you have a moment more, be obliged for a small inspection of the throat of the sheath, which I have suspected of catching slightly on the draw in cold conditions, and the cold conditions are likely to be upon us before this descent is through.
I will tell you, friend, what I felt when Elandor finished speaking, because the feeling is the thing I want most to convey from that night. I felt, friend, the small bright pleasure of being trusted in my craft. I had not, until that moment, realized how much I had wanted to be trusted in my craft by these strangers, and the realization came upon me with the small embarrassment of a man who has discovered in himself a vanity he had not known he had. But the vanity was the small honest vanity of a man who knows his work, and Elandor’s careful enumeration of what he was and was not permitting me to do had been, in its way, the highest compliment that a man of Elandor’s disposition was capable of paying, which was the compliment of treating me as a fellow professional whose judgment was sound enough that he could specify the exact boundaries of the work and trust the boundaries to be observed. I took the blade and the sheath onto my lap, and I told him that I would do exactly the things he had named and no others, and that the edge was a beautiful edge from what I could see of it across the leather of the sheath, and that I was a smith and not a master of arms and would not have presumed to put my stone to it even if he had asked me, and that the cross-piece would be a small matter of perhaps a quarter hour, and the third lap of leather a small matter of a further quarter hour with the waxed cord I had on me, and the throat of the sheath I would have a look at and report back, and we would see whether it wanted anything done to it at all or only a small drop of oil along the inner lip. He gave a small nod, and he returned to his post by the corner, and his right hand returned, almost without his thinking, to the position it had been in before, although his blade was no longer at his hip, and I marked the small unconscious gesture and was, in some way I cannot entirely defend, moved by it.
Vren did not come over at all. Vren remained at the post against the far wall and did not move. I did not, friend, take this as a refusal of my offer, and neither did the rest of the company, because Vren had already, by that hour of the evening, demonstrated to all of us in small ways that the things Vren did and did not do were not the things any of the rest of us did and did not do, and the differences were the kind of differences that were not best addressed by direct comment. I waited a small while, working on Maelis Veth’s satchel buckle, which proved to be a simple matter of a small misalignment of the inner tongue and which took me less than ten minutes to correct with the awl I had brought, and when I had finished with the buckle I caught Vren’s eye across the small ring of light from our fire, and I held up the awl, and I said in a voice pitched low enough not to disturb the others, friend, the offer is open, and if at any point in the next two hours you would like to send across to me a single item to be looked at, I will look at it with the same care I am giving the others, and I will return it to you without comment of any kind. Vren held my eye for the duration of perhaps three breaths, and then Vren reached into the folds of the dark cloak and drew out one of the twin blades from the sheaths at the small of the back, and Vren laid the blade on the floor of the chamber and slid it across the stone with a small careful motion of the foot until it came to rest perhaps two paces from where I was sitting. Vren did not speak. I did not speak. I rose, and I went and I picked up the blade, and I returned to my place by the fire, and I held the blade up to the small yellow light, and the blade was a thing of unusual workmanship, of a kind I had seen perhaps twice in my life and only at a great distance, and I will not describe it in detail because describing the personal weapons of a person such as Vren in detail is the kind of indiscretion that a smith does not commit, but I will say that the blade was beautifully kept, that there was almost nothing for me to do with it, that the edge was, like Elandor’s, not mine to address, and that the only small service it required of me was the replacing of a single tiny pin in the throat of the sheath that had worn slightly thin at the head, which I did in the space of perhaps five minutes with one of my own spare pins of the appropriate size, and I returned the blade across the floor of the chamber in the same manner Vren had sent it, and Vren retrieved it without comment, and the blade returned to its sheath at the small of Vren’s back, and that was the whole of the transaction between us, and I considered it a good transaction and I considered, also, that I had been given a small piece of trust that I had not been quite expecting, and I held the small piece of trust carefully in my mind for the rest of that evening, the way a man holds a small bird that has, against all expectation, alighted upon his finger.
I worked, after that, in the steady patient way I work in my forge at home, which is to say with my whole attention upon each piece in turn and no attention whatsoever upon anything else, which is, I have always held, the only honest way to do the work of a tradesman. I worked on Maelis Veth’s satchel, and when I had finished with it I worked on her Spinneret Gloves of the Patient Hand, which had a small loose stitch along the inside of the left wrist that I closed with a needle and the same waxed cord I was using for Brother Caius’s beads, and Maelis sat across from me through the whole of the working and asked me small questions about smithing in the easy bright manner she had, and I answered her, and I found that I was happy to be answering, and that the answering was making me speak more freely than I generally speak about my craft, because Maelis asked the kind of questions that a person asks who is genuinely curious and not merely making conversation, and a smith who is asked such questions will tell you, friend, that there is no greater pleasure in his trade than to have an audience that wishes to understand him.
I worked on Brother Caius’s staff, and I found at the foot of it that the iron shoe had worked loose from its seating by perhaps the width of a fingernail, and I tapped the shoe true again with the small head of the punch I carried, and I worked along the seam where the shoe met the wood with a thin paste of beeswax and pitch from the small tin in my kit, and the staff when I returned it to him would, I told him, strike true on stone again for as long as he had need of it, and Brother Caius received the staff back with both his hands and inclined his head to me in the small deep way that old monks have of giving thanks for small things, and I felt again the warm small flush in my chest that I had been feeling all evening, the flush of being permitted to do good work for people who had received it in good spirit, and which I now think, in the long reflection of these many years afterward, may have been the truest thing I felt during the entire descent into The Maelstrom’s Embrace, truer even than the fear or the grief that came later, because the flush was the small natural condition of a man doing what he was made for in the company of people who were letting him.
I worked on the pilgrim’s beads, replacing the worn section of cord with a fresh waxed length and re-knotting the small ends in the pattern Brother Caius showed me, which was a pattern of his order that I had not seen before and which he taught me as I worked, with the small careful patience of a man who had spent thirty-eight years explaining small things to novices and had become very good at the explaining.
I worked, then, on Elandor’s Whisperedge. The cross-piece I tightened with the small pin-punch and the wedge of hardwood I always carry for such purposes, and the third lap of leather along the grip I unbound and rebound with the waxed cord, taking particular care to match the angle of the original binding so that Elandor’s hand, when it next closed on the hilt, would meet nothing it was not expecting. The throat of the sheath I inspected by the small yellow light of the fire, and I found a small burr along the inner lip on the side opposite the cutting edge, and I worked the burr down with the fine corner of one of my whetstones, not touching the blade itself but only the inner lip of the sheath, and when I had done I oiled the throat with a single small drop of the light oil I carry for the purpose, and I slid the Whisperedge back into the sheath, slowly, and the blade came home with the small clean whisper that had given it its name, and the whisper this time was, I noticed at once, half a tone clearer than it had been when Elandor had handed me the sheath, the difference being the difference of a draw that no longer caught even slightly on the cold of the leather, and I knew that I had done good work, and I returned the sheathed blade across the chamber to Elandor, who took it back from me with the same care he had handed it over with, and who said, in his clipped formal voice, master Goradd, you have earned the trust this company is going to need to place in you, and I will not forget the care. That was all he said. From Elandor, I will tell you, friend, the speech was an oration.
There were, throughout the evening, small flatteries that I gave to each of the company, small flatteries of the kind a tradesman knows how to give without diminishing himself in the giving. I told Maelis that her satchel had been built by a craftsman who knew his business and that the inner stitching of it was the work of a glover and not merely of a sack-maker, which had the effect, I noted with pleasure, of making her smile in a way that was not quite her usual bright smile but was something a little softer and more private, the smile of a person who has heard her possessions praised by someone she has decided is qualified to praise them. I told Brother Caius that the iron shoe of his staff was of a make I had not seen in years and that the smith who had set it for him had been a thoughtful workman, and Brother Caius’s small old face went into a long quiet pleasure at that, because the smith who had set the shoe, he told me, had been his master in the order’s lay-shop forty-one years ago, a man dead these many years and not much remembered, and to have the man’s work praised by a stranger in a cold chamber far from any forge had given Brother Caius, he said quietly, a small piece of his own past back, and the giving of it had been a kindness he had not expected. I told Elandor that the leather of his grip was of an unusually good cure and that the original binder had taken the trouble to age the leather properly before working it, which spoke well of the order’s apprentices, and Elandor inclined his head a fraction and did not speak, but I marked that he had heard the compliment and was, in his own quiet way, pleased by it. I told Vren nothing, friend, because I had said at the outset that I would return the blade without comment, and a man who has said he will return a thing without comment must return it without comment, and the not-saying was itself the small flattery, which was that I had remembered what I had promised.
The work, as work will, took longer than I had expected when I had begun, because each small piece I addressed produced two further small pieces I had not at first noticed, and the small pieces multiplied themselves the way the small pieces always do in the working life of a tradesman, and by the time I had completed the last small attention I judged necessary, our small fire had burned down through three of its small rations of root and was working on its fourth, and Elandor and Vren had remained at their posts without ever flagging, and Brother Caius had gone into the soft sleep that old men go into when they have decided that the company they are with may be trusted to watch them, and Maelis Veth had at some point in the second hour fallen quiet, not asleep but quiet, and was sitting now with her hands clasped about her knees and her eyes on the small fire in the way of a person who is letting her thoughts arrange themselves without insisting upon any particular arrangement, and I had, at last, only my own hammer to attend to.
I took the hammer from my belt and I laid it across my knees and I worked the head of it against the fine whetstone with the steady patient motion that I have been doing in some form or another since I was eleven years old, and as I worked I thought, friend, I thought about the evening that had just passed, and I thought about what had happened in it, although I do not believe any of the others would have agreed with me at the time that anything had happened in it, since all that had happened in it on the surface was that one man had cleaned and adjusted the gear of four other people in a small cold chamber by the light of a small cold fire. But I thought, all the same, that something had happened, and I think it now, and I will tell you what it was.
What had happened, friend, was that five strangers who had stepped across a threshold together that morning, knowing not the first thing about one another and having no reason to trust any of the others, had, in the slow hours between the evening meal and the first sleep, agreed by small unspoken steps to behave as a company. They had agreed to it not by any speech or any oath, although speeches and oaths have their uses elsewhere, but by the simple plain mechanism of permitting one of their number to handle the most personal things they owned. Each piece of gear that had passed across the floor of that chamber from a stranger’s hand to mine and back again had been a small piece of trust given and received, and the trust had not been a grand abstract trust of the kind that gets sworn at altars, but a small practical trust of the kind that gets demonstrated in the small hours of evenings, when no one is watching and there is no advantage to be gained by the demonstrating beyond the small private one of being a person who has demonstrated it. I had been handed Maelis Veth’s satchel. I had been handed Brother Caius’s staff and beads. I had been handed Elandor’s eleven-year blade. I had been handed Vren’s beautiful uncommon weapon across the floor of the chamber by the soft push of a foot. None of these handlings had been a small thing. Every one of them had been a quiet declaration. And I had returned each thing properly, with care, with the small respect each thing was owed, and the returning of them had been my own quiet declaration in answer, and the declarations had compounded themselves through the long hour of the working, and by the time I came at last to my own hammer the company had, by some small invisible reorganization, become a thing that it had not been at the evening’s beginning, and the thing it had become had no name yet, only the small steady warmth of itself, and the warmth had nothing to do with the fire.
I worked on the hammer. The hammer required little. The hammer is an honest tool, and an honest tool needs less of its master than a master generally gives it. I worked nonetheless, because the working of one’s own tools at the end of a working day is, my old master used to say, the small last courtesy a tradesman pays to the only assistant who has not complained about him during the day, and I had been raised by my old master in the small last courtesies, and I had not given them up just because I was sitting in a cold chamber a long way from my forge. I worked, and I thought, and the small thoughts settled themselves in me as the small bright filings settled themselves on the flat stone before me, and at the end of the working I had a hammer that was a small shade brighter than it had been at the beginning, and a heart that was a small shade easier than it had been at the beginning, and that was enough.
Brother Caius woke for a moment, perhaps half an hour after I had finished, and he sat up on his small bedroll in the slow careful way old men sit up, and he looked across the small fire at me and he said, in the soft slow voice of a man who has been thinking small thoughts in his sleep, master Goradd, you have given this company something it did not know it would have at the gate this morning, and I do not know that any of us has said to you that we are grateful for it, because saying it would have been awkward at the time, but I am saying it now, and I am saying it for each of us, although I have no authority to do so, only the small authority of an old man who has noticed what was happening while it was happening, which is the only authority an old man has and which is, I have come to think, generally enough.
I told him that I was the one who was grateful, friend, because the working had been the truest work I had done since the morning the tinker had come to my forge with the broken axle and the story, and that the doing of it in this company on this evening had been a small grace I had not expected to receive in a place such as this one, and that he was kind to say what he had said but that he must not pretend the gratitude all ran one way, because it did not, and Brother Caius smiled at me across the fire in the small soft way he had, and he lay back down on his bedroll, and within a minute he was asleep again, and the niche was quiet, and Elandor at his post had not moved, and Vren at the far wall had not moved, and Maelis Veth still sat with her hands clasped about her knees and her eyes on the small fire, and I, with the hammer back in my belt and my small kit packed away in the deep pocket of my apron, leaned back against the cold stone of the chamber wall and let myself, for the first time in many hours, draw a slow breath all the way down to the bottom of my lungs.
I will tell you, friend, what I felt as I drew that breath, because the feeling was the feeling I had been working all evening to earn, although I had not known I was working to earn it until I had it, and the feeling was the small warm glowing fellowship that one finds, sometimes, in the small hours of evenings before the worst is yet to come, when one has been good at one’s work and one’s work has been received in good spirit, and the people who have received it have, by small invisible degrees, become persons one would prefer not to lose. None of these four people, I will say frankly, was a person I had known one full day. I had known each of them perhaps eight hours, or nine. And yet I felt, drawing that breath, that there was now in the world a small set of four other persons whom I would not, if I had any choice in the matter, wish to see the worst of The Maelstrom’s Embrace come to. I wished, in fact, the opposite. I wished, as I drew the breath, that I could walk all four of them back up out of the corridor at dawn and put them on the four roads they had each come down by and send them home, with the small gear I had attended to that evening doing its small honest work for them along the way, and that I could go back to my forge at the Three-Stones Crossroads and stand at my anvil and never again be required to think about the place we were now in. And yet I knew, as I drew the breath, that I would not do this, and that none of them would, and that we would all of us go on down into the dark in the morning, because going on down into the dark in the morning was what we had each, in our separate ways, come here to do, and the doing of it together would be, by some small invisible arithmetic, better than the doing of it alone, and the small invisible arithmetic had been worked out, in part, by the evening that had just passed, and the work of the evening had been, in part, mine, and I was proud, friend, to have been the smith of it. I will not apologize for the pride. The pride was a clean pride. It was the pride of a tradesman in his trade.
The fire burned down to its last small handful of coals, and I did not feed it further, because the coals would last us perhaps two hours more and then we would have darkness, and darkness was, in this place, what we were going to have to learn to be at ease in, and there was no point in delaying the lesson. I drew my apron up about my shoulders in the way I have always slept in my apron when I have been away from home, and I let my eyes close, and I let my breathing slow, and I trusted Elandor at the opening and Vren at the far wall, both of whom I had not known a full day, with my own sleeping body, which is a trust, friend, I will say plainly, that I have not given to many persons in my life, and the giving of it then surprised me almost as much as it would have surprised me to be given it.
I slept. I am told by Maelis the next morning that I snored, which she informed me of with great cheerfulness, and which I had been aware of all my life as a thing my wife Tessa had taught herself to sleep through over the years of our marriage, and which I was sorry to have inflicted upon the others. I am told by Brother Caius that I slept the whole sleep of a man who had laid down a long honest day’s work and was at peace with the laying down, and I will allow him his charitable interpretation, because old monks are charitable in their interpretations and there is no profit in disputing them. Elandor and Vren slept in their respective shifts, which they had divided between them without my being told the details, and by the time I woke in the slow gray imitation of morning that the small new fire Maelis had built was casting around the niche, both of them had, by all evidence, slept and risen again, and were in the postures of two people whose night had passed without incident.
Each of the others had risen, when I woke, and was attending to the small private business of the morning. Maelis was folding away her bundle, and her satchel buckle was, I noticed at once, no longer making the small noise it had been making the day before, and her Spinneret Gloves were on her hands and the small loose stitch was no longer loose. Brother Caius was on his feet and was working his staff against the floor in the small testing way of a man who has had a tool repaired and is verifying the repair, and the strike of the iron shoe against the stone was clean and true and the small irregularity was gone. Elandor had drawn his Whisperedge a fraction from the sheath and slid it home twice while I watched, and the second time he did it I caught the small narrowing of his eyes that was, I had learned, his version of evident pleasure, which meant the throat of the sheath was no longer catching even slightly. Vren had at some point in the night, I think, returned my small repair to its proper standard, because the way Vren now stood by the far wall and the way the cloak fell about the small of Vren’s back was, very subtly, easier than it had been the evening before, and I took this to mean that the small pin I had replaced had been a service that mattered, although Vren had not and would not say so. And in the company at large, friend, there had taken hold during the night a small invisible thing that had not been there at the threshold, which was the small invisible thing of trust beginning to settle.
We did not speak of it. We did not need to speak of it. The trust had settled in the night the way small fine sediment settles in a glass of water that has been let stand, and the water that morning was, by the slightest of degrees, clearer than it had been the evening before, and the clearer water was the water we now had to drink for the rest of the descent. I rose, and I drew up my apron about me properly, and I checked my hammer in its loop at my belt, and I looked round at the four of them, friend, and I said, well now, well now, friends. Let us go on then. We have a road. Let us see where the road goes.
And we went on, the five of us, in the not-quite-formation we had taken up the day before, with Elandor a half-step ahead and Vren a half-step behind and Brother Caius and Maelis at my elbows on either side, and we went down into the deeper corridors of The Maelstrom’s Embrace, and the small warm fellowship that I had felt drawing my breath at the end of the night before went with us, and the carrying of it was, I will tell you, much of what made the days that followed bearable, and I have remembered the small evening of small work in the small chamber many times in the years since, and I have remembered it always with the same small bright pride, the pride of a smith who had, on one particular evening of his life, been allowed by four strangers in a cold chamber to do his work properly, and had done it properly, and had been thanked for it by the simple expedient of being trusted, the next morning, to walk on with them into the dark, and there is no smith in any forge of this moon, friend, who would tell you that he had been thanked any better than that in any evening of his working life.
Segment Nine: Into the First Dark
We went down on the second morning at the slow pace of a company that did not yet know its own ground. The smith had said let us see where the road goes and the rest had not disagreed and the small assent had been the closest thing to a plan we had between us. I took point. No one had asked me. No one had needed to. The hero called Elandor had looked at me once across the cold ashes of the fire when we rose and the look had been the look that passes between two people of certain professions when each has recognized in the other the one most likely to keep the company alive in a corridor and the one most willing to be at the front when the corridor required it and I had returned the look and the look had been the agreement and the agreement had been sufficient. The smith took the rear. The smith had not been asked either. The smith had taken the rear because the smith was the kind of man who would not let anyone walk behind a company he had cared for the night before and would not say so. The other three walked in the middle. The hero walked second. The brother walked third. The woman with the satchel walked fourth. The smith walked fifth. The order had set itself in the first hundred paces and did not change for the morning.
I want to tell you how I walked. I walked the way I have walked at point in two cities and one forest and three other places I will not name. I walked with my weight set forward over the balls of my feet so the next step could be taken or refused at the same speed. I walked with my eyes not on the floor and not on the far end of the corridor but on the place a man’s eye does not naturally go which is the seam where the wall meets the floor and the seam where the wall meets the ceiling because the wrong things in a corridor live in the seams and a man whose eye is on the middle of the corridor sees what the corridor wants him to see. I walked with my hands at my sides and not on my blades. A hand on a blade in a corridor is a hand that has decided what is coming. I had not decided. I had only suspected. A hand at the side is a hand that is free.
I will describe the upper passages as they were. I will describe them because the describing is the work. A point walker who does not describe to herself what she is walking through is a point walker who is going to miss the thing she is walking past. I described them to myself as we went. I am describing them to you now in the same order I described them then. The upper passages were stone. The stone was the gray stone of the country above. The stone had been worked. I do not mean the stone had been carved. I mean the stone had been worked. There is a difference. Carving is the removal of material to produce a form. Working is the persuasion of material toward a use. The stone of the corridor had been persuaded. The persuasion was old. The persuasion was not the persuasion of any tool I had a name for. The corridor was the height of two men and the width of three men walking abreast and it had no door and no arch and no joint. It was a single piece. A corridor of that length cut from a single piece is not a corridor that was cut. It was a corridor that the stone had agreed to be.
The floor was dry. That was the first thing I noted that I did not like. A corridor of that depth into stone country in the late spring should have had at least a sheen of damp along the lower walls and the floor should have been cool with the cool that wet stone has when there is even the small evaporation of moisture that comes off a wet wall. The floor was not cool. The floor was the temperature of a thing that has been kept at the temperature of a thing for a very long time. The walls were dry. The walls had no salt-line at the bottom of them which is the line a wall acquires when water has been working on it across years. The walls had no salt-line because no water had ever worked on them. The walls were the walls a stone has when the stone has been persuaded to be a wall and has agreed not to be anything else and has held the agreement.
I noted the seams. There were no seams. I noted the corners. There were no corners. The corridor turned. It turned at intervals that were not the intervals a natural cave turns at. It turned at the intervals that the persuader of the stone had wanted it to turn at and the intervals were not random and the intervals were not even. I counted them. The first turn came at sixty-three paces. The second turn came at forty-one paces. The third turn came at fifty-seven paces. There was no pattern I could read in the counts but I held the counts in my head because a man may not know what a pattern means until he has the counts and a pattern that turns out to mean nothing has cost him nothing to keep. I kept them. I keep them still. I could tell you now the count to every turn we took on that first day and I will not because the listing would not interest you and because the counts are mine. But I had them. I had them then and I have them now.
I noted the drafts. There was a draft. The draft was the same draft that had come out of the gate the morning before. It had not stopped. It moved past us in the same slow steady breath as it had moved past us at the threshold. The draft moved against our line of march. It moved up the corridor from below us toward the gate above us. A draft that moves up out of a hole is a draft that is being pushed by something that is below. There are honest reasons for the pushing. There are dishonest reasons. I did not yet know which. I noted the temperature of the draft. The draft was not the temperature of the stone. The draft was a measurable amount colder than the stone. A draft colder than its enclosing stone is a draft that has not been in the stone. The draft was coming from somewhere that was not the corridor we were walking in. I noted that. I held the note.
I noted the shadows. There were no shadows. The corridor was lit by the small lantern Brother Caius carried in his left hand at the third place in our line. The lantern threw light forward and the light went past me by perhaps fifteen paces and then it ended. There was no shadow behind us because the lantern was behind me and the corridor was straight enough between turns that the lantern’s light filled it. There was no shadow ahead of us because the light ended in a smooth fall against the wall at the next turn and the wall did not give back a shadow because there was nothing on the wall to cast one. A wall in a worked corridor will have small irregularities and the small irregularities will cast small shadows and the shadows will move as the lantern moves and the shadows are how a corridor tells you it is real. This corridor told me nothing. The light moved. The wall did not move with it. A wall that does not move under a moving light is a wall that is not a wall the way other walls are walls. I noted that.
I noted the sound. There was sound. The five of us were five sources of sound in a corridor that had no other sound at all. Brother Caius’s pilgrim’s beads at his belt clicked in the soft regular rhythm of his step. The smith’s hammer at his belt creaked in the loop of leather that held it. The woman with the satchel had a small piece of chalk in her right hand and she was making small marks at intervals on the wall as we passed and the marks made a small soft sound that I would not have caught if I had not been listening for it. The hero made no sound. He walked the way a hero of his order walks which is the way a wolf walks when the wolf has decided not to be heard. I made no sound. I had not made a sound in the walking of any corridor since I was fifteen and I had not stopped because the not stopping was the work. The five of us produced four sources of sound and the corridor returned none of them. A corridor of stone returns sound. A corridor of stone returns it at a measurable interval and the returning of it tells you the shape of what is ahead of you. The corridor did not return sound. The sound that left our boots went into the corridor and did not come back. I noted that.
I will tell you what I felt as I noted these things. I felt the cold I had felt in the room above the sail-maker’s shop. I felt it move from the chest where it had been since the afternoon of the letter into the shoulders and from the shoulders into the arms and from the arms into the hands. The cold settled where it was useful. The hands were ready. The hands had been ready since I had drawn the cloak around me the morning of the letter. The hands were now ready in the more particular way that hands become ready when the work is no longer prospective. I was inside the work. The work was around me. The work was the corridor.
I had what I have learned to call in myself the held breath. It is not a literal breath. I was breathing. I was breathing in the slow even way a person breathes when she does not wish her breath to be a thing that distinguishes her from the air around her. The held breath I am describing is a different held breath. It is the held breath the body keeps in the small bones of the wrist and the small muscles of the back of the neck. It is the held breath that says the snare is here. The body knows the snare before the mind does. The body had known since the threshold and the body knew more sharply now. The held breath sat in the small bones of the wrist and the small muscles of the back of the neck and the held breath was a useful thing. It is the held breath that makes a person ready. I was ready.
I did not turn around. A point walker does not turn around. A point walker turns around once and the company behind the point walker stops believing in the point walker. The company believes the point walker is afraid. The company is not wrong to believe this because a point walker who turns around has just told the company that she is afraid and a point walker who has told the company that she is afraid has given the corridor a gift. I did not give the corridor the gift. I walked. I noted. I held the breath. The corridor went on.
There was a place at perhaps the seventh turn of the morning where I stopped without thinking. I do not mean I decided to stop. I mean my feet stopped and after the stop I considered why and I found the reason. The reason was a single grain of dust at the foot of the wall at my left hand. The grain of dust was the only grain of dust I had seen in the corridor. The corridor had no dust. A corridor in stone country has dust because stone country produces dust. The corridor had no dust because the corridor did not permit dust. The single grain at the foot of the wall was therefore a grain that had been carried in. I had carried no dust. The corridor was new enough to our company that any dust we had brought in on our boots would still be on the floor where we had walked and not on the wall where we had not. The grain was on the wall. The grain was at the foot of the wall at the height of perhaps the small of my back. The grain was where a leg would have brushed in passing. I knelt. I did not touch the grain. I looked at the grain. The grain was not dust. The grain was a small fleck of pale silk. The silk had a faint sheen. The silk was not the silk of any spider that lives in a corridor of cold stone. The silk was the silk of the thing in the sketch. The silk was the size of a grain of dust because the thing in the sketch had been very careful when it had passed. The thing in the sketch had passed close enough to the wall to leave a single fleck and had not left more. The not leaving more was the part that the held breath in my small bones tightened over.
I rose. I did not speak. I marked the place with my eye. I went on. The company behind me did not ask why I had knelt. The hero behind me had marked the kneeling and had not asked. The brother behind the hero had marked the kneeling and had not asked. The woman with the satchel had marked the kneeling and had begun to mark a chalk sign at the place on the wall that I had knelt at and I lifted one hand at my side in a small gesture that was not a sign of any tradition and was only the gesture of a hand asking another hand to wait and she waited and she did not make the mark. The corridor would not have her mark. I will tell you why I gave the gesture. I gave the gesture because a corridor that is being watched will note the marks of the watchers and a watcher who is being watched should not give the corridor her name. The woman understood. I had begun by then to understand that the woman understood a great deal more than her speech suggested. I went on.
There was a second place perhaps a hundred and twenty paces further on where the held breath in the small muscles of the back of my neck tightened sharply enough that I felt it as a small physical pain and I stopped again. I will not pretend to a calm I did not have. The pain was the body telling me to stop and the body’s telling was correct. I stopped. I looked at the corridor ahead and I did not see what had told the body. The corridor ahead was the corridor that had been ahead at every previous step. I looked at the wall to my left. The wall was a wall. I looked at the wall to my right. The wall was a wall. I looked at the floor and the ceiling and the seams that were not seams and the corners that were not corners and there was nothing in any of them that I could put my eye on. I held the stop. I have learned to hold a stop when the body says stop even when the mind cannot yet account for the stopping because the body is right more often than the mind in such places and a point walker who corrects the body for the mind has stopped being a point walker and has started being a corpse. I held it. I breathed once slowly. I let my eye go soft. There is a way of letting the eye go that I will not name because the naming would suggest that the way can be taught and I do not believe it can be taught. The eye goes soft. The corridor is no longer corridor. The corridor is shapes and the shapes are weights and the weights have densities and the densities are the thing the eye is now looking for.
I saw it. It was not where my hard eye would have looked. It was at the ceiling. There was a place at the ceiling perhaps four paces ahead of me where the density of the stone was not the density of the rest of the stone. The place was the size and shape of a small overturned bowl. I could not see it with the hard eye. With the soft eye I could see that the place at the ceiling was a place where the stone was thinner than the stone around it. The stone was thinner because the stone was not stone. The stone in that place was the appearance of stone that had been left in place by something that was no longer behind the stone. The thing had been there. The thing had passed. The thing had passed through the stone the way the three words in the letter had said it would and the thing had taken its passage with it and had left the small not-stone behind where it had passed. I noted the place. I let the soft eye go. The hard eye saw the ceiling and the ceiling looked the same as the rest of the ceiling. The thing was no longer in the stone. The thing was elsewhere now. The thing had been here perhaps an hour ago. Perhaps less. I did not let myself estimate further. An estimate that is not founded on a count is an estimate that has been given for the comfort of the estimator and not for the work and I had no need of comfort.
I lifted my left hand again in the small gesture that meant wait. The company waited. I lifted my right hand slowly and I pointed at the ceiling. The hero behind me looked. The brother behind the hero looked. The woman with the satchel and the chalk looked. The smith at the rear looked. The hero’s hand went to the hilt of his blade without the blade leaving the sheath. The brother said nothing and his old face went very still. The woman with the chalk did not make a sound but I could feel the not making of the sound. The smith did not make a sound either though the smith was the most likely to make one because the smith was a man who made sounds when he thought and the smith was, I noted, thinking. The five of us stood under the place in the ceiling for perhaps a count of ten and the place in the ceiling did not change and the thing did not come back through the place and I lowered my right hand and I lifted my left in the small gesture that meant go on slowly and we went on slowly and we passed under the place and the place did not change as we passed and we were past it and the corridor went on.
I will tell you what I thought as we passed under the place. I thought that the thing had not waited. The thing had come through the ceiling at this place an hour ago or less and the thing had gone elsewhere. I thought that the thing had come through at this place because this place was a place where a thing of the kind described in the sketch would come through if it were patrolling. I thought that the corridor we were walking in had a patrol. I thought that the patrol was not running at a fixed interval because if the patrol had been running at a fixed interval the thing would have come through while we were under the place and the thing had not. I thought that the patrol was running at the interval of need. The thing came through when the thing was wanted. The thing had not been wanted under our feet at the moment we had passed under the place. The thing had been wanted elsewhere. The thing had been wanted, I considered, where we were going. I thought, and I did not speak the thought aloud and would not have spoken it if any of the company had asked, that the corridor was not a corridor we were intruding into. The corridor was a corridor we were being permitted through. The permission was the permission of a thing that wished to gather us at the far end of the corridor and not in the corridor itself. I thought the gathering at the far end was the dream-room or it was a room very like the dream-room. I thought that the gathering had been arranged.
The thinking did not change my walking. I do not let thinking change my walking. A point walker who lets her thinking change her walking has stopped walking point and has started walking philosophy and the corridor does not give a great deal of room to philosophers. I walked. The hero walked. The brother walked. The woman with the satchel walked. The smith walked. The corridor turned. It turned at intervals I counted. The intervals did not become regular. The drafts continued. The drafts came from below. The walls did not give back our sound. The lantern’s light went forward fifteen paces and ended. There were no shadows on the walls. There was no dust on the floor. There was the one fleck of silk at the foot of the wall behind us and there was the one place of not-stone in the ceiling behind us and there were no further such things in the next three hours of walking and I want to tell you that I trusted the not-finding of further such things even less than I had trusted the finding of the first two.
A corridor that gives you nothing is a corridor that is keeping the giving for later. I knew this. The held breath in the small bones of the wrist held. I let it hold. I did not try to let it go. A point walker who tries to relax a held breath in a corridor like this is a point walker who has misunderstood the held breath and what the held breath is for. The held breath is not a discomfort to be eased. The held breath is the body’s hand on the rope of the snare. The body holds the rope. The rope is the only line between the body and the time at which the snare will spring. The body does not let go of the rope until the snare is sprung or until the corridor is past. The corridor was not past. The body did not let go.
There is a thing I will say about the others now because the saying is honest. The others were not walking point. They could not have been walking point because they did not have the training. The hero had a training but the hero’s training was a training of a different shape and the hero would have walked point well in a corridor that asked for his shape of training and he would have walked point poorly in this corridor. He knew this. He had not asked to walk point. He had ceded the point with the small careful look across the ashes of the fire and the small careful look had been all the discussion the question had required. I have walked with men of skill who would have insisted on the point at the threshold for reasons of pride. The hero of the pale star was not such a man. I am noting this because the noting is fair to him. He would have a use later. He was not using himself now in a way that would diminish his use later. This was a quality I had not been certain of when I had met him and I was certain of it now. I did not say so to him. I would not say so to him for many days. The not saying was not coldness on my part. The not saying was the way I gave him the recognition. A man of his training did not need me to tell him he had ceded well. He had ceded and the ceding was its own knowledge between us.
The others I will speak of more briefly because they were not in my line of immediate concern. The brother was walking with the small soft step of a man who had walked in many places and had learned in each of them to walk in a way that did not trouble the place. The brother was, I noted, a man with the small useful gift of being unobtrusive without trying to be unobtrusive. The brother was, I noted further, watching me. He was not watching me the way a person watches another person whom she does not trust. He was watching me the way a person watches another person whom he is trying to learn. I did not mind the watching. The brother was not the threat in the corridor. The corridor was the threat in the corridor. The brother could watch me as long as he wished. The watching was not interfering with the walking and the watching was not interfering with the work. The woman with the satchel was the most surprising of them in the walking. She had a small light foot that I had not expected from her. I had taken her on first meeting for a person who would be loud in a corridor and she was not loud. She was quieter than the smith and quieter than the brother and only slightly louder than the hero. The chalk in her right hand made the small soft sound but the boots made no sound and the satchel made no sound and the breath made no sound. The woman had walked in cellars. A person who has walked in cellars walks in a corridor with the manner that the woman walked in. I noted this. I revised my assessment of her. She had been useful at the fire the evening before and she would be useful in the dark hours below us and the use would not be only the use of her notebook. The smith at the rear made the sounds the smith would always make. The hammer in the loop. The boots on the stone. The breath. The smith was the loudest of us. The smith could not help it. The smith was a smith. The smith made the noises a smith made. The corridor would have his measure first and would have it accurately and I considered this and I let it be. The smith at the rear was the smith at the rear for a reason and the reason was that no one was going to come up behind us along the corridor and survive being the smith’s surprise. The smith was a man at the rear who had a hammer and the hammer was the kind of hammer that a thing coming up a corridor would not enjoy meeting and the smith had the hammer well and would use it well and the rear was where he belonged. The arrangement was good. The arrangement had set itself in the first hundred paces and the arrangement was good for the corridor we had.
At perhaps the fourth hour of the morning we came to a wider place. The corridor opened into a chamber. The chamber was a small chamber the size of perhaps eight paces by eight. The chamber had three openings. The corridor we had come down by was one. There were two others. One led off to the right at a sharp angle. One led off to the left at a gentle curve. The chamber had no other features. There was no debris. There was no furniture. There was no marking on the walls. There was no body in the room. I want to be specific about the absence of a body in the room because the absence was the kind of absence that a point walker notes. A chamber at the meeting of three corridors deep in stone country in a place where eleven hunters had not come back should have had at least one of the eleven in it or some part of one of them or some sign of one of them. There was none. The chamber had been swept. The sweeping had been the same kind of sweeping as the cellar of the inn the woman had described. The thing that had been here had been removed and the thing that had removed it had also removed the sign of its having been here. The chamber was a clean chamber. A clean chamber where eleven men had gone and not come back is a chamber that is not a chamber. The chamber was a holding place. The holding place was a place where the corridor had brought people and from which the corridor had then sent them somewhere else. The somewhere else was not above. The somewhere else was below. The chamber had two corridors going further down and the corridor we had come in by going up. The chamber was a junction. The thing did not want us to turn back. The thing wanted us to choose between the two further down corridors. I knew this without having to think it through. The body in the small bones of the wrist and the small muscles of the back of the neck knew it and the knowing reached the mind without the intermediate work of thought.
I stopped at the entrance to the chamber. I lifted my left hand. The company stopped behind me. I did not enter the chamber. I stood at the entrance to it and I looked. I let the soft eye go again. The chamber was a chamber. The soft eye did not find a not-stone in the ceiling. The soft eye did not find a fleck of silk on a wall. The soft eye found, at the seam of the floor and the wall opposite the corridor we had come in by, a very faint discoloration. The discoloration was not a stain. The discoloration was the kind of discoloration that the eye gets when a surface has been wiped clean of something dark with a cloth that was insufficient to the task. The discoloration was at the height where a body lying on the floor would have rested its head against the wall. The discoloration was at the seam of the floor and the wall and was approximately the width of a man’s skull. I looked at it for perhaps the count of ten. I did not enter the chamber. I lowered the soft eye. The hard eye saw the seam of the floor and the wall and saw nothing. I lifted my left hand again, palm out, and I did not speak. The company waited. I looked at the two corridors leading further down. The corridor to the right ran straight for perhaps twenty paces and then turned. The corridor to the left curved and went out of sight within ten paces. The right corridor showed me more of itself before turning. The left corridor showed me less. A corridor that shows you more is a corridor that is letting you see what is in it. A corridor that shows you less is a corridor that is keeping what is in it. I have walked a long time and I have a small bias in such choices. The corridor that keeps is the corridor that does not want you. The corridor that shows is the corridor that does. I do not always trust the corridor that does not want me. A corridor that does not want me is sometimes a corridor that does not want me because the corridor has nothing to offer me and is letting me know in the only way a corridor knows how. But a corridor that does want me is always a corridor that has something to offer me, and the offering is what I am there for. The offering may be a trap. The offering is more often a trap than not. A trap that is offered is at least a trap that has decided to engage with me, and an engaged trap is a trap I can work with, and a corridor of empty patience is a corridor that can outlast me. I prefer the trap. I have always preferred the trap.
I lifted my right hand and I pointed at the corridor to the right. I did not turn my head to look at the company. I held the point. The hero behind me made a small soft sound in his throat that I had not heard him make before and that I would learn later was his sound for agreement when the agreement was a matter of professional judgment rather than of speech. The brother and the woman and the smith made no sound. I lowered the hand. I moved. I went into the chamber. I went around the chamber on the side opposite the faint discoloration at the seam of the floor and the wall. I did not look at the discoloration as I passed it. The looking at it would have been the small admission to the chamber that I had seen it and the chamber did not need that admission. I crossed the chamber and I came to the mouth of the right corridor and I stopped at the mouth and I looked down the right corridor. The right corridor was the same as the corridor we had come in by. The same stone. The same persuasion. The same intervals it would turn at. The same drafts coming up against my face. The same lack of dust and the same lack of shadow and the same lack of sound returned. The right corridor was a corridor of the same kind and not a corridor of a different kind. I had wondered whether a different kind would have shown itself at the junction. It had not. The thing was content to let the two further corridors be the same as the first. This told me a thing. The thing telling me a thing was that the thing was not yet hurrying. The thing had time. The thing knew it had time. The thing did not need to vary its corridors yet because the corridors were doing the work that the thing wanted the corridors to do. The work was bringing us further in. The work was sufficient. The work would be varied when the work needed to be varied and not before. I noted this. I held the held breath. I went into the right corridor. The company followed.
We went down the right corridor for perhaps two hours more. There were no further signs in the two hours. No silk. No not-stone in the ceiling. No discoloration at the seam of the floor and the wall. The walking was the walking it had been. The intervals at which the corridor turned changed again. The pattern, if there was a pattern, was not a pattern I could yet read. I held the counts.
In the second of the two hours something changed. I will be exact about what changed because the changing was the moment that the held breath in the small bones of the wrist tightened to its useful maximum. The change was this. The draft against my face increased. It did not become a wind. It did not even become a strong draft. It became a measurably stronger draft. A draft that is steady and then becomes measurably stronger is a draft that has been opened to. Something further below us had opened. I do not mean a door. I do not believe the place had doors of the kind we would mean. I mean a space had become available to the draft that had not been available to it before. The space had not been available to it five minutes earlier. The space had been opened in the five minutes. I do not know what had been done to open it. I know only that it had been done and that the doing of it had increased the draft and that the increase was very small and would have been missed by anyone who was not watching the draft and that I had been watching the draft for the better part of two hours and that I had not missed it.
I lifted my left hand. The company stopped behind me. I did not lower the hand. I held it raised. I stood with the hand raised for perhaps the count of thirty. I listened. The corridor did not give back our sound. The corridor did not give back any sound. The increase in the draft did not bring a sound with it. The increase in the draft brought only itself. I lowered the hand slowly. I did not lower it all the way. I held it at the height of my hip. I moved. I moved more slowly than I had been moving. The company followed at the slower pace. The slower pace was the pace the held breath had asked for and the held breath had been correct.
We went on perhaps three minutes more and then I stopped of my own choice. I had stopped not because the body had stopped me. I had stopped because the corridor ahead had begun to widen and I wished to see what it widened into before I walked into it. I stopped and the company stopped and the lantern in the brother’s hand caught the widening ahead of us and threw its light into the widening and the widening was the entrance to another chamber. The chamber was larger than the chamber at the junction. I could see across the entrance that the chamber was perhaps fifteen paces by fifteen and that the ceiling rose higher than the ceiling of the corridor and that there were more openings in the chamber than the three openings the previous chamber had had. I could not count them from the entrance. I would have to enter the chamber to count them and entering the chamber to count them was the thing the chamber wanted me to do and I have made a long practice of not doing the things that chambers want me to do without first considering the doing.
I stood at the entrance and I considered. I let the held breath do its work in the small bones of the wrist and the small muscles of the back of the neck. The held breath was very tight now. The held breath was the tightest it had been since we had stepped through the gate. The body was telling me that the snare was here. The body was not telling me where in the chamber the snare was. The body could not tell me that. The body could only tell me that the chamber was the snare and that the snare was set and that if I walked into the chamber in the way the chamber wanted me to walk into it then the snare would close. I have been told by people I have respected that the body is sometimes wrong. I have not, in my own walking, found it to be wrong about a snare. I have found it to be wrong about other things. About a snare it has not been wrong. I trusted the body.
I lifted my left hand at the height of my hip and I made the small gesture that meant wait, and I made it twice, which was the small gesture that meant wait longer than the first wait. The company waited longer. I did not turn my head. I will tell you what I did then because the doing was the only thing I had left to do at that moment in that corridor and the doing was the small useful thing of a point walker who has come to the snare.
I waited.
I waited because the body said wait and the body had been right at every previous moment of the morning and the body was likely to be right at this moment also. I waited and I let the held breath sit in its useful place and I let the cold sit in the hands where it had been since the room above the sail-maker’s shop. I waited and the corridor waited with me and the chamber ahead waited with me and the company behind me waited with me, and the draft kept coming up against my face from below, and the lantern’s light at the brother’s third place in the line laid its yellow on the threshold of the chamber and did not move, and I had the strong sense, in the long waiting, that something else was also waiting, somewhere in the chamber or in the openings of it, waiting because it had been told to wait, waiting because the waiting was its work, waiting the way I was waiting, only that it had waited longer and would wait longer still, and that the snare it had set was not the kind of snare that opened when a foot touched the cord, but the kind of snare that opened when the foot did not touch the cord, when the prey had been still long enough at the threshold for the snare to know that the prey was clever, and was therefore worth the spring of the better trap, the one held in reserve for prey of that kind, and that I had now told the snare that I was such prey by waiting at the threshold this long. I had given that gift after all. I noted it without flinching. The gift had been earned. The corridor had earned the gift fairly and I had given it. The held breath did not slacken. It became, if anything, tighter. The body said the snare is here and the body said the snare has now adjusted itself for you and the body said you will know which it is when it springs and not before. The body was right. I held. The company held. The lantern held its yellow at the threshold. The draft came up. The dungeon received us, as it had received us at the gate, without comment, and at the threshold of the second chamber the dungeon was, for the first time, looking back.
Segment Ten: The Skittering Below
It came on the held silence like a stone dropped into deep water, that first thin sound, and Elandor the Swift knew it for what it was before his mind had words to say it.
The veiled hunter at the point had not moved. The lantern in the brother’s hand had not moved. The company had stood at the threshold of the second chamber for what Elandor in the hot quiet of his blood reckoned at three full breaths, four, five, six, in the way a soldier reckons such things when nothing else is moving but his own counting, and at the end of the seventh breath the sound came up out of the dark of one of the openings beyond the chamber and crossed the floor of the chamber and reached them at the threshold, and the sound was the sound of legs.
It was not many legs. That was the first thing Elandor knew, and his knowing was the cold practical knowing of nineteen years of work. The legs were too few for the swarm that the chronicles of his order had described and the tinker had hinted at and the woman with the satchel had implied in her odd sideways way at the fire the night before. The legs were the legs of perhaps two of the creatures, or three at the most. The legs moved over stone in a quick light pattern that had no weight in it to speak of, the pattern of a thing whose body did not press the floor in the way a heavy body presses, the pattern of a thing that walked on the points of itself rather than upon the soles. The legs were perhaps forty paces from the threshold of the chamber, in one of the further openings, and they were moving across stone that the lantern’s light did not reach.
The second thing Elandor knew was that the legs were not coming for the company. They were going past. They were moving across the line of one of the further openings, perpendicular to the corridor that fed into the chamber from the entrance where the company now stood, and they were doing so at the pace of a thing patrolling and not of a thing hunting, which was a pace any soldier who had hunted soldiers would recognize at once, because the pace of a thing patrolling is a pace that has a small jaunt in it, a small confidence, the small unhurried step of a creature that has not yet been told there is anything in its corridors to hunt.
The third thing Elandor knew, in the same instant as the first and the second, was that this was the moment.
The held breath in his own body, which had been there since he had drawn the line in the dust at the gate two days before and had not slackened, drew itself up in his chest in a single hot rush, and the rush was the rush he knew, and the rush was older than any vow and any order and any blade in any sheath, and the rush was the small bright animal in him that had been bred and trained for the doing of exactly this and that had been waiting, perhaps without his quite admitting it to himself, all of these many quiet days of the descent. The animal in him was now on its feet. The animal in him was on its feet and was singing.
Hell, but the singing was a good thing. He had forgotten in his quiet years of training how good a thing it was. The singing was the small fierce song that ran along the inside of the breastbone when the work for which a man had been shaped came at last into the room with him and stood and was clearly the work, and not some doubtful echo of it, and not some grayer cousin of it, but the work itself, with the work’s own particular sound. The sound was now the skittering, the thin light pattern of legs on stone, and the work was the thing that the legs belonged to, and Elandor would not pretend, even to himself in the cold quiet half-light of the corridor, that the work coming up did not lift him.
He stepped past the veiled hunter at the point.
He did it without speaking. He did it with the small care he had been keeping for two days about each thing in turn, because he had marked at the threshold of the first corridor what Vren had been doing at the point and how Vren had been doing it, and Elandor would not be the man who undid the work of a fellow professional by clattering past her without grace. He laid his left hand for the briefest instant against Vren’s left shoulder as he came up, and the laying of the hand was a small old soldier’s gesture that meant only I am here and I am taking this, and the gesture was understood, and Vren did not move, and Vren’s gold eyes turned the smallest fraction toward him in the dim and Vren nodded once, only the once, and the nodding was the small permission, and Vren let him by, and Elandor stepped through into the chamber, and his right hand drew the Whisperedge of the Faithful Hand from its sheath in a single clean motion that he had practiced ten thousand times in the cloister-yard and perhaps two hundred times in earnest, and the blade came home into his hand the way an old friend comes home, and the small dry whisper of steel against the well-oiled throat of the sheath, which had been adjusted the night before by the smith’s careful hands and was now half a tone clearer than it had been at the gate, was the only sound Elandor made as he came forward, and the sound was, oh by the small gods of his order, the sound he loved best in the world.
He came into the chamber at the long careful pace of a man who would not surrender to the running of the blood the privilege of choosing the ground. The chamber was the chamber Vren had described it as, fifteen paces by fifteen and a higher ceiling than the corridor and more openings than the previous chamber, and Elandor counted the openings as he came in the way a man counts the doors of a room he is going to fight in, and the count was five, including the one he had just entered by, and he marked each opening in his eye, and he marked the floor of the chamber for any irregularity that might catch a boot, and he marked the ceiling for the small overturned-bowl place that the silence at the point had taught him to look for, and he found two such places in the ceiling of this chamber, neither of them currently occupied by anything that the lantern’s light or his own old soldier’s sense could detect, and he marked them both in his head and went on.
The skittering went on also. It came from the second opening to his right, the one in the southwestern wall of the chamber. The pattern of the skittering had not yet changed. The creatures had not yet been told of his arrival in the chamber. They were patrolling past at their unhurried pace and the corridor beyond their opening was, by the sound of the legs, a corridor that ran across the chamber’s wall some distance further on, perhaps ten paces, perhaps fifteen, and the corridor was not lit and Elandor could not see into it, but the corridor was, by the timing of the skitterings, perhaps the length of two skitterings from the opening’s mouth, which was to say that in perhaps eight to ten seconds the creatures would come past the opening, and the creatures would, when they did, in the natural order of patrolling things, glance into the chamber as they went, and the glancing would tell them that the chamber held strangers, and the patrolling would become hunting in the space of one further breath.
Elandor had eight to ten seconds. He used them.
He turned, in the chamber, with the Whisperedge held low and ready at his right side, and he made the smallest of beckoning gestures with his left hand toward the threshold where the company stood. The beckoning was not the beckoning of a captain telling soldiers to come in. The beckoning was the beckoning of a man telling his fellows to advance to the line he had already drawn for them, which was a line three paces into the chamber and along the wall opposite the southwestern opening, where the company would be out of the immediate line of sight of any creature glancing in from that opening but would be within close working range of whatever entered the chamber thereafter. The line was the correct line. He had picked it because picking it was what nineteen years of his training had made his eye do at the threshold of any chamber of this rough kind, and he was not going to insult the company by explaining the line, because the company had stepped across the gate with him and had spent two days learning him as he had been learning them, and the company would understand the line by reading the line.
Vren entered the chamber first, behind him. Vren went left along the wall, hugging it, and Vren’s twin blades were already in her hands, and Vren did not speak. The brother entered second, with the lantern at his left hand, and the brother went with Vren along the line, and the brother set the lantern down upon the floor at the line and stepped back from it half a pace, because a lantern in a fight is a thing that draws blades and a lantern in a fight that is not in a man’s hand is a thing that the man may pick up again later if he is alive to do so. The brother had thought of this without being told. The smith entered third, the hammer already in his great rough hand, and the smith took the right end of the line with the easy economy of a man who had decided in some quiet way at some quiet hour that his place in a fight would be where the heaviest hand was wanted, and the right end of the line was the end nearest the southwestern opening, and the smith would be the first hammer that any creature coming through that opening would meet. The woman with the satchel entered last, and she did not take a place in the line in the manner the others had, but she came into the chamber and stood at the entrance the company had used, in a position that put her at the back of any creature that came through the southwestern opening, and her right hand was up at her satchel and the satchel was open and her left hand had already drawn from it a thing Elandor could not see in the dim, and she was, he noted with the small bright satisfaction of a man who has just seen a piece of his battle-plan filled in by another professional, going to be the unpleasant surprise.
Four heartbeats. Five. The legs in the southwestern opening came on.
Elandor stood in the center of the chamber, three paces forward of the line, with the Whisperedge held low at his right side and the small fierce song running up the inside of his breastbone, and he let himself feel the song. He had not let himself feel it in nineteen years of cloister-yard work, because the cloister-yard work had not required it. He had let himself feel a quieter cousin of it perhaps two hundred times across those years, in earnest engagements with mortal men in mortal places, and the quieter cousin had been useful and he had been grateful for it. But the full song he had not felt since he had been twenty-one years old, in a market town in the eastern marches, on a morning when the work that had come to him had been work of a size that had matched him, and the matching had been so close that he had felt the singing in the inside of his ribs and had known then that the singing was the sound a man’s life makes when the life is doing what it was made for. He had been twenty-one then. He was thirty-seven now, and he had thought, in some quiet part of himself, that the singing might never come again, and that the not-coming would be the small private grief of his later years, a grief he would carry without complaint because all professions have such griefs and the bearing of them is part of the work.
The singing came. The singing was here. The chamber was wide enough and the work was right enough and the company at his back was the kind of company that the singing recognized and accepted, and the song was singing in him as he stood three paces forward of the line, and he wanted, with a wanting that he did not bother to be ashamed of because shame was not a useful response to it, the creatures to come through that opening and to see him, and to come at him, and to find out what nineteen years of cloister-yard work had been preparing for.
They came.
The first of them came through the southwestern opening in the loose easy lope of a thing patrolling. It crossed the threshold of the opening at the height of the small overturned-bowl places in the ceiling, which is to say that it was not on the floor of the chamber at all but was on the wall, and Elandor’s eye caught it at the first instant of its appearance because his eye had been on the opening and on the wall above the opening at the same time, the soft soldier’s eye of a man who knows that creatures of this rough kind do not respect the orientation of floors as a matter of course. The Gloomspider, for there could be no question now what the creature was, came down the inside wall of the southwestern opening and over the lip of the opening and onto the wall of the chamber proper, all of this in a single fluid motion that was the motion of a thing perfectly suited to its element, and the creature was the size of a hound and was the color of wet ash and the legs were too many, and Elandor counted them as it came, and the count was nine, which was wrong, which was a count not of any natural arachnid that had ever crawled in any country of this moon. The body was wrong. The body was twisted in a way that was not the twisting of injury but the twisting of original design, as though the thing had been imagined by someone who had been told what a spider was but had been told wrongly, and had imagined faithfully what they had been told, and the faithful imagining had then been given a body. The eyes were a row of small dark points and there were not six and there were not eight and Elandor did not count them because the counting of them was a thing for later, but they gleamed in the lantern’s light without giving any light back, and the gleaming was a gleaming that Elandor had not previously had in his life and did not wish to dwell upon.
The Gloomspider came onto the wall of the chamber and paused there, perhaps two paces above the floor, in the careful unhurried way of a thing taking inventory of a room it had not expected to find inventoried. Its head, if the round forward portion of it could be called a head, turned slowly across the chamber, and the small dark points took in the line of the company along the far wall, and they took in the brother and his lantern set down at the line, and they took in the smith and his hammer, and they took in Vren and her twin blades, and they did not take in the woman with the satchel, because the woman with the satchel had positioned herself in the only place in the chamber that was not within the creature’s first arc of view, and Elandor, observing this, made a private note in himself that the woman with the satchel was perhaps even more dangerous than he had on first acquaintance estimated, which was already a generous estimate.
The Gloomspider’s head turned to him last.
Elandor had been standing three paces forward of the line, perfectly still, with the Whisperedge held low at his right side, and his right hand had not moved on the hilt, and the small dry whisper of the drawing was a whisper that the chamber had received and had not given back. The creature’s head came around to him, and the row of small dark points settled upon him, and Elandor felt the looking land on his chest in the same place where the singing was, and the singing went, for the briefest instant, half a tone higher.
He grinned. He could not help it. He had not grinned in earnest in some years. The grin was the small private grin of a man who has just been recognized at his work by the work itself, and who is glad of the recognition, and who is about to set about returning it.
Behind the first Gloomspider, in the southwestern opening, two more pairs of legs sounded, and a second Gloomspider came down the inside wall of the opening and onto the wall of the chamber in the same fluid manner the first had come, and behind it a third, and the three of them now spread themselves along the southwestern wall of the chamber at the height of a man’s shoulder, in a loose arrangement that was the arrangement of three patrolling creatures who had just decided to stop patrolling, and the singing in Elandor’s breastbone rose another half tone and the song was now the song full and round and old, and his right hand opened and closed once upon the hilt of the Whisperedge in the small unconscious gesture by which he had, all his life, told his right hand that it was about to be asked to do something it had been bred for.
The first Gloomspider came at him.
It did not come at him in any way that a man fighting men would have understood. It came at him along the wall, not the floor, in three quick light skittering bounds, each bound covering perhaps a man’s length, and on the third bound it left the wall altogether and crossed the air toward him in a leap that bent its many legs back along its body like the bent legs of a thrown thing, and the leap covered the four remaining paces between the creature and Elandor in less time than it had taken Elandor’s grin to set.
Elandor stepped.
He stepped in the direction the leap had not been planned for, which was forward and slightly to his own left, which put him under the apex of the leap rather than at its target, and the Whisperedge of the Faithful Hand came up in his right hand in the long clean upward cut that was the first cut of the second form he had ever been taught, and the cut took the creature along the underside of the body as it passed over him, from the place where the forward legs met the body to the place where the rear legs left it, and Elandor felt the small bright kiss of the edge meeting hide that was not hide and bone that was not bone and the something between hide and bone that the Gloomspider’s body was instead, and the edge went through the body the way a good edge will go through any body that is not specifically shaped to resist it, and Elandor came out of the cut with the blade above his right shoulder and his weight set on his forward foot and his left hand out and his eyes already turning to find the second of the creatures, and the first creature came down behind him in two pieces, and the pieces struck the floor of the chamber with the small wet not-blood sound that Vren would later quietly remark upon, and the pieces twitched once and went still.
He had not expected the cut to take. He wants me to tell you that, in the small honest way a man tells his own story when he is trying not to flatter himself. He had drawn the blade against creatures of myth perhaps three times in his life, against creatures he had taken at the time for things of the dim ordinary world that had grown bigger and uglier than their kind should have grown, and twice the blade had taken and once it had not, and the once it had not had been the worst night of his work, and he had carried the lesson of that night, which was that the edge of a man’s blade is not a thing one assumes will take against a creature one has not previously cut. He had drawn the cut with the full strength of his shoulder and the full intention of his eye and the small bright song of the breastbone behind it, and he had not assumed the cut would take, and the cut had taken, and the taking was a small private gift to him from the Whisperedge and from the smith who had tightened the cross-piece the night before and from the master of his order who had laid the original binding eleven years ago, and Elandor would not in this hour or any hour after this hour forget to be grateful for the gift.
The second Gloomspider was already on him. It had come the way the first had come, along the wall in two bounds and a leap, and the leap was a little wider than the first leap had been because this one had learned from its companion’s death the importance of width, and Elandor, who had also learned, was in the wrong place for the leap by the time it had committed to the air. He had moved on his forward foot from the end of the first cut into a step that took him further left and the second creature’s leap was therefore going to the place where he had been and not to the place where he was, and the creature, in the air, registered the wrong place by the small twitching of three of its many legs that were trying to correct for it, and the correction was, Elandor saw with the small bright satisfaction of his profession, not enough. The creature would land behind him by perhaps half a man’s length, and in the moment of its landing it would be turned three-quarters away from his blade, and the moment of its landing was the moment the second form of his order had been designed in part to address.
The third Gloomspider, however, was not coming at him. The third Gloomspider had broken from the wall in the moment of the second’s leap and had taken a wider line along the chamber’s southern wall, in the long fluid scuttle of a creature that intended to flank, and the line was the line that would take it past Elandor and toward the line of the company along the far wall, and the targeting of the line was, Elandor saw, the brother and the lantern.
He did not have the seconds to handle both the second creature and the third. He had perhaps two seconds to handle the second creature in the way the second form would handle it, by pivoting on the forward foot and bringing the Whisperedge down through the rear of the second creature in the moment of its landing, and the doing of this would leave him out of position to intercept the third creature, and the third creature would reach the brother before Elandor could reach the third, and the brother would have a Gloomspider on him before the Whisperedge could come back.
These things took less time to think than they take to read. They took less time to think than they take to feel. Elandor felt them, more than thought them, and the feeling told him to commit to the second creature and to trust the line of the company along the far wall to handle the third, and he committed, and as he committed he made the small soft sound in his throat that he had made at the threshold of the chamber when Vren had pointed at the right-hand corridor, the small soft sound that meant professional agreement, and he made it this time toward the brother and the smith and Vren and the woman with the satchel, and the small soft sound was the only signal he had time to give, and the signal said the third is yours, and he hoped they would understand it, and he hoped he had not been wrong about them.
He pivoted on the forward foot. The Whisperedge of the Faithful Hand came down through the rear of the second Gloomspider in the moment of its landing, and the cut was a clean cut that opened the creature from the place where its abdominal segment met the rear pair of legs and ran forward along the underside to the place where the body began, and the creature came apart in much the same manner as the first had come apart, and the pieces of it twitched once on the floor and went still, and the small wet not-blood sound of its falling was now twice in the chamber and Elandor was already turning, and as he turned his eye went past the falling pieces and across the chamber to find the third creature and to see whether his trust in the company had been the right trust.
It had been.
The third Gloomspider had reached perhaps the midpoint of the chamber when it had encountered, in the air directly in front of it, a small flung object that the woman with the satchel had drawn from her bag and had cast across the chamber in a sidearm motion in the moment of the creature’s break from the wall, and the small flung object had been a packet of something Elandor could not at this distance identify, and the packet had struck the creature on the round forward portion of its body and had broken open, and a fine pale dust had bloomed across the creature’s many eyes, and the creature had reared up on its hind four legs in the unmistakable jerking spasm of a thing that has had something fine and pale and stinging cast into the places where it sees from. The brother, in the same instant, had taken up the lantern from the floor at the line and had thrust it forward at arm’s length at the creature’s head, and the lantern’s light, which had been the soft yellow honest light of an old monastic lantern across the corridor, had bloomed in some way Elandor’s eye did not entirely follow into a brighter and steadier light that struck the creature full upon those many eyes already blinded by the pale dust, and the creature reared higher and let out the only sound any of the three had made, which was a thin high cry that was not the sound any animal of this moon was supposed to be able to make, and Vren, who had been holding her line along the far wall with her two blades at her sides, came across the floor of the chamber at the creature’s flank in three light steps and put both blades through the place where the round forward portion of the body met the segment behind it, with a clean economy that Elandor, even in the moment of his own pivot, found himself admiring, and the third Gloomspider’s many legs collapsed under it, and the smith, who had also moved at the breaking of the creature from the wall, came up beside Vren in the moment of the creature’s collapse and drove the head of his short hammer down upon the round forward portion of the body with the steady killing force of a smith who had once finished a wounded horse, and the body broke under the hammer, and the third creature went still.
There was, in the chamber, an instant of absolute quiet.
The skittering had stopped. The thin high cry had stopped. The lantern at the brother’s hand had subsided to its ordinary soft yellow light. The three creatures lay in their three pieces and pieces upon the floor. The five of the company stood in their five places where the small brief action had left them, and not one of them had so much as a scratch.
Elandor stood at the center of the chamber with the Whisperedge of the Faithful Hand held out before him and the singing in his breastbone still going, although the singing was already beginning to come down off its high tone toward something steadier and quieter, and he became aware, all at once, that he was grinning still, and that the grin was the grin of a man twenty-one years old in a market town in the eastern marches, and that the grin had not in fact gone away in the sixteen years between that morning and this one, but had only been put aside in a small careful place, and that the placing aside had been undone, and that he was, in some way he had not entirely had words for before this moment, restored to himself. He breathed once, and he let the breath out slowly, and he lowered the Whisperedge to his right side, and he did not yet sheathe it because the chamber had four other openings besides the one the three creatures had come through and the chamber had two not-stone places in the ceiling that he had marked at the threshold, and a man does not sheathe his blade in a chamber with four unsealed openings and two not-stone places in the ceiling because the chamber has been quiet for two breaths.
He looked at the company.
The brother stood holding the lantern out before him still, in the same posture in which he had thrust it forward at the third creature’s eyes, and the brother’s old face was, Elandor noted, very pale beneath its weathering, and the brother’s left hand was trembling very slightly upon the lantern’s chain, and yet the brother held the lantern steady at the height his arm had thrust it to, and the brother was not setting it down, because the brother understood, as Elandor understood, that the chamber was not done yet. The smith stood with the hammer in his right hand and the head of the hammer slick with the not-blood of the third creature, and the smith’s chest was rising and falling in the deep slow way of a man who had only just remembered to breathe, and the smith looked at Elandor across the chamber and the smith’s face went into the small relieved bark of a smile, and the smile said well now well now, and the smile was answered, before either man said anything, by a single short laugh from Elandor that surprised him with the dryness of it but did not surprise him with the warmth. The woman with the satchel stood at the entrance the company had used, her right hand already drawing a second packet from the bag, the first packet having been so well-thrown that Elandor wanted, in some absurd small part of himself, to ask her where she had learned the throw, and she met his eye across the chamber and inclined her chin to him the smallest fraction, and the inclination said something like I had a brother who threw stones and I learned from him and Elandor, reading it, returned the inclination, and the small exchange was understood, and Vren, at the corpse of the third creature, was already going through the practiced economical motions of wiping the twin blades against the underside of the dead thing and returning them to the sheaths at the small of her back, and Vren did this in perhaps three seconds, and Vren then rose, and Vren’s pale gold eyes met Elandor’s eyes across the room, and Vren said, in her flat deliberate voice, very plain, almost soft, and almost in the way a person says it to a person of her own profession when there is nothing to be added that the work has not already said, she said, well done.
It was, perhaps, the second thing Elandor would carry out of that chamber for as long as he lived. The first thing he would carry was the song. The second thing was Vren saying well done.
He nodded to her, and he did not say well done back, because Vren had not done the thing the first two creatures had required, and to say well done to her for the third creature would have been to imply that there had been any doubt of her competence in the doing of it, and there had not been any doubt, and the not-saying was the more honest acknowledgment, and Vren understood. Elandor was beginning to understand that Vren understood almost everything. He filed the understanding in himself.
He spoke at last, in his clipped formal voice, and the speaking was the first speaking any of them had done since the beckoning gesture at the threshold, and the voice came out of him a little louder than the chamber wanted and he lowered it the second sentence.
He said, friends, that was well met on every side. I did not have time to give signal beyond the small one I gave. You read the signal correctly. Brother Caius, the lantern was a piece of work I did not know was possible, and I will ask you about it at the next fire. Master Goradd, the hammer at the moment was the right hammer at the right moment, and I will tell you that any spider that ever lives to meet your hammer twice will be a spider that has not been listening properly. Maelis Veth, I do not know what was in the packet you threw, and I do not need to know yet, but I would like to know eventually, when we have the time. Vren, you flanked at exactly the right pace, and I will say this once and not again because I think you do not like being said to about your work, but you flanked perfectly. That is all I will say on it. Are any of us hurt.
There was the small honest silence of a company taking inventory of itself for the first time after a fight. Each of them looked at themselves and then looked at the others, and one by one each shook the head, and the count was five whole bodies, and Elandor allowed himself, in his chest, one further low pulse of the song.
He said, then we will press forward. The skittering came from the southwestern opening, and there were three of these creatures patrolling, and three has been dealt with. There will be more behind the three. There always are. We do not want to give what is behind them the time to muster. We will go now. We will go through the southwestern opening at the pace we have been keeping, and we will go with the same order on the line, and Vren will retake the point at the threshold of the opening, by Vren’s leave, because the point in the opening is the point Vren walks better than any of the rest of us, and we will let Vren have it back. I had it only for this chamber. I do not require to keep it.
Vren’s pale gold eyes lingered on him for the duration of one breath. The eyes said you are sound. The eyes said I had not been certain, and I am certain now, and the certainty will be useful. The eyes turned to the southwestern opening, and Vren moved across the chamber to its threshold, and Vren took up her point posture there, with the weight forward and the hands at her sides and the soft eye already going past the lip of the opening into the unlit corridor beyond, and Vren did not look back.
Elandor sheathed the Whisperedge. He sheathed it slowly. The half-tone-clearer whisper that the smith’s small attention had given the sheath the night before sounded again as the blade came home, and Elandor, hearing it, smiled the smaller private smile of a man whose tools have done him good and who has reason to know it, and the smith heard the smile in the smaller sound, and the smith allowed himself, for the briefest of moments, to lean upon his hammer with the small pleased posture of a tradesman whose work has just been used in earnest and has not failed under the use, and Elandor saw the lean and approved of it, and did not remark on it, because some pleasures are taken in the not-remarking.
The company formed up again at the threshold of the southwestern opening in the order they had taken at the threshold of the gate two days before, with Vren at the point and Elandor in the second place and the brother in the third and the woman with the satchel in the fourth and the smith at the rear. The chamber was left behind them with its three dead Gloomspiders and its faint not-blood on the floor and its two unaddressed not-stone places in the ceiling, and Elandor as he passed under the openings of the chamber gave each not-stone place in the ceiling a single careful glance, and neither of them gave him anything back, and he passed on.
The southwestern opening took them into a corridor narrower than the corridors they had been walking in, and the corridor descended more steeply than the previous corridors had descended, and the air in this corridor was warmer than the air in the previous corridors had been, and the warmth was not the warmth a man would call welcoming, but the warmth was a warmth, and after two days of the cold of the upper passages the warmth was a thing the company felt without comment in the small muscles of the back of the neck and the small bones of the wrist, and the warmth told Elandor what it had told Vren before him, that they were now into the part of the place where the patrolling stopped being a courtesy of the dungeon and started being an active interest, and that the active interest was below them, and that they were going toward it.
He let the song in his breastbone come down to its smaller steadier register, the register the song had at twenty-one in the market town when the worst of the first engagement had passed and the work had reorganized itself into the second engagement which had been the longer and harder one, and he walked at the second place in the line behind Vren in the long slow careful pace of a man who had at last been told by the morning what kind of morning he was having, and the song went with him down the warmer corridor, and the company went with him, and the three dead Gloomspiders lay where they had fallen behind them, and the chamber received them as the dungeon had received them at the gate, without comment, and Elandor the Swift, called by some who did not have other names for him, brother of the Order of the Pale Star, sworn in his eighteenth year and now thirty-seven years old and walking in the second place of a line of five in a corridor that was warmer than it had any right to be, was, for the first time in sixteen quiet years, fully and gladly and dangerously alive.
Segment Eleven: The Web of the Listening Strand
There is a thing about narrow corridors that the people who write the songs about them tend to leave out, love, and I will tell you what it is now while we are between songs, because the thing about narrow corridors is that the air in them does not move the way air is supposed to move, and after about half an hour in one even the most settled of stomachs begins to suspect that there is a deal of breathing going on somewhere in the walls that no one has yet been honest about, and the dishonesty of the breathing begins, by small degrees, to work upon the nerves. The corridor we were walking down out of the chamber where the first three Gloomspiders had been so satisfyingly disassembled was not the worst narrow corridor I have ever been in, mind, because I have been in narrow corridors in cellars in port towns where the walls were close enough to require sideways shuffling and the breathing in those walls was extremely well-attested by other parties who had not survived to attest it any further, but this corridor was, even by the relaxed standards of my professional life, what one would call a narrow corridor with opinions.
It was, for one thing, getting warmer. It had been the cold of stone country at the gate and it had been the cold of slightly-less-stone-country at the chamber and now it was, by the time we had been in it perhaps an hour, what one might describe as the temperature of a cellar that had been closed up in the summer with a great many vegetables in it, although without any of the vegetables. This was not pleasant. This was, in fact, considerably less pleasant than the cold had been, because the cold had been a cold one knew how to feel about, and the warmth was a warmth one did not. A cold corridor wants you out of it. A warm corridor, love, is a corridor that does not mind you being there, and a corridor that does not mind you being there is doing some thinking about you that you would rather it were not doing.
The webs began at perhaps the second turn of the new corridor.
I had been waiting for them. I want to be honest about that. The whole reason I had walked out of the cellar of the Bent Reed eleven days before, give or take a day for the small confusions of country roads, had been because of webs, and I had been mentally preparing myself for webs ever since, and yet when the first of them appeared in the lantern’s light at the far edge of the corridor’s stretch I will tell you, petal, that my breath did the small involuntary thing breath does when one’s intellectual preparation has not entirely kept pace with the actuality of a situation, and I had to take a small deliberate breath after it to remind my lungs that they had, in fact, been planning for this.
The first web was a small one, almost modest, hanging from one wall of the corridor to the other at about the height of a tall man’s chin, in a pattern that was not the pattern of any spider that had ever lived in any cellar of any inn of any river of this moon. I am going to say that again, love, because the saying of it bears repeating. It was not the pattern of any spider. I had been a quiet and frankly somewhat obsessive student of spider web patterns for the better part of my adult life, and I had built up in my notebooks a private taxonomy of perhaps three hundred and fifty distinct patterns by the time I had got to the Bent Reed, and the pattern of the web hanging across our corridor matched none of them and did not even rhyme with any of them. The web was made up of strands that ran in long straight lines from anchor point to anchor point, which is a thing real spiders do not do except for the foundational strands of an orb web, and the strands intersected at sharp angles that the strands of an orb web do not intersect at, and between the strands there were no spiral connecting threads of the kind that a spider weaves to actually catch flies, which is the part of an orb web that does the catching, which is the entire functional point of the orb web, the rest being structural support for the spiral. There was no spiral. The web before us was, if I may be permitted a small piece of professional vocabulary that I had been quietly developing in my third notebook over the last three weeks, all structure and no function, which in spider terms is approximately the equivalent of a kitchen that has been beautifully tiled and plumbed and which contains no stove. It is not a kitchen. It is a thing that is kitchen-shaped for reasons of its own.
The web in front of us, then, was not a kitchen. It was something else that was web-shaped. The question of what that something else was had been preoccupying me in the abstract since the cellar of the Bent Reed three weeks ago and the question of what it was was about to become considerably less abstract within the next quarter hour, and I will tell you, love, that I knew this even as I stood looking at the web, and that the knowing of it produced in me the small bright sensation that I had been trying to describe to myself for years and had never quite managed, which is the sensation of being terribly glad about being terribly worried, which is not, in the dictionaries I have consulted, a recognized emotion, but which is, I have come to feel, one of the more reliable emotional registers a person of my disposition will encounter in her working life.
We stopped, all five of us, in the small unsignaled way that a small company stops when the person at the point has stopped, and Vren in her usual quiet manner did not in fact stop entirely so much as she became, by degrees, less moving, which is a thing Vren did with her body that I have not seen in any other person and which I have come over time to find rather restful, although I would not say so to her face because Vren is not the sort of person to whom one says one finds her restful. Elandor in second place stopped properly. Brother Caius behind him stopped and lifted the lantern very slowly so that its light fell more fully upon the web across the corridor. The smith behind me at the rear stopped, and did, I noticed, the small careful thing he had been doing for two days now whenever any of us stopped, which was to take a half-step to the side and look back the way we had come for the count of three before he turned back forward, just in case something had been being polite enough to let us walk away from it and was about to stop being polite. The half-step and the count of three were, I had come to understand, the small everyday discipline of the smith’s particular form of vigilance, and I had filed it under things I admired about him, which was a file that was getting on for some thickness by then.
I said, in the small voice that one uses when one is in the presence of something one is fairly sure can hear, oh, petals, well now. Look at this. I said it half to the others and half to the web. The web did not respond, which was the response I had been expecting, but I had been wrong to expect it, because the response had only been delayed. The web, I want to tell you, was vibrating. Not in any way that the rough eye would have caught. It was vibrating at the same humming pitch that the webs in the cellar of the Bent Reed had been vibrating at on the morning all my one hundred and forty-three spiders had cleared out, and I had heard that pitch every morning of my journey since, in the small back-of-the-throat way one hears such things when one has been carrying around the memory of them, but this was the first time I had heard it in actuality since the cellar, and the hearing of it in actuality was a different thing from the hearing of it in memory, because in actuality the pitch was a touch lower than it had been in the cellar, and the lower was, I want to be exact about this, the difference between a person speaking and a person speaking and listening at the same time. The web in the cellar had been listening. The web in the corridor was both listening and being listened to, which is to say it was a node along which conversation was passing.
I said, friends, this is the web I have been telling you about. This is exactly the web. I would like, with the company’s permission, to put a hand to it.
The four of them looked at me with the four small different looks one would expect of them. Vren’s pale gold eyes turned the smallest fraction back over her shoulder toward me without her body following the turn, which was Vren’s economical way of telling me that she had heard the request and that the decision was mine and that she would not interfere with it but that she would be ready in the event that my having touched it produced an unforeseen development. Elandor turned his head fully toward me, which was Elandor’s far less economical way of telling me that he was paying attention to the request and was reserving judgment until he heard what I intended to do with my hand once I had got it onto the web. Brother Caius lifted his eyebrows in the slow careful way he had, which was the brother’s signal that he was about to say something diplomatic, and he duly said, in his slow careful voice, daughter, if you tell me that there is a thing to be learned from the touching of this web, I will accept that, and I will only ask, before you do, what is the smallest possible touching that would learn the thing, so that we may begin with the smallest. The smith behind me let out a small low whuff of air that was the smith’s signal that he was uneasy with the proposal and was nevertheless not going to gainsay it on the strength of his unease alone, which was, I had come to understand, the smith’s general policy with respect to my proposals, and a policy I had a great deal of affection for, although I would not say so to him either, because the smith was the sort of person who did not require the affection to be said in order to know it was there.
I said, oh, brother, the smallest possible touching is the gloves. The Spinneret Gloves of the Patient Hand, which we had collectively agreed on the first night to take seriously as a piece of equipment of mine that was not merely decorative, are designed in such a way that when I touch a web with them I can read the vibrations along the strand the way a real spider would read them. Not with my brain, mind. The reading happens in my fingers and arrives in my brain as a kind of, oh, very faint impression of meaning, in the way one perceives meaning in a piece of music when one is not listening to any particular note of it. I have used the gloves on three webs in my life, all of them mundane, and I have read each of those webs, and the readings have given me information about the spider at the heart of each that I could not have got any other way. None of those three webs vibrated like this one, however, and I am going to be honest with you, petals, that I do not know what this one is going to give me when I touch it. It may give me nothing. It may give me a great deal more than I can hold. It may give me a great deal more than I can hold and then it may give me the attention of something on the other end of the strand that I have not invited to my attention. I am going to do it anyway, because the only way to find out what the web is for is to use it for what it is for, and what this web is for is conversation, and I would like a turn at the conversation.
Brother Caius nodded slowly. Elandor’s hand at his hip relaxed by the small fraction that meant he was approving of the proposal while reserving the right to draw the Whisperedge in less than a second if the approving turned out to have been a mistake. Vren did not move at all. The smith said, well now, well now, but if you start to fall, lass, I am catching you, and if I catch you I do not give the catch back until I am told it is safe to do so by yourself, and I want that understood between us before you begin, by my forge. I told him, petal, that the catch was very much pre-accepted on my part, and that he was a treasure, and the smith made the small embarrassed huffing noise he made when paid a compliment, and we were ready.
I came forward past Brother Caius and Elandor in the small careful sideways way one comes past one’s companions in a corridor that is not entirely wide enough for ease, and I took up a position directly before the web at perhaps an arm’s length from it, and I drew the Spinneret Gloves of the Patient Hand more firmly down upon my fingers, the small leather having a way of riding up at the knuckles in cold weather, and the corridor was no longer cold but the riding up had become a habit by now, and I addressed the web, in the small private way one addresses a thing one is about to touch which one is not entirely sure is going to enjoy being touched.
I said, in my head, very quietly, although I was sure now that the web heard everything one said in any voice, I said, hello, love. I am going to put a hand on you. I would like to listen. I will not stay long. I will not pull on you. I will only listen. I am Maelis. You may call me what you like.
Then I put the palm of my right hand, gloved, very lightly against one of the long straight strands of the web, in the same gentle way one rests one’s hand on the flank of a sleeping cat one is not sure has invited it.
And, oh, petals, oh, my loves, oh, the everything of everything.
I want to tell you what happened in my fingers and arrived in my head, but I am going to have to do it in approximate language, because the precise language of it is not language. I want to tell you also that what I am about to describe was not what I had expected, and that my expectations had been considerably more modest than the reality, and that I had to do a great deal of small adjustment within myself in the first ten seconds of the contact to keep from doing something embarrassing like fainting or vomiting or laughing the laugh I had laughed in the hollow which would have been the wrong laugh for this corridor.
The first thing that arrived in my head was the corridor. I had not previously been entirely sure where I was in the corridor in three dimensions, because corridors are not the easiest things to triangulate in the dark with only a lantern, but the moment I touched the web I knew. I knew where I was relative to the chamber we had left behind us and I knew where I was relative to the second chamber that lay ahead of us, although I had not been told one lay ahead. I knew where the not-stone places in the ceiling of the previous chamber were. I knew where two other not-stone places in the ceiling of this corridor were, although the lantern’s light had not yet reached them and I had not seen them. I knew, in the same way one knows the shape of one’s own room in the dark having lived in it for some years, the architecture of perhaps a third of a mile of corridor in every direction around me. The web had told me this. The web had told me this because the web had been carrying this information along its strands for some time and the touching of the strands had given the information up to my fingers in the way the information had been being given up to anyone, or anything, with the proper fingers along the strands.
This was not what I had expected. I had expected to hear the equivalent of a single distant voice, faint, possibly translated only partially through my fingers, possibly nothing at all but a confirmation that there was something on the other end. I had expected the small basic thing one expects from a node in a network when one has put a tap upon the node. I had got, instead, the map. I had got the map first because the map was the most basic thing the web was carrying, the underlying common knowledge that all the conversational traffic upon the web took for granted, the equivalent of the basic civic knowledge that everyone in a small town has about which lane is which and where the bakery is and where the well is and which lane one ought not to go down after dark. The web was carrying that civic knowledge as a foundation, and the foundation had arrived in me in the first instant of contact like a small encyclopedia handed to me by a perfectly civil clerk who had not noticed that I was a stranger in town.
The second thing that arrived, perhaps half a breath after the first, was the conversation.
There were three voices, or perhaps four. I will not pretend that I could distinguish them with any precision, because the precision was not yet available to me, and I am not entirely sure even now whether the precision would ever have become available to me with longer use of the web, which I did not have. There were three voices, I am going to say, for the sake of the telling, and the voices were not voices in the sense one would mean by voices, but they were patterns of vibration that had the cadence of voices, the small back-and-forth of speech, the small overlapping interruption that conversation has when more than two parties are engaged, the small pauses at the ends of phrases for the small accommodation of the next speaker. The voices were, the moment my fingers heard them, recognizably the voices of intelligent creatures speaking to one another, and I want to say that, petals, I want to say that very plainly, because I had not, until that moment, fully believed that the Gloomspiders were anything but extremely well-engineered hunting devices, and I want you to understand the small private adjustment I had to make within myself at the discovery that they were talking.
They were talking. They were talking in a language that I did not speak, the way one might hear two strangers talking in a foreign tongue at the next table in a tavern and yet know perfectly well that what one is hearing is conversation and not noise, by the cadence and the rhythm and the small social architecture of it. They were talking, and as I held the strand the language began, by very small degrees, to acquire meaning at the edges, in the way a foreign tongue will acquire meaning at the edges for a person who has listened to enough of it without ever having been formally taught a word, the way certain repeated words emerge first because they are repeated, and certain emotional tones emerge next because emotional tones are universal across most kinds of speaking, and only later do the actual meanings settle in. I had perhaps thirty seconds of listening before I had enough of the edges to begin to translate, and I want to tell you, friend, that those thirty seconds were the longest thirty seconds of my life to that date, although they would, in the course of the next several days, be exceeded.
I will tell you what I translated. I will tell you in the order I translated it. The order is not the order in which it was being said. The voices were saying many things at the same time, interrupting and overlapping in the manner of a long conversation that had been going on without my arrival and would continue without my departure. I picked out what I could pick out.
The first thing I translated was a phrase that was being repeated by all three voices at irregular intervals, with the cadence of an acknowledgment, the small social phrase that one says to confirm that one has heard what one’s interlocutor has said. The phrase was the word for she. Not she meaning any particular she. The word for she as a stand-in for a referent that all parties to the conversation already knew. I want to be exact about this, petals. The voices were saying she and they were not specifying her further because there was only one she in their world worth saying and all of them knew which she that was. The she was not a Gloomspider. The she was not the great Gloomspider at the heart of the dungeon that we had all been told about and that we had all assumed was the queen of this place. The she was something else, something that the voices spoke of with a particular cadence that I want to call the cadence of devotion, in the same way that the small cadences of certain very old religious orders carry a particular cadence of devotion even when the words themselves are mundane. The she had a kind of weight in the conversation. The she was the subject the conversation kept returning to even when it was nominally about other things. The voices were checking in with one another about her. They were comparing notes about her. They were, I want to say very carefully because this is the part where I have to use language that is not quite right, they were attending to her.
The second thing I translated, after perhaps a further half a minute, was a sequence of small declarations of position. The voices were saying where they were. They were saying it in terms of the map the web had given me in the first instant of contact, the underlying civic knowledge of the corridor system. Voice one was at a place I now mentally located as perhaps a quarter of a mile below us and a little to the east. Voice two was at a place perhaps half a mile below us and to the south. Voice three was at a place I could not pin down precisely because voice three was at the edge of the map the web carried and was perhaps further down still. There was a possible voice four that I had at first counted but had since decided was a kind of echo of voice one along a different strand, although I was not sure. The three voices were patrolling. Each of them, in the small declarations of position, would say its place, and the other two would acknowledge with the word for she which I now understood was not only an acknowledgment of the speaker but a small reassurance about the subject of their devotion, the equivalent of a sentry saying she is well and a fellow sentry replying she is well as a confirmation that the patrol was going as the patrol was meant to go.
The third thing I translated, and this was the part where my hand went very cold inside the Spinneret Gloves and I felt the smith behind me take a half-step closer because the smith had been watching my face and the smith had not liked what he had seen happen on it, the third thing I translated was a sequence of references that the voices were making to the chamber we had just left.
They were referring to three. They were referring to three having gone quiet. They were referring to three not having checked in. They were doing so without alarm, which I noted at the time and which I think now was the most important of all the small noticings I did in that minute or two of contact, because the lack of alarm meant that the three that had gone quiet were not unusual in their having gone quiet. It happened. It had happened before. It was being noted and would be replaced, in the same way the small civic functions of any town are noted and replaced when an officer of the town has not checked in on time. The three voices were discussing, in the cadence one uses for small administrative matters, the rotation of further patrols to cover the absence of the three. They were not discussing us. They had not yet identified the three as having been killed by us. They had only identified the three as having stopped vibrating along the strand. They were going to send more, and the more would, I gathered from the small subsequent exchanges, take perhaps an hour to be in position, in the way patrol rotations always take a small administrative interval before becoming actual on the ground.
This was useful information. This was extremely useful information. I marked it.
The fourth thing I translated, and this is where I want to ask you to imagine, petal, the small bright dreadful sensation of a person who has been an amateur scholar of small things suddenly discovering that her amateur subject is much, much larger than she had quietly suspected, the fourth thing I translated was a small remark by voice two to voices one and three that I am going to put in approximate language as follows. The web hears a new tap. The web hears a tap that has the cadence of a sister but is not a sister. The web hears a listener.
Petals.
I want to tell you that my hand did not at first leave the strand when I translated this. I want to tell you that I am quietly proud of my hand for not leaving the strand, because the small panicked animal in the back of my brain very much wanted my hand to leave the strand, and the small panicked animal was making a perfectly reasonable case for the hand leaving the strand, and yet some other animal in some other part of my brain, an animal I had not previously been on speaking terms with, decided to overrule the small panicked animal in the back, and that other animal made my hand stay on the strand, because the other animal had calculated, in the small fraction of a second between the translation and the impulse, that lifting my hand off the strand at this exact moment would in fact tell voices one, two, and three considerably more than they currently knew about the listener, by the very abruptness of the lift, in the same way that a person eavesdropping at a keyhole tells the people inside the room considerably more about themselves when they jerk away from the keyhole than when they remain still. My hand stayed.
I will tell you the next few seconds carefully because the next few seconds are, I think, the only few seconds of my life so far in which I have been clever in a way that I did not need to think about being clever in order to be. Some clevernesses one has to plan. Some clevernesses one does in retrospect, and one is generous to oneself afterward in describing them as clevernesses, when they were in fact small lucky stumbles. This was the third kind, which is rarer in my experience and which I am told by older people is the kind one acquires only by long practice, although I had not had long practice yet. The third kind is the cleverness that comes out of one’s hands without ever passing through one’s head, and it does the right thing because the hands have been thinking on their own and the hands have been thinking better than the head would have.
My hand on the strand did not lift. My hand on the strand did, however, very slightly, alter the way it was resting upon the strand, in a small careful adjustment that lengthened the contact between the glove and the strand by perhaps the width of a fingernail and softened the pressure of the contact by perhaps the same proportion, and the alteration of the contact changed the vibration that my hand was producing along the strand. The vibration my hand had been producing along the strand, I want to be clear, had been the vibration of a foreign hand resting upon a foreign strand for the first time, which is a vibration that has a particular cadence, the cadence of a listener, the cadence of an outsider. The vibration my hand now began to produce, after the small careful adjustment, was a vibration that imitated, to the best of my hand’s ability and the gloves’ ability and my own halting new knowledge of the cadences I had been listening to, the cadence of a sister. The cadence of one of the voices.
I will tell you exactly why this worked, because the why is the whole of the trick. The voices on the strand were, I now understood, themselves transmitting through the same medium and by the same method that I was now using. They did not speak to one another with sound. They spoke to one another with vibration along the web. Each of them produced its conversational input by causing its body or its legs or its claws to vibrate the strand in a particular pattern, and the pattern was the cadence, and the cadence was the speech, and the speech was carried by the strand to the next node and on to the next. The voices, in other words, did not have a privileged claim to the strand. The strand was the medium. Anything that could produce the correct cadence on the strand was, for the duration of the producing, a voice.
My hand, with the Spinneret Gloves of the Patient Hand on it, began to produce a small careful cadence. I want to tell you, friend, that I did not know what I was saying. I want to tell you that I did not have the vocabulary to say anything in particular. I produced a single small cadence that I had heard repeated half a dozen times in the last minute and that I had identified as the small acknowledgment phrase, the equivalent of yes, or noted, or so it is. I produced it twice, with a small pause between, in the natural unhurried rhythm I had heard the other voices produce it in, and I produced it on the strand at the moment when voice two had just said the web hears a listener.
The effect was immediate and was, oh, love, was perfect.
The three voices on the strand received my two small cadences and incorporated them into their conversation in the exact way a fourth speaker, late to a discussion, would be incorporated by three speakers who had been expecting a fourth all along. Voice one said, in approximate translation, ah, four has joined. Voice two said, in approximate translation, the count is now correct. Voice three said, in approximate translation, what is your position, four. There was a small expectant pause along the strand. The voices were waiting for me to say where I was.
I will tell you, friend, that this was the most delicately balanced second of my entire professional life so far. The voices were waiting for a position. The position they were expecting was a position within their map, the map the strand had given me in the first instant of contact. I had the map. I knew, from the map, where their voices were and where the gaps were, the places along the corridor system that did not currently have a voice assigned to them. I knew, in particular, that there was a gap perhaps three quarters of a mile below us and to the east, a gap that voice one had been quietly discussing in connection with the rotation to cover for the three that had gone quiet. The gap was the gap a new patrol would be expected to be filling within the hour, and the gap was vacant at this moment, and a fourth voice declaring itself in that gap would not only be plausible but would be welcome, because it would relieve voice one of having to arrange the rotation, which voice one had been complaining about for the better part of the last minute in the small administrative way one complains about extra paperwork.
My hand produced, very carefully, the small cadence pattern that corresponded to the gap perhaps three quarters of a mile below us and to the east. I will not pretend that I produced it with any great accuracy. The hand was new to the cadence and the cadence had subtleties that the hand could only approximate. But I produced something near enough to it that voice one and voice two and voice three received it, and there was a small further pause along the strand, and then voice one said, in approximate translation, that is acceptable. The rotation is closed. She is well.
And voices two and three said, in approximate translation, she is well.
And my hand, my own poor lying hand on the strand, said, in approximate translation, she is well.
And the conversation along the strand resumed at the cadence of three voices discussing their patrols, only now they were four voices, and the four voices included one that was actually a young woman from a riverside inn many miles away who had no business at all being on a strand of dark magical webbing in a corridor of a place that the maps named with a softer word than it deserved, and who was, at this moment, the proud possessor of a small functional fluency in a language she had not, six minutes ago, known existed.
I let my hand stay on the strand for perhaps a further two minutes. I produced, twice more during those two minutes, the small acknowledgment cadence at the appropriate intervals, in the natural rhythm I had heard the other voices produce it in. I did not attempt any further speech. I did not have the vocabulary, and I did not wish to draw any further attention. I listened. I listened with the small intense attentiveness that one listens with when one has just got away with something and is fairly certain that the getting away with it has not been noticed yet.
In those two minutes I learned, by additional small overheard fragments, three further things.
I learned, first, that the she was, at this moment, asleep. Or rather, that the she was in a state that the voices referred to with a cadence that translated approximately as the deep waiting, which I gathered was their way of describing a state in which the she was not active but was nevertheless present, like a person asleep in a room who is nevertheless taking up the room. The she was below us. The she was at the place at the heart of the corridor system that voice three had been the closest of any of them to, and voice three was furthest below.
I learned, second, that the she was not the queen of the Gloomspiders. The Gloomspiders served the she. The she was something else. The voices used a cadence for the she that they did not use for any Gloomspider, including, by implication, themselves. The she was, in the small cadence of devotion the voices had used from the first moment of my listening, of a kind altogether different from the speakers. She was their object of attention. They were her instrument. The Gloomspiders, as I had unwisely assumed, were not the inhabitants of this place. They were the staff.
I learned, third, and this was the thing that made me at last very gently lift my hand from the strand, because I had heard enough and did not wish to hear any more, that the she was waking up.
The voices did not say this in a single phrase. The voices implied it in the way a long conversation will imply a coming event by the cadence of preparation that runs underneath the conversation’s surface. There was a cadence of preparation running underneath the surface of the three voices’ patrolling chatter. It was a cadence of small adjustments being made along the corridor system in advance of an event that the voices were quietly preparing for. The event was the she’s emergence from the deep waiting. The event was not happening yet. The event was approaching. The approaching was being measured by the voices in terms that I could not entirely translate but that I am going to put approximately as within the period of the next sleep, which I gathered meant within perhaps the next day to two days as I would count days. The she had been in the deep waiting for a long time. The she was, by the small adjustments along the system, beginning to come out of it. The Gloomspiders were preparing for her emergence by ensuring that the corridor system was clear of anything that might disturb her in the waking. The clearing of the corridor system had been, I now understood, the entire purpose of the patrolling we had been the recipients of since the gate. The patrolling had not been hunting us. The patrolling had been the small administrative work of any housekeeper preparing a room for a guest, by which I mean preparing the corridor system for the awakening of its sleeping mistress, and the three Gloomspiders we had killed in the chamber had been not hunters but, oh, petals, not hunters, but the equivalent of three small civil-service patrol officers going about their patrol rotations, who had encountered intruders in a part of the system that was supposed to be quiet in advance of the mistress’s awakening, and who had attempted, in the small economical way of patrolling officers, to remove the intruders, and who had failed, and whose failure had been noted by their colleagues only as the small administrative inconvenience of an unfilled rotation, which was now being covered by the late and welcome arrival of voice four.
Voice four. Who was me. With my hand on a strand. In a corridor narrower than I liked. Two minutes after the fact.
I lifted my hand from the strand. I lifted it very slowly. I lifted it with the same care a person lifts a teacup that has been resting against a sleeping cat. The cat did not stir. The strand did not register the lift in any cadence I could detect. The voices went on along the strand without me, and I noted, before the cadences faded out of my fingers entirely, that the voices were continuing the conversation in the same way they had been before my arrival, without any apparent awareness that voice four had stopped contributing the acknowledgment cadence. They would notice, I supposed, in due course, when they sent a real fourth officer to the gap three quarters of a mile below us and to the east, and when the real fourth officer arrived and did not find anyone there to greet her. But that was an event of the next hour or two. That was an event for after I had got my hand off the strand and got the company down the corridor and put us, with any luck, in a place where the voices would have a harder time finding us when the small administrative inconvenience of voice four’s disappearance was at last properly investigated.
I turned to the company.
I had not, until I turned, realized how long I had been with my hand on the strand. It cannot have been longer than four or five minutes by the world’s clock. It had been considerably longer than that by mine. The company had not moved during the listening. Vren had not turned around. Elandor had stayed in his place at second. Brother Caius had held the lantern at the level he had lifted it to when I had first stepped past him. The smith behind me had taken the half-step closer that I had felt, and had not retreated from it, and the smith’s face when I turned to face them all was the face of a man who had been watching me very carefully and had been about, perhaps, to take some small drastic action of his own to bring me out of whatever I had been in, and who was now relieved beyond easy expression to find me coming out of it under my own power.
I said, in a voice that I will tell you was not entirely steady, although I made it steady by the third or fourth word, I said, petals, oh, my loves, I have a great deal to tell you, and I am going to tell you very quickly, and then I am going to suggest that we move further down this corridor at a pace slightly faster than the pace we have been keeping, and I am going to ask you to trust me about the pace because I will explain the reason for the pace in the telling, and I am going to ask you to please not interrupt me until I have finished, because if you interrupt me I am going to laugh, and the laugh will not be the laugh of a sensible person, and I would prefer to maintain the appearance of being a sensible person for at least the next ten minutes, after which I will permit myself a small private hysterical episode in some quieter chamber if we can find one, but not in this corridor, because this corridor is, friend, not a corridor I wish to have a small private hysterical episode in.
The four of them stared at me. Brother Caius nodded slowly. Elandor’s hand went back to the hilt of the Whisperedge. Vren in front of me turned for the first time in five minutes, the small full-body turn of a person who had been listening with the back of her neck for the entire duration of my contact with the strand and was now turning to listen with the rest of her, and her pale gold eyes were very steady upon me, and Vren said, in her flat deliberate voice, speak.
I spoke. I will not give you the speaking word for word, because the speaking was hurried and was, looking back, considerably more disjointed than it would have been if I had been delivering it as a lecture in a more comfortable hall. I will tell you what I told them. I told them that the Gloomspiders were not the inhabitants of this place but the staff. I told them that the inhabitants of this place were, so far as I could understand, a single being whom the spiders referred to only as she, and whom the spiders served, in a cadence of devotion that I had recognized in my own translation and that I could not mistake for anything else. I told them that the she was below us, in a place I could approximately indicate by direction and distance, and that I would mark it on a piece of paper for them later. I told them that the she was in a state the voices had called the deep waiting, which was a kind of sleep that was not exactly sleep, and that the she was preparing to come out of that state within the next day or two as I reckoned time. I told them that the patrolling we had been encountering had not been hunting but housekeeping, and that the three Gloomspiders we had killed in the chamber had been not soldiers but civil servants, and that this changed our understanding of the resistance we had been meeting and would continue to meet, because the resistance was not the resistance of an entity that had identified us as enemies but the resistance of an entity that had identified us as administrative anomalies, and the resistance would change, possibly dramatically, when the entity identified us as something more than administrative anomalies, which I gathered would happen within perhaps the next hour to two hours, when the missing voice four was investigated and when its absence at the supposed gap was noticed and connected with the three quiet patrol officers in the chamber above us. I told them that I had, by a small piece of cleverness that I would explain to them in greater detail at a calmer moment, briefly impersonated a fourth patrol officer on the strand, in order to keep the voices from realizing that the tap on the web they had just detected was not, in fact, a sister but a stranger. I told them that this impersonation had bought us, in my estimate, perhaps an hour or two of additional grace before the alarm went up. I told them that the impersonation was not going to hold beyond that. I told them that the most dangerous thing we could do in the meanwhile was to remain in this corridor, because this corridor was densely webbed and was therefore densely listened to, and the more time we spent in it the more likely we were to give the strands additional information about ourselves that I had not had the chance to misdirect.
I told them, finally, that the she was waking up, and that I did not know what the she was, and that I had a strong sideways feeling that finding out what the she was, in any way other than by walking up to her at the heart of the corridor system while she was emerging from the deep waiting, was going to be the central problem of the next twenty-four hours of our lives.
There was a small silence after I had finished. The four of them looked at me. The lantern’s light fell on my face and on the four of theirs, and we stood there in our small uneven row in the narrow warm corridor with the silent web hanging between us and the way forward, and I felt, in the small bones of my hands inside the gloves, the smallest residual hum of the strand’s cadence, as though the strand was still saying she is well to the voices, and the voices were still answering, and I was, for the first time in my life, on the inside of a conversation I had previously only suspected was being held.
Brother Caius spoke first. He spoke very softly, in the small slow voice that he used for the moments that required it, and he said, daughter. Daughter. The lord be merciful. We have come a great deal further than I had understood, and I will say what I have come to say after we are out of this corridor, but I will say one thing now. I am, I think, less surprised than I would have wished to be. Let us move.
Elandor said, in his clipped formal voice, with a small narrowing of the eyes that I would later come to read as the small bright satisfaction of a soldier who has been handed a far better map of his battlefield than he had previously possessed, he said, agreed. Maelis Veth. You have done good work. We are moving.
Vren said only, move.
The smith said, well now, well now, by my forge, lass, you will explain the impersonation business to me at the next fire because I am, by my forge, I am proud of you in a way that has nothing to do with smithing and is therefore a way I have not had occasion to use much in my life so far, but I am, I am proud of you, lass, and let us move.
We moved. We moved at the slightly faster pace I had requested, and Vren took the point again, and the company formed up again in the order we had been keeping, and we passed beneath the web without touching it, ducking under the lowest strand by the careful small amount, and as I passed beneath it I will tell you, petal, that I felt the strand’s faint hum on the back of my neck and that the hum was not changed by my passing, and that the voices along the strand were still talking, and that for perhaps an hour or two, perhaps a little longer if we were lucky and a little shorter if we were not, voice four was still on the rotation, and the rotation was still closed, and the she was still well, and we were still merely an administrative anomaly making its way down a corridor that was warmer than it had any right to be, toward a place at the heart of the system where a thing was about to wake up, and the warm corridor breathed around us, and I, voice four, called by some who did not have other names for her Maelis, and called by herself in the small private way at the back of her own head Maelis Veth, was now in the most extraordinary position of her professional life, which was the position of a small amateur scholar of small things who had at last discovered that her amateur subject was a great many magnitudes larger than she had previously dared to hope, and who had a working interview, of a kind, on her hands, and who was, oh, my loves, terribly glad and terribly worried, in approximately equal measure, and who was walking now in the fourth place of a line of five down a warming corridor toward whatever it was that was, in some place not too far below her, only just beginning to stir.
Segment Twelve: A Confession in the Antechamber
We came at last, by Maelis’s faster pace, to a place where the warm corridor turned upon itself in a long slow bend and gave out into a small alcove off the main run, and the alcove was not a chamber and was not a corridor but was that third small kind of space that the persuaded stone occasionally produced, a niche the size of a smallish kitchen with one entrance and no further openings, and the absence of further openings, after the densely webbed corridor we had just been in, was, I will tell you plainly, the small unspoken gift that the company most needed at that hour, and we accepted it without remarking upon it, as one accepts most unspoken gifts. We turned into the alcove in the order we had been keeping. Vren went in first, in the careful way Vren went into any new room, and she stood for the count of ten with her pale gold eyes letting the soft eye go across every surface in the alcove before she nodded once, very small, to Elandor behind her, and Elandor passed the small nod back to me, and I passed it back to Maelis, and Maelis passed it back to Goradd at the rear, and the small nod was, as it had been at every such moment of our descent, the only language the company required to declare the alcove safe enough for the present hour.
We sat. Maelis sat down upon her leather bundle in the easy crumpling way she had of sitting down, the way of a person who has done all the work she means to do for the moment and is willing to give the floor its small contribution to her rest. Goradd sat against the wall with his hammer across his knees in the unhurried posture of a tradesman at the end of a long shift who has not yet been told whether he will be required to start another. Elandor remained standing, near the entrance, with his right hand at his hip and his eyes upon the corridor outside, and I knew without his telling me that he would remain standing for the duration of this particular rest because the corridor outside required someone watching it, and the watching had fallen to him, and he would not surrender it to anyone else this hour. Vren sat at last, after a small further inspection of the alcove that involved running her gloved fingertips along the seams of the lower corners on both sides, in case there might be something there that the soft eye had not caught, and finding nothing she sat on the floor with her back against the rear wall of the alcove and her cloak drawn about her and her knees drawn up and her hands resting on her knees in the loose easy posture of a person who could be on her feet again in the time it takes a breath to be drawn in, which was, I had come to understand, Vren’s only posture of rest.
I sat across from her, with perhaps three paces of the alcove’s floor between us. I sat because my knees were the knees of a man past sixty who had been walking and standing for the better part of two days in country that did not pamper the knees, and the sitting was therefore not so much a choice as a small surrender to the body, the kind of surrender I had been making in recent years more often and with less negotiation than I would have made it a decade ago. I sat, and I drew my old habit around me, and I let my breath go in and out a few times at the slow rate it required when the body had been asked too much.
We had been in the alcove perhaps ten minutes by my reckoning when the others arrived at the small honest condition of half-sleep that is the only sleep one gets in such places, and the arrival of the others at half-sleep was, in the small etiquette of our company that had grown up without anyone having drafted it, the signal that quiet conversation between any two of the wakeful could begin, as it might in a long-ago monastery infirmary when the brothers on watch had let the brothers in the cots go down to whatever rest could be had. Maelis was the first to go. She let her head come down against the leather of her bundle in the long sigh of a woman who had been carrying her cleverness for a great many hours and was glad to set the cleverness down for an interval, and her breathing went into the small slow regular pattern of a person who was not quite sleeping but had agreed to stop being awake. Goradd, who had a particular gift in this regard which I have come to envy in old soldiers and old smiths alike, was asleep, properly asleep, within five minutes of sitting down, and his snore, which had been the small good-natured complaint of the first night, was now the small good-natured complaint of every night, and would have been a comfort to me except that the comfort would have required me to also be asleep, which I was not, and would not be, for some time yet.
I had been sitting across from Vren for those ten minutes without speaking, and Vren, I had observed, had not so much as moved her eyes from the entrance of the alcove, although she could not in any practical sense have been watching the entrance more closely than Elandor was watching it, and I had begun to understand that Vren was, in fact, not watching the entrance, but was watching the entire alcove in the way Vren watched all spaces, with the soft attentive presence of a person who never quite went off duty, and that her not looking at me did not mean she was not aware of me, and that her not speaking to me did not mean she was not available to be spoken to, and that the difference between Vren’s not-availability and Vren’s available-but-not-soliciting was a difference that one had to learn to read, and that I had, by this point in our descent, learned to read it tolerably well.
I said, very softly, in the quiet way one speaks in a sickroom at night when one does not wish to be heard further than the person one is addressing, I said, Vren, I would speak with you. May I.
Vren’s pale gold eyes turned the smallest fraction toward me without her body following, in the small economical way she had, and she said, quietly, in her flat deliberate voice that had no contractions in it, she said, you may speak.
That was all. It was, in Vren’s economy, the equivalent of another person’s drawing up a chair and offering me a cup of tea and asking me to take my time, and I received it as such, and I did not at first know how to begin. I had not expected to be the one to begin, although I do not know whom I had expected to be the one. I had not planned, when I had asked the question, what I would say if Vren said yes. I had only known that I had to ask, and Vren had said yes, and now I was sitting across from her with all the time I would have for this conversation in the next hour, and I would have to make use of it.
I will tell you, friend, why I had asked. I had asked because of Maelis’s translation along the strand. I had asked because of the cadence of devotion, and the she who was waking, and the long preparation that had been laid in this place by an entity that the Gloomspiders served as their staff. I had asked because the alcove was the first quiet place we had been in since the chamber the night before last when Goradd had attended to our gear, and in the time between that chamber and this one the company had not had occasion for any conversation that went deeper than the surface, and there were now things in me that had to be set down or I would not be able to carry them further. I will tell you, also, that I had asked Vren rather than Goradd or Elandor or Maelis because Vren was the only one of the four of them who, I had become certain, would not require me to perform any small social courtesy in the receiving of what I was about to give them. Goradd would have been kind, and the kindness would have done the work of softening the hard edges of what I needed to say, and the softening would have, by very small degrees, robbed the saying of its truth. Elandor would have been respectful, and the respect would have placed me into a small narrative of his order’s making, the narrative of an old brother of an old order bearing the small old burdens that old brothers bear, and the narrative would have absorbed the saying into itself the way certain narratives do, and the saying would not have been the saying that I needed it to be. Maelis would have been curious, and the curiosity would have wished to ask me questions, and the questions, even if she did not ask them aloud, would have shaped the saying toward the answers, and the answers would not have been what the saying needed to be either. Vren, alone of the four, would not soften, would not narrate, and would not curiously question. Vren would listen, and the listening would be a flat true listening that did nothing to the saying but receive it, and the receiving was what I needed.
So I began.
I said, Vren, I am going to tell you why I came here. I have not told the others, although Master Goradd and Maelis have each of them indicated, in their separate ways, that they suspect there is more to my coming than I have so far given, and Elandor of course knows that there is, because Elandor is of an order that knows what the cost of certain comings is. I am not going to tell them now. I will tell them in time, perhaps, if the time comes. I am going to tell you now because I do not know whether the time will come for any of us, and the not-telling of it to anyone would be a weight I would prefer not to bring back up out of this place, if I should be permitted to bring anything back up out of it at all.
Vren did not move. Vren did not nod. Vren’s pale gold eyes turned the smallest fraction further, so that the gaze was now properly upon me and not only available to me, and that was all the acknowledgment Vren would give, and the acknowledgment was correct.
I drew a breath. The breath was longer than I had wanted it to be, and slower, and I held it for a small moment before I let it out, in the way one holds a candle one is about to carry across a drafty room and wishes to keep lit.
I said, I have been a brother of my order for thirty-eight years. I took the cloth in my twenty-third year, after a long youth spent in a port town to the west, where my father was a fisherman, and where I had been raised in the small ordinary manner of fishermen’s sons, with the small ordinary expectations of fishermen’s sons, and where I had, by the age of twenty-three, come to understand that the small ordinary expectations were not the expectations I was made for, and that the boats and the nets and the long quiet evenings on the dockside would not be my life, although they would be the lives of every man I had grown up with, and the parting from them would have to be a clean parting, because half-partings in such matters cause more grief than full ones. I took the cloth in a chapter house perhaps four days’ walk inland from my port town, and I have been a brother of that chapter and its order for the thirty-eight years that followed, and in the thirty-eight years I have done many small things and a few middling things and one or two larger things and a great many smaller things still, in the small ordinary manner of brothers of an order, and the doing of those things has been the life I was made for, and I would not, in any of the thirty-eight years, have traded the life for any other life that was offered me, and I want to say that at the outset of what I am about to tell you, because what I am about to tell you might lead a listener of another disposition than yours to conclude that the life had been a small disappointment to me, and that conclusion would be entirely wrong. The life has not been a small disappointment. The life has been a large gift. What I am about to tell you is a thing I carry within the gift, and not a thing that has soured the gift, and the distinction matters more to me than I can put easily into words.
Vren did not move. I went on.
I said, in the eleventh year of my brotherhood, when I was thirty-four years old and was no longer young but had not yet become what the order calls a middle brother, which is the category of brother who is given charge of novices, I was assigned to a small parish post in a village called Aldrun, which lay perhaps two days’ walk south and east of the chapter house, in country that was not exactly poor and not exactly prosperous, but lived the small steady mended-and-mended-again life of villages along that road. My duties were the duties of a parish brother, which were the saying of the small daily offices in the village’s chapel-house, and the visiting of the sick, and the keeping of the small parish ledger, and the receiving of the small confessions of the village in the small confessor’s room behind the chapel, and the doing of the small kindnesses that the village needed done, which were many and were not large, and which I did, in the eleven months I held the post, with what I have since come to think was something close to the proper attention of a brother to his work, although it has been my long habit to take such judgments of my own attention with a certain skepticism, since the skepticism has been the more reliable companion in these matters than the satisfaction.
Vren did not move.
I said, in the village of Aldrun, in the small parish house attached to the chapel where I lived, there was a woman who came to visit me regularly, by which I do not mean any small irregular thing, Vren, I want to say that plainly. She came to the parish house in the manner that parishioners come to a parish brother, in the small open way of a person bringing a small open need, and the small open need that she brought was the small open need of her son. The son was nine years old when I first arrived in Aldrun. He was, when I left it eleven months later, ten years old. He had a name, which I will not say to you, because the saying of his name in this place is the small last thing I have not yet given up, and I will give up many things to many people in the course of this descent if the descent requires it, but I would prefer to keep the name of the boy for myself, if you will allow me that. His mother, his name I will say, was called Pell. She had been widowed, I gathered in the first weeks, by some small accident of farming that the village did not seem to wish to discuss with me in any great detail, perhaps because the small accident had not been entirely an accident and perhaps because it had, and the village had not yet decided. The boy was the only child she had. He was a quiet boy. He had what the village called the slow tongue, which was the village’s word for a small condition I do not think the village had a real name for, and which I have since seen in other children, and which is the condition of a child whose mind is whole and bright but whose mouth does not always cooperate with the mind, so that the words arrive out of order, and certain words simply do not arrive at all, and the child speaks in the careful careful manner of a person who has learned to compensate for the wandering of his own tongue, which produces in the listener the impression of a child who is slower than he is, which the boy was not, Vren. He was not slow. He was, in fact, quick. He had been keeping his mother’s small accounts at the age of nine, in his own clear small hand, in a small bound book she had given him for the purpose, and the accounts were tidier than my own ledger at the parish house, and I had told him so, on the third or fourth visit, and he had gone pink at the praising and had not been able to answer me with any words at all, and his mother had laughed, in the small soft laugh of a widowed mother proud of a difficult son.
I said, the visits became regular. The boy began to come on his own, after a while, to the parish house, in the long afternoons when his mother was at the small holding she kept, and he began to come not for any particular small open need but for the company. I will not pretend that I had not noticed, in the long quiet years of my early brotherhood, that the parish house was a place that quiet children sometimes came to when there was no other quiet place to go, and that the small ordinary courtesies of a parish brother to such children were not, in any of the catechisms, a duty laid upon us, but were nevertheless one of the things we were for, in the way that the small ordinary courtesies of any settled adult to any child in his vicinity are one of the things settled adults are for. I had been such an adult to other children in earlier parishes. I was such an adult to this child in this parish. He would come, and he would sit at the small table in the kitchen of the parish house, where I generally did my reading in the afternoons, and he would copy out passages from whichever book I was reading, in his own clear small hand, for the practice of his writing, and I would read, and we would not speak, often, for hours at a time, and the not-speaking was a part of the small comfort he came for, because his mouth did not have to do its difficult work in the not-speaking, and he could rest from it. He did not rest from it often. He would have rested from it more had the village understood that he needed to. The village was not unkind, you understand. The village was simply a village, with all the small impatiences of villages, and a boy whose mouth made the words come out backward was a boy who got, in the small ordinary way, less of the village’s patience than he needed, and more of its small jokes, and the small jokes were not malicious, but the small jokes accumulated, and a small joke accumulated upon a child for nine years is, I have learned in the long years since, a thing the child carries inside him in ways that do not look like carrying.
I said, in the eleventh month of my post at Aldrun, in the late autumn of the year, the boy came to the parish house one afternoon in a state I had not before seen him in. He was, when he came, very quiet, which was not unusual, but the quiet was a different quiet. He sat at the small table in the kitchen, and he did not copy out anything, and he did not ask me what I was reading, and he did not look at the small loaf of bread that I had set out for him as I had set out for him every afternoon of those eleven months, and the bread sat between us untouched for the better part of an hour while I read, and after the hour I set the book down and I asked him, in the small soft careful way one asks a difficult child a difficult question, I asked him whether something was the matter. He looked at me, Vren, and his face did the small slow rearranging of a face that has been preparing for some hours to say something difficult and is at last permitting itself to do so, and his mouth opened, and the words began to come out, in the difficult careful order they always came out in for him, and the words were the words of a child trying to tell me a thing that the words of a child were not adequate for, and I will not tell you, Vren, what the words were, because the words were his words, and the keeping of them is, like the keeping of his name, the small last thing I have not yet given up. I will tell you only that the words were about a thing that one of the older boys of the village had been doing to him, in the long fields beyond the granary, in the late afternoons when the village’s older boys were given the small idle hour that the village’s older boys were always given, and that the thing was the kind of thing that older boys sometimes do to younger boys when no settled adult is paying attention, and that the doing of it had been going on for some weeks, and that the boy had not told his mother because his mother was a widow and had her own burdens and the boy had not wished to add to them, and the boy had not told me until that afternoon because the boy had been afraid of what telling me would do, both to himself and to the older boy and to the village in which he and his mother had to go on living after I, as he understood, would eventually return to the chapter house and be elsewhere.
I said, and the boy told me, after the difficult difficult telling of what had been done, that he did not know what to do, and that he was sorry to have told me at all, and that he would not blame me if I did not believe him, because the older boy was a clever boy and was well-liked in the village and was the son of a man who held a small position of trust on the village council, and that the older boy had told him, the small boy, that no one would believe him if he told, and that the small boy had come to me only because he had reached a kind of end of his being able to keep the not-telling inside himself, and that the keeping had been making him sick at his stomach for some days, and that he hoped only that I would not be angry at him for the telling, and that he would understand if I did not know what to do, because he did not know what to do either, and the not knowing was now a thing the two of us shared.
I said, Vren, I have spent many of the twenty-seven years since that afternoon trying to set down for myself what I should have done in the hour that followed, and I have not, in twenty-seven years, arrived at a setting down that satisfies me. I will not pretend to you now that I have it. I will tell you what I did do, and I will tell you it as honestly as I have ever told it to anyone, which is more honestly than I have told it to anyone, because I have told it to no one. I did not tell the master of my chapter house, because the master of my chapter house was, at that time, a man whom I had reasons to know was not the right master for a confidence of that kind, and the master was, in any case, two days’ walk away. I did not tell the village’s small council, because the village’s small council included the father of the older boy, and the small council was not, in my judgment then or now, a body that would have taken the small boy’s word against the older boy’s father without strong corroboration of a kind I did not at that hour have. I did not tell my fellow brothers in the chapter house, because telling them would have required a letter, and a letter would have required time, and time was the thing I judged then that the small boy did not have. I did, instead, what seemed to me at the hour the small wise course, which was to ask the boy whether he would come and stay at the parish house for the next several days, in the small spare room I kept for travelers, and I told him that he should bring his mother, and that the three of us would sit down together that evening, and we would talk plainly, and we would decide together how to address the matter in the manner that did the least further hurt to him and to her. I told him this in the careful tone of a parish brother who had been making such small wise courses for eleven years and who believed, with the small steady belief of a man in his middle thirties who has not yet been broken by the world, that small wise courses were generally sufficient to the troubles the world brought to a parish house.
I said, the boy nodded. He nodded the slow careful way he did things, and he said that he would speak with his mother, and that he would come back in the evening with her or without her, and that he would, in either case, come back. He took, then, the small loaf of bread from the table, the loaf he had not been able to eat at the start of our hour, and he wrapped it in a corner of his coat, in the small careful gesture of a child taking with him a thing he intends to share with his mother, and he left the parish house, and he walked out into the long late autumn afternoon, and I stood at the door of the parish house and I watched him go down the lane between the cottages toward the small holding where his mother would be, and I did not know, Vren, when I watched him go, that I was watching him for the last time.
I said, he did not come back. I waited that evening for him until the small chapel bell rang the second office. I waited the following morning until the first office of the morning had been said. I went to the small holding myself, in the middle of the morning, when I had at last begun to fear that something had gone wrong with our arrangement, and I went down the lane between the cottages in the bright cold light of an autumn morning, and I came to the small holding, and there was no smoke from the chimney, and the door was closed, and I knocked, and there was no answer, and I knocked again, and there was no answer, and I opened the door, in the slow careful way one opens the door of a house one is not sure one ought to be opening, and I went in.
I said, Vren, the boy was in the kitchen of the small holding. He was, when I found him, hanging from the beam above the kitchen table by the cord of his mother’s apron, which he had taken from the peg by the door. He had set a chair beneath himself, and he had stood on the chair, and he had tied the cord, and he had stepped off the chair, and the chair had fallen sideways against the table leg, and he had been hanging there, by the small careful estimation of an old apothecary I asked many years later about the matter without telling him the particulars, for the better part of twelve hours by the time I found him, and he was nine years old, Vren, he was ten years old, he had not yet had his birthday but I had been told it was coming in the spring and would have made him eleven, and his mother was lying on the kitchen floor at his feet, and she had not been able to lift him down by herself because the cord was too high and the chair had fallen sideways, and she had been sitting on the floor at his feet for, again by the apothecary’s later estimation, perhaps the four or five hours since she had returned from her own small evening errand and had come into the kitchen and had seen, and she had not gone anywhere in those four or five hours, Vren, she had only sat there, and she did not, when I came in the door, look up at me, she did not, when I knelt beside her on the floor, look up at me, she did not, in the next many minutes during which I was at last able to do what she had not been able to do alone, which was to take down her son from the beam and to lay him on the kitchen floor and to draw a piece of clean linen from the chest in the corner and to cover his small body with it, did not look up at me even once, and I will tell you, Vren, that I have not, in the twenty-seven years since, been able to forgive myself the four or five hours during which the boy hung from the beam and his mother sat at his feet on the kitchen floor, because in any reasonable accounting of those hours I was at the parish house, doing the small evening offices, and reading my book, and going to my bed at the usual hour, and rising at the usual hour, and saying the first office of the morning, and the boy had been hanging from the beam through the whole of that long quiet routine, and the keeping of my routine through those hours has been, in twenty-seven years, the small thing I have not been able to set down.
I said, the village did not handle the matter as I had hoped, in the days that followed. The mother, who was named Pell, did not speak for three weeks, except to me, and only to me, and the speaking she did to me was the speaking that a parish brother is meant to receive and to keep, and I have kept it. The older boy was not, in the end, brought to any formal account of what he had done. The village council, in the small careful way of village councils, decided that the matter was a tragedy that did not require further investigation, since the small boy was beyond any restitution and since the older boy was, after all, a child himself, and since investigation would only further harm the mother, who had already been harmed enough, and I sat in the small council meeting at which this decision was reached, and I argued, in the small persistent way of a parish brother who had not yet learned that a village council is not in the end persuaded by arguments of mine, and the council heard me out, and the council thanked me for my concern, and the council did not change the decision. The older boy continued in the village. The older boy continued, by all accounts I had from the village over the following years, in his small ordinary life, and the small ordinary life eventually included a wife and children and, I believe by the most recent letter I had from Aldrun, a small position of trust on the village council that had once been his father’s. The mother, Pell, did not remain in Aldrun. She left within the year. I do not know where she went. I have, over the years, written three or four times to people who might have known, and I have received no answer, and I have come to understand that her not being found was perhaps her own choice and ought to be respected, and I have respected it, although the respecting has not been easy.
I said, Vren, I returned to the chapter house at the end of my eleven months in Aldrun, and I told the master of my chapter house what had happened, and the master, who was the man I had been right to be cautious about, gave me a small careful response that I do not need to set down here, and I asked at the end of the response to be relieved of parish work for some time, and the master granted the request, and I was assigned to the chapter house’s scriptorium, which is where I have spent the bulk of the twenty-seven years since, copying and keeping the small books of the order, and I have been a tolerable scribe in those years, by the small measures of the work, and I have been a tolerable confessor to the brothers of my own house, when they have asked, and I have done, in the small unspectacular ways of an older brother, the small unspectacular work the order has asked of me, and I have not, since the day in Aldrun, taken another parish post, and the not-taking of one has been, in part, my own choice and, in part, the order’s careful avoidance of asking me to take one, in the small careful way of an order that knows when a brother is not fit for a particular kind of work and does not press him to be.
I said, the cold I felt in my chest on the night before I left the chapter house this last time was not a new cold, Vren. The cold was an old cold. The cold had been in me since the morning I had found the boy on the beam, and the cold had been in me for twenty-seven years, and the cold had grown by very small degrees over those years, in the way a cold of that kind grows, by the small steady accumulation of all the further things one becomes aware of as one ages and reads and thinks, and the cold by the night before I left was, in a sense I do not have a good word for, full. I had a dream that night which I have set down in another place. I dreamed of a man dreaming, and of a small shadow at the rafter of his dream taking shape into something that would, in time, have legs. I wrote the line in my book. I left in the morning. I do not believe, Vren, that the cold and the line and the leaving are entirely unrelated to the boy on the beam. I do not believe that what is waking in this place, the she that Maelis has translated for us, is the same thing that drove a boy of ten years to climb on a chair in his mother’s kitchen and tie a cord around his neck. I do not believe that. I believe that the things of this world are too various to be reduced to a single thing waking somewhere. But I do believe, Vren, that what is waking in this place is a thing of the same family. I believe it is one of the patient slow listening things that gather themselves out of the unwitnessed griefs of the world, the way certain crops grow only where no one has looked, and I believe that I came here, in part, because I owe it to a boy of ten years to whom I owed a great deal more than I gave at the hour I was asked, to come and to look at this thing, and to name it, if I can, and to do what I can do, which is not the doing of a hero or of a hunter or of a smith or of a scholar, but is the small doing of an old brother whose chief skill at this point in his life is the willingness to look at a thing without turning away, and the willingness to call the thing by its name when the name comes, and to keep calling it, even after, even after.
I said, I am sorry to have laid this on you, Vren. You did not ask for it. I would say that I do not know why I chose you to lay it on, but that would not be entirely honest, and I am trying, in this hour, to be entirely honest, and so I will say that I chose you because of all of us I judged that you would receive it without altering it, and the not-altering of it was what I needed, and you have given it to me, and I am grateful, and I will not ask you to receive any further such thing from me unless you indicate that you are willing, and I will not refer to this confession again, in this descent or, if we both of us come out of it alive, after, unless you yourself open the door to it, which you are at liberty never to do.
I stopped. I had not realized while I was speaking how long I had been speaking. The little alcove had gone very quiet around us. Maelis’s breathing was still the slow regular pattern of someone not quite asleep but not quite awake, and Goradd’s small good-natured snore was still going at the wall, and Elandor at the entrance had not moved, but I had the small inescapable sense that Elandor had heard at least the latter portion of what I had said, and that Elandor would, in the way of his order, not have heard any of it, and that the not-having-heard would be the gift he gave back to me in return for whatever the saying had been worth, and I was grateful for that too, although it was not the gift I had asked for and was not the gift I had been seeking when I had begun.
I sat in the silence and I waited. I did not know what to expect from Vren. I had told her, at the outset, that I was not asking her to respond, that the receiving was all I needed, and I had meant it. I had not, however, fully reckoned with what it would feel like to sit across from a person who had received something of that weight in silence, in the long slow silence of a person who would not soften the silence with the small ordinary courtesies of speech. The silence was very long. I let it be long. I had let many silences be long in my work. I had, perhaps, an old advantage over Vren in the matter of letting silences be long, which was that I had been letting them for thirty-eight years, and Vren had probably been letting them for a shorter while, although I would not have wagered any large sum on the question.
Vren spoke at last. Vren did not speak much. I want to say that here, because the saying matters. Vren said three things, and the three things were the only things she said in the alcove, and the three things were all I needed.
Vren said, the boy’s name does not need to be said. He is held.
There was a small pause. Vren’s gold eyes were upon me steadily, without flinching, and the eyes were the eyes of a person who was not at this moment performing any small social courtesy at all, because there was none, and the not-performing was a thing of its own quality that I had not quite encountered in any other listener in my life.
Vren said, the small wise course was the course you had. You used it. It was not enough. That is the kind of fact this world is full of. You do not have to keep it alone.
There was another small pause. I felt, against my own will, the cold in my chest move by some small fraction. The cold did not lift. I want to be honest with you. The cold did not lift, and I do not believe Vren had intended it to lift, because Vren was not a person who intended such things, only a person who would say, when asked, what was true, in the way Vren saw it. But the cold, Vren, moved by some small fraction. It was the smallest fraction I have ever known a cold of that kind to move. It was, nevertheless, a movement.
Vren said, last, very quietly, in the same flat deliberate voice, with no contraction in it and no softness over it, only the flat true voice that Vren had always spoken in. Vren said, when we are below, in the room where she is. If there is a moment in the doing when one of us is to stand between her and the small thing that she has eaten of and has been eating of. I will see you have the moment. I will make the moment for you. You will not have to ask me. I will make it.
That was all Vren said. That was the third thing. Vren did not elaborate. Vren did not explain. Vren did not extend the offer further. Vren said it, and Vren let it sit between us in the alcove, and Vren returned the gold eyes to the entrance of the alcove, in the small economical way she always did, and Vren was once more in the posture of the watcher, and the conversation was at an end.
I said nothing for a long while. I sat across from her in the alcove. I drew my old habit about me. I let the breath go in and out at the slow rate the body required. I felt the small fraction of the movement of the cold in my chest, and I felt the breath of it, and I felt, slowly, that something had been done in this hour that I had not, when I had asked the first question, expected to be done. I had asked for the small mercy of being heard. I had received the small mercy of being heard. I had received, in addition to it, the further mercy of being told that the small wise course had been my course, and that the using of it had not been an error, even though the using had not sufficed. I had received, in addition to that, the offer of a moment. I had not asked for the moment. I had not, until Vren had spoken of it, even known there would be such a moment, or what its shape would be. I knew now that there would be one. I knew that Vren had marked it for me. I knew that I would not have to ask Vren for it, when the time came. I knew that Vren would make it, and that Vren had said so, and that Vren did not say things she had not measured before saying them.
I will tell you, friend, that I wept then, in the alcove, very quietly, with the small dignified weeping of an old man who has not wept properly in many years and who is, even in the weeping, attending to the volume of his weeping for the sake of the others sleeping nearby, and the weeping went on perhaps the length of three breaths, and Vren did not turn the gold eyes back to me during the weeping, and Vren did not acknowledge the weeping, and Vren’s not-acknowledging was the last and quietest mercy of the alcove, because the not-acknowledging meant that the weeping was permitted, and that nothing further was required of me on account of it, and that I could weep as long as I needed to weep without owing Vren or anyone else any small response or any small further explanation, and the not-owing was, I will tell you, perhaps the most generous thing one person had given to me in twenty-seven years.
I dried my face with the cuff of my habit. I sat back against the wall of the alcove. I drew my breath. The cold in my chest was still there. The cold would, I understood now, be there at the heart of the corridor system in the room where she was, when the time came. The cold would be there, perhaps, even after, if there was an after, which I did not promise myself. The cold was the cold I had been given, and it was the cold I would carry, and it was the cold I would now carry into the room with her, and I would do whatever the moment Vren had promised me would permit me to do with the cold, and I did not yet know what that would be, and I did not need to know yet, because Vren had said the moment would be made, and Vren did not say such things lightly.
I said, very softly, almost to myself, with the smallest of nods to Vren though Vren did not see it, I said, thank you, friend. I will be ready when the moment comes.
Vren did not answer. Vren did not need to. Vren had already answered. The alcove was quiet. Maelis went on with her not-quite-sleep, and Goradd with his snore, and Elandor at the entrance with his watching, and Vren with her watching, and I, with the cold a small fraction moved in my chest, sat across from her in the alcove for the remainder of the rest, and I did not sleep, but I rested, in a way I had not rested in twenty-seven years, in the small honest way one rests when one has at last set a thing down, even if the setting down was only for the duration of an hour in a niche in the persuaded stone of a place that the maps named with a softer word than it deserved, and the resting was, friend, sufficient.
Segment Thirteen: The First Ambush
It came upon them in the second hour out of the alcove, and it came as the worst of such things ever come, which was without warning, and from every quarter of a room at once, and Elandor the Swift, who had been listening for it with the full attention of his nineteen years of training since the moment Maelis had lifted her hand from the strand, knew the instant of the coming by the smallest of signs and not by any of the larger ones.
The sign was the cessation of the draft.
For two days the cold breath out of the gate had been at their faces, steady as the breathing of some great patient animal, and for the last several hours of warmer corridor the breath had been at their backs instead, pushing them on with the slow indifferent push of an exhalation that meant nothing in particular by it. The breath had not stopped in those two days. It had not faltered. It had been the one constant of the descent, the one feature of the persuaded stone that a man could lean upon as a reliable thing, in the way one leans upon the steady tick of a clock in a sickroom.
The breath stopped.
It stopped between one of Elandor’s strides and the next, and the stopping had no fade in it and no warning. The air in the corridor, which had been moving, simply was not moving any longer, and the not-moving sat upon the back of Elandor’s neck like a cold hand, and Elandor opened his mouth to speak the small soft warning sound he had made at the chamber two days before, the small sound that meant the company should freeze in place, and the sound did not have time to leave his throat.
They came through the walls.
He saw the first of them out of the corner of his left eye as it emerged, and the seeing was the seeing of a thing that one’s eye refuses for a moment to admit, because the thing was at the wall and was not at the wall and was, in the space of a single heartbeat, no longer at the wall at all but in the corridor, on the floor, three paces from Vren at the point, with its many legs already gathered and its body already coiled to spring. Elandor’s training and his body, working faster than his mind, knew the sight for what it was and answered without consulting him. His right hand went to the Whisperedge and the Whisperedge came out of the sheath in the small clean whisper that the smith’s small attention had given it three nights ago, and the whisper was the only sound in the corridor for the duration of perhaps a quarter of a heartbeat, and then everything else made noise at once.
A second Gloomspider came through the wall to Elandor’s right at the level of his shoulder. A third came through the ceiling at a place perhaps four paces ahead of where he stood. A fourth and a fifth came through the floor itself at points he did not have time to count, a thing the persuasion of the stone had not seemed to allow before this moment, and he understood in the same instant, with the small bright cold understanding of a soldier who has been outmaneuvered, that the floor and the walls and the ceiling were not in fact solid in the way solid things were generally solid, that the persuaded stone had been a permission rather than a barrier from the start, and that the Gloomspiders’ use of it had been kept in reserve until now for reasons of arrangement rather than reasons of ability.
The arrangement had now been triggered. The arrangement had been triggered because the company had been recognized as more than an administrative anomaly. The arrangement had been triggered because Maelis’s clever masquerade on the strand had finally been investigated and found to be a masquerade. The hour they had been promised had been generous in the giving and was now being collected.
These thoughts arrived at the back of Elandor’s mind and were filed there in the small instant before the first creature reached him, and his body did not wait for the thoughts to be done. His body had been waiting for this moment since the chamber two days before, and the small fierce song that had been singing at half-tone in his breastbone for the better part of two days, ever since the first creatures had come and had been so cleanly broken, sang now in full, and the song rose in him with the rising of his right arm and the cutting of his right wrist and the long upward sweep of the Whisperedge along the line he had drawn in the cloister-yard ten thousand times.
The first creature came onto him from his left and his cut took it through the upper segment of its body in the same single motion with which he had taken the first creature in the chamber, but this one was faster than the chamber creature had been, and the cut did not part it fully, and the creature came on through the cut with two of its many legs still working, and Elandor stepped past it without arresting his motion and let the cut finish itself behind him as he turned, and the creature came apart on its own momentum and fell in two unequal pieces on the floor of the corridor behind him, and he was already across the corridor and at the second creature, the one that had come through the wall at the level of his shoulder, and the second creature was reaching its long forelegs forward in the slow careful way of a creature that intended to take him by the throat in the next instant, and Elandor went under the forelegs and brought the Whisperedge up in the short hard cut of the third form he had ever been taught, and the cut went into the underside of the creature’s body where the legs joined and continued upward into the place where, in a thing of normal arachnid build, the heart-equivalent would have been, and the second creature came down on him with all its weight before it understood that it was already dead, and Elandor caught the weight on his off shoulder and twisted under it and let the weight slide past him, and the second creature struck the floor of the corridor on its side, and its many legs jerked once, and were still.
Two. He counted in the small wordless way he had been counting in the chamber two days ago. There were three more in his immediate vicinity, and he was now between the third and the fourth and the fifth, and his company was already scattering behind him in the only direction the corridor offered them to scatter, which was back the way they had come, and the scattering had been forced by the third creature, the one that had come through the ceiling at a point four paces ahead, which had dropped between Vren at the point and the rest of them and which was therefore at this moment between Vren and Elandor in a way that cut the line of the company in half.
Vren was beyond the third creature. Vren was alone on the far side of it. Vren had her twin blades out already, of course, because Vren had her twin blades out before the rest of the company even fully understood what was happening, and Vren was, Elandor knew without needing to look, dealing with whatever further creatures had come through the wall on Vren’s own end of the corridor, which were not Elandor’s concern at this moment because they were Vren’s, and Vren did not require any man’s intervention in such matters and would have, in fact, resented any.
Brother Caius and Maelis and Goradd were on Elandor’s side of the third creature, and they were the company Elandor had to protect, and the third creature was now turning toward Brother Caius, because Brother Caius was the slowest of them at the moment of the attack and was therefore, in the Gloomspiders’ small administrative calculus, the easiest of the three to secure first, and the protecting of Brother Caius from the third creature was now Elandor’s only relevant concern in the world, and he committed to it without thought.
He went past the corpse of the second creature in three long strides and he came up upon the third creature from behind in the small clean way of a soldier who has trained for this maneuver perhaps fifteen hundred times across his career, and he drove the Whisperedge into the place at the rear of the body where the rearmost legs joined, and the creature spasmed at the strike and the rearmost legs collapsed under it and the creature came down on its belly upon the floor of the corridor, and its forward legs swept out in a wide arc toward Brother Caius and the lantern in Brother Caius’s hand, and Brother Caius, who had stepped backward with the long careful step of an old man who had been in a great many sudden situations in his life and who had learned to step backward without falling, brought the head of the Walking-Staff of the Long Road around in a low sweep that Elandor had not previously known the old brother had in him, and the head of the staff struck the creature’s forward legs at the joint and turned them aside, and Brother Caius did not press his advantage, only used the gained moment to step backward another full pace, which was the correct use of the moment for a man of Brother Caius’s years and means, and the use bought Elandor the half-second he needed to drive the Whisperedge a second time into the creature, this time into the upper body, and the creature came apart upon the floor in three pieces and did not rise again.
Three.
The fourth creature came at him from his right side, the side he had just exposed by the second strike against the third, and Elandor caught its first leg upon the cross-piece of the Whisperedge and turned the leg aside and stepped into the creature in the close way of a man who has decided that the only working distance against a creature with too many legs is the distance at which the legs cannot be brought to bear, and inside that distance he drove the pommel of the Whisperedge upward into the underside of the creature’s head and stunned it for the duration of a heartbeat, and in that heartbeat he reversed his grip on the blade and drove the point down through the top of the creature’s body at the place where the head met the segment behind it, and the creature collapsed in upon itself as a great spider will when its small central nerve is cut, and Elandor stepped back out of the falling, breathing hard for the first time, and the song in his breastbone was now at the full singing pitch he remembered from the market town in the eastern marches sixteen years ago, and the singing was, he had time to think in a small bright corner of his mind, the singing he had wondered if he would ever hear again, and here it was, and it was, oh by all the small gods of his order, sweet.
Four. There was one more in his immediate vicinity. The fifth had come through the floor. He had not yet faced it. He turned to find it.
The fifth was not facing him. The fifth was on Maelis.
He saw it in the same instant he turned, and the seeing did something to him that he had not had done to him in a great many years, which was to remove the small bright song from his breastbone altogether and replace it with a much older and quieter and colder thing that lived underneath the song, the thing that lived under all his training and that the cloister-yard had spent nineteen years teaching him to keep underneath, and the thing came up now without his permission and took the inside of his chest the way the cold takes a fire when the wind shifts wrong, and the thing in him said go and the body went.
He went past the fallen pieces of the fourth creature in the smallest of motions and he crossed the floor of the corridor in three strides that were the longest strides he had ever taken in his life, and the fifth creature had Maelis backed against the wall of the corridor with its forelegs already reaching for her throat, and Maelis, who was a sensible woman and a tolerably brave one but who was not a fighter in any sense that the Gloomspiders’ small administrative classification would have recognized, had drawn the small piece of chalk from her right hand in the only useful gesture she had had time to make, and was holding it up as though the chalk were a knife, in the small absurd gallant way of a woman who had not been trained for this and was nevertheless not going to die without holding something up, and Elandor came at the fifth creature from its left side at the speed of a man whose blade was already moving before he arrived, and the Whisperedge went through the joint between the fifth creature’s body and its forequarters in the single hardest cut Elandor had thrown in nineteen years, and the cut took the forequarters off entirely, and the body of the creature went one way and the forequarters went the other way and the forelegs that had been reaching for Maelis’s throat fell short of her by the width of her own breath, and the eyes that had been studying her went up the corridor in a small spinning arc and struck the wall and did not come back, and Maelis stared, and Elandor stared, and the chalk fell from Maelis’s hand and broke in two pieces upon the floor, and the corridor was for the duration of one heartbeat absolutely silent.
Five.
The silence did not hold. The corridor erupted in the second wave.
Elandor would think later, in the long quiet of after, that the first wave had been the wave of the door being opened, and the second wave was the wave of what had been waiting behind the door, and the first wave had been kind of them, in some small administrative way, because the first wave had been a courtesy, the courtesy of an opening shot. The second wave was the answer to the courtesy, and the answer had teeth.
They came in numbers he did not count, because there was no counting when the count was beyond useful counting, and he had stopped counting at five, and the five had been the useful count, and now he was no longer in the country of counts. He was in the country that he had been bred for and the country he had been waiting for and the country in which numbers no longer applied because the body did not have time for numbers. He went into it.
He will not be able to tell you, friend, what happened in the next two minutes in any precise account. Two minutes is the duration he believes, after the fact, the fight lasted, although his own private duration of those two minutes was both much longer and much shorter than two minutes by any clock anyone had ever made. He was in the long slow time that combat gives a man at his best, where each motion of his enemy’s body became a thing he had time to read in detail, and yet each motion of his own body was completed in the small short time of the body acting upon its training without consulting the eye that watched. He was in two times at once, and the two times were the two times he had not been in since the market town sixteen years before, and the being in them again was the gift he had not asked for and would not have known how to ask for.
He fought. He fought back up the corridor toward where his company had been, because his company had been broken in half by the third creature and was being broken further by the second wave, and the breaking of the company further was a thing he would not permit if he could prevent it. He cut a Gloomspider in half that came at him from the ceiling and he kicked the falling pieces aside without looking at them. He drove the cross-piece of the Whisperedge into the eyes of a Gloomspider that came at him from the floor and he ducked under its retaliatory snap and he cut the snap-jaw off it and the creature dragged itself back into the floor through the place it had come, and he marked the place for later. He took a slashing cut across his off shoulder from the leg of a Gloomspider he had not seen, and the cut was not deep but it was the first wound he had taken in a fight in five years, and the wound, when he had time later to consider it, would surprise him with how little it hurt, in the small numb way that the worst hour of a man’s working life always seems to mute the small pains of it.
He came back upon his company in stages.
Brother Caius he found first. The old brother had backed against the corridor wall and had set the lantern down at his feet, and the lantern was somehow still burning steady upon the floor in the smaller honest way it had burned in the chamber on the first night, and Brother Caius had taken his walking-staff in both hands and was working the head of it in the slow steady arcs of an old man who had once, in some life Elandor had not been told about and would not ask about, learned to use a staff for purposes other than walking. The old brother was not winning his small contest with the two Gloomspiders that had him cornered, but he was also not losing it. He was, in the small precise way of his order, holding. He had been holding, by Elandor’s later estimate, for perhaps forty seconds when Elandor came up beside him, and the two Gloomspiders were drawing closer with the slow patient pace of creatures who had decided that the old man would tire before they did, and Elandor came in from the side and took the further of the two Gloomspiders through the body in a single horizontal cut that he did not even feel his arm make, and the nearer Gloomspider turned upon him with the snap-jaw open and the forelegs raised, and Brother Caius’s staff came down across the back of the creature’s head in the same instant, in a strike Elandor would not have expected of any of his own training-masters at the cloister-house, never mind of an old brother in dust-colored wool, and the creature’s head broke under the strike and the creature fell, and Brother Caius set the head of his staff back down upon the floor at his feet and said, in the small even voice of a man who had not been afraid in any way that he was willing to record, he said, thank you, captain.
Elandor did not stop to answer. He pressed past Brother Caius and back up the corridor toward where he had last seen Goradd at the rear, because Goradd at the rear had been the last of them to be reached by the wave and would therefore by now be the deepest in it, and his ear had been catching, through the long stretched-out duration of the last two minutes, the steady regular ringing of a smith’s hammer on something that was not iron, and the ringing was the sound of Goradd at his work, and the work had not stopped, which was a sound Elandor was glad of beyond his power to record.
He came upon Goradd at the rear of where the company had been, and Goradd was standing with his back to the right-hand wall of the corridor in a place where the wall had a small inward jog, and the jog had given Goradd a small protected angle, and Goradd was using the angle the way a man who had once worked a furnace at full draw would use a corner of his forge to keep the worst of the heat off his back, and the heat in this case was three Gloomspiders that were taking turns at him from the open side of the angle, and Goradd was, with the most economical motion of his big shoulders Elandor had ever seen from a man who was not a trained soldier, putting his short hammer through the round forward portion of each creature as each presented itself, and the three creatures had become two creatures by the time Elandor arrived, and were becoming one creature in the same instant that Elandor came up at the open side of the angle, and Elandor took the last creature from its blind side with a single overhead cut that finished the work, and Goradd, breathing hard and bleeding from a small slash along the side of his neck that Elandor would later make sure was attended to, looked at Elandor across the small heap of dead creatures and said, in his slow Dickensian voice that had not been substantially altered by the fight, he said, well now, captain, that was a piece of work, by my forge it was, and I would not be cross if I never did it again.
Captain. Both of them. He had not, in nineteen years, been called captain by anyone outside his own order, where the title had been used in only one of the more formal ceremonies. He thought, in the small bright corner of his mind that was still capable of irrelevant thought during a fight, that he had become captain to this company at some point in the last several days without anyone having appointed him, and that the appointment had now been ratified twice in the space of one minute by two men who had absolutely no reason to defer to him beyond the simple practical reason that he was the man with the blade and the training and the song in his breastbone, and that the ratification was, in its small honest way, the highest compliment of his life so far, and that he would not let either of them down.
Maelis came up beside him then, with a packet from her satchel already in her left hand and a fresh piece of chalk in her right hand to replace the one she had broken, and she did not speak, only fell in at his elbow in the small unspoken understanding that she would be the one to throw the next packet at the next creature that needed it, and Goradd straightened from his angle and fell in at his other elbow, and Brother Caius came up from behind with the lantern in his right hand and the staff in his left, and the four of them stood for one long breath in the corridor, with the dead and the dying around them, and the small shaking silence of a brief lull in the wave, and the song in Elandor’s breastbone had now risen to the highest pitch it had ever reached, and the singing was the singing of a man whose company had survived the first ambush of this descent, and whose company was here at his elbows, and whose company was waiting for him to call the next thing.
He called it. He called it without looking at any of them, because he did not need to, and they did not need to look at him to know what he had called. He called Vren. Vren was on the other side of the corridor, behind whatever further wave the corridor had thrown at her at the point, and Vren had not come back through the wave to them, which meant either that Vren was dealing with the wave at her end on her own terms and would come through when she was ready, or that Vren could not come through, or that Vren was already past the wave and was waiting for them somewhere ahead.
Elandor did not yet know which of the three was true, and the not knowing was the only thing in the corridor at this moment that he could not bear, and the only way to make it bearable was to find out.
He said, in the clipped command voice he had not used in many years and that came out of his throat without his having to look for it, he said, Master Goradd, Brother Caius, hold this position with Maelis at your center. I am going forward to find Vren. I will not be more than two minutes by the clock. If I am not back in two minutes, you will fall back to the alcove we left this morning. You will not come after me. Do you mark me.
Brother Caius said, captain, we mark you. Be quick.
Goradd said, captain, by my forge, you will be quicker than that, I think, and we will be here when you come back. Go.
Maelis said, in the small careful voice she used when she was being precise, she said, Elandor, the creature that was on me was a different make from the others. There was something different about its eyes. Bring that knowledge back with you, please.
He nodded once, and he went.
He went forward up the corridor at the long fast lope of a man who had not lost a foot of his old speed in the sixteen years between his market town and this corridor, and the long fast lope of him had been called the Swift by the men of his order for reasons that they would not have needed to explain to anyone who had been in the corridor with him at that moment. He went past three more Gloomspiders that had been left behind by whatever wave had passed Vren at the point, and he did not stop to cut them, only struck each as he passed in the small short economical way that left each crippled and slow and possible to be finished by Goradd’s hammer when Goradd came forward to do so, which Goradd would.
He came around the bend of the corridor.
He found Vren.
Vren was alive. Vren was alive and Vren was upright and Vren was standing in a small irregular circle of seven Gloomspider corpses with both blades in her hands and the blades both wet to the hilts, and Vren’s veil was askew across the lower part of the face and there was a small thin line of blood along the cheekbone above the veil and Vren’s left arm was held a fraction lower than the right because Vren had taken some hurt to the left shoulder, and Vren’s pale gold eyes met Elandor’s gold eyes across the small irregular circle of corpses and Vren said, in the flat deliberate voice that had no contractions in it, Vren said, three more came through the wall behind me when the wave broke. I have them. Are the others alive.
He said, in the same instant, the others are alive. Goradd has a slash on the neck. Brother Caius is not injured. Maelis was nearly taken by one I dealt with. We are holding, perhaps a hundred and twenty paces back. I came for you.
Vren nodded once. The nod was the smallest nod Elandor had ever received in his life, and it was, oh, the most welcome nod he had ever received in his life.
Vren said, the bend ahead is closed. They have closed it. I cannot tell whether they have closed it with a wall or with a watcher. We will not go forward through it. We will go back. Are you well enough to take the rear with me.
He said, I am well enough to take whatever you give me to take.
Vren did the thing then that Vren did so rarely that Elandor would remember it the rest of his life. Vren smiled. The smile was a small precise thing that lasted perhaps the width of one breath. It was the small dry smile of a person of Vren’s profession acknowledging, in the only register available to her, that the man before her had passed a test he had not been told he was taking, and had passed it not by skill alone, although the skill had been part of it, but by the simple practical fact of having come forward through the wave to find her. The smile was gone almost before Elandor saw it. The smile was, nevertheless, there.
Vren said, then we go back. Quickly.
They went back. They went back in the small fast careful way of two professionals who had at last properly met one another, with Vren at point in the direction of retreat, which was the direction of advance now, and Elandor at the rear in the direction of pursuit, and they came up upon Maelis and Goradd and Brother Caius in the holding position perhaps two minutes from the moment Elandor had left them, by Goradd’s later report, and the holding had been held, and Goradd was breathing hard, and Brother Caius was leaning upon his staff in the slow plain way of an old man who had spent more in the last several minutes than he had to spare, and Maelis was looking at Elandor with the wide grave eyes of a woman who had been within the width of her own breath of being taken and had not been, and the looking was a thing Elandor did not have the time at that moment to receive properly, but he marked it, and he would receive it later, when there was time, and there was, in the brief looking between them, the small acknowledgment of a debt that did not need to be named to be accepted.
He said, in the command voice, fall back to the alcove. Vren at the front. Maelis behind Vren. Brother Caius behind Maelis. Master Goradd behind Brother Caius. I will take the rear. We do not stop. We do not look back. We do not engage anything we encounter unless engagement is the only path through. Mark me.
They marked him.
They fell back along the corridor. The Gloomspiders did not pursue. He would not, for a long while, understand why they did not. He would come to understand, in the long quiet of after, that the wave had been a test as well as an ambush, that the Gloomspiders had been given as much of the company as they had been able to take in the time they had been given, and that the wave had been called off by the she below them at the moment when the test had given her sufficient information about the company to know what kind of company she had against her, and that the recalling of the wave was, in its small administrative way, a courtesy of a different kind than the first courtesy, the courtesy of a being who had now seen enough of them to know that any further wave at this depth would have been wasted, and who was conserving what remained of her staff for the room at the heart of the system. But this understanding did not arrive in him until many hours later. In the immediate moment, Elandor only knew that the corridor behind him was quiet, that the dead lay where they had fallen and were not being replaced, that his company was on its feet and was moving, and that the small cold older thing under his song had begun, very slowly, to lower itself back into the place beneath where the cloister-yard had taught him to keep it.
The song in his breastbone was at full pitch still as he walked at the rear. He let it sing. He had been told once, by an old master of his order, that the song was a thing one did not put down when the fight was over, but rather a thing one carried for some hours afterward, because the song was the body’s way of staying ready, and the body needed to stay ready until the body could be certain that the fight was truly over, and the certainty came in its own time, not on a man’s command. He let it sing. He carried it. He was bleeding from his off shoulder in a small steady way that he would have to attend to in the alcove, but the blood was a small honest bother and not a wound that would matter at this hour. His company was alive, and was at his elbow, and was moving in the order he had set, and was holding the order, and the holding of it was the thing he had been bred for, and the bred-for-thing had been done, and they had all of them, the five of them, come out of the first ambush alive, and the coming out was the only number that counted now, and the count was five, and five was the right count, and Elandor the Swift, called captain twice in two minutes by men he had not asked it of, walked at the rear of his company back up the corridor toward the alcove of Brother Caius’s confession and Maelis’s not-quite sleep and Goradd’s snore, with the long quiet still ahead of him in which he would come down, slowly, from the high pitch of the song, and with the white-hot clarity in him still humming along the inside of every bone, and with the thought he did not say aloud and would not say aloud for a long time, which was that he had been made for exactly this, and that he had come at last to the work that had been waiting for him for sixteen years, and that the work was glad to have him, and that he, against all of his order’s small careful counsel about pride, was glad of the work.
Segment Fourteen: The Wounded and the Whole
We came back into the alcove in the staggering order of five persons who had agreed, for the duration of the last hundred paces of corridor, not to think about anything except the next pace, and the agreement had served us as far as the threshold, and the threshold released us, and we came into the small kitchen-sized niche where we had rested earlier in the day, and we came in with the small loose dignity of a company that had agreed in advance not to fall down until the falling down could be done in private, and we made it as far as the floor of the alcove, and then, by various small inelegant routes, we set ourselves down upon that floor in the postures of persons whose bodies had been carrying them on terms that had now expired.
Vren made it the furthest into the alcove before sitting, and I noted that she did not so much sit as let the wall behind her receive her weight in the slow controlled fall of a person who has been on her feet for too long and knows that the proper choice is to sit before the choice is taken away. Elandor, our captain by recent ratification, came in next and went directly to the entrance and turned and stood there with the Whisperedge still drawn, watching the corridor we had come back up, and he would remain in that posture, I knew without his telling me, until I or someone else explicitly relieved him of it, because Elandor was now in the small mode he had been in after the first chamber two days before, the mode in which the song would not let him sit until the song had decided it was safe to come down, and the song would not be hurried. Brother Caius came in third, leaning hard upon his staff, and he set the staff carefully against the wall and he sat down upon the floor against the same wall with the slow careful settlement of an old man who had spent more in the last quarter hour than his small body had to spend, and his face when he had got himself down was a face of small finished labor, in the way an old man’s face is small and finished when he has done what he was asked and is glad of the doing but is honest about the price. Maelis came in fourth, in the small dazed walk of a woman whose mind had been moving very fast in the corridor and had now begun, in the comparative safety of the alcove, to slow down to the small unwelcome speed at which feelings catch up with thoughts, and she sat down in approximately the same place she had been sitting earlier in the day, upon her leather bundle, and she did not arrange herself, only sat as she had fallen, with her gloved hands palm-up on her knees and her eyes upon the floor in a way that I did not like.
I came in fifth, last by my own assignment as rear watchman, although Elandor at the entrance was, I noticed, taking that duty from me with his standing post. I came in last, friend, and I want to tell you that I came in with the small private knowledge of a man who had been hurt in the fight but had not yet permitted himself to know how much, because permitting oneself to know how much one has been hurt is a luxury that a man does not afford himself while he is still walking with companions, and I had been walking with my companions the last hundred paces of corridor, and the corridor had now ended, and the alcove had begun, and the alcove was, by the small unspoken agreement of all of us, the place in which the knowing could begin.
I sat down at the wall opposite Brother Caius, near the entrance but not at it, so that I would have line of sight to Elandor’s back at the entrance and to Vren against the rear wall and to Maelis upon her bundle and to Brother Caius across from me, and so that I would, in the small habitual arrangement of a man who has been doing such arrangements without thinking about them since he was a boy, be in a position to watch them all without seeming to watch any one of them. I sat, friend, and I drew in the longest breath I had drawn in perhaps three hours, and the breath came in to the bottom of my lungs and I felt the small sharp objection of my right side that I had been ignoring for some considerable time, and I let the objection register, and I marked it, and I let the breath go out slowly, and I knew then, in the way one knows such things, that I had a cracked rib on the right side, possibly two, and that one of the Gloomspider’s legs had got to me harder than I had let myself notice during the work, and that the rib or ribs would be a thing I would have to manage for the next several days, and that I had bandage and binding in my kit for the managing, and that the managing was not yet the work of this hour, because there was other work first, and the other work was the company.
This is the smith’s way, friend, and I will not apologize for it, because I have lived with it long enough to know that it is a true way and not a vanity, although I will admit that it has the small admixture of vanity that any true way of doing things acquires when it has been done for thirty years. The way is this. When a smith has been in a hard hour and has come out the other side with his company, the first work of the hour after the hard hour is not the smith’s own work but the company’s. The smith does not bind his own ribs before he binds the cuts of his fellows. The smith does not eat his own bread before he has set bread before others. The smith does not lay himself down before he has seen the others laid down, and seen them taking the laying down well, and seen that the company has begun, in some small visible measure, to mend. Only after the company has begun to mend may the smith begin to mend himself. This is not because the smith’s mending is unimportant. The smith’s mending is very important, and a smith who never gets around to it is no smith at all, only a man pretending. But the order matters, friend, the order matters, and the order is the smith’s and the company’s first, and the smith’s own second, and the second comes when the first has been honestly tended to and not before.
So I did not bind my ribs in the first minute of the alcove. I sat at the wall opposite Brother Caius and I drew that long breath and I marked the rib, and I let the marking be the marking, and I rose again, with the small useful application of my left hand against the wall to push myself up so that the right side was not asked to do the rising, and I went to my pack and I took out the small kit I had been carrying since the smithy at the Three-Stones Crossroads, and I went first to Maelis.
I went to Maelis first, friend, because Maelis was the one who had been within the width of her own breath of being taken in the corridor, and Maelis had not been touched, by any standard a healer would have used, and Maelis had no wound at all, and Maelis was therefore by my reckoning the one in the company who was most in danger at this moment, because the wound she had was the wound that does not show, the small wound of having looked at one’s own death across a distance of perhaps two feet and having had nothing more to defend oneself with than a piece of chalk, and that small wound is the kind of wound that will, if not attended to, become a much larger wound by the next morning, in the way the small wounds of the spirit have of doing when no one comes by to set a clean cloth upon them and to say a small honest word.
I sat down on the floor beside her, with the small effort of getting down on my right side that I did not allow my face to register, and I did not look directly at her, because looking directly at a person in such a moment is sometimes the wrong choice, and I looked instead at the gloves on her hands and I said, in the easiest voice I had in my throat, well now, lass, well now, those Spinneret Gloves of yours look a touch dusty after their afternoon. Would you mind if I had a look at them, and gave them a small attention. I would like, also, while I am at the looking, to ask after the small leather case at your belt, which I noticed earlier this morning had a small worn place along the front strap which I have a piece of dressing for, and I would not be cross to do the dressing for you, if you are agreeable.
She looked at me. She did not look up at me with her eyes at first, only her head turned slightly toward me, and the head was the head of a woman who was very far away inside herself at that moment, and whom my voice had reached only as a small far-off sound. I waited. I do not rush a person who has gone far away inside herself. I have known smiths who do, and I do not respect them for it. I waited, and I held my hand out to her gloves in the small offering way of a craftsman asking permission, and at last her hand came up out of its palm-up posture on her knee and met mine, and she let me take the glove off her right hand and lay it on my knee, and she said, in a small voice that was not her usual bright voice, she said, oh, petal. Oh, petal.
I said, oh aye, lass. Oh aye. We are here. We are all of us here. Let me have the gloves.
She let me have them. I worked on them in the slow careful way of a man cleaning a tool that did not in fact need much cleaning, because the cleaning was not the work. The work was the holding of her hand while the cleaning was happening, which was the small permitted touching of an old smith and a younger woman that was permitted by the cleaning and would not have been permitted by any other framing, and I held her hand in mine in the slow careful way I had held the hands of perhaps a dozen younger smiths in the years of my mastery when they had had a near miss at a forge and had needed a hand held without the holding being framed as the holding of a hand, and I had learned, in those years, that the framing of the cleaning is the doorway through which the holding may pass, and that the holding is the medicine. I held her hand. I cleaned the glove. She said, after perhaps a full minute of my cleaning, in the small returning voice of a woman who had begun, by very small degrees, to come back into the alcove, she said, master Goradd, I am going to have a small private hysterical episode in approximately ten minutes, and I want you to know that it is not your fault, and I want you to know that I will appreciate, in advance, if no one in the alcove pretends to ignore it but also if no one in the alcove makes a great fuss of it, and I want you to know that I have been promising myself this small private hysterical episode for the better part of three hours and I think I have earned it, and I am only telling you ahead of the episode because you are the one in the alcove who is most likely to do the right thing during it.
I said, in the same easy voice, lass, you will have the episode. You will have it when you are ready for it. I will not pretend to ignore it. I will not make a great fuss of it. I will sit exactly where I am sitting, and I will work on the gloves and the leather case in the slow way I am working, and the working will be the small wall around your episode so that you can have it in the small protected place of the working without anyone in the alcove having to do anything other than what they are already doing. Is that agreeable to you.
She said, oh, petal, that is exactly agreeable. Exactly.
I went on cleaning the glove. I took my time. I have, in the years of my mastery, learned that one of the great gifts a tradesman can give a person in distress is the gift of a piece of work undertaken slowly in their presence, because the slow undertaking of a piece of work tells the person in distress that the world has not, in fact, ended, and that the world’s small ordinary requirements are still in force, and that the world will accommodate them in the small ordinary way it always has. It is a small gift. It is, in the right moment, an immense one. I worked. The small private hysterical episode that Maelis had given herself permission for arrived at about the eight-minute mark, perhaps a little earlier than the ten she had estimated, and it took the form of her shoulders beginning to shake quietly, in the small dignified way of a woman crying without making any sound that the company would have to acknowledge, and I went on cleaning the glove, and I did not look at her face, and I did not stop my hands, and at one point her left hand, the one I was not holding, came up and rested for a moment upon the back of my right hand where I held her glove, and the rest of her left hand was the small return gesture of a person who did not require speech to say what was needed, and the gesture said, I am here, I am with you, do not stop working, the working is the wall, and I did not stop, and the working was the wall, and after perhaps three minutes more of the small dignified shaking she drew the deep breath that meant the episode was concluding, and she sat up a little straighter, and she said, in something a little closer to her ordinary bright voice, although the voice was still not entirely her voice, she said, petal, that is much better. Thank you. I will take the gloves back now.
I gave her the gloves back. She put them on. I worked next, without rising, on the small leather case at her belt, in the same slow careful way, and the dressing of the worn place along the front strap took perhaps the same length of time that her small episode had taken, and the two pieces of work fit together as well as if I had timed them on purpose, which I had not, although I will tell you, friend, that I had a tradesman’s intuition that the times would fit, and that the intuition was based on the small honest experience of having timed many such pieces of work to many such episodes over the years, and the intuition had not failed me yet, and it did not fail me here. By the time I had finished the dressing, Maelis was upright on her bundle, and her hands were back upon her knees in their normal active posture, not the palm-up posture of the first minute, and her eyes were no longer upon the floor in the way I had not liked, and she was, by the small invisible measure of a tradesman watching for such things, ninety percent of the way back to being Maelis Veth, with the remaining ten percent to be made up over the next several hours by sleep and food and the steady company of the other four of us. I rose. I made the rising look easier than the rising felt, because the rib was, by this time, complaining audibly to itself inside my chest, and I was not going to give the complaint the satisfaction of being acknowledged in front of the company. I said to Maelis, well now, lass. You will do. Eat the small biscuit I will pass you in a moment, even if you do not want it. The eating will help. And I went on.
I went next to Brother Caius. The old brother was sitting where I had seen him sit, against the wall opposite my own place, with his staff laid carefully beside him and his hands folded on his lap and his old face composed in the small composed way that I had come to understand was the face he wore when he had spent more than he had to spend and was not going to mention it. I sat down across from him with the same small care to my right side, and I said, in the same easy voice I had used with Maelis, well now, brother, well now. Let me see the staff. I would like, also, to see the small grip on the head of it, where I noticed earlier this morning that the binding had begun to slip the smallest amount along the upper coil, and I have a small length of waxed cord that I had not used yet, and I would not be cross to do the rewinding for you.
Brother Caius looked at me. He looked at me with the small slow look of an old man who had perhaps not entirely expected anyone to come and sit across from him at that moment, and the looking was a little surprised and a little grateful and a little, I want to tell you, friend, a little embarrassed, in the small particular way old monks of his order get embarrassed when someone has noticed that they are tired and are about to do something about it. He said, in his slow gentle voice, master Goradd. Master Goradd. You are kind. The staff would, perhaps, welcome an attention. I do not know that I require any attention myself. He said it in the way an old man says such a thing when he very much does require an attention and is asking in the only way his order permits him to ask, which is by the careful not-asking that allows the other person to provide the attention without obliging the old man to admit he wanted it.
I said, by my forge, brother, the staff and yourself are by my reckoning the same item at this hour, and the attention to the one is the attention to the other, and I will not draw any further distinction between them than that. He smiled at me, a small dry smile, the smile of a man who had been seen and was not minding being seen, and he handed me the staff, and I took it across my knees, and I went to work on the upper coil of the binding, in the slow careful way I had worked on Maelis’s glove, and while I worked I said, almost as an afterthought, brother, you took quite a sweep with that staff at the third creature back there. I had not seen the staff put to work like that. Where did you learn the stroke. He looked at me sideways, in the small startled way that meant the question had touched something he had not been recently asked about, and he said, in the slow voice, master Goradd, I was raised in a port town to the west, where my father was a fisherman, and where the small boys of the dockside were given a great deal of free time of an afternoon, and the small boys of the dockside developed, among the various games and arts of free time, a particular game played with old broom handles in which the small boys hit one another about the shoulders and arms in elaborate patterns that were said to be derived from a soldier’s drill that one of the older men of the town had brought back from his time of service many years before. The game was called by the small boys the long brooms. I was tolerably good at the long brooms. I had not, before this afternoon, used the stroke for anything else in something on the order of fifty years. The stroke came back. The stroke had been there all along, in the same place I keep most of my early life, in the small back room of my memory. I was, I will confess, surprised to find it.
I said, by my forge, brother, the long brooms are alive and well in the back room of you, and we are all of us grateful for the long brooms, and I will tell you that I think the stroke saved Elandor a half-second that he would otherwise have had to find elsewhere, and a half-second in a corridor with five creatures is a great deal of half-second. He laughed at that, a small dry laugh that did not have the dryness of his earlier laugh in the corridor but had a small wetness in it, and he said, master Goradd, I had not thought of myself, in the last forty years, as a man who could give Elandor a half-second of anything. I am pleased to have given it.
I worked on the binding. I worked slowly. I let the slow working do the work it was meant to do, which was to give him the small comfort of being attended to without my having to call the attending by its name. When I had finished the binding, I took up his pilgrim’s beads as well, in the small unobtrusive way of a smith finishing a job by also finishing the small adjacent jobs, and I checked the new cord I had set in the beads three nights ago, and I tightened a small knot that had loosened in the fighting, and I returned the beads to him, and I said, well now, brother. You will do. Eat the small biscuit when Maelis passes you one, even if you do not want it. The eating will help. And I rose.
The rising hurt more than the previous rising had hurt, because the rib had now been quiet for some minutes and had decided to use the quiet to organize itself into a more concentrated complaint, and the complaint surfaced in the rising, and I did not let it show, and I went on.
I went next to Vren. I went to Vren third because Vren was the kind of person who could not be approached first, the way one does not approach a wary cat first when one comes into a room of cats. Vren was sitting against the rear wall of the alcove in the slow controlled fall posture I had marked when she came in, and the left arm was held lower than the right, and there was, I could see in the lantern’s light, a small dark spreading along the upper sleeve at the shoulder that was not the dark of the cloak’s natural color, and I could not tell from a distance how deep the wound was or whether it was still bleeding, and I knew that Vren would, by every preference of her disposition, prefer to attend to the wound herself in some quiet hour when no one was watching, and I knew, also, that I could not allow her that preference, because Vren had taken the hardest of the five of us in the corridor and Vren was the one of the five of us who would be the most stubborn about attending to it, and the stubbornness was a quality I respected in her but was a quality that I, in my capacity as the alcove’s medical officer for the next quarter hour, was not going to indulge.
I sat down across from her with the same small care to my right side, and I did not, this time, look at the gloves or the case or any of the small adjacent items. I looked at the sleeve. I said, in the same easy voice I had used with the others, but pitched a small fraction lower so that the others would not feel obliged to hear the conversation, I said, Vren. The shoulder. Let me see it.
Vren did not move. Vren did not speak. The pale gold eyes met mine across the small space between us, and the eyes were the eyes of a person who was, I will tell you, weighing the small social cost of allowing me to attend to her against the small practical cost of not being attended to, and the weighing took perhaps three seconds, and the practical cost won.
Vren said, in the flat deliberate voice, the cut is along the top of the shoulder. The cloak will need to come down. I will let you do that. I will not let you do more than is required. You will work quickly.
I said, by my forge, Vren, I will work as quickly as the work permits and not faster, because faster than the work permits is the work being done poorly, and I will not do poor work on your shoulder for any consideration. But I will work quickly. Let us begin.
Vren let me draw the dark cloak down off the left shoulder with the slow careful permission of a person who had not let anyone draw a cloak down off her shoulder in some considerable time, and I will tell you, friend, that I did not look at anything more than I needed to look at, because there are forms of looking that one does not perform when one has been given the kind of permission Vren had given me, and I worked. The cut along the top of the shoulder was not the worst cut I had ever seen, but it was a thing of the second or third tier of bad cuts, in the way I had used to grade such cuts at my forge when an apprentice came in with a burn or a slash from the day’s work. The cut was perhaps four inches long, running across the top of the shoulder from front to back, and it was no longer bleeding actively but had bled enough to soak the cloth of the under-tunic across the whole upper portion of the left side, and the cut was clean enough at the edges that I judged a creature’s leg-blade had made it in a single fast stroke and had not torn or sawed, which was a small mercy. I worked. I had in my kit the small bottle of clear distillate that I carried for the cleaning of cuts, which had once cost me dear at a healer’s shop in a town I had passed through six years ago and had been worth every coin since, and I had clean linen and waxed thread for stitches, and I had a small jar of the dark salve my wife Tessa had given me at the door of the forge on the morning I had walked out, which I had laughed at her for at the time and which I was now going to use without comment because Tessa had been right and I had not been.
Vren let me clean the cut. The cleaning hurt, by any reasonable measure of pain, but Vren did not move and did not make a sound and did not so much as alter the rate of her breathing, and I admired the not-altering with the small professional admiration of a man who had seen apprentices flinch at half this cleaning. Vren let me stitch the cut. I made nine small stitches in the slow careful pattern I had learned from a field-leech in the southern hills when I had been a younger man, and the pattern was a pattern that left a thin clean scar rather than a ragged one, and I had not made the pattern in some years and I was glad to find that my hands remembered it. Vren let me apply the salve, which had the small clean smell of the herbs Tessa grew in the side yard, and the smell was, I will tell you, friend, the most welcome smell I had encountered since I had walked out of the door of the forge two weeks before, and the smell did, by some small mechanism I cannot explain, more for me in that moment than any binding had any right to do. Vren let me bind the shoulder with clean linen. Vren let me draw the cloak back up over the bound shoulder. Vren said, after the cloak was back in place, very quietly, in the flat deliberate voice, Vren said, smith. The work was good. Thank you.
I said, by my forge, Vren. You are welcome. Eat the small biscuit when Maelis passes you one, even if you do not want it. The eating will help. And I rose, and the rising this time hurt enough that I had to set my left hand against the wall to steady myself for half a second, and Vren marked the steadying with the pale gold eyes, and Vren did not speak of it, and I was grateful for the not-speaking.
I went last to Elandor at the entrance.
I will tell you, friend, that going to Elandor last was the correct order, although it would not have looked correct to a stranger walking into the alcove. A stranger would have seen Elandor at the entrance bleeding from the off shoulder where the Gloomspider’s leg had got across him in the fight, and the stranger would have said, why is the smith leaving the captain for last, surely the captain is the first to be attended to, and the stranger would have been wrong, friend, because Elandor was the last to be attended to for the simple practical reason that Elandor was the only one of the five of us who was still in the work, still at his post, still in the high pitch of the song that he carried after the fight, and a man in that pitch is not a man who can be attended to until the pitch comes down, and the pitch comes down on its own schedule and not on a smith’s, and the smith who goes to such a man early only succeeds in delaying the coming down, which is exactly the opposite of what the attending is for.
So I went to Elandor last. By the time I reached him at the entrance, he had been standing there perhaps a quarter of an hour, and the song in him had begun to come down by very small degrees, in the way I could see in the slight relaxation of the line of his shoulders and the slight letting-out of his breath at the end of each inhale, and the Whisperedge had at some point in the quarter hour been sheathed, which I had not seen but which I noted now, and the right hand was at the hip in the old habit but was not in the active grip it had been in when he had come in. I stood beside him, not in front of him, at the entrance, in the small careful way one stands beside a man whom one has not yet been given permission to interrupt, and I did not speak for a while.
He spoke first. He spoke in his clipped formal voice, but the voice had a softness in it that I had not heard in it since the morning at the gate when we had first met, the softness of a man whose body had at last informed him that he was a man and not only an instrument of his order, and he said, master Goradd. Master Goradd. Thank you for taking the others first. I had been about to ask you to. I would not have known how. He looked sideways at me. His eyes had the small reflective tiredness of eyes that had been in the long stretched-out time during the fight and were now coming back to ordinary time, and the coming back was costing him something, and the something was visible in the small fatigue around the eyes. He said, am I bleeding badly. I cannot feel it.
I said, captain, you are bleeding. You are not bleeding badly. The cut is along the off shoulder. It is the same kind of cut Vren took, although shallower. I can see that the cut has clotted for the moment. I will need to clean it and stitch it. I will not do the cleaning here at the entrance. The cleaning needs you sat down. I will take the entrance from you, if you will permit me, while you sit. I am not as fast as you are on the entrance, but I am the next fastest, and the corridor outside has been quiet for the entire time I have been working in the alcove, and I judge the corridor will remain quiet for the next half hour. May I take the entrance.
He looked at me for the count of two breaths. He said, master Goradd, you may take the entrance. He stepped aside. I took the entrance. I stood where he had been standing, with the Whisperedge of his still at his hip but the standing now being mine, and I felt, friend, the small considerable weight of standing at the entrance of an alcove in The Maelstrom’s Embrace as the watch, and I will tell you that I felt the weight more in the chest than in the legs, because the chest was where the rib was, and the rib was now informing me, in some considerable detail, what it thought of all this. I did not allow the chest to inform anyone else.
Elandor sat down at the wall where I had been sitting. He sat down in the slow controlled fall of a man whose body had been holding itself up by the discipline of the song and was now being permitted to let the discipline go for the duration of one cleaning and one stitching, and he sat, and Brother Caius across from him gave him a small nod, and Maelis upon her bundle gave him a small smile, and Vren against the rear wall gave him the smallest of the pale gold acknowledgments, and Elandor returned each of these in the smallest measure that his face permitted, and he sat, and he let his head come back against the wall, and he closed his eyes for the duration of perhaps three slow breaths, and he opened them, and he said, master Goradd, work on me when you can. I will not bleed out in the next five minutes. I think you should work on yourself before me.
He had seen, friend, he had seen. I should have known he would. A man of Elandor’s training does not stand at an entrance for a quarter hour with four other people in the alcove behind him without seeing every small thing he can see in his peripheral vision, and the small steadying of my left hand against the wall after Vren’s stitching had been a thing he had seen, and he had marked it, and he had been keeping the marking in his mind through the quarter hour, and the marking had come out now.
I said, captain. The rib will keep. I have made it keep for the last hour. It will keep for the next half hour while I work on you. You have a cut that has clotted now and that will need to be reopened for the cleaning, and the longer the cut sits clotted the worse the reopening will be, and the reopening will be easier in the next minutes than in the minutes after that. Let me work on you first. The rib I will attend to last.
He looked at me from his seat at the wall. He said, master Goradd, you are a stubborn man.
I said, captain, I am a smith.
He said, that is what I said. And he closed his eyes again, and he smiled a small dry smile, and he opened his eyes and he said, very well. Work.
I went to him. I worked. I worked on his cut in the same way I had worked on Vren’s, with the small bottle of distillate and the clean linen and the waxed thread and the dark salve from Tessa’s jar. The cleaning was the worst part for him, because the cut had clotted and had to be reopened, and Elandor’s face during the reopening went into the small careful neutrality that I now understood was his face for receiving pain that he had decided to receive without comment, and he received it, and I worked quickly because he had given me permission to work quickly, and I made six stitches because the cut was shorter than Vren’s, and I applied the salve, and I bound the shoulder with clean linen, and I drew the leather and cloth of his jerkin and tunic back into place over the binding, and I sat back upon my heels, and I said, captain, you are bound. Eat the small biscuit when Maelis passes you one. The eating will help.
He laughed at that, a single short bark, and he said, master Goradd, you have said the same line to every one of us in the last half hour, and I think Maelis has not yet passed any of us a small biscuit, and I think the biscuit may be a small fiction of yours.
I said, captain, the biscuit is not a fiction. I have a small bag of biscuits at the bottom of my kit. I have been waiting to bring them out until I was sitting back at the wall, because bringing them out at the entrance would have been an awkward arrangement. I will pass them around in a minute. The biscuits are not fancy. They are oatcakes. My wife Tessa baked them the morning I walked out. They will be a little stale now. They are still oatcakes.
He laughed again, the small short bark, and Brother Caius across the alcove gave a small dry laugh of his own, and Maelis upon her bundle gave a small breath of a laugh, and Vren against the rear wall did not laugh, but the line of her shoulders relaxed by the small fraction that was Vren’s version of laughter, and I rose for the second-to-last time in the alcove and went to my kit and brought out the small bag of oatcakes that Tessa had pressed into my hand at the door of the forge, with the small note tied to the bag in her clean small hand that said simply, in the way Tessa wrote things, husband, eat these with the company you find on the road. I had not, until this hour, found the company that Tessa had meant. I had now found them. I passed the bag around. Each of the four of them took an oatcake. Vren held hers in her hand for some time before eating it, in the same way she had held the smith’s piece of bread on the first night, but Vren did eat it, eventually, in the slow careful chewing of a person who had not eaten in some hours and had only just been reminded that she could. Maelis ate hers in two bites and laughed at herself for it. Brother Caius ate his slowly and methodically and gave me a small nod at the end of the eating that said the eating had been welcome. Elandor ate his at the same speed he did most things, which was the speed of a man who had decided to give the eating his attention while it was happening but who was not going to spend more attention on it than the eating required.
I sat down at last at the wall where I had been sitting before, with the small effort of the right side that I was now no longer hiding, because there was no longer any reason to hide it, and I drew up my apron and I drew up my tunic and I began the slow work of binding my own ribs in the long firm wrappings of clean linen that I had been carrying for this purpose, and the binding was a small private craft of my own that I had done before for myself in earlier years, and I did it now in the slow careful way of a man whose hands were tired but who had been doing the work long enough to do it tired, and the binding went on, and I worked, and the rib, when the binding was done, was contained, and the breathing was the small careful breathing of a man with bound ribs, and the breathing was easier than the unbound breathing had been, and I drew my tunic back down and my apron back up and I leaned my head against the wall, and I closed my eyes for the duration of one breath, and I opened them, and I looked around at the four of them, and I will tell you, friend, that the four of them were all looking at me, in the small simultaneous way a company looks at a man who has just finished the round of attending to them, and the looking was the looking of four people who had each, in their separate ways, just understood that the small attending of the last half hour had not been a chore of mine but a small chosen gift, and the understanding was a thing of its own quality, and I will not be embarrassed about the quality of it. The company looked at me. I looked at them. And then, because the looking had begun to acquire a weight I was not entirely sure my chest could carry at that hour, I cleared my throat in the way a smith clears his throat when he is about to do a thing he has done a thousand times in his forge, which is to tell a story to fill the small uncomfortable space that has opened in the company.
I said, friends. Friends. Now that we are sitting and the work of the body is done, let me tell you a story. The story is from my apprentice years. I have not told the story in many years and I think it wants telling tonight, because I have been thinking about it all afternoon since the fight without knowing I was thinking about it, and the way of such thoughts is that they want telling when they will. The story is about the great fire at my master’s forge in the year I was nineteen years old.
Brother Caius made the small old-monk noise that meant he was settling in for the listening. Maelis pulled her knees up to her chest in the small posture of a woman ready to hear a story properly. Elandor inclined his head once, in the small soldier’s permission to begin. Vren did not move, but the pale gold eyes were upon me, and the eyes had the look that I would come to know over time as Vren’s most attentive look, which was the look she gave to anyone who was about to tell her something she had decided was worth listening to.
I told them. I told them the story of the night the western shed of my master’s forge had caught fire in a dry summer in the year I was nineteen, when I had been my master’s senior apprentice and had had two younger apprentices in my charge and had been alone with them in the forge yard because my master had been three days’ walk away at a guild meeting, and the fire had begun, I told them, in the small accident of a careless apprentice spilling a tray of half-finished hot rivets upon a pile of straw that should not have been there, and the straw had taken at once, and the straw had set the shed wall alight, and the shed wall had set the beam alight, and within the space of perhaps three minutes the western half of the forge yard had been on fire, and I had been nineteen years old and entirely responsible for the two younger apprentices and the master’s tools and the master’s stock and the master’s stables and the small house behind the forge where the master’s wife and his three children were asleep on a hot summer night with the windows open. I told them, friend, how I had gone first to the small house. I told them how I had carried each of the three children out one at a time in the long staggered runs of a young man trying not to lose his grip on small sleepy bodies, and how the master’s wife had carried the smallest child herself in the last run because her legs were faster than mine had become by the third run. I told them how we had set the children down in the yard of the neighboring farm across the lane, and how the master’s wife had wrapped each of them in the heavy farm blanket the neighbor had brought out, and how the neighbor and his two sons had then come back with us to the forge with the great water buckets and the long-handled rakes, and how the four of us, with the two younger apprentices who had at last stopped crying and had begun to be useful, had spent the next six hours wetting and beating and digging firebreaks and saving what could be saved.
I told them how the western shed had been a complete loss. I told them how the eastern shed had been saved, with three of its walls scorched but the roof intact. I told them how my master’s anvil, which had been in the western shed under the burning beam, had been recovered intact the next morning when the embers cooled, because an anvil of that quality is not destroyed by a single night’s fire, although it had had a black bloom upon its face for a year afterward that had taken months of patient working to remove. I told them how, when my master returned three days later from his guild meeting and found his western shed gone and his children alive and his eastern shed standing and his apprentices smoke-blackened but whole, he had set down his traveling bag in the middle of the forge yard and had stood looking at the four of us for perhaps a full minute without saying anything, and then he had walked over to me, and he had put his great rough hand upon my shoulder, and he had said, in the slow voice of an old smith whose voice was not given to small fancies, he had said, lad, the shed will be rebuilt. The children are alive. You have done your work. Now you will go to your bed for two days, and you will not come out of it, and you will be a smith of this forge for the rest of your apprenticeship and you will be a journeyman of this forge after that and you will be, if you wish it, the master of this forge after me, because I have seen now that you are. And then he had walked past me, and he had gone into the small house behind the forge, and he had not come out for perhaps an hour, and when he had come out his eyes had been red, but he had not spoken of why, and I had not asked.
I told them how I had not become the master of his forge, because my master had lived for another twenty-two years after that night, and by the time he died I had set up my own forge at the Three-Stones Crossroads where I now lived, and where I had been working for the eleven years before the tinker came with the cracked axle that brought me to this corridor. I told them, friend, that the night of the great fire had been the worst night of my working life, and the night had also been, in a small way that I had not been able to put into words for a long time afterward, the night that had given me the rest of my working life, because the night had taught me what a smith was for, which was for the gathering of a company in the small honest work of the world and for the keeping of the company through the worst hours that the world had to offer, and the work of the keeping was the small ordinary work of binding cuts and rivet ing bracers and feeding stale oatcakes to four other persons in a small alcove in a place that the maps named with a softer word than it deserved, and the small ordinary work was the great work, friend, and there was no other great work that I had ever met, in thirty years since the night of the great fire, that I would have traded for it.
I finished the story. I did not realize, until the finishing, that I had been speaking for perhaps a quarter of an hour. The alcove had gone very quiet during the telling, and the quiet was the small attentive quiet of four people who had been listening properly, and the quiet held for a moment after the finishing before Maelis said, in her small returning voice, oh, petal. Oh, petal. I am going to need to think about that for some time, but I think I am going to thank you for it now, in advance of the thinking, because the thinking will be slow and the thanking is ready. And Brother Caius said, in his slow gentle voice, master Goradd, I have heard a great many stories in my life, by the requirement of my work, and yours is one of the better ones, and I will hold it. And Elandor said, in the clipped formal voice that now had the softness in it, master Goradd, you and I are perhaps in the same trade after all, although the trade has different names in our different orders. I had not understood that before this hour. I understand it now. Thank you for the telling. And Vren did not say anything for some time, and then Vren said, in the flat deliberate voice that had no contractions in it, Vren said, smith. The smallest child in your story. The one your master’s wife carried out herself. What became of that child.
I told her. I told her that the smallest child had grown up and had become a midwife in a town to the south of the Three-Stones Crossroads, and that she had three children of her own now, and that I had been at the birth of each of them as the family smith who was asked to forge the small iron blessing-charm that her order put under the bed of each newborn for the first three months of its life, and that I had forged the three charms with the most particular care of any forging of my career, and that the smallest of those grandchildren of the master’s wife was named, by an arrangement that the family had asked me about and that I had given a small embarrassed permission for, the smallest grandchild was named Goradd, and that the boy was now four years old and was, the last time I had seen him, the small image of his great-grandmother, who had been the woman who had carried out the smallest child on the night of the great fire, and that I had not, until Vren’s question, thought about that line of small chosen kinship in a long time, and that I was grateful for the question, because the question had given the line back to me at an hour when I had not known I would want it back.
Vren did not answer. Vren only nodded once, the smallest of nods, the same nod Vren had given me at the end of the stitching of her shoulder, and the nod was the only answer the question required, and I will tell you, friend, that the small honest line between Vren and me, which had been begun on the first night at the small fire when Vren had slid the twin blade across the floor of the chamber to me for the small attention of the pin, had now extended by some small invisible measure further, and that the extending of it was, in the small private bookkeeping of my heart, one of the better extendings of my recent life.
The lantern at Brother Caius’s feet burned on. The corridor outside the alcove was quiet, and would remain quiet, I now believed, for several more hours. Maelis fell asleep, properly asleep, perhaps ten minutes after the end of the story, with the small slow breathing of a woman who had at last set down the cleverness for a longer interval. Brother Caius fell asleep against his wall with his hands folded on his lap and his old face composed. Elandor permitted himself a half-sleep against his own wall, which was the only sleep his order allowed him in such places, with the right hand still at the hip in the old habit but the body letting the half-sleep do its work. Vren did not sleep, because Vren never slept in any way that I had ever observed, but Vren let the pale gold eyes close at intervals for the duration of perhaps a minute each, which was as close to rest as Vren came, and the intervals were longer than they had been any night so far on the descent, and I marked the lengthening with the small private satisfaction of a smith who had been keeping count.
I sat against my wall with my bound ribs and my tired hands, and I leaned my head against the cold stone, and I did not sleep, because I had been the smith of the alcove and the smith of the alcove did not sleep until the alcove was quiet enough to surrender the watch, and the alcove was not quite quiet enough yet, but it was close, and in the small intervals when I let my eyes close, I thought of the night of the great fire, and I thought of my master’s hand upon my shoulder in the forge yard, and I thought of the four people sleeping or half-sleeping or watching the corridor in the alcove around me, and I thought, friend, that I had been brought a long way down into the persuaded stone of a place that did not want any of us, and that I had been brought down with four other persons whom I had not known a fortnight ago, and that the four of them were, by some small invisible measure that I would not have been able to describe to my wife Tessa even if I had had a piece of paper and an evening and a fire to write the letter by, the four persons in the world I would most have wanted at my back at that hour, and that the wanting was the small great gift of the alcove and the small great gift of the entire descent, and that the gift had been earned by the small ordinary work of the last half hour and by the stories told in it, and that the small ordinary work was the great work, friend, and that there was no other great work I had ever met that I would have traded for it, and I closed my eyes properly at last, and I slept, the slow honest sleep of a smith who had been good at his work that evening, and the alcove kept us, and the corridor stayed quiet, and the lantern burned on.
Segment Fifteen: The Question of the Stain
We slept in the alcove the length of a long night by the body’s reckoning though no clock could have told us so. I did not sleep in any sense the others would have called it but I let the eyes close at intervals and I let the body do the small economical thing it does in such intervals which is to rest without surrendering. The smith snored. The brother breathed slow. The woman with the satchel breathed slower still. The hero did the half-sleep his order permitted him which is not sleep but is closer to it than the watching is to either. The lantern at the brother’s feet burned in its honest small yellow. The corridor outside the alcove gave back nothing.
In the small first hour of waking I rose. I rose without disturbing them. I went to the entrance of the alcove and I stood there in the place the smith and the hero had each in turn held during the night and I let the soft eye go past the threshold and down the corridor in the direction we had come from. The corridor was as we had left it. The dead lay where they had fallen. The fluid that had come out of them when the blades had taken them lay in dark pools beneath each body and along the floor at the angles the pieces had rolled to. The pools had not been moved. They had not been touched. The Gloomspiders had not returned in the dark of the night for their dead. This was a thing I noted and a thing I held.
I will tell you what I had been turning over in the back of my head since the moment of the second creature in the corridor. I had been turning over the way the bodies had come apart. A body of a creature of the size of those creatures comes apart in a particular way when a blade has taken it. There is a way that flesh parts. There is a way that the inside of a body shows when the outside has been opened. I had cut a great many things in my working life and I had cut perhaps a hundred living creatures of various kinds and I had a working knowledge of how the cuts looked at the moment they were made. The cuts on the Gloomspiders had not looked the way the cuts on a creature looked. The flesh inside the cut had not been flesh in the way flesh is flesh. The fluid that had come from the cut had not been blood in the way blood is blood. I had marked these things in the corridor and I had not had time to consider them and I had filed them where I file such things and now in the small first hour of waking I was going to consider them.
I went down the corridor to the nearest body. It was the body of the fifth creature that had come at the woman with the satchel and that the hero had taken in a single hard cut that had separated the forequarters entirely. The forequarters lay perhaps five paces from the body. I went to the body first. I knelt beside it. I drew one of the twin blades from the sheath at the small of my back. I used the tip of the blade as a probe. I did not touch the body with my hand. I have a rule about touching bodies of an unknown kind with the hand and I have kept the rule for many years and I had no reason to abandon it now.
The body did not stir under the probe. The body was as bodies are when they have been some hours dead which is to say still. The fluid that had come from the cut was the fluid I wished to examine. The fluid had pooled along the floor of the corridor in a shape that was not quite the shape that blood would have pooled in. Blood pools in a particular way. Blood has surface tension and blood has a particular reluctance to spread and blood drying at the edges acquires a particular color that this fluid did not acquire. The fluid pooled at the body had spread further than blood spreads and had spread in a more even thinness than blood spreads and had not dried at the edges. The edges were still wet. The body had been dead for what I estimated at six to eight hours by the time I was kneeling beside it. The fluid should have dried at the edges. The fluid had not.
I put the tip of the blade into the pool. The blade went into the fluid in the way a blade goes into a slow viscous liquid that has not quite the density of water but has more than the density of oil. I drew the blade up. The fluid came up with the blade in a long slow thread that did not break at any height I tested. I lifted the blade to the height of my shoulder. The thread did not break. I lifted it to the height of my head. The thread did not break. The thread connected the tip of the blade to the pool on the floor in a slow continuous filament that did not have the behavior of any blood I had ever drawn and did not have the behavior of any other fluid I had ever drawn from anything else either.
I let the blade down slowly. The thread reabsorbed into the pool. The pool did not show any further alteration. I put the tip of the blade into the cut along the body itself. The cut was clean and dry along its upper edge but along the lower edge the same slow viscous fluid was still slowly seeping. The seeping was not the seeping of post-mortem drainage. Post-mortem drainage stops within the first hour. This was the seventh hour past the cut by my count. The body was still producing the fluid. The body was producing it in the slow even way that suggested the body was not entirely a body in the sense that bodies stop producing fluid when they die.
I considered this.
I sheathed the blade. I rose. I went back up the corridor to the alcove. I came back inside the threshold of the alcove. The four of them were still where they had been when I had risen except that the smith was now awake and was sitting up against his wall with his back against the stone and the pale eyes of a man who had been awake for perhaps a quarter hour but had not moved because he had not wished to disturb the others. He looked at me as I came in. He did not speak. I gave him the small nod that meant wait. He gave the small nod back. I went to the lantern at the brother’s feet. I picked the lantern up. I went back out of the alcove with it. I did not explain.
The smith rose. He rose in the slow careful way of a man whose ribs were bound and whose body would not be hurried in the rising. I had marked the binding the night before when he had done it and I had marked also that he had not let any of the others see him do it except the hero who had seen it last. The smith came across the alcove. He took up his hammer from the floor beside him. He came out of the alcove behind me into the corridor. He did not ask where I was going. He came because he had decided to come. I did not stop him. The smith would not be useful in what I was about to do but the smith would not be in the way either and the smith’s presence at the body was its own argument that I had not gone out alone into the corridor in the small first hour of waking which was an argument the company would later be grateful for.
We went down the corridor together. We came to the body. I knelt again. The smith stood at perhaps two paces and held the lantern out at arm’s length so that its light fell upon the body and the pool. He did not speak. He had been a smith for thirty years and he understood what watching meant.
I will tell you what I did next because the doing of it was the part of the morning that produced the answer I had come for. I took a small piece of clean linen from the pouch at my belt. I have carried small pieces of clean linen for many years. I had used such pieces for many purposes. I took the piece and I folded it once and I lowered it slowly to the surface of the pool. I let it rest on the surface for the count of three. I drew it up.
The linen had taken up some of the fluid. The fluid in the linen was the same dark color it had been in the pool. The color was a color I want to be exact about. Blood is red. Blood when it has been some hours out of a body is brown. Old blood is black. This fluid was not red. This fluid was not brown. This fluid was a color I do not have a clean word for and the closest word I have for it is the color of the inside of a pupil. It was the color of looking down a long well at midnight. It was a black that did not reflect the lantern’s light. The light fell on it and did not come back. A surface that does not return the light that falls upon it is not a surface that is behaving according to the rules of surfaces. I had not seen a fluid that did this before. I considered this.
I drew the smell of the linen. I did not put the linen to my face. I held it at arm’s length and I let the air move across the linen toward me and I drew the air. The smell was not the smell of blood. Blood has a smell. Blood smells of iron and salt and the small organic decay that begins as soon as blood is out of a body. This had no such smell. It had a smell. I will not pretend it had no smell. The smell was a smell I want to be exact about because the smell was the part of the morning that gave me my answer.
The smell was the smell of the cellars of an old building that has been closed for a long time but has not been a building for a long time. The smell was the smell of dust that has been sitting in a place where the air does not move. The smell was a dry old smell and not the smell of anything organic. The smell was the smell of a thing that had not been alive in the sense that things are alive. The smell was not the smell of a creature.
I considered this for the count of perhaps thirty.
The smith had not moved at his two paces. He held the lantern steady. He watched me draw the smell. He did not ask. The smith had a kind of patience that I had not expected from him at the beginning of this descent and that I had come to depend on by the morning of the alcove.
I will tell you what I did next. I took the piece of linen and I folded it and I put it back in the pouch at my belt. I drew the blade again. I put the tip of the blade into the cut along the body and I drew the blade slowly along the inside of the cut at the depth of perhaps half an inch. The flesh under the blade did not behave as flesh behaves. There is a way that flesh resists a blade. The resistance is the small steady push of a thing that does not wish to be cut. This resisted but the resistance was not the resistance of flesh. The resistance was the resistance of something that had the form of flesh but did not have the substance of it. The blade went through the resistance and met something behind it that was harder than flesh and softer than bone and was not either. I withdrew the blade. The blade had not been damaged. The blade came out clean except for the slow filament of the fluid which dripped back into the cut. I sheathed the blade.
I considered this also.
I sat back on my heels. I did not rise. I let the consideration go through. I let the various pieces of the morning lay themselves out in the order they wished to lay themselves out. The body that had been dead some hours but was still seeping. The fluid that was not blood. The color that did not return the light. The smell that was the smell of an old closed cellar and not of a creature. The resistance under the blade that was not flesh.
I will tell you what these things meant when I had let them lay themselves out. They meant that the Gloomspiders were not creatures in the sense the word creature is used. They had the form of creatures. They moved in the ways that creatures move. They had the small administrative behavior that creatures have when they are patrolling a corridor. They had the cadences that the woman with the satchel had translated along the strand which were the cadences of speech. But they were not creatures. They were forms. They were shapes that had been given the appearance of creatures and the behavior of creatures and the speech of creatures and the body of creatures but they had not been given the inside of creatures. The inside was a different substance and the substance was not living substance and the substance was not dying substance. The substance was older than either.
I had a word in my head for this. I will not pretend I did not have the word. I had the word because I had read once a long time ago in a book that should not have been in the place I had read it a description of certain things that have appearance without substance. The word in the book had been chaff. The author of the book had used the word in the way of an old farmer who knows what chaff is and is using it as a metaphor for things that look like grain but are not grain. The author had meant that there are kinds of beings in the world that have the form of beings but not the substance. They are the chaff of being. They have been winnowed off something else. The something else is what gave them their form and the something else is somewhere that the chaff is not. The chaff has been thrown off in the doing of whatever the something else does. The chaff carries on in the appearance of being a thing for some time after the throwing off but it is not a thing. It is the leavings of a thing.
I considered this also. I considered it for some time. I considered what the something else would have to be that would throw off chaff in the form of these creatures. I considered what the something else would have to be that would throw off chaff that could move and speak and patrol and obey. I considered the cadence of devotion the woman with the satchel had translated. I considered the she that they had been speaking of.
I will not say what I concluded because I had not yet concluded it. I had the word chaff. I had the suspicion of the something else. I did not yet have the concluding. The concluding would take more than a morning. But I had enough now to bring back to the alcove and to tell the others. The telling was the next work.
I rose. The smith had not moved. He had watched the whole of the working. He had not asked. I turned to him at last.
I said, smith. Walk back with me. I have a thing to say to all of you in the alcove.
He said, well now, Vren. I will walk back with you. I will tell you that I do not entirely like the look on your face but I have not entirely liked the look on your face most mornings of this descent so I will not hold it against you.
I almost smiled at that. I did not. I have not smiled often in my life and I had given one smile to the hero the previous afternoon when he had come up the corridor through the wave to find me and I had decided that one smile in a week was enough for the kind of company I was keeping. I gave the smith the small nod instead. He returned it. We walked back up the corridor together. The smith made the soft regular sound his boots made on the stone and his hammer made in its loop at his belt. I made no sound. We came back to the alcove.
The others were waking. The brother was sitting up against his wall with his old hands folded on his lap and his eyes upon the lantern in the smith’s hand which had come back into the alcove with us. The woman with the satchel was sitting up on her bundle with her gloved hands on her knees. The hero was at his post at the entrance which he had taken from me when I had gone out the first time and to which he had returned when I had not come back within five minutes. He stepped aside for me as I came in. I took the post back from him with the small nod and he returned the nod and went to the wall opposite the smith and sat down. The five of us were now in the alcove. The four of them were awake. The lantern was at the smith’s feet because he had set it down upon entering.
I came forward into the center of the alcove. I do not generally come forward into the center of a room. I prefer the edges. I came forward this time because what I was going to say needed to be said from the center and not from the edge and I had decided this on the walk back. I sat down upon the floor in the small space between them. I drew the cloak around me. I placed my hands upon my knees.
I said, in the flat deliberate voice that had no contractions in it, I said, listen.
The four of them listened. The hero turned his head fully toward me. The brother lifted his old eyes from the lantern to my face. The woman with the satchel set her hands flat on her knees in the small attentive posture I had come to know was her listening posture. The smith leaned back against his wall and rested his hands upon his thighs.
I said, I have been examining the bodies in the corridor. I went out at first waking and I worked at the bodies and the smith came after me and he watched at two paces. I have done what work I could do in the first hour of waking and I have come back with what I think I know. I want to tell you what I think I know. I will tell you in the order I learned it.
I told them. I told them about the fluid that did not pool the way blood pools. I told them about the color that did not return the lantern’s light. I told them about the body that was still seeping at the seventh hour past the cut. I told them about the smell that was the smell of a closed cellar and not the smell of a creature. I told them about the resistance under the blade that was not the resistance of flesh and not the resistance of bone and was the resistance of something I did not have a word for. I told them what I had concluded which was that the Gloomspiders are not creatures in the sense the word creature is used. They are forms. They are shapes that have been given the appearance of creatures and the behavior of creatures but not the substance. They are, in the word of an old book I had read once, chaff. The author of the book had meant by chaff a thing that has been winnowed off something else in the doing of whatever the something else does and that carries on in the appearance of being a thing for some time after the throwing off but is not a thing. It is the leavings of a thing.
I stopped. I had given them the words. I let the words sit between us in the alcove. I did not elaborate. I do not elaborate when the elaboration is not yet earned.
There was a silence in the alcove of perhaps the count of twenty. The four of them absorbed what I had said in the four ways they absorbed such things which were their four separate ways and which I will set down now in the order I observed them.
The brother absorbed it first. His old face did the slow careful thing it did when a piece of information he had not previously had was being incorporated into a larger framework he had already built. He did not look surprised. I want to be exact about this. The brother did not look surprised. The brother looked as a man looks who has heard, at last, the technical confirmation of a thing he had already suspected on other grounds. The brother said, in his slow gentle voice, daughter, you have given a name to a thing I have been feeling about this place for two days but have not been able to put my own words to. The cadence of devotion that Maelis translated along the strand. The way the patrol behaved when it found us. The lack of any sound in the corridors when our boots passed. These had not been the qualities of creatures. I had not said so to any of you because I had not been certain. I am more certain now. Thank you for the certainty. He paused. He said, in the smaller voice he used for difficult things, he said, this also bears upon what I told you in the alcove yesterday afternoon. I do not wish to elaborate before the company. I think you understand. He looked at me. I gave him the small nod. He returned the small nod. He had understood and I had understood and the small old confession of the previous afternoon was now sitting in the new frame the morning had given it and the brother was making the small adjustments that his soul required. I let him make them. I went on watching the others.
The woman with the satchel absorbed it second. Her face did a thing I had not previously seen on it which was that the face went very still and the small bright play of intelligence that was its usual register went down beneath the surface and did its work there where the others could not see it. She did not speak for some time. She let her hands stay flat on her knees and she let her eyes go past me to a point in the middle distance and she let the thinking do its slow heavy work. Then she said, in the voice that was not her usual bright voice but was the smaller voice she used when she had a precise thing to say, she said, oh, petal. Petal. Petal. I want to be honest with all of you that I am a little annoyed at myself for not having caught this sooner. The cadence along the strand had a quality to it I had not been able to name. I want to name it now. The cadence was the cadence of a set of voices that all derived from a single source. They were not three separate voices speaking to one another the way three friends speak to one another. They were three voices that were each, in their own way, partial reflections of one voice. The conversation between them was not actually a conversation. It was a single thinking process distributed across three points. The thinking process was the she. The voices were not the speakers of the cadence. The voices were the medium through which the she was thinking. They are not creatures, you are correct, Vren. They are something more like the parts of a sentence that the she is in the middle of saying. They are the words being spoken by the she. And we have been cutting the words.
She stopped. She put her gloved hand to her mouth in the small involuntary way of a person who had just understood something she did not wish to have understood. The smith reached over with his great rough hand and laid it upon her gloved hand and gave it one small squeeze. She let him. She let the hand stay on hers for perhaps the count of three. Then she lowered her own hand and the smith withdrew his and she said, in the smaller voice still, she said, this changes the count. I have been thinking of the Gloomspiders we have killed as casualties on the way to the boss, in the small unworthy way one thinks about such things on a long descent. I will need to stop thinking of them that way. They are not casualties. They are syllables. Every one we have killed, the she has felt go.
The smith absorbed it third. His face did the slow thing it did when he was given a piece of bad news he did not entirely understand but had decided to receive at face value because the people delivering the news were people he trusted. He looked at me, and he looked at the woman with the satchel, and he looked back at me, and he said, in the slow voice, he said, well now. Well now. I am a smith and I am out of my depth in the technical particulars of what you and Maelis have just said. But I will tell you what I take from it as a smith. I take this. When a smith makes a thing he makes it with his hands and his hammer and his fire and his stock but he also makes it with his attention. The attention is the part of a making that you can only see if you have made a thing yourself, and a stranger looking at the finished thing will only see the iron and not the attention, but the attention is in the iron and it can be felt if you know how to feel for it. He paused. He said, what you are telling me, lass, is that these creatures are the attention of the she. They are her attention given a shape so that the shape can be sent down a corridor on her behalf. When we have killed one, we have not killed a creature. We have, in a way I do not entirely have the words for, broken the small piece of her attention that the creature was carrying. The she has had to draw the attention back. The attention has returned to her, less the small portion that died in the breaking. He looked at me. He said, lass, am I close.
I said, smith, you are very close. The small portion that died in the breaking is the part I had not yet thought through. I think you have just thought it through for me. The smith inclined his head one fraction. He had been told, by his own working out, that he had contributed to the thinking and he had received the telling without comment which was, for the smith, the highest acknowledgment he gave or accepted.
The hero absorbed it last. He had not moved during the others’ absorbings. He had sat with his back against the wall and his right hand on his hip in the old habit and his eyes on me steadily. When the smith had finished speaking the hero drew in a long breath and let it out and he said, in the clipped formal voice that had the new softness in it that I had marked the previous evening, he said, Vren. I have a question. I will ask it carefully. He paused. He said, when I killed the great Gloomspider in the chamber on the first day, I felt a thing as the blade went through it that I have not felt going through any living creature in nineteen years of my work. I felt the thing as a kind of resistance that gave way more easily than flesh and bone should give way. I had marked the feeling at the time and I had not had words for it and I had set it aside because the next creature had been coming at me. The feeling has been at the back of my head since. The feeling matches what you have just described.
He stopped. He drew another breath. He said, my question is this. If these creatures are not creatures, but are forms of the she’s attention, and if killing them is breaking small portions of her attention, then the cutting of them is not the killing of independent enemies in the way I have understood killing in my work for nineteen years. The cutting of them is something else. It is closer to, perhaps, the smashing of an instrument. It is the work of a man who breaks something so that the player of the instrument can no longer use it. I want to know whether you think the work is still permissible. I want to know whether what I have been doing in this descent is the work my order trained me for or whether it is a different work that I have not yet been authorized for. I am not asking for your absolution. I am asking for your professional judgment as one who has thought longer about this kind of distinction than I have.
The alcove was very quiet for a moment. I want to tell you, friend, that the hero’s question was a question I had not expected him to ask and that the asking of it raised him in my private estimate by some considerable measure, because the question was the question of a man who had been doing very hard work very well in the corridor the day before and was now, in the comparative safety of the alcove, asking whether the work had been the right work, and that asking was the question of a man whose order had given him better training than I had previously credited it with, and that I had been wrong to underestimate his order in the small first day at the gate and would not underestimate it again.
I said, hero. I will give you the answer I have. The answer I have may not be the answer you wish to hear. He nodded once. I went on.
I said, in the work I have done in my own life, I have killed things and I have broken things and I have once or twice ended things that I did not know whether to call killing or breaking. The distinction is the distinction you are asking about. I have my own private rule about it. The rule is that if the thing in front of me is acting against me with what I judge to be its own intention, I treat the work as killing and I do it as cleanly as I can. If the thing in front of me is acting against me with what I judge to be another’s intention, I treat the work as breaking, and I do it as carefully as I can, with the understanding that the breaking is a partial measure and that the real work is still ahead of me. The Gloomspiders, by what I have learned this morning and by what Maelis has just added, are the second kind. The cutting of them is breaking and not killing. The breaking is permissible because the breaking weakens the she. It is not, however, the work for which your order trained you. The work for which your order trained you is the work that comes after the breaking, in the room where she is. That work, when we come to it, will be killing. It will be the only killing this descent has asked of you. The work you have done so far has been the small necessary work of clearing the syllables out of the way. You have done it well. You have done it cleanly. You have not been wrong to do it. But you have not yet done the work your order trained you for. The work your order trained you for is below us. I judge that you will do it when we come to it and that the doing will be the doing the order asked of you, and I would not have walked with you these four days if I judged otherwise.
I stopped. The hero looked at me for the count of perhaps five. His face did the small careful thing it did when he was absorbing a piece of information that he had needed and had not been certain he would be given. He said, in a voice that was quieter than the clipped formal voice and quieter than the new soft voice and was a third voice I had not heard from him yet, he said, Vren. That is the answer I needed. I thank you for it. The order would thank you for it also if the order knew of this conversation. They will not know of it. But I will know that I have been told. He paused. He said, the work I have to do is below us. I understand. I will save myself for it. The cutting I do between here and there is the small breaking and not the great killing, and I will do it accordingly.
He set his back against the wall. He did not say anything further for some moments. I noted that the new soft voice and the clipped formal voice and the quieter third voice were all available to him and that he had chosen carefully which one to use for which thing in the conversation and the choosing was the small careful work of a man of more education than he had previously displayed, and I made a private note in myself that the hero of the pale star was a more complicated person than the hero he had been in the corridor and that the more complicated person was perhaps the one who would be useful in the room below, and not only the one with the blade, and I filed the note where I file such notes.
There was a small further silence in the alcove. The four of them had each absorbed what I had brought back from the body in their four ways and the absorbings had been completed and the absorbings had each, in their separate ways, moved the company by some small invisible measure further into the work the descent required. I sat in the center of the alcove and I let the small silence hold for a moment and then I rose.
I said, we go on in a quarter hour. Eat now. Drink. The corridor outside has been quiet for the night which I take to mean that the she has spent her morning thinking about us. She has, by what we have just worked out, had to think with fewer syllables than she did yesterday. That is to our advantage. We do not know how long the advantage will hold. We use the quarter hour and then we go on.
The four of them did not argue. The brother began to draw out the small bread he had been keeping. The woman with the satchel reached into her bundle for something. The smith took out his small bag of oatcakes again and laughed dryly at the laughing and passed them around. The hero ate as he had eaten the day before, at the speed of a man giving the eating his attention but no more attention than the eating required.
I ate. I do not eat often. I ate this morning. I ate the small piece of bread the brother passed me and I ate the small oatcake the smith passed me and I drank a small swallow of water from the skin the woman with the satchel passed me, and the eating and the drinking were small acts that I had not been doing in any company for many years, and the doing of them in this company, in the alcove that smelled faintly of the salve from the smith’s wife’s jar and the small sleep of the brother and the small warm light of the lantern, was a thing I noted and a thing I did not say. The four of them did not require me to say it. The four of them were, I had begun to understand, the kind of company that did not require speech for the things that mattered.
When the quarter hour had passed we rose. We rose in the order we had rested in. The woman with the satchel rose first because she was the most rested. The smith rose second with the small careful pushing-against-the-wall that his ribs required of him. The brother rose third with the staff in both hands to steady the rising. The hero rose fourth. I had not sat back down after my announcement so I did not need to rise. The five of us formed up at the entrance of the alcove. I took the point. The hero took the second place. The brother took the third. The woman with the satchel took the fourth. The smith took the rear. The order had set itself again as it had set itself on the first day and the setting was good.
I stood at the threshold of the alcove and I looked down the corridor. The corridor was still quiet. The bodies still lay where they had fallen. The dark pools were still on the floor. I considered them one last time. They were the syllables of the she that we had broken yesterday. She had had to draw her attention back, less the small portions that had died in the breaking. She had spent the night thinking about us with what remained. The remaining had been substantial. The she had a great deal of attention to begin with. The breaking we had done had cost her, but the cost had not been crippling. The cost would be crippling when we had broken enough more. That breaking was below us, and it was further down than I had calculated yesterday, and the corridors between here and there would be full of further syllables that she would send up against us, and each syllable would have to be broken, and the breaking would have to be done in the manner of the hero of the pale star which was the manner he had clarified for himself in the alcove just now, which was cleanly and carefully and with the understanding that the great killing was below and not here.
I stepped across the threshold of the alcove into the corridor. The lantern in the brother’s hand fell on the corridor and on me and on the line of the four behind me, and the corridor received us, and we went on, and the dead lay behind us, and the pools that did not return the light lay behind us, and the question of the stain had been answered, and the answer had given us, for the small first time in this descent, the proper shape of the enemy we were going against, and the proper shape was the shape of one thing and not many, and the one thing was below us, and was waking, and we walked toward it down the warming corridor in the order we had set, and the held breath in my small bones did not slacken, and the body went on with the work, and the company went on with me, and that was sufficient for the morning.
Segment Sixteen: The Map That Drew Itself
There is a thing that happens to scholars, love, and I have been a scholar of small irregular kinds for long enough now that I consider myself something of an authority on this also, the sort of authority that universities continue to be uninterested in, possibly because the universities have begun to suspect, correctly, that I would not be a useful guest at any of their faculty dinners. The thing that happens to scholars is that we develop, over the years, the small private conviction that the things we are scholars of are not, in any meaningful sense, paying attention to us. We are paying attention to them. We are writing them down. We are drawing little diagrams of them in the backs of notebooks that other scholars will, in fifty years, find embarrassing but which we will at the time consider essential to the work. We are circling around them with our small instruments and our small theories and our small careful taxonomies. And the things, in their indifference, are simply being themselves, and being themselves with the magnificent obliviousness of a thing that has never once paused in its long existence to consider whether it had an audience.
This conviction is, as I have learned over the years and was about to learn again in a corridor that nobody had built and that nobody therefore had to take responsibility for, exactly as reliable as one’s good opinion of one’s own posture, which is to say that it is reliable until somebody points out, in a tone of innocent curiosity, that one is in fact slumping rather dreadfully and has been slumping for some hours, and then one is forced to admit that one has not been seen by oneself for quite some time and one’s posture has, in the absence of any internal supervision, gone considerably to seed. The conviction that the things one studies are not paying attention is, in other words, a small comfortable assumption that one carries around because one has not had it specifically disproved, and the specific disproving of it, when it comes, is one of the more striking experiences a scholar of small irregular kinds will ever have, and I had it that morning, friend, I had it that morning in the warm corridor below the alcove, and I am going to tell you about it now because the telling is, as the smith would say in his slow Dickensian voice, what the morning requires.
We had been walking, by my reckoning, perhaps three hours from the alcove since we had set out after Vren’s small and very upsetting morning lecture on the substance of the Gloomspiders, which I had been thinking about steadily ever since and had not yet finished processing, and which I want to say at the outset I was going to need at least another day to properly digest, although the day was not, as it turned out, going to be available. The corridor we were walking down was a continuation of the warm corridor we had been ambushed in, in the sense that the stone was the same persuaded stone and the walls had the same lack of seams and the floor had the same dry temperature, but the corridor was also not entirely the same, because the corridor had widened, by very small degrees over the three hours, to the width of perhaps four people walking abreast, and the height had risen, by similar small degrees, to perhaps the height of three tall men standing on each other’s shoulders, which was a height that had begun, in the slow accumulating way of such things, to feel less like a corridor and more like an entry hall to something one would rather not enter. The lantern in Brother Caius’s hand at the third place in our line cast a small honest yellow upon the floor and the lower walls and ran out into the dark before it reached either the ceiling or the further end of the corridor, and the running-out of the lantern’s light against the dark was a thing one got used to in this place, the way one got used to other small unsettling regularities of the descent.
I had been making my marks, friend. I had been making my marks the whole way down from the alcove. I want to tell you about the marks because the marks were the central instrument of what happened that morning, and the instrument needs to be understood before the event makes sense.
The Chalkbone Marker, which was given to me by an old woman in a small market town nearly nine years ago, and which I have written about in some considerable detail in the third notebook in my bundle, but which I will summarize here for the sake of the telling, is a small piece of carved chalk-like substance, about the length of my middle finger and about the thickness of my thumb, in a pale grayish white color that the old woman who sold it to me said was the proper color of the proper Chalkbone although I have never been entirely sure she was not making the proper-ness up to justify the price. The Chalkbone has the small ordinary property that any chalk has, which is that it makes a mark on a rough surface when one drags it across the surface, and the Chalkbone also has the small extraordinary property that the marks it makes glow faintly to my eye and to my eye alone for the duration of one full day after the making, and that the marks resist being smudged by, among other things, the spider-silk of magical webbing and certain forms of magical erasure that other markers do not resist, and that the marker never runs out of chalk material, no matter how many marks I make, which is a small mercy I have been grateful for many times across nine years of cellars and corridors and the small backs of books I should not have been writing in.
I had been making marks, then, the whole way down from the alcove, in the small careful working language that I had developed for myself across nine years of using the Chalkbone, which was a language that consisted of a small set of symbols I had invented partly out of older scholarly conventions and partly out of my own private inventions, and which I had used in cellars and corridors and on the backs of books from one end of the eastern river country to the other. The symbols I had been using in this corridor were the standard ones I used in any descending corridor of unknown territory. There was a small left-arrow symbol at each turning of the corridor, marked on the wall about chest-high, indicating which way we had come and which way to go back. There was a small dotted circle at each junction or alcove indicating a place where the party had stopped or might want to stop again. There was a small careful X at each point where I had marked something specifically worth noting, like the fleck of silk Vren had spotted on the first morning, or the not-stone place in the ceiling, or, more recently, the place where the second creature in the corridor had come at me and Elandor had cut it in half before it could reach me, which place I had marked with rather more enthusiasm than my usual practice because the place had been the place where I had nearly died and the marking of it had been, by my own small unwilling admission, partly therapeutic.
There were, in addition to these standard marks, a set of small private marks that I made for myself alone, which were the marks of a scholar making notes for further consideration at a later hour, and which I will not describe in detail here because the describing would be tedious, but which included things like small annotations on the temperature of the air at particular points, and small annotations on the density of webbing at particular intersections, and small annotations on the apparent age of the persuaded stone at particular places, which I had been quietly investigating by the small evidence of weathering at the upper corners of the walls. These small private marks were marks I had been making in cellars for years, and they were the marks that no one but me had ever paid the slightest attention to, and they were the marks I had been making in this corridor with the same unselfconscious freedom I had been making them in the cellar of the Bent Reed three weeks ago and that nobody had bothered me about.
I had not, until that morning, looked back at any of my marks once I had made them.
I want to explain why I had not, because the why is part of the explanation of why the morning was so unsettling. I had not looked back at my marks because the marks were for use on the return journey. The marks were the breadcrumbs. The marks were how we were going to walk back out of this place if we walked back out of it, and the whole point of the marks was that they were going to be there when we needed them and not before. I had been making them and walking on. I had been making them in the small confident way of a scholar who knew her instrument and trusted her instrument and was not in the habit of double-checking the instrument’s work because the instrument had not, in nine years, ever required double-checking.
That morning, friend, I happened to look back.
I want to be exact about why I looked back, because the why was small and stupid and I have been embarrassed about it ever since, and I am going to tell you anyway because honesty in such matters is the only thing that distinguishes a real scholar from a fraud. I looked back because I dropped my chalk.
I had not, in nine years, ever dropped the Chalkbone Marker. The marker is a small comfortable object that fits in the hand the way a small comfortable object should fit, and the marker has, by my count, never actually slipped out of my fingers in nine years of use, even in some quite damp cellars and even on the deck of a ship at sea in a small piece of weather that I would rather not describe in detail. That morning, walking in the fourth position of our line, I dropped the marker. I dropped it because my glove caught very slightly on the lining of my satchel as I was reaching to put the marker back, and the catching jerked my hand the smallest fraction, and the marker slipped, and the marker fell, and the marker made the small clear ringing sound of a piece of carved chalk-like substance hitting persuaded stone, which was a sound that the corridor, as usual, did not return.
I stopped. The company stopped. Vren at the point did the small full-body turn that meant she had heard a sound she had not expected and was registering it. Elandor’s hand went to his hip. Brother Caius lifted the lantern. Goradd at the rear made the half-step-and-look-back gesture I had become very fond of. I said, very quickly, oh, petals, sorry, sorry, I dropped my chalk, only my chalk, do not draw any blades on my account, and I knelt down to retrieve the marker, and as I knelt my eye, in the small natural way of an eye that has been pointed at the floor, went past the mark I had made on the wall perhaps three paces back, which had been the most recent mark I had made before the dropping, and the mark was a small left-arrow at the chest-high level on the right-hand wall, and the mark was, oh, friend, the mark was not the mark I had drawn.
I picked up the marker. I rose slowly. I did not say anything to the company. I said, in the easy voice I had been practicing the use of since the corridor of the strand two days ago, I said, petals, on we go, sorry for the small delay, and the company on Vren’s small nod resumed its forward motion, and I, in the fourth position, fell back into step, and as I fell back into step I let my eye drift, in the small unobtrusive way of an eye drifting, back along the right-hand wall behind me to where the small left-arrow mark had been.
The mark was a small left-arrow. It was at chest-high. It was on the right-hand wall. It was, in every superficial respect, the mark I had made. It was glowing faintly to my eye in the way the Chalkbone’s marks glow faintly to my eye and to my eye alone. The mark was, in any sense that any other observer would have been able to detect, the mark I had drawn.
The mark, however, was not the mark I had drawn.
I want to tell you how I knew. The knowing is the part of the morning that I will spend the rest of my life being mildly proud of and considerably unsettled by in approximately equal measure. I knew because of the angle. The Chalkbone Marker, when held in my right hand, draws marks at a particular small angle of departure from vertical, the angle that my own right wrist holds the marker at when I am drawing on a wall. The angle is a small idiosyncratic angle that is mine, in the same way every person’s signature is theirs by the angle of the strokes, and I had been drawing left-arrows with my Chalkbone for nine years and my left-arrows have a particular small lean to the right at the back of the arrow because of the way my right wrist holds the marker against the wall. The lean is not the kind of thing anyone but me would ever notice. It is not the kind of thing I had ever consciously noted, in the sense of having sat down and articulated it to myself in words. It is the kind of thing my eye knew about my own marks because my eye had been looking at my own marks for nine years and my eye had developed, in the way an eye does, a small unconscious template of what my marks looked like, and when my eye saw a mark that did not match the template, my eye knew, in the way the eye knows things, that the mark was not mine, even before my mind had caught up with the knowing.
The mark on the wall was a perfect left-arrow at chest-high on the right-hand wall. The mark glowed faintly to my eye. The mark was at the angle of departure from vertical that an arrow would be at if drawn by someone who had observed my arrows and had reproduced them very carefully but had not been holding the marker in the same right wrist that I held it in. The arrow was, in other words, drawn by someone who was not me, who had seen my arrows, and who had attempted to redraw the arrow, and had got the redrawing very nearly right, with the very smallest possible error, which was the kind of error that one would only make if one had not actually drawn one’s own arrows for a few thousand of them and did not have the wrist-memory in one’s wrist for it.
I stopped breathing for a moment. I started again. I want to be clear that I started breathing again very quickly and that nobody in the company noticed the small involuntary pause. I am proud of the not-noticing because the not-noticing was the most useful thing I could have done in the first two seconds after the realization, and I did it correctly, and I went on.
I walked another fifty paces in the fourth position of our line and I made another mark on the right-hand wall, which was another small left-arrow at chest-high, drawn at the angle my right wrist drew arrows at, and I went on past it without making any small adjustment to my pace or my breath or my expression. I walked another fifty paces. I let my eye drift, in the small natural way of an eye drifting, back along the right-hand wall to where the arrow I had just made was.
The arrow was still the arrow I had made.
I let my breath out very slowly. I let the eye drift back forward. I walked another fifty paces. I let the eye drift back again. The arrow was still the arrow I had made.
I walked another fifty paces. I let the eye drift back again. The arrow was the arrow I had made. The angle was my angle. The lean was my lean. The mark was, in all respects, the mark I had drawn.
I walked another fifty paces. I let the eye drift back again.
The arrow was no longer my arrow.
The angle had shifted. The lean had been corrected. The mark was a perfect left-arrow at chest-high on the right-hand wall, drawn by a hand that had observed my arrows and had reproduced them very carefully but had not been holding the marker in the same right wrist that I held it in.
It had happened in the space of perhaps thirty seconds.
I did not let it show on my face, friend, although I want you to know that the keeping of it off my face was perhaps the most difficult small piece of self-control I have ever performed, because what I had just observed was that the corridor, or some entity acting through the corridor, was watching my marks in real time, and was redrawing them in real time, and was doing so very carefully and very precisely with the smallest possible error of execution, and that the error of execution was the only way I knew that the redrawing was happening, and that if I had been even slightly less obsessive about the small idiosyncratic angle of my own wrist over the last nine years, I would not have known. The redrawing would have proceeded undetected. The marks I had been making since I had walked into this corridor would have been, by some small invisible mechanism, transformed into marks that looked like mine but were not mine. The breadcrumbs would have been replaced by breadcrumbs that the entity wished us to follow.
I will tell you what I felt then, in the fourth position of our line, walking on at the small careful pace of a woman who had not let anything show on her face. I felt a great many things at once, and I want to be honest with you that I felt them in the same approximately equal measure I have come to expect from this descent. I felt, first, the small bright intellectual elation that I had felt at the cellar of the Bent Reed three weeks ago when I had first put my hand to a strand of webbing and had heard the wrong pitch. The elation was the elation of a scholar who had just discovered that her subject was very much more interesting than she had previously known. The subject of the descent had now become a subject that paid attention not only to our conversations along the strands and to our footsteps in its corridors but to the very marks I was making on its walls. The subject was paying attention to me personally. I will not pretend that my small vanity did not appreciate the personal attention. My small vanity is honest enough to admit it.
I felt, second, the slow horror of a person who had just understood that the personal attention was being paid by an entity whose interest in me was not collegial. The entity was not paying attention to me the way another scholar pays attention to a colleague’s work. The entity was paying attention to me the way a chess player pays attention to an opponent’s pieces. The redrawing of my marks was not a small academic correction. The redrawing was a move. The redrawing was the entity playing chess with me, on a board whose dimensions I had not known existed until thirty seconds ago, with pieces I had not known I was using until I saw them being moved.
I felt, third, the small steady cold that I had carried since the cellar of the Bent Reed, which had not lifted in the alcove and had not lifted in the corridor of the strand and was now, after Vren’s lecture this morning, beginning to feel like a small permanent feature of my interior weather rather than a passing condition. I will not say that the cold was unwelcome. The cold was the part of me that knew, in the way certain parts of one knows things, that I was in the proper place. The proper place is, in my experience, almost always cold, in the small steady way I am describing.
I felt, fourth, and this is the feeling that drove the rest of what happened that morning, I felt the small mischievous delight of a person who had just realized that her opponent had betrayed itself by the very precision of its correction. The entity had been so careful in its redrawing that the carefulness was itself a kind of message. The entity had not been able to resist the small temptation of perfecting the marks. A truly indifferent corridor would have either left my marks alone or destroyed them outright. A truly clever opponent would have left the small idiosyncrasies in. The entity had done neither. The entity had cleaned my marks up. The entity had, in the way of all overly tidy opponents, made the marks look more like ideal marks than my actual marks. The entity had revealed itself as a thing that valued precision more than it valued plausibility, which is the small fatal flaw of a great many otherwise impressive opponents, and which is a flaw I have, in my professional life, occasionally been able to exploit.
I considered this for perhaps the next two hundred paces. I made no further marks during those paces. The company did not notice the absence of marks, because none of them had been keeping track of my marks at the level of paying attention to whether I had drawn one at each turning, which was a small consolation for me as the small bookkeeper of our breadcrumbs. I considered. I considered what it would mean for me to do what I was now planning to do. I considered the risks. I considered the alternatives. I considered the company, who had not yet been told what I had discovered, and whom I would have to tell, because the discovery was the kind of discovery a company has the right to be told, and I considered, in the small private bookkeeping I had been keeping in my own head these last four days, the various ways I might tell them that would let me also do the thing I was planning to do.
At the end of the two hundred paces I had decided.
I lifted my left hand, in the small gesture I had been picking up from Vren over the last days, the gesture that meant pause. The company paused. Vren turned the small full-body turn. Elandor’s eye went to the corridor ahead and then to me. Brother Caius held the lantern steady. Goradd did the half-step-and-look-back. I said, in the easiest voice I could manage, oh petals, sorry, I would like to take a small minute. I have noticed a thing about the marks I have been making and I would like to share it with the company.
Vren said, in the flat deliberate voice, share.
I told them. I told them about dropping the chalk, in the small embarrassed way I had to tell that part because the dropping was the only reason I had looked back at all. I told them about the small left-arrow that had not been my left-arrow, although it had been a left-arrow and although it had been at chest-high on the right-hand wall and although it had glowed faintly in the way my marks glow faintly. I told them about my small idiosyncratic angle of departure from vertical and how my wrist had been drawing arrows at that angle for nine years and how the angle was a thing I had not consciously known I had until I had seen a mark that did not have it. I told them about the test I had run by drawing four more arrows over the next two hundred paces and watching to see how long each took to be replaced. I told them that the most recent arrow had been replaced in the space of perhaps thirty seconds. I told them what I thought this meant. I told them that the corridor was paying attention to my marks in real time, and was redrawing them in real time, and was doing so with very high precision, and that the precision itself was a small piece of information about the entity doing the redrawing, because the entity had not been able to resist cleaning up my marks, and that this told me something about the entity’s character, which I was about to try to take advantage of.
There was a small silence after I had finished. The four of them absorbed this in the four ways they absorbed such things. Brother Caius’s old face went into the slow careful look that meant a piece of information had been added to a framework he had been building. Vren’s pale gold eyes did the small narrowing that meant she had taken in a tactical fact and was integrating it. Elandor’s hand went down from his hip in the small relaxation that meant he had decided this was not, at this immediate moment, a fighting matter. Goradd at the rear made a small low whuff of air, the smith’s all-purpose noise for being uneasy with a development but not gainsaying it.
Brother Caius spoke first. He said, in his slow gentle voice, daughter, I have a question. Has the corridor, by your reading, been redrawing only your idiosyncratic angle, or has the corridor been redrawing the meaning of the marks as well.
This was, friend, the kind of question Brother Caius asked. The kind of question that made one immediately wish one had thought of it oneself. I had been so focused on the angle that I had not yet sat down to consider whether the meanings of the marks were also being altered. I considered it now. I said, in the smaller voice I used when admitting that another person had thought of something useful, I said, brother, I do not know. I have only verified the angle. The arrow I tested was a left-arrow, which meant the way we had come, and it was on the wall on the side I had drawn it on, and it appeared in all other respects to be the mark I had made except for the angle. I would need to test more marks before I could say whether the meanings are being altered. But I had not asked the question, and the question is the question to ask, because if the meanings are being altered then the redrawing is much worse than I have been thinking.
He nodded. He said, daughter, I think the testing of that is the next thing to do. And I think also that you have a plan for the testing which is more particular than simply drawing more marks and watching them, and I would like to hear the plan.
I will tell you, friend, that being read by Brother Caius is a thing one gets used to in this company but never entirely. I cleared my throat in the small embarrassed way of a woman who had been read accurately. I said, petals, the brother is correct. I have a plan. The plan is this. I am going to draw a deliberately false mark. I am going to draw a small left-arrow on the right-hand wall at chest-high, at my idiosyncratic angle, in the same manner I have been drawing them all morning. The mark will, however, be drawn at a location at which there is no actual turning of the corridor. The mark will say that we turned left here when we did not turn left here. The mark will be a small lie. I want to see what the corridor does with the small lie.
There was another silence. Vren spoke this time. She said, in her flat voice, that is a clever test.
I said, oh, petal, thank you, and the small bright thing in me that had been keeping bookkeeping of Vren’s small acknowledgments since the morning of the alcove made another tick in the column, which was now at, by my count, three.
Vren went on. She said, the corridor will do one of three things with the lie. The corridor will leave the lie alone, in which case the corridor is only redrawing for angle and not for meaning, and the lie will sit in your trail of marks and confuse anyone who tries to follow your trail back, which is presumably what the corridor wants. The corridor will redraw the lie into a truth, by which I mean the corridor will alter the mark so that it indicates correctly that we did not turn left at that point, in which case the corridor is redrawing for meaning and not for angle alone, and is, by that redrawing, declaring an interest in the truthfulness of your map. Or the corridor will do something else that neither of us has yet thought of, in which case we will learn a third thing about the corridor. All three outcomes are useful. The test is a good test. I approve.
Elandor said, in the clipped formal voice, agreed.
Goradd said, well now, well now, lass, by my forge, I am not certain I understand all of what you and Vren and the brother have just said, but I will tell you that the test sounds like a small honest test and that I will be glad to walk past the false mark without commenting upon it. I trust your reasons.
I said, petals, the trust is more than I deserve, and I will repay it by trying not to get any of us killed by it. Now. I would like the company to do something for me when I draw the false mark. I would like the company to act as though they have not heard this conversation, when we resume walking. I would like Vren to walk on as though there is nothing different. I would like Elandor to walk on as though there is nothing different. I would like Brother Caius to walk on as though there is nothing different. I would like Goradd to walk on as though there is nothing different. I would like, in other words, the corridor not to know that we know it is paying attention. The corridor has been paying attention without our knowing for the entire descent. We have an advantage now in that we know it is paying attention and the corridor does not yet know that we know. The advantage is small but it is real, and I would like to keep it as long as possible, which means that none of us should at any point look back at the false mark, none of us should pause near the false mark, none of us should give the corridor any reason to suspect that the false mark is special. I will watch the mark, but I will watch it through my own peripheral vision in a way I have been practicing for some years, which is a way that does not look like watching. Do we have agreement on this.
There was the small unanimous nodding of four people who had each understood that the small unworthy game I was about to play was a game with high stakes and that the game required all of us to be in on it, and that none of them was going to undermine it. Brother Caius nodded slowly. Vren did the smallest of nods. Elandor nodded once. Goradd’s nod was the largest and slowest of the four, the nod of a smith who had committed to a course of action and had committed in the full understanding of what the course required.
I said, petals, you are wonderful. Let us go.
We resumed walking. I will tell you that the next twenty paces felt like the longest twenty paces I have walked in my professional life, because I was walking on in the fourth position of our line at the same easy pace I had been walking all morning, and I was looking very ordinary, and I was, beneath the ordinariness, vibrating with the small focused attention of a scholar about to perform a small surgical procedure on her own data. We came to a stretch of corridor that ran straight for perhaps forty paces with no turning. I picked a point about halfway along the straight, on the right-hand wall, at a place where there was no turning either ahead or behind. I lifted the Chalkbone Marker from my satchel in the small habitual gesture I had been using all morning. I drew, on the wall at chest-high, a small left-arrow. I drew it at my idiosyncratic angle. I drew it with all the small careful confidence I had been drawing the others with. I put the Chalkbone back in the satchel. I walked on.
I did not look back. I walked the next twenty paces with my eye forward and my breath even and my pace at the same easy steady rate I had been keeping all morning, and the company walked with me, and the corridor stretched on, and I could feel the small left-arrow behind me in the way one feels a small important thing behind one without looking at it, the way one feels the door of a room one has just left without turning back to it.
At the end of the twenty paces I let my eye drift, in the small natural way of an eye drifting at a passing thought, sideways and slightly behind me. I did this not by turning my head, which would have telegraphed the looking, but by the small trick I had been practicing for years which was to let the eye go to its corner and to use the small reflection in the lantern’s light from the wall surface to see what I needed to see. The technique is imperfect. The technique requires a certain quality of reflective surface and a certain angle of light, both of which the lantern’s light and the persuaded stone were, by some small mercy, providing.
I saw the small left-arrow.
It was still my small left-arrow. It was at my angle. It had my lean. It was at the chest-high level on the right-hand wall in the place I had drawn it.
I let the eye drift forward. I walked another fifty paces. I did not look back. I let the eye drift sideways again. I saw the small left-arrow in the lantern’s reflected light.
It was no longer my small left-arrow.
I will tell you what it had become. It had become a small right-arrow.
The mark was a small right-arrow at chest-high on the right-hand wall, drawn at an angle of departure from vertical that matched my own idiosyncratic angle as cleanly as if I had drawn it myself, glowing faintly to my eye in the way my marks glow faintly to my eye and to my eye alone, and pointing in the opposite direction from the direction I had drawn the arrow in.
The corridor had not redrawn the lie into a truth. The corridor had not left the lie alone. The corridor had done a third thing that neither Vren nor I had yet thought of when we had discussed the possibilities. The corridor had reversed the mark. The corridor had turned my false left-arrow into a false right-arrow. The corridor had, in other words, taken my lie and converted it into a different lie, a lie that would mislead anyone following my trail back in the opposite direction, away from the path we were actually traveling. The corridor was not interested in correcting my marks for truthfulness, and the corridor was not interested in leaving them alone. The corridor was interested in actively misleading anyone who followed them. The corridor was, in the small absolutely undeniable way of such things, the corridor was setting a counter-trap for the return journey.
I will tell you, friend, that the bottom dropped out of my chest at that moment, in the way the bottom drops out of a small wooden bucket when the bottom has been failing for some weeks and one finally, on the last drawing of water from the well, has the bottom go altogether, with all the water and the bucket and one’s hand following it down the well. The corridor had not been a passive instrument. The corridor had not been a clever opponent only in the small administrative sense. The corridor had been actively preparing for the possibility that we would walk back out of this place, and the corridor had been salting our trail with reversed marks the whole way down, and the corridor had been doing this so quietly and so precisely that I had not noticed until I had dropped my chalk, and I had only noticed then because of nine years of obsessive attention to the small idiosyncratic angle of my own wrist, and the corridor had only failed to deceive me because the corridor had been so careful in its cleanup that the cleanup itself had betrayed it.
I will tell you also, friend, that the small mischievous delight that had been driving me all morning did not go away when the bottom dropped out of my chest. The two things sat next to each other inside me, the delight and the small dawning horror, in the way the things in me have been sitting next to each other for the better part of this descent, and the sitting of them next to each other was not an unfamiliar arrangement to me by this point, although the scale of the arrangement was larger than it had been at any previous point, and I was, against all my better judgment, very nearly enjoying myself, in the small terrible way one enjoys oneself when one has just discovered that one’s opponent has been playing a much more interesting game than one had given them credit for, and that one has the small honor of being a worthy enough player to have at last detected one of their moves.
I let the eye drift forward. I walked on. I did not let any small visible change come over my face. I walked the next hundred paces in the fourth position of our line at the same easy steady rate I had been keeping all morning, and the company walked with me, and none of them, by their postures, gave any indication that they were waiting for me to say what I had seen, although I knew, with the small reliable knowing of someone walking in a company that has been together for some days, that all four of them were quietly attending to my pace and my breath and my small back-of-the-neck signals to read whether the test had been a success or a failure, and whether the news I would deliver at the next stopping would be the news of a small academic curiosity or the news of a much larger and more troubling discovery.
We came at the end of the hundred paces to a small irregularity in the floor of the corridor, a place where the persuaded stone had decided, for reasons of its own, to produce a small slight rise of perhaps an inch over the length of three paces, which was the kind of small irregularity that had been almost entirely absent from the rest of the corridor system, and which therefore, by its very unusualness, justified my calling a small halt. I lifted my left hand. Vren stopped. The company stopped. I said, in the easiest voice I could manage, petals, I would like to talk for a moment about the test.
There was a small alertness in the four of them. They had read me correctly.
I told them. I told them that the corridor had done a third thing. I told them that the corridor had reversed my false left-arrow into a false right-arrow. I told them what this meant. I told them that the corridor was not interested in correcting my marks but in actively misleading anyone who followed them on the return journey. I told them that I now had to consider all the marks I had made since entering the corridor as suspect, and that I would have to develop a new system, in the next several hours, for laying a trail that the corridor could not redraw without revealing itself, although I did not yet know exactly what such a system would look like. I told them, finally, that the discovery had a small bright side which was that we now knew the corridor was actively planning for our return journey, which implied that the corridor expected us to have a return journey, which was a small piece of information about the corridor’s intentions that was, in its way, almost reassuring.
There was a small silence. Vren spoke. She said, in the flat voice, that is an interesting reading of the bright side. I am not entirely persuaded by it. The corridor expecting us to have a return journey is consistent with the corridor expecting us to have a return journey under conditions of its choosing, which would include conditions in which we were following its reversed marks back into a place it had prepared for us. The bright side is therefore not necessarily bright. But the test was a good test and we have learned a great deal. The trail of marks should now be considered compromised. We should not rely upon them for the return journey. We will need another method.
Brother Caius said, in his slow voice, daughter, I have a small suggestion. The marks the corridor cannot redraw are the marks the corridor cannot see. The corridor has been redrawing your visible marks. The corridor has not, presumably, been redrawing marks that are not visible. If you have any means of laying a non-visible trail, it would be the time to begin.
I said, petal, that is a thought of considerable beauty. The Chalkbone Marker has a small property I have not before this morning had occasion to use, which is that it can place glyphs that are not visible at all, that are not even glowing, that are only legible to me by the small private sense of placement I keep in my head while I am laying them. I have not used this property because it requires me to also remember the placements without the help of any visible reminder, and I have, in nine years of using the Chalkbone, never developed sufficient confidence in my own placement memory to rely upon it. But the corridor’s redrawing has made my visible marks useless, and the choice is now between relying on the placement memory or relying on nothing, and I will choose the placement memory.
Elandor said, in the clipped formal voice, agreed.
Goradd said, well now, lass, by my forge, I will say one thing for the entity in this place. It has been more interesting than I had been hoping for, when I came down here. I had been hoping, on the morning of the gate, for a straightforward sort of monster that I could hit with a hammer until it stopped being a monster, and I had thought that the work would be unpleasant but reasonably contained. The work has not been contained. The work has been getting larger every day of this descent. And I will say also, lass, that the small uneasy feeling I have been carrying since the morning of the gate has now been given a small precise reason, and the giving of a reason has, oddly, made the carrying of the feeling easier. I would rather know what I am uneasy about. Thank you for the testing.
I said, petals, thank you for the listening, and thank you all of you for not looking back when the false mark was being redrawn. The not looking was a small piece of professional courtesy that none of you owed me and that I will not forget.
We resumed walking. I drew the Chalkbone from the satchel and began, in the next stretch of corridor, the slow careful work of laying invisible glyphs at each turning and each junction. The glyphs were placed in the small unmarked manner I had been theorizing for nine years, which is to say at specific points on the lower walls, at the height of the lower seam between wall and floor, where the Chalkbone left no glow and no scrape and no visible mark of any kind, but where the small private sense in my head told me a glyph had been laid, and where I would, on the return journey, know the glyph was, and where the corridor, by my best guess, would not be able to see the glyph because there was nothing to see. The placing of them required all of my concentration, which was a useful thing for the next several hours, because my concentration on the placement was the small wall around the small slowly settling horror that the morning had introduced.
I walked on in the fourth position of our line. The corridor continued its slow widening and slow rising and slow warming. I laid my invisible glyphs at each turning and each junction. I did not look back at any of my old visible marks. I let the corridor go on redrawing them in whatever way the corridor chose to redraw them, because I had no time to spare for the visible marks any longer. The visible marks belonged to the corridor now. The invisible glyphs were mine. The corridor did not know about them yet, which was the small advantage I had bought with the false left-arrow, and the small advantage was, I was very nearly certain, the most expensive small advantage I had ever bought in my professional life.
We walked on. The lantern’s light fell forward into the dark and ran out before it reached the further end. The company walked in the order it had set itself at the gate. The four of them attended to their separate offices in the careful steady way they had developed over the days. I, in the fourth position, attended to the laying of the small invisible glyphs and the slow turning over in the back of my head of the long set of further questions the morning had introduced, and the long set of further questions was a set I would not finish turning over for some time, and at the very back of the set, at the place where the questions begin to be the questions one does not wish to articulate, was the question that I had not yet permitted myself to ask aloud and that I will set down now, in this private telling, in case I do not have the chance to ask it later. The question was this. If the corridor could redraw a small left-arrow on a wall at the precision of my own idiosyncratic angle within thirty seconds of my drawing it, what else had the corridor been redrawing in the last four days of this descent that I had not been obsessive enough about to notice. The corridor had been paying attention to all of us. The corridor had been paying attention to all of us for some considerable time. The corridor had had access not only to my marks but to my movements and my conversations and the small careful arrangements of the company. The corridor had been, in the long slow patient way of the listening I had first detected in the cellar of the Bent Reed three weeks ago, the corridor had been quietly redrawing us as we descended, in ways that were not the gross obvious ways that we would have noticed, but in the small careful ways that only the most idiosyncratic obsessive scholar of small things would ever have detected, and the redrawing of us had been going on the whole time, and it was going on now, and the small invisible glyphs I had begun to lay were perhaps the first thing in four days that the corridor had not been able to redraw, and the corridor would, when it noticed the lack of new visible marks behind us, work out very quickly that we had begun to work in a medium it could not see, and the corridor would, by then, have learned everything from us that the visible marks had been carrying, which was a great deal more than I had previously considered, and the next several hours of the descent were going to be, oh petals, oh my loves, the next several hours of the descent were going to be considerably more interesting than I had quite been ready for, and I walked on in the fourth position of our line at the same easy steady pace I had been keeping all morning, and the small bright thing in me and the small horrible thing in me sat next to each other in approximately equal measure, and I went on, and the corridor went on, and the company went on, and the descent went on, and somewhere below us the she went on with her own slow careful preparation, and I had now, in a small unworthy way I will not pretend to be entirely sorry for, paid her the small specific attention of having looked her in the eye across the small left-arrow on the wall and having said, in effect, I see you, friend, and the corridor had answered, in its small precise way, oh love, oh petal, I see you also, and we had had, in our small mutual way, a conversation, and the conversation would continue, and I would not be the same scholar at the end of the conversation that I had been at the beginning, and I was, against my better judgment, glad of that, because the better scholar I was about to become was the scholar I had been quietly hoping to become for some years, and the becoming was being paid for at a price that I will not, in this private telling, attempt to fully accept, only set down that I was aware of, and walking on in the fourth position of our line, and continuing to lay the small invisible glyphs at each turning, and trusting that the laying of them would, when the time came, prove sufficient to get the five of us back out of this place alive, although the trusting was, I will tell you, the smallest and most fragile of the small things I had carried with me down into the corridor since the morning of the gate, and the small fragile trust was now, by my own small unworthy count, the only thing standing between us and the long slow corridor of the corridor’s choosing, and I walked on, and the lantern’s light fell forward, and the dark received us, and the small private conversation between me and the corridor continued, and the small private conversation, oh, friend, was the most interesting conversation of my life.
Segment Seventeen: The Lantern in the Long Corridor
We had come, by the end of the day after Maelis’s discovery of the redrawn marks, to a place in the corridor system that I am going to call, for the purposes of this telling, the long corridor, although none of us called it that aloud at the time. We did not call it anything aloud. It was the sort of place that received names only in private. By private I mean in the small back rooms of one’s own attention where one keeps the names of things that one is not yet sure one wishes to share with one’s companions. The corridor was longer than any corridor we had been in. It ran in a single uninterrupted straight line as far as the lantern’s light could reach and considerably further, and Vren at the point had walked it for what she later reckoned to be perhaps two hours before she came back to where the rest of us were resting in a small side niche, and reported that the corridor went on, and that she had not reached its end, and that she had not, in two hours of walking, encountered any creature or any sign of a creature, and that she would have to think about what this meant before going further.
She thought about it. We rested while she thought. I will not pretend that the resting was easy. The corridor before us was the kind of corridor that did not invite resting in the side niche at its mouth. The walls of the long corridor, by what we could see of them in the lantern’s light, were broader and smoother than the walls of the corridors we had been in, and the floor was wider, and the ceiling was higher, and the persuaded stone had been persuaded into a shape that was less like a corridor and more like a long hall, the kind of long hall one walks down in old monasteries to reach the chapter house at the far end, where the brothers gather for the morning offices and the small business of the order. I had walked down such a hall every morning for thirty-eight years of my life, and the long corridor in The Maelstrom’s Embrace looked, by some small uncanny resemblance I did not wish to dwell upon, very much like the hall of my own chapter house, only larger, and darker, and without the small high windows along the eastern wall that let in the gray morning light at the hour of the first office. The resemblance, I will say, was the kind of resemblance that a thing of this place might produce in order to put a brother of my order off his step. I was put off my step. I want to acknowledge that. I do not wish to pretend that I was not.
Vren returned to the side niche where the rest of us were resting, and she sat down on the floor in the slow controlled fall she had been using since the morning of the alcove, and she said, in the flat deliberate voice, the corridor goes on. I have walked perhaps two hours of it. I have not reached the end. I have not encountered anything. The corridor is, by my reading, the longest single stretch we will walk in this descent, and it is going to take, by my best estimate, perhaps four or five hours to traverse at our normal pace. I cannot walk it twice in that time. I cannot scout it and then bring the company through it without the scouting becoming the better part of a day and the strength of the company being spent before we cross. I want the company to consider whether one of us should walk it alone, ahead, while the others rest here, in order to see whether the corridor holds anything that we should know about before bringing all five of us through.
There was a small silence in the niche after she had spoken. Elandor said, in his clipped formal voice, Vren, you have just walked two hours of it alone. You have the strongest claim to walk the rest of it. Why are you proposing that someone else go.
Vren said, hero. I have walked the first two hours and I have learned the first two hours. The first two hours are a kind of stretch I am suited to walk. The further hours, by what I could see at the limit of the lantern’s reach, are a different kind of stretch. They have a different character. I am not certain how to describe it. The corridor is, in some way I cannot put cleanly, a corridor that does not want to be scouted by me. It wants to be scouted by someone else. I do not know how I know this. I know it.
The honesty of Vren’s not-knowing was the kind of honesty I had come to admire in her over these days, and I will say that I had come to trust her not-knowings in the way I had been raised in the order to trust the not-knowings of brothers who had been long in their callings, because the not-knowings of long-called persons are sometimes the truest knowings they have, the knowings that come from beneath the small surface of articulated reason and that one does well to listen to even when one cannot defend them in a chapter meeting. I listened.
Elandor said, then which of us is the corridor wanting.
Vren did not answer for some time. She looked at each of us in turn, in the small careful way she had, and her pale gold eyes settled at last upon me, and she said, brother, I think it is you.
I felt, friend, when she said this, the small slow tightening of the cold in my chest that I had been carrying since the night before I left the monastery. The cold did not lift. I want to be honest about that. The cold did not lift, but it shifted, in the way the cold has been shifting at intervals throughout this descent, in the small way that says the cold has recognized what is being asked of it and is preparing to be useful.
I said, in the slow voice I use when I have understood something I had not expected to understand, I said, Vren. I will go.
There was a small further silence after I had said this. The others, I think, had been expecting me to argue against the proposal, in the way an old brother would ordinarily argue against being sent alone ahead of a company into an unknown corridor at the end of a long day. The argument would have been a reasonable argument. I was the oldest of them. I was the slowest. I had no skill at arms. I had taken longer to recover from the descent than any of them, and the recovery had not been complete, and I would not return to anything like complete recovery before the descent was through. By every reasonable measure of who should be sent alone ahead of the company into the long corridor, I was not the one to send. I knew this, and they knew this, and Vren most of all knew this, because Vren did not propose such things lightly and would not have proposed this one if she had not been certain.
She had been certain. Her certainty had been a not-knowing of the proper kind. I had felt the rightness of it in my chest at the moment she said it. I will not pretend that the rightness was a comfortable rightness. The rightness sat in me as a sorrow sits, the sorrow of a thing being correct in a way one does not wish it to be. But the rightness was the rightness, and I am too old in my work to argue with such rightnesses when they arrive.
I said, Vren, I will go. I will take the lantern. I will walk at the pace of an old man, which is the only pace I have. I will mark whatever I find, in the small ways the brothers of my order have always marked such things. I will not turn back unless I am borne back. If I do not return by the end of perhaps five hours by your reckoning, the company should come after me, in whatever order seems sensible, and should expect to find me at some point along the corridor in a condition the company can interpret as needed. I would prefer, if the choice is given to me, that the company come at the end of five hours and not before, because the corridor that wants to be walked alone is the corridor that wants to be walked alone, and the wanting is part of what I am going to walk.
Elandor said, very slowly, brother, I do not like this. I will say so plainly. I will not gainsay the going, because Vren has said it and Vren does not say such things lightly, and because you have said you will go, and because the corridor is the corridor and we cannot stay at its mouth indefinitely while we argue about it. But I do not like it. I will not be at peace while you are walking it.
Goradd said, by my forge, brother, I have nothing to add to what Elandor has said, except that I will sit at the mouth of this niche and I will keep watch upon the corridor for the full five hours, and I will not move from the watching, and if you come back at any point in those five hours and need any small help, I will be the first hand to meet you. That is the only small comfort I have to offer you for this work, and you may take it as you wish.
Maelis said, oh, brother. Oh, brother. I have been the one in this company most likely, until this hour, to volunteer for things that were not my business. I want you to know that I am not going to volunteer to come with you, because Vren is right, and the corridor is asking for you and not for any of the rest of us, and I would only be in the way if I came. I want you to know also that I am going to be quietly miserable about your going for the entire duration of your walk, and that if the misery in any small way reaches you in the corridor and is of use to you, then it will have served. I am sorry I do not have a better offering.
I will tell you, friend, that I almost laughed at Maelis’s small honest declaration of her quiet misery, in the way one almost laughs at the small gifts the people one loves give one at moments when nothing larger can be given. I did not laugh. I smiled, the small smile that an old brother gives a younger person whom he has come to be fond of. I said, daughter, the misery will be welcome. Send it as you can.
Vren said, brother. I will say one thing more before you go. The corridor is not, by any reading of mine, a corridor that intends to kill you. I do not say this to be reassuring. I say it as a piece of professional judgment that I have arrived at and am offering you for what it is worth. The corridor wants you for something other than dying. I do not know what the something is. I want you to walk into the corridor with the small alertness that the something requires, which is not the alertness of a man expecting to be attacked, but the alertness of a man expecting to be addressed. Do you understand the difference.
I said, daughter, I understand the difference. I have lived in the difference for thirty-eight years. I know how to walk into a place that wants to address me. Thank you for the saying.
She nodded once. That was all.
I rose. I rose in the slow careful way of an old man, with the help of the staff and the small useful pushing-against-the-wall of my left hand. I took the lantern from the floor at the entrance of the niche, where Goradd had placed it when we had stopped, and the lantern’s small honest yellow light fell upon my hand and upon the cold stone of the wall, and the light, I will tell you, was a small comfort of a particular kind that I had not, in the previous five days of this descent, paused to be properly grateful for. The lantern had been my companion since the morning I had left the monastery. It had burned through eleven days of road and four days of corridor and had not failed me, and the brothers who had taught me the small care of such lanterns when I was a novice would have been proud of the way I had been keeping it, and I want to set down here that I was, in that moment of taking up the lantern, grateful both to the lantern and to the long line of brothers in my order who had taught me how to keep one, and that the gratitude is the kind of gratitude I do not generally articulate in front of company but which I will articulate here because the moment has been set down for the telling and the telling permits such things.
I took up my staff. I had cleaned it and bound it and oiled it during the rest in the niche, in the small careful way Master Goradd had taught me to keep it at the alcove, and the staff felt true in my hand. I took it. I stood at the mouth of the niche. I looked once at the four of them. Goradd had already settled himself against the wall with the hammer across his knees and his eyes upon the corridor. Vren was sitting on the floor in her usual posture against the rear wall, with the cloak about her and the pale gold eyes upon me. Elandor was standing near the entrance, his right hand at his hip, his face in the small composed look of a man who had decided not to say further what he had already said. Maelis was sitting upon her bundle, and her gloved hands were in her lap, and she gave me the smallest of small waves, the kind of wave a child gives to a parent leaving on a journey, in the small unguarded way of Maelis when Maelis is not pretending to be anything other than what she is.
I gave them each in turn the small nod that an old brother gives to companions he is leaving for what he hopes is a short time. I stepped past Goradd at the mouth of the niche. I walked into the long corridor.
I want to tell you about the walking, friend. The walking was the work of this hour, and the work of this hour was not the work of the corridor itself, which would come, but was the small preparatory work of the body for the corridor, and I will set down the preparatory work because I think the preparatory work is not often described in the records of such descents, and yet it is, in my long experience, often the part that determines what the body brings to the work proper.
I walked at the pace of an old man. I do not apologize for the pace. The pace is the pace I have. I have, in the small honest assessment of myself, not the pace of a younger man, and I have not had it in some years, and I have learned over those years not to fight the pace, because the fighting of the pace produces only the small unworthy result of an old man arriving exhausted at the place he is needed, which is the small unworthy result that the order has been training us not to produce for many centuries. The pace is the pace. I walked at it. The corridor was long. The corridor would still be long when I had walked another step and another step, and the corridor would not be shortened by my walking at the pace of a younger man, and the corridor would only be shortened by my walking at the pace of an old man for the duration the corridor required, which was, by Vren’s estimate, perhaps four or five hours.
I let myself fall into the slow rhythm of the staff against the stone. The staff struck the floor at the small interval that my pace produced, and the iron shoe of the staff, which Master Goradd had attended to in the alcove on the first night, rang true against the persuaded stone with a small clean tone that did not echo in the corridor and did not return to me in the way sounds normally return, but which I could feel in the small bones of my left wrist where I held the staff, and the feeling of it was the small good feeling of a tool doing its proper work. I held the lantern in my right hand at the height of my shoulder. The lantern’s light fell upon the floor before me to a distance of perhaps fifteen paces, and beyond the fifteen paces the dark received the light without complaint, and beyond the dark the corridor went on as the corridor had been going on for the better part of an hour by then, in the long slow uninterrupted line that did not turn and did not narrow and did not give back any sound.
I said the office of the second hour as I walked. I did not say it aloud. I said it in the small private way one says the office when one is walking alone in a place that does not need to overhear it. The office of the second hour is short, and the saying of it took me perhaps ten minutes of my walking, in the small slow careful rhythm of an old man saying an office he has said ten thousand times before, and the saying of it settled my breath in the way the office is meant to settle the breath, in the small useful way the offices have of settling breath when nothing else will. I had not, until that moment in the corridor, considered properly how much of my work as a brother of the order had been the small unspoken work of settling my own breath through the offices when no other settling was available to me, and the consideration was a small piece of recognition that I had not expected to receive in this corridor and that I received gratefully and walked on.
I want to tell you, friend, what the corridor felt like in those first hours. I have been trying to find the right word for it across the years since, and I have not, in those years, arrived at a single word, only at a small set of approximate words, which I will set down here in the hope that one of them, if not all of them, will give you the proper impression. The corridor felt waiting. The corridor felt attentive. The corridor felt prepared. The corridor felt like a long hall in an old house that one is walking through on the way to a meeting that has been arranged for one, and that one knows is the meeting one is going to, although no one has told one in so many words that the meeting is at the end of the hall and not somewhere else, and one knows nonetheless. The corridor was set for the meeting. I do not know how a corridor is set for a meeting, in any way I can describe in plain country language, but the corridor was set, and I was walking the long hall toward the meeting, and the lantern in my hand was the small honest light I was bringing into the meeting, and the staff at my side was the small honest tool of my walking, and the office in my breath was the small honest discipline of my order, and the company at my back, four hours behind me by then in the small niche at the mouth of the corridor, was the small honest reason I had come to the corridor at all, because I had not come into this place for my own sake but for the small sake of the four of them and of the small further sake of what the place was doing to the wider world, and I walked, and the corridor went on.
At some hour I did not exactly count, but which I think now was perhaps the fourth hour of my walking, the meeting began.
I will tell you how it began. It began without any sound. The corridor did not produce any sound. The lantern did not flicker. The staff did not change its tone against the stone. The temperature of the air did not alter in any measurable way. There was no draft. There was no smell. There was, by every external measure, nothing. There was only, all at once, the small certain knowledge in the small back of my attention that I was no longer walking alone in the corridor.
I want to be exact about this, friend. I was not joined by a creature. I was not surprised by an ambush. I was not approached by a Gloomspider in the way Vren had described the Gloomspiders at the body in the corridor of the strand. I was, by the small certain knowledge in the small back of my attention, in the presence of another walker. The walker was beside me. The walker had been beside me for some unknown small interval before I noticed. The walker was walking at exactly the pace of an old man, in the small slow careful rhythm of an old man who knew the corridor and was walking it as I was walking it, and the walker’s step was on my left, at perhaps the distance one would walk beside a companion in a long hall.
I did not turn my head. I will tell you why I did not turn my head. I did not turn my head because the small private discipline of my order, in such moments, is to receive the thing that has come to meet one without first declaring with one’s body that one has noticed it. The receiving is the small first courtesy. One does not turn upon a guest at one’s elbow. One walks beside one’s guest, and one waits, and one lets the guest speak first if the guest has a thing to say, and if the guest has not, one walks until the walking has done what the walking is going to do. I had been raised in this discipline for thirty-eight years. The discipline came up in me now without my having to remember it.
I walked. The walker walked beside me. The walker’s step matched my step, exactly. The walker was, by the careful adjustment of the rhythm, observing the small idiosyncrasies of my own walking, the small slight favor I gave the right side because of an old fall years ago that had left a small permanent ache in the right hip in cold weather, the small slight emphasis I gave the staff on the alternate strides, the small slight slowing of my pace at every twelfth step or so when I drew the deeper breath that an old man draws when he has been walking for some time. The walker was observing all of this and was matching it, and the matching was, friend, very nearly perfect. The matching was the matching of a thing that had been watching me for longer than I had been aware. The matching was the matching of an old friend who has known one for so many years that the friend can walk beside one at one’s own pace without any conscious adjustment, the way two old friends walking together fall, without speaking of it, into the same step.
I knew, in the small back of my attention, who the walker was supposed to be. I want to set this down clearly, because the knowing was the part of the meeting that I had been preparing for since the morning Vren had said the corridor wanted me, and the knowing arrived in the corridor in the way the knowing always arrives, which is to say in the way that one suddenly recognizes a face one has not seen in many years, by some small particular detail of bearing rather than by the face itself. The walker walked, beside me, in the slow careful rhythm of my mother, who had died when I was eleven, and whose walking I had not properly thought about in any conscious way for perhaps the last forty years, but whose walking my own walking remembered, because I had walked beside her every day of my first eleven years, on small errands in the port town where my father was a fisherman, and her walking had been the walking that mine had grown up in the rhythm of, and the rhythm of her walking was the rhythm at my left now.
I did not turn my head.
I said, in the small private way one speaks at such a moment, in the small voice that one would use in the chapel after the last office of the evening when one is the only brother left in the chapel and is having a small private conversation with someone who is not in the chapel, I said, in that voice, although aloud, because aloud was the only form of speech available to me at that hour, I said, mother. Mother. I have walked beside you in this rhythm before. I had not remembered how the rhythm felt. Thank you for the reminding.
The walker did not answer. The walker walked. The matching of the step continued.
I said, after another small interval, I do not know whether you are my mother. I will tell you what I know. I know that something has met me in this corridor that has chosen to walk beside me in my mother’s rhythm. I do not know whether the choosing was a kindness or a test or a small deception or a thing that is none of these and is its own kind of thing. I would prefer to think it was a kindness. I am old enough now to know that what I would prefer to think is not always what is. I will, however, choose to receive it as a kindness for the duration of this corridor, because the receiving of a thing as a kindness is, in my experience, the small first move that determines whether the thing becomes a kindness or whether the thing becomes its opposite. I have learned, over my years, that things in this world are sometimes asking us a small question, by the way they come to meet us, and the question is what we will receive them as, and the answer we give the question becomes, by some small mechanism I do not entirely understand, the thing the thing then becomes for us. I am answering your question, walker. I am answering it as a kindness. I would be obliged if you would carry on in that register, or if you cannot, if you would tell me plainly what other register you require, so that I may answer the next question as well.
The walker walked. The walker’s step matched my step. The walker did not speak.
I said, after another interval, my mother died when I was eleven. She died of a fever that the apothecary in our port town could not name. I sat with her the last night. I held her hand. She did not, at the end, have any words to give me, and I had not, at eleven, the words to give her either that I have since wished I had given her, and the not-giving has been one of the small sorrows of my long life, although the sorrow is the small sorrow of any son and any mother of a certain kind, and is the sorrow that the order has taught me is not mine alone to carry but is carried in the world by every child that has ever sat with a dying parent. I do not bring up the not-giving now to ask for any small repair of it. The repair is not available, and I am old enough to know that the repair is not the right thing to ask for at this hour. The asking for it would be a small unworthy asking, and I will not make it. I want only to say to you, walker, in the register of kindness that I have chosen to receive you in, that if you are my mother in any form that retains a piece of her, then I am sorry I had not the words at eleven, and that the not-having of them was not from any lack of love, and that the love has been there all the years since, although it has been the love of a small grown son for a small remembered mother, which is the love of an absence and not of a presence, and which is therefore the smallest love that love can be, and is still, in its smallness, love.
The walker walked. The matching of the step continued. I will tell you, friend, that I felt, beside me, a small shift in the rhythm, of the kind a companion makes when she has heard something and is not going to comment upon it but has registered it in her own small back attention and will keep the registering, and the small shift was a small kindness back, and I received it.
I went on walking. The corridor went on. The lantern in my right hand burned on at the small honest yellow, and the staff in my left rang true against the stone, and the walker at my left walked at my pace, and we walked, the two of us, side by side in the long corridor, in the rhythm of my mother and her son going down the lane in the port town in the early mornings when I was a small boy and she had been carrying me, in some part of her attention, the way she always carried me, which was as the small son she had had and which she had set down at last because the body could not carry me any further but which I think now she had not, in any other part of her that could carry, set down at any other point.
I said, after another long interval, walker, I want to tell you about my brother. He was younger than I by four years. His name was Marrin. He drowned in our port town’s harbor when he was nine and I was thirteen, in the small accident of falling off a boat that he had no business being on, in a small horseplay with the older boys that had gone wrong in the way such horseplays go wrong. I have not, in fifty years, told anyone in my order about Marrin, because by the time I came to the order Marrin had been gone twelve years and the telling of him to strangers seemed a kind of imposition upon him that I was not willing to make, and so I have carried Marrin in the small back of my attention the way one carries the brothers one has lost when one has not yet found the company to whom one wishes to introduce them. I am introducing him to you now, walker, because you, if you are in any sense my mother, are the only other person in the multiverse who has carried Marrin in the way I have carried him, and the introducing is a small relief I had not expected to give myself in this corridor, and I am giving it.
The walker walked. The small shift in rhythm came again. The walker did not speak.
I said, walker, I have a third thing to tell you. I will tell it because the telling is the work of this corridor, and the work of this corridor is the work that has been asked of me, and I will do the work. I have, in the years since I have been a brother of the order, had occasion to fail a small boy in a village called Aldrun, whom I will not name, and whose mother was called Pell, and whose failing has been the small great burden of my professional life. I have, in the alcove yesterday afternoon, told the youngest and quietest of my companions about the failing, and the telling did me a small good. I want to tell you about the failing also, walker. I want to tell you not because you can absolve me of it, for absolution of that kind is not within any walker’s giving, but because I want the failing to be known to my mother, if you are she. The mothers of small boys have a particular interest in the failings of small boys, and the mother I had, if I had her any longer in any small way, would have wished to know.
I told her. I told her in the slow careful way I had told Vren in the alcove, and I will not set the words down here a second time because the words are the same words, and the second setting-down would only weaken them. I told her about the boy. I told her about his slow tongue and his clear small hand and his small bag of bread and his coming to me in the late autumn afternoon, and his telling me the difficult difficult thing, and my small wise course, and the not-coming-back, and the morning in his mother’s kitchen with the cord and the chair, and the four or five hours during which I had been at the parish house doing the small evening offices while he had been hanging from the beam, and the long unforgiving years since.
The walker walked. The matching of the step continued. The shift in rhythm came twice more during my telling, in the small intervals at which my voice paused for breath, and the shifts were the shifts of a companion who had heard each pause and was acknowledging it, and the acknowledging was, I will say plainly, friend, the most generous acknowledging I have ever received in my life. There was no condemnation in the shift. There was no easy comfort in it either. There was only the small steady acknowledgment of a thing being heard, and the hearing being honored, in the way the hearing of any difficult telling is honored when it is honored properly, which is by being received and not amended.
I finished the telling. I did not, at the end of it, weep in the way I had wept at the end of the telling in the alcove. I had wept already, with Vren. The well of that particular weeping had been emptied to a small useful degree the day before, and the well was not yet refilled. I walked instead, in the small steady rhythm I had been walking in, and the walker walked beside me, and we walked, the two of us, in the silence that followed the telling, for what I would later reckon at perhaps another quarter of an hour.
It was at the end of this quarter of an hour that the walker spoke.
I want to tell you that the walker spoke. I will not be able to set down for you what the walker said in any of the words of any of the languages I know, because the walker did not speak in any of those words, and yet the walker spoke. The speaking was the same kind of speaking that the strand had been carrying when Maelis had put her hand to it, the speaking that arrives as meaning at the edges of the listener’s attention rather than as articulated words in the listener’s ear. I received the speaking. I will give you, in plain country language, an approximate translation of what I received, with the understanding that the translation is a small thing compared to the original, and is, like all translations, a small honest betrayal of the source.
The walker said, approximately, son. The walking has been long. You have walked it as you were taught. The teaching was good.
The walker said, approximately, the boy in Aldrun. I have known him these many years. He has been with me. He sat with me a long while in the small place I have been keeping in this corridor for the keeping of such sittings. He told me his version of the afternoon you told me of, and his version was the version of a small boy who had come to you with a burden and had set it down at your kitchen table and had taken it back up again to carry home with him because the carrying-home was, in his small understanding, the thing the burden required of him. He did not blame you, son. He did not, in his sitting with me, blame you. He was sorry only that the carrying-home had been too much for him, and he was sorry that his mother had had to find him, and he was sorry that you had had to find his mother. He was not sorry that he had come to you. The coming to you had been the small last good thing in his small life, son, and the coming had not been wasted, even though the small wise course had not sufficed. The not-sufficing was not the wasting. The coming was its own small good thing, and the small good thing remains a small good thing, and the small good thing has been preserved in the keeping I have been doing.
The walker said, approximately, your brother. Marrin. He is also with me. He has been with me longer than the boy from Aldrun. He has missed you, son. He has missed you with the small uncomplaining patience of a younger brother who has been waiting for his older brother to come along. He sends, by my carrying, the small message that he does not blame you for the boat. He climbed onto the boat on his own. The horseplay was his choice. You were thirteen and you were not in the boat and you were not in any way at fault for the boat, and he wants you to know that he has been telling you this in your dreams for fifty years and you have not, in fifty years, fully heard him. I am telling you now. He has not blamed you. He has waited. He waits still.
The walker said, approximately, son. You have been a long time at your work, and the work has been good, and the work has had in it the small unworthinesses that all long works have, and the small unworthinesses are not the work. The work is the work. The work was, and is, the small steady carrying of the company of the world, of which the company at your back is the small most recent expression, and which the company before you in the chamber below us is the small most recent occasion for. You will carry your company further. You will reach the place where she is. You will do, when you arrive, the small particular thing that has been kept for you to do, and the thing is small, and it is not the slaying of the great Gloomspider, which is not your work, and it is not the breaking of the syllables, which is the hero’s work, and it is not the laying of glyphs, which is the scholar’s work, and it is not the binding of wounds, which is the smith’s work, and it is not the closing of the spaces between walls, which is the killer’s work, but is the small thing only an old confessor can do, which is the naming of a thing in its presence, in such a way that the thing must hear itself named, and the naming will, in the small unworthy hour of the naming, be your small unworthy gift to the company and to the world, and the gift will be enough. It will be enough, son. I am telling you. It will be enough.
The walker stopped. The walker did not speak again. The walker’s step beside me continued for perhaps another fifty paces, in the same matching rhythm, and then, at a point in the corridor I did not particularly mark, the walker was no longer beside me. There was no fading. There was no farewell. The walker was, simply, no longer at my left. I walked another twenty paces alone before I was certain, and I was certain, and I walked on.
I will tell you, friend, that I wept then, in the corridor, in the same small dignified way I had wept in the alcove the day before, only this time the weeping was not the weeping of a man setting down a small great burden, but the weeping of a man who had been given a small great gift that he had not earned and did not know how to thank the giver for, and the weeping went on for perhaps the length of a hundred paces of my walking, and then it stopped, and I dried my face with the cuff of my habit, and I walked on, and the lantern in my right hand burned on, and the staff in my left rang true against the stone, and the corridor, friend, the corridor, although it was the same corridor it had been an hour before, was not the same corridor. The corridor was a corridor that had now had me walked down it, and had said its small piece to me, and was, in the way of such corridors, finished with me. It was letting me through.
I came at the end of perhaps another hour and a half of walking, by my best reckoning, to the far end of the long corridor. The far end did not give onto a chamber as the other corridors had. The far end gave onto a second smaller alcove, in a position symmetrical to the alcove at which I had left the company. The second alcove was empty. I stood at its threshold and I let the lantern’s light fall into it and I saw that it was a place where the company could rest before going further, which was the only news I had been sent ahead to gather, and which I had gathered, and which I would now bring back.
I turned. I walked back. I will not describe the walking back, because the walking back was the small uneventful walking of a man returning the way he had come, with the lantern in his right hand and the staff in his left and the small inner adjustments of a man who had just been spoken to in a corridor and was, in the small reasonable way of one’s faculties, processing the speaking as he walked. The walking back took perhaps the same time as the walking down, which is to say four or five hours, which is what an old man’s pace produces in a long corridor whether he is walking with company or alone, and at the end of those hours I came to the small niche at the mouth of the corridor where the company was waiting.
Goradd, sitting at the entrance with the hammer across his knees as he had said he would, saw me first. He rose with the great speed of an old smith who had been sitting too long and was glad to be done with sitting, and he came to me and he took the lantern from my hand without asking, because my hand was, at that hour, tired enough to be glad of the taking, and he steadied me with his big rough other hand at my elbow, and he said, in his slow Dickensian voice, brother, brother, you are returned, by my forge you are, and I am glad, and the others are within. Come in. Sit down.
I came in. I sat down. The company was as I had left them, only better-rested by the four or five hours of their resting and the further four or five hours of their further resting. Vren was upright against the rear wall. Elandor was at the entrance. Maelis was upon her bundle. They were each in the postures of relief that the company of any person who has been gone alone into a corridor on a piece of business will adopt when the person comes back, and the postures are postures I had not previously thought to be observable, but were observable in the moment of my entry, and were a small further gift on top of the gifts of the corridor.
I told them. I told them that the corridor was passable, and that there was a small alcove at the far end where the company could rest before going further. I told them that I had encountered something in the corridor, but that the something had not been a creature, and that the something had been a kind of meeting that the corridor had been preparing for me, and that the meeting had been, by the choice of the something and by my own choice in turn, a meeting of kindness, and that the meeting had been the work I had been sent down the corridor for, and that the work was now done.
I did not tell them what the walker had said. I will not tell them in this lifetime, I think, and perhaps not in any other. The walker’s saying was for me. The saying had its own seal upon it, in the way the small private kindnesses always have their own seal, and I would not break the seal for the small comfort of the telling. The four of them, friend, did not press me. Vren only looked at me with the pale gold eyes for perhaps the count of three, and the looking was the looking of someone who had read the small absence of pressure on my face and had decided to honor it. Elandor said, brother, I am glad you are back. We will eat. We will rest. We will go in three hours. Goradd said, well now, well now, brother, well now. Maelis came across the niche to me in the small unguarded way she had, and she put her small gloved hand against the side of my old face for the length of one breath, and she said, oh, brother, oh, brother, you have been somewhere, and you do not need to tell us where, and she withdrew her hand, and she went back to her bundle, and the small unspoken understanding of the company held.
I leaned back against the wall. I let my eyes close. I let the small honest tiredness of an old man’s body do what it would. I will tell you, friend, that the cold in my chest had not lifted entirely, because the cold has not been the kind of cold that lifts entirely, but the cold had shifted again, by some small further measure, in the way the cold had been shifting at intervals throughout this descent. The cold had moved this time in the way that says it has been given a thing to hold that is not its own, and that the holding will make it lighter, although it will not make it warm, because the cold is not the kind of cold that becomes warm, only the kind of cold that, by the gradual addition of small held things across one’s long life, becomes a cold one can carry.
I had a small held thing now, friend. I had the small held thing of the walker’s saying. I had the small held thing that the boy from Aldrun had not blamed me, and that my brother Marrin had not blamed me, and that my mother had been keeping them with her all these years, and that the work I had done across the thirty-eight years of my brotherhood had been the work, and that the small particular thing I would be asked to do in the chamber below was the small thing only an old confessor could do, which was the naming of a thing in its presence, in such a way that the thing would have to hear itself named, and the gift of the naming would be enough.
It will be enough. I sat with my eyes closed in the niche and I let those words sit in me. It will be enough. I had not, in thirty-eight years, been told that anything I had done or would do was enough, in plain country language, in the unambiguous tone of a thing said by someone with the standing to say it. I had said many small enoughs to myself, in the small private way of an old brother accommodating himself to the small enoughs of his work. I had received many small near-enoughs from masters of the order and from companions and from the people whose small confessions I had heard over the years. I had not, in any of those small near-enoughs, received the saying of it in the full register of enough, until that hour in the corridor.
I had received it now. I would carry it. I would carry it, friend, the rest of my life, however long the rest was, and I would carry it into the chamber below, and I would do the small particular thing that had been kept for me to do, and the doing would be sufficient, because the saying had said so, and the saying had been said by someone with the standing to say it, and that, friend, is what the long corridor had given me, and that is what I will, in the small remaining set-down of this telling, give back to you, with the small reminder that the gift was a gift to me and that the gift may not be the gift you are given when your own corridor comes for you, but that the corridor will come, in some form, in some shape, and that when it comes, friend, you may walk down it at the pace you have, with the lantern you have, and the staff you have, and the small offices in your breath that have been settling your breath these long years, and the walker, when she comes to walk at your left, will walk in the rhythm you grew up in, and the meeting will be a meeting of kindness if you choose to receive it as one, and the choosing is the small first move, and the move is yours to make, and the corridor is waiting, and the corridor, in its slow patient way, will be waiting for as long as it takes you to come.
Segment Eighteen: The Phasing Hunters
They had crossed the long corridor in the order they had set for it, with Brother Caius leading at the pace the old brother had walked alone the night before, and Vren at the second place because the corridor was now known to Vren and Vren had passed her morning judgment that the corridor was safe in the sense that mattered, and Maelis at the third, and Goradd at the fourth, and Elandor the Swift at the rear. The walking had taken them through the better part of the morning by the body’s reckoning, and at the end of it the company had come into the second alcove that the brother had described, and the alcove was as the brother had said, an empty small niche at the corridor’s far end, large enough for the five of them and small enough to be defensible, with one entrance and no other openings, and Vren had inspected it in the careful way Vren inspected any new room, and Vren had given the small nod, and the company had set itself down in the alcove for what would, by Elandor’s professional judgment, be the last proper rest they took before the chamber below.
Elandor took the entrance. He took it without anyone offering it to him. He had begun, over the last several days, to take entrances without asking and to give them up without asking, in the small unspoken arrangement that had grown up between him and Vren and Goradd by the natural mechanism of three persons who knew what they were doing taking turns at the work that needed doing. He took it now because Vren had walked point all morning and Goradd had walked rear and the brother had been ahead of the company alone for a long stretch of the previous evening and was, by Elandor’s reading of him, more tired than he was willing to say. Elandor took the entrance. The others arranged themselves within.
The brother lay down. The brother lay down properly, full-length on his bedroll with his old hands folded across his chest, in the small careful way of an old man who had decided that the time for half-rest had run out and that the time for proper rest had arrived, and the brother was, within perhaps four minutes of laying down, asleep. The sleep was the deep clean sleep of a man who had set down a thing too large to set down in any small way and was now permitted, in the small mercy of a body that had earned it, to take the rest the setting-down had purchased. Elandor noted the sleep with the small approving attention he had been giving the brother since the brother had returned from the long corridor the night before. The brother had earned the sleep. The brother could have it.
Maelis settled herself upon her bundle in her usual posture of not-quite sleep, with the gloved hands palm-up on her knees and her eyes upon a point in the middle distance. Goradd sat down against the wall opposite the brother and laid his hammer across his knees in the slow careful way of a man whose ribs were still bound from the ambush three days ago and whose body would not be hurried. Goradd did not sleep. Goradd had developed over the days the small reliable habit of resting without sleeping, in the careful way of an old smith who had learned over many decades to rest his body while keeping his attention available, and the habit had become one of the small things Elandor had quietly come to depend on.
Vren did not sleep. Vren never slept. Vren sat against the rear wall in the slow controlled fall posture, with the cloak drawn about her and the pale gold eyes upon the entrance, in the position of a second watcher, which was the position Vren took whenever Elandor took the entrance, in the small unspoken arrangement that Vren had been making with Elandor since the morning of the first chamber.
Elandor stood at the entrance and watched the corridor.
He had been at the entrance perhaps two hours when the Brace of the Watchful Eye on his left arm warmed for the first time.
The Brace had been with him eleven years, and the small inlaid crystal at its center had warmed perhaps fifty times across those years, in the small reliable way the crystal had of warming when something with hostile intent was watching him from cover. He knew the warming. He knew the degrees of it, and he knew the meaning of each degree, by the long acquaintance of a man who has learned to read his own tools as a fisherman learns to read his own line. The crystal had warmed at perhaps a tenth of its possible warming, which was the smallest grade of attention, the equivalent of a person glancing at him from a doorway and looking away. He did not move. He let his eye go past the entrance into the corridor and he let the soft soldier’s eye go to its corners and its seams and its small irregularities, and he found nothing. He found nothing because there was nothing in the corridor for the hard eye to find. The watching was not in the corridor. The watching was somewhere else, and was reaching him through the persuaded stone, and the crystal was reading the watching at the small remove that persuaded stone introduced.
He marked the time of the first warming in his head. He let his hand drift, in the small natural way of a hand drifting, to the hilt of the Whisperedge of the Faithful Hand at his right hip. He did not draw the blade. He only let the hand rest upon the hilt in the small reassuring way the hand had of resting upon the hilt at such moments. He did not turn his head to look at Vren. He knew, without turning, that Vren had marked the small drift of his hand, because Vren marked everything, and that Vren had quietly transferred her attention from the entrance to him, in the small unspoken way that Vren transferred her attention when she suspected that Elandor had read something the rest of the alcove had not yet read.
The crystal warmed a second time. It warmed to perhaps a quarter of its possible warming. The warming was no longer the warming of a glance. The warming was the warming of a sustained study, of the kind that a hunter performs upon a prey when the hunter is considering how to approach. Elandor’s hand tightened the smallest fraction on the hilt of the Whisperedge. He drew his breath in the slow careful way he had drawn it before the ambush three days before, and he let it out, and he let the small fierce song in his breastbone, which had been quiet across the long corridor, sit up in him with the small alert sit-up of an animal that has heard a sound from the brush and has decided to attend to the brush in particular.
He said, very softly, in the voice that would not carry past the alcove’s threshold, he said, Vren.
Vren said, in the flat voice, also softly, hero.
He said, the Brace is warming. Sustained study, by my reading. From inside the stone.
Vren said, how long.
He said, perhaps three minutes since the first registration.
Vren said, wake the others. Quietly. I will take the entrance.
Vren rose. She rose in the slow controlled way of a person rising without producing any sound, which is a way Elandor had been studying for some days and which he had not yet entirely understood, and Vren came across the floor of the alcove in three soundless steps and replaced Elandor at the entrance, and Elandor turned to the alcove and did the small wakings.
He went to the brother first. He went to the brother first because the brother was asleep and would take longest to wake. He went to the brother and he set his hand upon the brother’s shoulder in the small specific way that the masters of his order had taught him to wake a sleeping brother in the field, which was a small firm pressure that did not shake and did not shock but informed the sleeper that the sleep was over, and the brother, who had been taught the same waking in his own order forty years before, came up out of the sleep in the slow clean way of an old brother who had been waked correctly. The brother’s eyes opened. The brother did not speak. The brother only looked up at Elandor and the brother’s old face read the situation from Elandor’s face, and the brother sat up without rustling the bedroll, and the brother took up his staff and his lantern without making any sound, and the brother rose to his feet beside Elandor in the small thirty seconds of a man who has been on the field before and who knows that the small thirty seconds is what wakings are for.
Elandor went to Maelis second. Maelis was already coming up from her not-quite sleep at the small sound of Vren rising, in the small reliable way that Maelis had developed of waking at small unusual sounds in the alcove, and Elandor only had to set his hand at her elbow and to give her the small nod, and Maelis returned the nod and rose and drew the satchel onto her shoulder and her left hand went already to the outer pocket where she kept the packets of pale stinging dust, in the small efficient gesture of a woman who had learned over the last days what her useful work in a fight was and who did not require further instruction.
Goradd was already on his feet. Goradd had risen at the moment Elandor had set his hand on the brother’s shoulder, in the small reliable way of an old smith who watched everything that happened in his alcove at a level of awareness slightly above his stated rest, and Goradd had his hammer in his right hand and was looking at Elandor with the small attentive look that meant he was awaiting orders, and Elandor gave them with two small gestures of his free hand, which meant rear of the alcove, by the wall, ready, and Goradd nodded and moved without sound to the rear wall of the alcove and set his back against the stone and held the hammer at his side in the small economical posture of a man who had decided to be a wall against which something would break.
The Brace warmed a third time. It warmed to perhaps half its possible warming. The warming was now the warming that meant the hunter had decided how to approach and was approaching. Elandor felt the warming as a small clean heat against his forearm, the kind of heat a man feels when he holds his hand near a fire that has just been freshly stirred. The heat said, in the small specific language of the crystal, that the something was preparing to come, and the preparation was perhaps thirty seconds from completion, and the coming was not coming through the entrance.
He said, very softly, Vren. Not the entrance.
Vren said, the walls. I read it also. Where.
Elandor let the soft eye go. The Brace, when it was at this grade of heat, gave him also a small additional sense, in the small bones of his left forearm, of the direction the watching was coming from. He let the sense sit in the forearm. The sense told him that the watching was distributed. The watching was not from one direction. The watching was from at least three. The walls of the alcove were being watched from at least three sides, and the watching was being done by at least three watchers, and the three watchers were coming.
He said, three sides. The wall opposite the entrance. The wall on the left. The wall on the right. They are coming together.
Vren said, ceiling.
Elandor let the sense run up. The forearm gave him a small further heat from above. He said, ceiling also. Four. Perhaps more behind them.
Vren said, the alcove will not hold. We hold it for the first wave only. We break out into the corridor at the second.
He said, agreed.
He turned to the company. He spoke in the clipped command voice that he had used at the ambush three days before, but he spoke at the volume of a man speaking in a sickroom at night, because the carrying of the voice was not the work of this hour, only the carrying of the words. He said, brother, you will stand at the center of the alcove with the lantern raised high. The lantern is our light. The lantern is also our weapon, in the way you used it in the first chamber. You will not move from the center. Master Goradd, you will hold the rear wall. The wall is going to give. When it gives, you will meet what comes through with the hammer, and you will buy us five seconds. Five seconds is all I am asking of you. Maelis, you will hold the wall to the left of the entrance. You will throw the packets at whatever comes through. You will throw at the eyes. Vren and I will take the wall to the right of the entrance and the ceiling, in whatever order they present themselves. If the alcove becomes untenable, we will break out through the entrance into the corridor and we will fall back along the corridor we came down by, in the order we came down. Mark me.
They marked him. There were four small nods. There were no words. The company had become, over the last several days, the kind of company that did not need words for such instructions.
The Brace warmed a fourth time. It warmed to three quarters of its possible warming. The warming was now the warming of imminent contact, the warming that a hunter’s prey was about to receive the hunter, and Elandor felt the small bright song in his breastbone come up at last to the high pitch it had reached three days ago, and he let the song come up, and his hand on the hilt of the Whisperedge tightened, and he drew the blade slowly, in the small clean way the smith had given it three nights ago, and the half-tone-clearer whisper of the drawing sounded once in the alcove and was the only sound for the duration of the next half second.
Then the alcove erupted.
I will tell you, friend, how a wall of persuaded stone erupts when a Gloomspider comes through it, because the eruption is the thing this segment of the telling is for, and the telling will not work if the eruption is not described. The wall does not break. The wall does not shatter. The wall does not collapse. The wall becomes, for the duration of perhaps a quarter second, the appearance of stone over the body of the thing coming through it, and the appearance of stone moves with the body the way a sheet draped over a person moves with the person, in the small fluid way that a fabric moves over a moving form, and then the appearance of stone parts at the leading edge of the body and the body is in the room with you and the appearance of stone falls behind the body and reforms, in the small fluid way, into a wall once more, and the wall once more is a wall and not a wound. There is no opening left. There is only the wall, and the body in the room, and the small impossible knowledge that the body has come through the wall as though the wall were a curtain, and the wall is once again a wall, and the body is between you and the wall, and the body is now your problem.
Four bodies came through four walls at once.
I will not pretend, friend, that Elandor saw all four with his hard eye. He saw two with his hard eye and two with the small additional sense of the Brace. The two he saw with his hard eye were the one through the right-hand wall and the one through the ceiling. The one through the right-hand wall came at the level of his shoulder, in the same fluid way as it had come at the wall of the first chamber, and the one through the ceiling came down upon the center of the alcove with its many legs splayed in the long bent fall of a creature that had been waiting for the drop. The two he did not see with his hard eye were the one through the rear wall, which Goradd would deal with, and the one through the left-hand wall, which Maelis would receive.
Elandor went into the work.
I want to describe the work, friend, but I want to acknowledge before I do that the description will be inadequate, in the way the description of any work of this kind is inadequate, because the work happened in the long stretched-out time that combat at its highest pitch produces, and the long stretched-out time is not a time that words run easily through. The words run at the speed of the page. The work runs at the speed of the breath. The two speeds do not match. I will tell you what I can.
He took the Gloomspider at the right-hand wall first. He took it because the right-hand wall Gloomspider was the closest to him and was the one that, if not taken immediately, would be on the brother in the center of the alcove within the next breath. He stepped to his right with the small clean step of the second form he had been taught, and he brought the Whisperedge up in the long upward cut that had taken the first creature in the first chamber and that had taken the second creature in the corridor three days ago, and the cut took the right-hand wall creature along its underside from the place where the forward legs met the body to the place where the rear legs left it, and the cut went cleanly through, and the creature came apart on its own momentum and fell in two unequal pieces on the floor of the alcove, and Elandor did not stop to look at the falling.
He turned.
The ceiling Gloomspider was on the floor. It had landed in the center of the alcove, between Brother Caius and the entrance, and Brother Caius had not yet had time to lift the lantern, which Elandor had told him to lift, and the ceiling Gloomspider was rising on its many legs in the slow gathering way of a creature that had landed and was now preparing to spring. Elandor crossed the alcove in two long strides and he came up upon the ceiling Gloomspider from its blind side and he drove the Whisperedge into the place where the round forward portion of its body met the segment behind it, in the third form he had been taught, and the blade took the connection between the two segments and severed it, and the ceiling Gloomspider’s body came apart at the joint, and the body fell to either side of the joint, and the small dark not-blood that Vren had identified three days ago in the corridor pooled at Brother Caius’s feet, and the brother, recovering himself, lifted the lantern high in the gesture Elandor had told him to perform, and the lantern’s small honest yellow bloomed, by the small mechanism the brother had not yet explained to Elandor and which Elandor still meant to ask about, into the brighter steadier light that had blinded the third Gloomspider in the first chamber on the first day.
The brighter light fell upon the rear wall, where Goradd was meeting the third Gloomspider.
Goradd was meeting it, friend, in the slow steady way of an old smith who had been working a furnace at full draw for thirty years. The Gloomspider had come through the rear wall directly into the spot where Goradd had set his back, and Goradd had stepped one pace forward at the moment of the eruption, in the small reliable way of a man who knew that a wall was about to become a problem and who did not intend to be against the wall when it did, and the Gloomspider had emerged into the spot Goradd had just left, and Goradd had pivoted on his right foot in the slow steady way of a smith pivoting at his anvil, and Goradd had brought the head of his short hammer around in the long arc that had killed the third Gloomspider in the first chamber, and the hammer met the round forward portion of the Gloomspider’s body at the small instant when the Gloomspider was still emerging from the wall and was therefore not yet in the position to use all of its many legs against him, and the hammer broke the round forward portion of the body in a single clean strike, and the Gloomspider’s body collapsed inward upon itself, and Goradd, breathing hard, stepped back, and the Gloomspider lay still upon the floor of the alcove at the rear wall, and Goradd’s eye went up and met Elandor’s across the alcove and Goradd gave the smallest of nods that said, captain, one is done, what is next, and Elandor returned the nod and turned to the left-hand wall.
The left-hand wall Gloomspider had come through onto Maelis.
Maelis had her packet ready. She had been holding the packet in her gloved left hand since the moment Elandor had told her to take the left-hand wall. She had thrown the packet at the eyes of the Gloomspider in the small instant of its eruption from the wall, in the same sidearm motion she had thrown the first packet at the first chamber three days ago, and the packet had struck the Gloomspider on the round forward portion of its body at the small moment when the body was still partially in the wall, and the packet had broken open, and the fine pale dust had bloomed across the Gloomspider’s many eyes, and the Gloomspider had reared up on its rear four legs in the same jerking spasm as the first chamber creature had three days ago, and Maelis, who had not stopped at the throwing, was already drawing a second packet, and she threw the second packet at the rearing throat of the creature, and the second packet broke open over the rearing throat, and the same fine pale dust bloomed across the throat, and the creature made the thin high cry that the first chamber creature had made, and Maelis, who was apparently a more dangerous person than Elandor had quite given her credit for, drew a third packet, and Vren, in the same instant, came across the alcove at the rear of the creature in the small soundless three steps Vren took to cross any space, and Vren’s twin blades went through the place where the round forward portion of the creature’s body met the segment behind it, in the same clean economy Vren had used at the first chamber, and the creature collapsed, and the third packet did not need to be thrown, and Maelis put it back in her satchel with the small embarrassed gesture of a woman who had drawn a weapon she had not needed and was returning it to its place, and Vren wiped the twin blades against the underside of the dead thing and the wiping was over in perhaps two seconds and the blades were back in the sheaths at the small of her back, and Vren met Elandor’s eye across the alcove and the pale gold eyes did the small narrowing that meant, hero, what is next.
Four down.
The Brace warmed a fifth time. It warmed past three quarters and toward the upper limit of its warming, and the warming told Elandor a thing he did not wish to know, which was that the four bodies that had just come through the four walls were the first wave, and the second wave was preparing, and the second wave was not coming from the four walls alone. The second wave was coming from the floor as well.
He said, in the command voice, the floor, mark the floor, and he had not even finished saying it when the floor of the alcove erupted in three places at once, and three further Gloomspiders came up out of the floor in the same fluid way the first four had come through the walls, and the three Gloomspiders coming up out of the floor were larger than the four that had come through the walls, and the three Gloomspiders were positioned, by some piece of small careful enemy planning, one in front of the brother, one behind Vren, and one between Maelis and the entrance.
Elandor did the calculation in the small fraction of a second that the calculation took.
The first wave had been the test. The second wave was the strike. The first wave had been four, the smaller creatures, sent in to occupy the company’s attention. The second wave was three, the larger creatures, sent in to take the company while the company was occupied. The three larger creatures had been placed to take Brother Caius, who could not defend himself in a fight of this kind, and Vren, who was the most dangerous of the company at close quarters, and Maelis, who controlled the entrance and was therefore the route by which the company would break out. The placement was good placement. The placement had been planned by something that had studied the company’s behavior in the three days since the corridor ambush, and that had taken the small administrative information from the previous fight and had used it to construct the second strike. The placement was, friend, the placement of an opponent who had now properly engaged with the company as an opponent, and not as an administrative anomaly, and the new register of the engagement was the register of a thing that had finally taken the company seriously, and Elandor felt the song in his breastbone come up to a pitch it had not been at since the market town in the eastern marches sixteen years ago, and the song now had in it the small further note that he had not heard in sixteen years, which was the note of a song that knew it might not be sung again, and the song would therefore be sung loud.
He went.
He went to the Gloomspider in front of Brother Caius first. He went because the brother had no defense at all against the Gloomspider in front of him, and the alcove was, in the small unworthy calculation of the moment, a place where the brother could not be lost, because the brother had a thing to do in the chamber below that none of the rest of them could do, and Elandor had been told this by Vren in the alcove of the brother’s confession two days ago, and Elandor had marked it, and Elandor had decided in the marking that the brother would not be lost.
He crossed the alcove in three strides. He came at the Gloomspider in front of Brother Caius from its left side. The Gloomspider had risen halfway out of the floor and was reaching its forelegs toward the brother, and the brother had lifted the staff in the long brooms stroke that had saved a half-second at the corridor ambush, and the brother’s stroke caught the Gloomspider on the leading foreleg and turned it aside, and the turning bought Elandor the half-second he needed to come up upon the creature’s blind side, and the Whisperedge took the Gloomspider through the upper segment in the same horizontal cut he had used at the corridor three days ago, and the cut went cleanly through, and the Gloomspider came apart upon the floor of the alcove, and Brother Caius, who had not lowered the lantern, gave Elandor the smallest of nods.
Five.
Elandor did not stop. He turned to find Vren.
Vren was already past her Gloomspider. The Gloomspider that had come up behind Vren had not, by some piece of planning that the planners had not foreseen, accounted for the fact that Vren was Vren, and Vren had pivoted at the moment of the eruption in the same way Goradd had pivoted at the rear wall, and Vren had not been where the Gloomspider had come up at, and Vren had come around upon the Gloomspider from its rear before the Gloomspider had fully cleared the floor, and Vren’s twin blades had taken the Gloomspider through the connection between the upper body and the rear segment in the small clean economy of Vren’s signature work, and the Gloomspider lay in two pieces upon the floor of the alcove already, and Vren was wiping the blades against the underside in the slow careful way she always did, and Vren’s pale gold eyes met Elandor’s across the alcove with the small flash that was Vren’s version of a grin.
Six.
The third of the second-wave Gloomspiders, the one between Maelis and the entrance, was the one Elandor turned to last, and the turning was the part of the fight that Elandor would think about, in the long quiet of after, with the small particular satisfaction of a soldier whose company had performed properly.
The third Gloomspider had risen between Maelis and the entrance, and had turned itself at the rising to face Maelis, who was its assigned target. Maelis had not drawn a third packet, because Maelis had no third packet for a creature already at three paces, only the chalk in her right hand and the satchel at her shoulder. Maelis had done a thing Elandor had not expected of her, which was that she had taken the chalk in her right hand and had struck the Gloomspider across its forward eyes with the chalk in the small sharp gesture of a woman who had decided not to die without hitting something, and the chalk had broken on the creature’s face, but the striking had distracted the creature for the small half-second that Elandor required, and Elandor came up upon the Gloomspider from the side that Maelis had drawn its attention away from, and the Whisperedge took the Gloomspider through the upper body in the long downward cut that was the fourth form Elandor had been taught, and the cut took the creature from the place where its head met the body to the place where the body began, and the creature came apart along the cut, and the cut took the creature’s many legs out from under it, and the creature collapsed at Maelis’s feet, and Maelis stared at Elandor across the corpse and Maelis said, in the small voice she used when she had nothing else available to say, oh, petal. Petal.
Elandor said, in the same small voice, all right.
Seven.
The Brace warmed past its upper limit. The warming became, for the smallest fraction of a moment, the warming that the crystal had only achieved twice before in Elandor’s eleven years of carrying it, which was the warming that said a hunter of an entirely different order from the previous hunters was now studying the company, and was preparing to come, and would come within the small interval that the warming allowed for, and the small interval was, by Elandor’s reading of the heat, perhaps five seconds.
He said, in the command voice, break out. Now. The entrance.
The company moved. They moved in the order he had given them, with Vren at the point of the breaking, and Maelis behind her, and Brother Caius behind Maelis with the lantern, and Goradd behind the brother, and Elandor at the rear, and the company came out of the alcove into the corridor in the small disciplined way of a company that had been trained over the previous six days to move at his command, and Elandor at the rear came out of the alcove last, with the Whisperedge still in his right hand and the song in his breastbone still at the pitch it had risen to, and he came out into the corridor and he turned to face the alcove behind him, and the alcove behind him was, in the small final second of his looking, the room that the new hunter was coming into.
The new hunter came up out of the floor at the center of the alcove. The new hunter was not a Gloomspider in the size or in the shape of the seven they had killed. The new hunter was perhaps half again the size of the largest of the seven, and the new hunter’s many legs had a more deliberate weight than the legs of the seven, and the new hunter’s eyes, which Elandor saw across the floor of the alcove in the small last instant before he turned and ran, the new hunter’s eyes were not the small dark gleaming points of the other Gloomspiders’ eyes, but were larger and more numerous and were arranged in a pattern that Elandor did not have time to read, and the pattern was, by the small certain knowledge of his back-of-the-mind, a pattern of intelligence, and the new hunter was not a syllable. The new hunter was a longer word, perhaps a small sentence, in the language Maelis had been learning along the strand.
Elandor turned and ran.
He ran at the long fast lope that had given him his name, in the small full speed of his order, and he caught up to the company within perhaps fifteen paces, and he took up the rear position in the falling-back order, and the company moved back along the corridor at the small fast pace that a company could move at without breaking the order, and Vren at the point set the pace and Elandor at the rear watched the corridor behind them, and the new hunter, by Elandor’s looking, did not pursue immediately. The new hunter remained at the alcove for the duration of perhaps a count of twenty, in the small careful way of a hunter that had taken inventory of a room and was now considering what the inventory meant.
They fell back along the corridor for perhaps a hundred paces. Elandor watched. The new hunter did not come. The seven dead Gloomspiders in the alcove behind them did not get up and walk after the company, in the small relief of a thing that Elandor had been quietly fearing might happen and had not happened. The corridor behind the company was, by Elandor’s reading, quiet.
At one hundred and twenty paces Vren at the point lifted her hand and the company stopped. Vren said, in the flat voice, the new one is not coming. Hero. Did you see it.
Elandor said, I saw it. It was larger. It had different eyes. It was, by my reading, a different order of creature.
Vren said, the larger word.
Elandor said, the larger word.
Maelis said, from her place in the line, in the small voice she used when she was working something out, she said, petals. Petals. If the seven we just killed were syllables, and the new one was a larger word, then the she is sending her sentences in pieces. The first wave was four small words. The second wave was three larger words. The new one was a single larger word, perhaps a small sentence. The she is, by my reading, having to send larger pieces of herself at us because the smaller pieces are no longer sufficient. The smaller pieces have been broken. The larger pieces are what she has left to send. This is a small piece of good news, friend, in that the she is now spending more of herself per attack than before. This is also a small piece of bad news, in that the next attack will probably be even larger.
Goradd said, well now, lass, well now. I will say that I am pleased we did not stay in the alcove to receive the next larger piece, because the next larger piece would have come up out of the floor at us in a place we had no room to move, and we would have been, by my forge, in a great deal more trouble than we were just in. The captain was right to call the break out.
Brother Caius said, in his slow gentle voice, captain. You were right to call it. I will say, also, that the lantern’s small further light that the brothers of the order taught me to bring up at need was given an exercise it had not had in some years, and that I am glad of the exercise, and that the lantern, by my reading, has more in it for the chamber below than I had previously suspected, and that the giving of it the exercise has reminded the lantern of its full work, and that the reminding is a small good preparation for what is coming. Elandor said, brother, when this is done, you will explain to me how the lantern does the second light. The brother smiled the small dry smile. He said, captain, when this is done, I will explain anything you wish. I will require you to be in a chair and to have a small cup of something warm in your hand, because the explanation is a long one and I will give it slowly. Elandor said, brother, I will accept those conditions, and we will sit in two chairs with two cups, because the captain at that point will require sitting and cups as much as the brother will. Goradd laughed at that, in the small short bark of his laughter, and Maelis gave the small breath of a laugh, and Vren did not laugh but the line of her shoulders relaxed by the small fraction that was Vren’s version of laughter, and the moment in the corridor was, for the duration of one breath, the moment of a company that had just survived something and had not yet had the time to process the surviving but was beginning, in the small communal way, to permit itself the surviving.
Elandor let himself, for the duration of one breath, feel the survival.
I want to set down, friend, what the survival felt like, because the feeling was the part of the alcove fight that was not the fight, and that is, in my long reflection, the part worth keeping. The fight had been the wildest fight of his nineteen years of work. He had killed three Gloomspiders in the alcove, four if one counted the support cut he had given to the one Vren had finished, and the killings had been the killings he had been bred and trained to perform, and the killings had been performed at the speed and the precision the breeding and training had been pointed at. The fight had been, in the small private register of his profession, a perfect fight. The fight had also been the fight in which an enemy that ignored walls had come through four walls at once and through the floor in three places and had nearly taken his company in a room he had been holding as a defensive position, and the small terror of that, the small terror of being in a room that no longer offered the small basic protection of having walls, was a terror Elandor had not previously felt in any room of his life. The two feelings sat in him now in the corridor, side by side, the raw exultant adrenaline of the perfect fight and the small terror of the foe that ignored walls, and the two feelings, like the small mischievous delight and the slow horror that Maelis had been describing in herself for some days, did not contradict each other and did not cancel each other but sat together in his chest in the small approximate equal measure that, he had come to understand, was the proper interior register of a person walking through this descent.
The song in his breastbone, he found, when he attended to it, was not entirely coming down off its pitch this time. The song was staying up. The song was staying up because the song knew, in the way the song knew things, that the fight in the alcove had not been the last fight, and that the fight had not even been the second-to-last fight, and that the song would be required again, perhaps soon, perhaps in a different register than it had ever been required in before, and the song was therefore not coming down off its pitch in the orderly way it generally came down after a fight, but was holding at the high pitch and was preparing, in its way, for what was next. He let the song stay up. He had been trained, over nineteen years, to bring the song down when the fight was over. He had also been trained, over the same nineteen years, to read when the song was telling him not to bring it down. The song was telling him not to bring it down. He honored the telling.
He said, in the command voice that now had the new soft note in it that he had been using since the second alcove, he said, friends. We will fall back to a place I judge defensible. We will not return to the alcove. The alcove is no longer ours. We will fall back along the corridor to a place in the long corridor that I marked on the walking, where there is a small narrowing of the persuaded stone at a point I judge to be perhaps half an hour back. The narrowing will not stop the new hunter from coming through walls if the new hunter chooses to. The narrowing will, however, force any attack against us to come at us at the rate of one or two at a time, rather than four or seven at once, and the rate is what determines whether a company can hold. We will hold at the narrowing for what remains of this resting period. We will set our watches in shifts, and we will not all sleep at once, and we will be ready for the next wave whenever the next wave comes. Master Goradd, you will take the first watch with me. Vren and Brother Caius will take the second. Maelis will sleep through the first two watches because Maelis has been thinking with her satchel open for the last hour and is more tired than she has admitted, and Maelis will then watch with me alone for the third while the others sleep. Are there objections.
There were no objections. There were the small unanimous nods of a company that had just been given a plan that was a good plan, and the nods carried in them the small relief of a company that had been waiting, in the small unconscious way of a tired company, to be told what to do.
Maelis said, in the smaller voice she used when admitting that she had been read accurately, she said, captain. The being read is not a thing I generally permit. I will permit it this time. Thank you for the third watch.
Elandor said, very softly, Maelis Veth. You permitted it because you are tired. The permitting is the right small permitting. You will sleep. We will not let anything come for you that we cannot stop.
She smiled, the small soft private smile that had not been her usual bright smile, and she fell into the line, and the company fell back along the corridor at the small fast pace, and the song in Elandor’s breastbone stayed up at the high pitch, and the corridor behind them remained, by his looking, quiet, and the new hunter, the larger word, the small sentence, did not pursue them in this hour, although Elandor knew, with the small reliable knowing of his profession, that the larger word was now somewhere in the corridor behind them, and was waiting, and was preparing the next thing to send, and the next thing would be larger, and the next thing would come, and the song in his breastbone would be sung for it, and the company at his back would, by every small reading he had of them now, be ready, and that was sufficient for the present hour, and the present hour, friend, the present hour in the slow steady falling-back walk down the warm corridor, with the lantern’s small honest yellow ahead and the small fierce song in his chest and the four people of his company in the order he had set for them and the rear watch he was keeping for them, was, in the small unworthy private register of Elandor the Swift, brother of the Order of the Pale Star, sworn in his eighteenth year and now thirty-seven years old, the present hour was the proudest hour of his life so far, and the pride was the small clean pride of a man who had been bred for the work and had done the work, and the work had been the right work, and the song was the right song, and the company was the right company, and he carried the pride down the corridor at the rear of the line, and the corridor went on, and the descent went on, and the song went on, and that, friend, was sufficient.
Segment Nineteen: A Forge Beneath the Stone
It was upon the fifth or sixth hour of our resumed walking, after the long fall-back from the alcove and the small further hours of cautious sleep at the narrowing where the captain had set our last watch, that I came round a slow bending of the corridor at my place in the rear and was nearly run into by Brother Caius, who had stopped in his place ahead of me, who had nearly run into Maelis, who had stopped in her place ahead of him, who had nearly run into Vren, who had stopped in her place ahead of her, who had not, by any sound or any sign that my eye could catch from the rear of the line, been run into by Elandor, who was at the point that morning by an arrangement Vren had proposed at the end of the second watch and which the captain had accepted in his clipped formal way, and who therefore had only stopped in the small clean way a hero of his order stopped when the corridor ahead of him had presented an unexpected feature.
I will tell you, friend, what the unexpected feature was, although the telling of it from the rear of the line came to me only at the small delay of perhaps thirty seconds, during which I leaned upon my hammer-haft and waited with the small patient waiting of a smith who had learned in many years of his trade that asking what is going on at the front of a queue is the small last refuge of the impatient man, and that the man with the patience to wait for the news to arrive in its own good time generally arrives at the news in approximately the same condition as the news arrived at him, which is to say undiminished. I waited. The news arrived. The news was passed back along the line in the small careful whispers of a company that had learned over the previous days that voices in the corridors of The Maelstrom’s Embrace traveled, and that the small careful whispers were the proper communication of any company in such corridors when the company had stopped without expecting to stop.
The whispers, as they reached me at the rear, were these. The corridor had widened. The corridor had widened into a chamber. The chamber was not a chamber of the kind we had seen before. The chamber was, by Vren’s reading at the point, empty of any creature. The chamber had in it a great many objects of a kind we had not seen in any of the previous chambers, and the objects were objects, by the small careful whispering of Brother Caius back to me, that I in particular ought to come forward to see, because the objects, the brother thought, were objects that fell within my particular professional competence, and the company was asking me to come forward and to look at them and to say what they were.
I came forward, friend, with the small careful pacing of a man whose ribs were bound and whose body would not be hurried, and I came up the line past Maelis at her place and past Brother Caius at his place and past Vren at the point where she had stepped aside to let me through, and I came at last to where Elandor stood at the threshold of the new chamber, and Elandor stepped aside to let me come up beside him, and I stood at the threshold beside him, and I looked into the chamber, and I will tell you, friend, what I saw, in the order I saw it, because the order of my seeing is the order in which the chamber laid itself out to my professional eye, and the order is not, I think, the order in which it laid itself out to any of the other four.
I saw, first, that the chamber was the proper shape and proper proportions of a forge. I want to say that plainly at the outset, because the saying of it is the necessary frame for everything that came after. The chamber was perhaps twenty paces by twenty, with the height of perhaps two tall men, and the floor was the persuaded stone of every other floor of this descent, only the floor of the chamber was darker than the floor of the corridors had been, with the particular darkening of a floor that has had hot iron dropped upon it many times across many years, in the small repeated way that any working forge floor acquires its darkening. I saw, second, in the same first instant of my seeing, that the chamber had at its far wall a great hearth set into the persuaded stone, and the hearth was the proper shape of a smith’s hearth, with the proper opening for the proper bellows-pipe at the right side and the proper raised lip at the front for the keeping of the coals from rolling out at the smith’s feet. I saw, third, that beside the hearth, set in the proper position relative to the hearth that a smith of any experience would set it in for the proper reach of his arm between the hearth and the anvil, was the great dark iron block of an anvil of an unfamiliar pattern, and I will come back to the anvil in a moment because the anvil was the central feature of the chamber and the central evidence of what I am about to tell you. I saw, fourth, hanging from pegs along the right-hand wall of the chamber, the long row of a smith’s working tools, each in its proper place upon its proper peg, in the proper order of size from the longest tongs at the far end of the row down to the smallest awls at the near end, in the small careful order that a smith of any pride in his calling will keep his tools in across the years of his working. I saw, fifth, set at the left-hand wall of the chamber, the great wooden trough of a quenching-tank, with the proper drainage cut into the floor leading away from it, and the water in the tank, friend, was still in the tank, after a passage of years I could not in that first moment estimate, although the water had a small fine dust upon it of the kind that any standing water acquires in a closed space across some considerable time. I saw, sixth, the small piles of various raw stocks at the left-rear corner of the chamber, in the careful sorting of a smith who knew his stock, and I saw, seventh, the small narrow workbench at the right-rear corner with the small careful arrangement of finer tools laid out upon it for the small detail work that all smiths come at last to at the end of any larger piece of work, and I saw, eighth and last, set in the very center of the chamber upon the great dark iron block of the anvil, the half-finished blade.
The half-finished blade, friend, was the thing my eye came to last, and the thing my eye stayed upon longest, because the half-finished blade was the small particular detail of the chamber that told me what had happened here, in the same way that a single sentence in a long letter sometimes tells one the whole content of the letter without the rest of the letter being necessary to the telling. I will describe the half-finished blade in detail, because the description is the description that contains the story.
The half-finished blade lay upon the anvil. The blade was perhaps eighteen inches in length at this stage of its making, with the shape of what would have been, in another six or eight hours of working, a long fine sword of an order I had seen perhaps three times in my career and had not myself ever attempted to forge, because the pattern was a pattern that required a higher degree of skill than I had been trained to and that required also a stock of certain qualities that I had not had access to in my own forge at the Three-Stones Crossroads. The blade was, in other words, the work of a smith of significantly greater accomplishment than myself, and I want to say that plainly at the outset of the description, because the description that follows is the description of a piece of work that humbled me to look at, and the humbling is the small honest reaction of any smith with the proper sense of his own place in his trade who comes across the unfinished work of a master.
The blade was at the stage of forging that I would call, in the small private vocabulary of my own trade, the long-shaping stage, which is the stage at which the rough billet has been drawn out into the approximate length and approximate taper of the eventual blade but has not yet had the final clean work done upon it for the proper edges and the proper distal taper and the small fine details of the fuller and the ricasso and so on. The blade had been hammered upon, by my counting of the small hammer-marks along its length, perhaps two hundred times, in the careful regular pattern of a smith who had been laying his strikes with great attention. The blade had been heated, by my counting of the small color-bands along its surface where the previous heats had been worked, perhaps fifteen times. The blade was, in other words, perhaps half of the way through a forging that would have, when it was complete, produced one of the finer blades that has ever been made on this moon.
The blade was not complete. The blade had been left on the anvil mid-stroke. I will tell you how I knew this, friend, because the knowing is the small particular detail that broke my heart, in the small honest way the small particular details of a smith’s work sometimes break the hearts of other smiths who come across them, and the breaking is the proper response of any smith with the proper sense of his trade. The blade had been left on the anvil with the tongs still gripping the tang, in the position that the tongs would have been in for the next strike. The hammer that had been being used was not on the anvil. The hammer had fallen, by my eye’s tracing of the small marks on the floor between the anvil and the hearth, perhaps two or three steps from the anvil, in the small irregular landing that a hammer makes when a hammer has been dropped from the hand by a smith who is no longer holding it. The hammer lay on the floor between the anvil and the hearth, in the small clear evidence of a smith who had been at his work at the anvil with the proper tongs in his off hand and the proper hammer in his strong hand, and who had, in the small unwilling moment of whatever had happened next, let the hammer fall out of his hand, and who had not, after the falling of the hammer, returned to the anvil to pick it up, but who had, by the small evidence of the bellows-handle at the hearth that lay also on the floor in the small extended position of having been let go, also not returned to the bellows, and the bellows had stopped, and the fire in the hearth, although it would have continued for some time after the bellows had stopped, would not have been refreshed, and the fire had gone, and the chamber had gone cold, and the blade upon the anvil had cooled, and the cooling had been the last action of the blade in this chamber, and the cooling had been, by the small unmistakable evidence of the rust along the lower edge of the blade, very many years ago.
I will tell you, friend, how many years. I am going to estimate, because I have not been able to be certain, but the estimate is the estimate of a smith with a long acquaintance with rust and a long acquaintance with the small careful materials that the rust appears upon, and the estimate is therefore not a small estimate but a considered one. The rust along the lower edge of the blade was the rust of a piece of high iron, of the order that the smith had been using, that had stood untouched in a closed dry space for perhaps fifty years, and not less than thirty, and not more than seventy, in the slow careful way that high iron acquires rust in a closed dry space when it has been worked but not finished and not protected. The estimate is my best, and I will defend it against any other smith of the moon who cares to argue the matter. Fifty years.
I want you to consider, friend, what that estimate means.
The smith who had been working at this anvil had been working perhaps fifty years ago. The smith had been in the middle of forging the finest blade I had ever seen forged, by far the finest, in fact, that I had ever seen, even in its half-finished state. The smith had been at the proper stage of the work, in the proper rhythm of the work, with the proper tools to hand and the proper hearth at his back and the proper anvil before him and the proper bench at the wall behind him for the finer work he had been planning. The smith had been, in the small reliable language of his own trade, a master of his calling. The smith had, in the small unwilling moment, let the hammer fall from his hand and the bellows-handle fall from his other hand, and had not returned to either. The smith had, by the small total evidence of the chamber as I now read it from the threshold, never returned to either. The smith had gone out of the chamber by some route that I would not be able to determine without a further inspection, and the smith had not come back, and the chamber had stood for fifty years exactly as the smith had left it, and the blade had cooled upon the anvil, and the rust had taken to the lower edge in the slow patient way of rust in a closed dry space, and the chamber had been waiting, for fifty years, for some other person to come into it and to see what had happened.
I came into the chamber.
I came in slowly, in the small careful way of a man who had felt, all at once, in the small unwilling way one feels such things, that he was crossing not a threshold of stone but a threshold of time, and that the chamber on the other side of the threshold was a chamber that had been kept by the persuaded stone of this place for the small particular purpose of being seen by another smith at some hour, and that I was now the smith of the seeing, and that the seeing was a small particular kind of work that I had not been asked to do before, and that the work was the work the chamber had been keeping for me.
I came in slowly. I went first to the anvil. I did not touch the blade. I want to say that, friend, very plainly, because the small reflex of any smith looking at a half-finished blade on another smith’s anvil is to pick the blade up by the tang and to feel the balance of it in the hand, in the small natural curiosity of one craftsman about another’s work, and the reflex came up in me as I approached the anvil and I refused the reflex, because the blade was not mine, and the smith was not present to give me permission, and the small honest discipline of a craftsman who comes upon the unfinished work of another craftsman who is not present is the discipline of looking and not touching, and I will tell you that I had been the recipient of that discipline myself, in the years when other smiths had come to my forge while I was at a stage of work that did not permit interruption, and the small generous discipline of those visiting smiths had been one of the small great courtesies of my professional life, and I would not violate the courtesy now.
I looked. I went round the anvil to read the blade from each of its sides. I read the blade from the right side first. The right side showed the small careful hammer-marks along the upper length of the blade in the slow regular pattern that I had identified from the threshold, and the small careful hammer-marks were the marks of a smith who had been laying the strikes in the small clean rhythm that the proper drawing-out of a blade of this pattern required, and the marks were laid with such evenness, friend, that I will tell you I could have set a small scale beside them and measured the distance from one to the next and found the distance to be uniform to within a small fraction that I would not have been able to achieve in my own hammer-work even on my best day. The smith had been at the height of his control. The smith had been laying the marks with the small confident regularity of a master who had ceased counting the strikes in his head and was striking by the small unconscious counting of his own arm.
I read the blade from the left side second. The left side told me the same story as the right, but the left side told me also a second story, which was the story of the small color-bands at the heating points along the blade. The color-bands at the heating points are the small visible record of the temperature at which each heat was worked, and a smith with the proper eye can read the bands and determine, after the fact, how each heat was managed by the smith who made it. The bands on this blade were managed, friend, with a precision I had not encountered in any other blade I had read. The smith had brought each heat up to exactly the proper working temperature for the proper drawing of high iron of this stock, and had taken the blade out of the heat at exactly the proper moment, and had begun the working of the heat at exactly the proper instant, and had ended the working of the heat at exactly the proper instant, and the small color-bands therefore showed the small uniform progression of bands that I had only ever read about in the old smithing manuals from the eastern coast and had never before seen in actual work. The smith had been, in the small particular detail of heat management, perhaps the finest smith of high iron I had ever encountered in the records or in the flesh.
I want you to consider, friend, the small honest grief of looking at such a piece of work and knowing that the smith who had made it had not finished it. I want you to consider, also, the small honest grief of knowing that the smith had been in the middle of the proper rhythm of his work, in the small confident reach of his own mastery, and had been, by some small unwilling thing, taken away from the rhythm, and had not come back. There is a kind of grief that strikes the smith, friend, when he looks at the unfinished work of another smith, and the grief is not the grief of one’s own losses but a small particular grief on the smith’s behalf, the small grief of knowing that the smith had been at his finest moment and had not been permitted to complete it. The grief is a small unworthy grief in the larger ledgers of the world, since the world has many larger griefs in its ledgers, but the grief is a real grief, friend, and any smith who has come across the unfinished work of another smith will know the grief I am describing, and any smith who has not come across such work will, I hope, never have to know it.
I read the blade from above. I went to the head of the anvil and looked down at the blade along its length. The taper was perfect. The taper was perfect, friend, in a way that I had not previously known to be achievable in this stage of the forging, because the taper of a half-finished blade is generally still rough, and is only made perfect by the finer work of the later stages, but this blade had been drawn so cleanly in the long-shaping stage that the taper was already at the precision that other smiths’ blades reached only at the polishing. The smith had been working ahead of the schedule of the trade. The smith had been giving the blade, at each stage, the precision of the stage after, in the small reliable way of a smith who knew that the small care taken early in the work would pay back in the small ease of the work later, and the small ease later would permit the small further care later still, and the cascading care would, by the end of the forging, produce a blade of a quality that other smiths could not approach by working at the standard rhythm of the trade. The smith had been forging, in other words, a small great blade, by the small great method of beginning the great work at the small earliest stages.
I sighed, friend. I sighed the small low sigh of a smith who had just been shown a small great thing and could not, at the showing, do anything about the showing except sigh. The company at the threshold, who had been quietly watching me read the blade for what I would later reckon at perhaps a quarter of an hour, did not say anything to me. The company, in the small careful way it had grown up over the days, had decided to give me the time I required for the reading. I had not asked them to give me the time. They had given it. I will say, friend, that the gift of that time was one of the small great gifts the company had given me during the descent, and I want to acknowledge the gift here in the telling because the acknowledgment is owed.
I turned at last from the anvil. I went to the hearth. I knelt beside the hearth, in the small careful way my ribs permitted, and I looked at the coals. The coals, friend, were the small particular kind of coals that had not been used by a working smith in fifty years. The coals had cooled long ago. The coals had, in the small slow chemistry that coals undertake in a closed dry space across decades, partially crumbled into the small fine gray that ash becomes when ash has been left undisturbed for a very long time. The coals were the coals of a fire that had been built up to its proper working heat by a smith who had been bringing his bellows up in the proper steady draw, and the coals had then been left, and the fire had gone, and the coals had gone gray, in the slow patient way of coals that had been waiting for fifty years to be told that they had been done with.
I touched the small gray with my fingertip. The small gray was cold. The small gray was the small absolute coldness of a thing that had not been warm in fifty years. I rose. I went to the bellows-handle on the floor. The bellows-handle lay in the small extended position of having been let go, with the small natural sweep that any handle takes when a hand has let it fall. I did not touch the handle. I looked at the floor between the bellows-handle and the anvil. The floor showed, in the small dim way of dust upon dark stone, the small faint trace of footprints, in the small irregular pattern of a smith who had stepped twice from the bellows to the anvil and once from the anvil toward the threshold, and then no more. The footprints toward the threshold did not reach the threshold. The footprints stopped, friend, at a point in the chamber perhaps three paces from the anvil and perhaps eight paces from the threshold. The footprints stopped because the smith, by my reading, had stopped, at that point in the chamber, in the small unwilling way that a man stops walking when he has been called, and had not, after the stopping, taken another step.
I went to the point where the footprints stopped. I stood at the point. I looked down at the floor. The floor at the point did not show, in the small dim way of dust upon dark stone, any further footprints. The floor at the point did, however, show a small fine paleness, in the smallest possible discoloration, of the kind a floor acquires when something has stood upon it for a long time and has then been removed, and the discoloration was approximately the size and shape of a man’s two feet placed side by side. The smith had stood, at that point, for a long time. The smith had not, then, taken another step.
The smith had been taken from his work in some way that had not involved his walking out of the chamber on his own.
I want to be careful, friend, about what I say next, because what I say next is in some sense a guess, and is in some sense a reading. The smith had been working at his proper rhythm at the anvil. The smith had stepped to the hearth to draw the bellows once more, in the small habitual gesture of a smith reaching for the next heat. The smith had, in the small unwilling moment, let the bellows-handle fall. The smith had returned to the anvil, in the small two steps the floor showed. The smith had let the hammer fall from his hand at the anvil, in the small dropping the small marks on the floor showed. The smith had taken three steps toward the threshold, the small natural three steps a man takes when he has heard, perhaps, a voice he was not expecting and has stepped toward the voice without yet committing to anything more than the small first steps of attending to it. The smith had stopped. The smith had stood, for a long time. The smith had not, after the stopping, taken another step. The smith had not, after the standing, returned to the anvil. The smith had not, by the small total reading of the chamber, gone anywhere at all under his own power.
The smith had been called, friend.
The smith had been called by the small slow patient listening that the woman with the satchel had translated for us along the strand, and the smith had answered the call in the small partial way of a man whose body was unwilling but whose attention had been seized, and the smith had stood in the middle of his own chamber, for some interval, listening to whatever was speaking to him, and the smith had then, in some way that the chamber did not record because the chamber could not record it, gone with whatever had called him, and the smith had not come back, and the chamber had been waiting, ever since, for someone else to come and to read the small story of the going.
I knelt down. I knelt down at the point where the smith’s footprints stopped. I knelt because the small ribs of mine required the kneeling for a moment, and because the small honest grief that the chamber had been pressing upon me since I had crossed its threshold had at last accumulated to a point that required some small further acknowledgment than the sighing, and the kneeling was the small further acknowledgment I had to give.
I will tell you, friend, that the four of them did not say anything to me during the kneeling. The four of them at the threshold had, I will say with the gratitude that is the proper response to such generosities, allowed me my kneeling, and had not interrupted it with any small social courtesy. Brother Caius, by my peripheral catching of him through the small wet edges of my eyes, had bowed his old head in the small way an old monk bows his head at a place that has been given to him to bow at. Maelis had her two gloved hands folded together in front of her in the small unguarded way she had when she was permitting herself to feel a thing properly. Vren was, by the way the pale gold eyes were upon me without looking through me, watching me with the small careful watching she had given me at the alcove of the confession two days ago, in the small respectful registration of a feeling she had decided I was permitted to feel without interference. Elandor was standing at the threshold with the right hand at the hip and the small composed face that meant he had decided to keep his own counsel for the duration of my kneeling, and the keeping of his own counsel was, in its small careful way, the most considerate thing he could have given me.
I rose at last. I rose with the small useful application of my left hand against my own knee, in the way the ribs required, and I turned to the four of them, and I said, in the slow voice that I had been using since I had crossed the threshold, the slow voice of a man who had been reading a story that was not his own and was about to attempt to tell it to others, I said, friends. Friends. I will tell you what this chamber is. And I told them.
I told them that the chamber was a smithy. I told them that the smithy had been built, by whoever had built it, to a high standard, in the small careful pattern of a forge intended for the production of fine work, and that the smithy had been used, for some period I could not estimate without further reading, by a smith of remarkable accomplishment. I told them about the anvil, and I told them about the row of tools at the right-hand wall, and I told them about the quenching-tank, and I told them about the bench at the right-rear corner, and I told them, at last, about the half-finished blade upon the anvil, and I described, as best I could in the small inadequate language of a smith of my own modest training, the small careful particulars of the blade that told me what kind of work had been being done here. I told them about the rust along the lower edge, and I told them my estimate of fifty years, and I told them that fifty years was my honest estimate and not a flourish, and I told them about the hammer on the floor between the anvil and the hearth, and I told them about the bellows-handle on the floor at the hearth, and I told them about the footprints that stopped at the point I had been kneeling at, and I told them, at last, what I had read from the small total evidence of the chamber, which was that the smith had been called, and had answered, and had gone, and had not come back, and that the chamber had been waiting fifty years for someone to come and to see.
There was a small silence in the chamber after I had finished. The silence was not the silence of a company that had nothing to say. The silence was the silence of a company that had heard a story and was permitting the story to settle, in the small careful way that good companies permit stories to settle.
Brother Caius spoke first. He said, in his slow gentle voice, master Goradd. I have a question. You said the smith was called. By what.
I said, brother. I do not know by what with any precision. I have a guess. The guess is that the smith was called by whatever the woman with the satchel translated along the strand. The guess is that the smith was called in the same way the boys of Holm-on-the-Mire were called, in the village outside this place where the hunters do not come back, by the slow patient listening that has been operating in this country for a long time. The guess is that the smith was, perhaps, the first person of skill that the listening called in the period before it could send creatures up out of the corridors to fetch people for it, and that the smith was called for the same reason later people have been called, which was that the listening was preparing for something and required certain kinds of skill to prepare with, and that the smith’s particular skill at high iron was a skill the listening had identified as useful, and that the smith was therefore drawn down here and was set to work and was, in some way I cannot speculate about with any certainty, kept until the work was no longer needed and was then released by whatever release the listening offers to the people it has called, which I do not believe is the kind of release that returns a person to the surface in any condition the person would recognize as themselves.
Brother Caius said, in the slow voice, master Goradd. The blade. What was it for.
I said, brother. The blade was for something. The blade was for a particular something, because the blade was of a pattern that has only one use, which is the use of a sword of an order I have only read about in old manuals and have only seen finished blades of in three museums and in the personal armories of two old nobles in my younger years. The pattern is called, in the small private vocabulary of high iron smiths, the long-piercing pattern, and the long-piercing pattern is the pattern of a sword designed not for the cutting of armored men nor for the cutting of unarmored men but for the piercing of things that are not entirely things, in the way Vren has been describing the Gloomspiders. The pattern is the pattern of a sword designed to go through forms that have appearance without substance, and the going-through is the small particular work the pattern is for, and the smith who had been forging the blade had been forging it for that work, and the work had been the work the smith had been called down here to do. The blade was, in other words, a small particular weapon designed by the listening, in some indirect way, for the listening’s own purposes, although the smith may not have understood, in the slow patient way the smith was being directed, exactly what the purposes were. The smith had been forging the long-piercing sword for whoever the listening intended to use it against, and the listening had intended to use it, by my best guess, against something that the listening considered an enemy at the time, and the enemy may have been a person from the surface, or may have been another listening of another kind in another corridor, or may have been something else that I cannot speculate about. The smith had not finished the blade. The smith had been called away from the work before the work was complete. The reason for the calling away, I do not know, and I will not guess at it.
There was another silence in the chamber. The four of them absorbed this in the four separate ways they absorbed such things.
Vren spoke at last. Vren said, in the flat voice, smith. The blade. We should take it.
I want to set down, friend, what I felt at Vren’s words. I felt, first, the small immediate professional objection of a smith who had been told that an unfinished blade should be taken from another smith’s anvil. The objection was the small reflexive objection of my entire training, and I felt it strongly enough that I will tell you I almost spoke the objection aloud. I felt, second, the small slower professional reconsideration of a smith who had just been told by a person of Vren’s professional standing that an unfinished blade of a long-piercing pattern, designed by the listening of this place against an enemy of the listening, might be a useful thing to have in our possession when we descended further into the chamber of the listening. The reconsideration was the small slower reconsideration that overruled the first reflexive objection, in the same way that the slower considered judgment of any smith generally overrules the small reflexive objection of his trained reflexes when the slower considered judgment has been given a chance to speak.
I said, in the slow voice, Vren. You are correct. We should take the blade. But the blade is unfinished. The blade in its present state is, for the proper use of the long-piercing pattern, perhaps half effective. The other half of the effectiveness lies in the finishing, which the smith was prevented from doing, and which I am not the smith to do, because the finishing of a long-piercing pattern is work above my training, and I will be honest with you about that.
Vren said, smith. Half effective is better than not effective at all.
I said, Vren. Half effective is better than not effective at all. I will accept the blade as it is. I will accept also one further small piece of work upon it, which I judge I am competent to perform, which is the binding of the tang into a temporary haft for use in the chamber below. The blade in its present state has no haft, only the tang. A blade without a haft is not a blade that can be used. I can bind a temporary haft from the materials in this chamber in the next hour, and I will be careful to bind it in a way that does not damage the tang for any future smith who may, after this descent is complete, have the opportunity to finish the blade properly. Is that acceptable.
Vren said, smith. That is acceptable.
I went to the bench at the right-rear corner of the chamber. I went carefully, in the small reverent way of a smith handling another smith’s tools, although the tools were the tools of a smith who had been gone fifty years and who was, by all reasonable accountings, not coming back. The tools were in the small careful order I had identified from the threshold, and the order was the order of a smith who had been good at the small careful ordering of his bench, and I will tell you, friend, that I worked from the bench with the small grateful care of a craftsman borrowing the tools of a better craftsman, and that the borrowing was a small communion of sorts, and that the communion was not something I would have expected to feel in such a place but that I felt nonetheless, and that the feeling was a small good feeling in the middle of the larger melancholy of the chamber.
I took from the bench a small straight piece of seasoned wood that had been set aside for the eventual making of a haft, in the small careful preparation that the smith had been making for the finishing of the blade. The wood was, by my reading of its small dryness, the proper seasoned wood for the proper grip on a blade of this pattern, and the wood was dry but not brittle, in the small particular way that fifty years in a closed dry space had treated it kindly. I took also a small leather wrap of the kind that I had been carrying in my own kit for various small bindings, and I took from a small jar on the bench, which I sniffed with the small careful sniff of a smith verifying that a jar contained what its color suggested, a small portion of the pitch-and-wax mixture that smiths use for the binding of temporary hafts, and the pitch-and-wax mixture in the jar was, by my sniffing of it, still good, in the small further mercy that the fifty years of the closed dry space had granted the smith’s preparations.
I worked, friend, for the next hour, in the small slow careful way I had been working at my own bench for thirty years. I bound the temporary haft to the tang of the long-piercing blade. I bound it in the small pattern that I had been taught for temporary hafts, with the small allowance for future re-binding by another smith who might, with more skill than I had, properly finish the work. I worked, and the company watched me work, and the company did not interrupt the working, and at the end of the hour I had a long-piercing blade with a temporary haft, and the blade was, by the small testing of it in my hand that I permitted myself only the once, a blade of a balance and a weight that I had not previously held in my own hand and that I will tell you was the most beautiful balance and weight I had encountered in any blade of my career, even in its half-finished state.
I rose from the bench. I held the blade in my right hand. I will tell you, friend, that holding the blade was, in some way I cannot put cleanly into words, the small holding of a small piece of the smith who had made it, in the way one holds the small last work of a craftsman who has gone on ahead of one, and one carries the work forward for the craftsman because the craftsman is not present to carry it. I held the blade. I felt the blade. I turned to the company.
I said, in the slow voice, friends. I have done what I can. The blade is the smith’s blade, not mine, and I want to say that for the small record of this telling, in case any small further recording of this telling is to be done. The blade is the work of a master smith who was called down here fifty years ago and who did not come back, and the blade was made for the small particular work of piercing the things of this place, and the blade is now the small particular tool we have for the small particular work of the chamber below. I will carry the blade in the chamber below if the company wishes me to. I will hand the blade to whichever of you the company decides should carry it. I do not have a strong preference. The blade should, however, go to whichever of us is most likely to have to use it against the thing that is below, and I have a small private guess about which of us that is, but I will not name the guess unless the company asks.
There was a small silence after I had finished.
Elandor spoke at last. He said, in the new soft voice that had the quietness in it, master Goradd. The blade is your work for the moment, by the binding of the haft. The blade will, when the moment in the chamber below comes, go to whichever of us is most useful. I will not name a carrier now. I will say that I judge, by my own reading of what is coming, that the blade may, in the chamber below, be useful in a particular hand that none of us has yet identified. I will trust that the moment will make the identification clear. In the meantime, master Goradd, please carry the blade. It is in good hands.
I said, captain. I will carry it.
I bound the blade carefully into the small loop at my belt that I had been using for various small carryings since I had walked out of my own forge two weeks ago, and the long-piercing blade fit the loop with the small good fit of a blade that had been waiting for fifty years for the small loop of an honest belt to be put around it, and I will tell you, friend, that the fitting of it gave me a small good feeling in the middle of the larger melancholy, and the small good feeling was a feeling I had not expected to find in the chamber.
I turned, at last, before we left, to the anvil. I went to the anvil and I stood beside it and I looked down at the place where the half-finished blade had been. The place on the anvil was a small clean patch of dark iron that had been kept polished, in the slow gentle way the iron of an anvil’s face polishes itself by use, by the smith’s many strikes across the long years of his working. The patch was the small visible record of the smith’s labor. I laid my left hand upon the patch. The patch was cold under my hand, in the small absolute coldness of an anvil that had not had a hot piece of iron upon it in fifty years.
I spoke aloud. I do not generally speak aloud in such moments. I spoke aloud now because the chamber had been waiting fifty years for a smith to come and to read it, and the reading was now done, and the small last courtesy of the reading was the small saying aloud of a thing the smith might, in some way I do not entirely understand, hear.
I said, in the slow voice, master smith of the long-piercing blade. I do not know your name. I have not been able to read your name from the chamber, although I have read much else. I will say what I can. You were a master of your trade. The half-finished blade upon your anvil was the finest piece of work I have ever read. I am sorry that you were called away from it before you could finish it. I have taken the blade from the anvil, with the company’s agreement, because the blade is needed in a chamber below us where the work of your blade may yet be useful, and I have bound a temporary haft upon the tang, in a way that does not damage the tang for any future smith who may, with more skill than I have, finish the work properly. I have not improved your blade. I have not pretended to. I have only given the blade the small useful binding that permits it to be carried at a belt, in the small humble work of a smith borrowing the tools and the work of a better smith. The blade will, by my carrying of it and the company’s carrying of it, be put to the work it was made for, in the chamber below. I cannot promise that the work will be the work you would have chosen for the blade, because I do not know what work you would have chosen. I can promise that the work will be the small honest work of a company that has come down into this place to look at the listening that called you, and to name it, and to do what we can do, and I will tell you, master smith, that we will carry your blade with us as long as it is useful to carry, and we will, if any of us comes out of this place alive, return your blade to your trade, in whatever form the returning can take. That is the small promise of a smith of lesser standing than yourself, and I make it as honestly as I am able.
I lifted my hand from the anvil. I stepped back. I bowed, friend, in the small careful bow that an apprentice gives to his master at the end of an apprenticeship, and I had not made that bow in thirty years, since the day I had finished my own apprenticeship at my master’s forge in the southern hills, but the bow came up in me at the anvil now without my having to remember it, in the same way Brother Caius’s long brooms had come up in him at the corridor ambush, and the bow was the right bow, and I gave it, and I straightened, and I turned, and I walked, friend, toward the threshold where my company was waiting, and I did not look back at the anvil, because looking back would have been the small final unfinished gesture and I had finished what I had come into the chamber to do.
I came to the threshold. The four of them were waiting, in the four small postures of attention they had been holding through the hour. Brother Caius stepped forward as I came up to him, and the brother put his old hand upon my shoulder, in the small gentle way the brother had, and the brother said, very softly, in the small voice he used for the things that mattered, the brother said, master Goradd. The smith heard you. I do not say this with any certainty. I say it as the small judgment of a man who has been a confessor for thirty-five years and who has learned to know when a thing has been heard. The smith heard you. The promise was received. Carry the blade.
I said, brother. Thank you for the saying.
We left the chamber. We left in the order we had been walking in, with Elandor at the point now, and Vren in the second place, and the brother in the third, and Maelis in the fourth, and me at the rear, and we left the smithy behind us in the corridor, and the smithy, by some small invisible mercy, did not produce any small protest at our leaving. The smithy let us go, in the small way that a chamber that had been waiting fifty years for the right small reading lets go the company that has at last given it the reading, and the persuaded stone of the corridor closed behind us, and we walked on, and the long-piercing blade rode at my belt, and the small melancholy fascination of the chamber stayed with me down the corridor for some considerable time, and I carried it as I carried the small further coldness that this descent had been laying upon me by small increments since the morning of the gate, and the carrying was the small steady work of the rest of the descent, and the small steady work was, by my reading, the work I had been brought down here for, and the work, friend, was the work, and that, friend, is what I will set down here as the small honest record of the smithy beneath the stone, in the small humble way that a smith of lesser standing sets down the work of a smith of greater standing, with the small promise that the blade will, before this descent is complete, be put to the use the master smith of the long-piercing pattern had been forging it for, and that the small promise will, by every small honest measure I can bring to it, be kept.
Segment Twenty: The Marking of Names
We stopped at the next narrowing of the corridor an hour past the smithy. It was a place I had marked on the walking up. The persuaded stone there came in by perhaps half on either side and made of the corridor a small constriction the length of perhaps eight paces and the smith said it would do for a watch and the captain said the same and we set ourselves at it.
I took the second watch. I would take it alone. The captain proposed two on the watch and I told him no. He looked at me. I told him I would take it alone and that the company would understand at the end of the watch why I had taken it alone. He did not press. He had learned across the days when to press and when not to. He took the first watch with the smith and the brother and the woman with the satchel slept and at the end of three hours by the captain’s count he woke me and the three of them lay down to the proper sleep the body had not had in days. The captain went down hard in the way men of his order go down when they are at last permitted to. The smith went down as he always did. The brother slept in the bedroll across from the smith. The woman with the satchel slept curled against her bundle in the loose easy way she had.
The four of them were asleep within perhaps ten minutes of my taking the watch. I sat against the stone at the inner side of the constriction with my back to the wall and the corridor in front of me and the four of them behind me and the lantern set on the floor at half-wick at a small distance that would not throw my face up. I sat for the first hour and I let the body settle into the watch in the way the body had settled into watches for many years.
In the second hour I took the Ledger from the cloak.
The Ledger of the Closed Names had been with me eleven years. It was the size of my open hand. The leather had been black at the binding and was now the gray-brown of leather that had been carried in many pockets. The pages were the small thin pages of a record book of a kind I had seen made only by one particular maker in a town I would not name and which I had bought the book from when I was twenty-two. There were sixty-three names written in the Ledger when I drew it out by the light of the lantern at half-wick that night. The names were written one to a line in the small careful hand I had been keeping for the Ledger since the first name. The names were not arranged by alphabet and not arranged by date and not arranged by any system that a reader who had picked up the Ledger would have recognized. The names were arranged by the small order in which I had decided to take them. The order was mine. I have not shown the Ledger to anyone in the eleven years I have carried it. I will not show it to anyone.
I opened the Ledger to the first blank page after the sixty-third name. The page was clean. The page was the eighty-fourth page of the Ledger. The Ledger had pages enough for many more names than sixty-three. I had been told by the maker when I bought it that the Ledger had two hundred pages and that I would not, in any reasonable life, fill it. I had not, in eleven years, filled it. I was not concerned that I would.
I took the small stylus from the inner pocket of the cloak. The stylus was a thing the maker had also given me. It was bone. The bone was of an animal I would not name. The ink in the stylus was an ink the maker had made and that I had refilled twice over the years from the small stoppered jar I kept at the bottom of my pack. The ink was the only ink that took on the pages of the Ledger and the pages of the Ledger were the only pages that took the ink. The maker had explained to me when I had bought the Ledger that the pages and the ink had been made together and that no other paper would hold the ink and no other ink would hold to the paper. I had not tested this. I had not needed to.
I wrote.
I wrote the first name. The first name was not the name of any individual creature. The first name was the name of the kind. I wrote, in the small careful hand, the words Gloomspider lesser patroller. I wrote this in the upper portion of the line. Beside the name on the same line I wrote a small notation. The notation was a single symbol. The symbol I will not describe. The symbol was a symbol of my own making which I had been making for eleven years beside the names in the Ledger and which had a precise meaning that I had assigned to it the first time I had used it and which I had not since varied. I made the symbol with the same hand that had written the name. The symbol took perhaps two seconds to make. The ink set on the page in the slow way the ink set. I drew breath and let the breath out and I went to the next line.
I wrote the second name. The second name was Gloomspider greater patroller. The greater patroller was the kind that had come at the company in the second wave at the alcove, the three larger ones that the woman with the satchel had called the larger words. I wrote the name and I wrote the same notation beside it. The notation was the same symbol I had drawn beside the first name. The making of the symbol took the same two seconds and the ink set in the same slow way.
I wrote the third name. The third name was Gloomspider hunter. The hunter was the kind that had come up out of the floor at the end of the alcove fight, the larger word, the small sentence, that the captain had described to me afterward. I had not seen the hunter myself in the alcove because I had been at the rear of the breaking out by the time the hunter came up. The captain had described it to me an hour into the falling-back along the corridor in the small clipped careful language he used for such descriptions. I had marked the description in my head at the time and I marked it now into the Ledger by writing the name beneath the first two and writing the same notation beside it.
There were three names now on the eighty-fourth page. There were three identical notations beside them. The ink was still wet on the third. I let the wetness sit. I let the page hold what I had given it.
I let the second hour become the third hour. I held the watch. I did not write further in the Ledger for some time. I sat with the Ledger open on my knee and the stylus capped in my right hand and the lantern at half-wick on the floor at a small distance and the four of them sleeping behind me and the corridor in front of me and the persuaded stone keeping its silence around us in the way the persuaded stone kept its silence in this place.
I thought.
I thought about what I had written and what I had not yet written. There were further kinds. There was the kind that had cocooned the captured adventurer the company had found earlier in the descent, which I had not yet seen but which I had heard described to me by the brother who had been near the cocoon while I had been at the point. There was the kind that the woman with the satchel had described from her translation along the strand, the kind that produced the cadence of devotion, which I had not yet seen with my own eye in any individual specimen but which I was certain we would meet. There was, at the heart of the corridor system somewhere below us, the she. The she was a kind of one. The she would have a line of her own. The she would have a notation of her own. The notation for the she would not be the same as the notation for the three lesser kinds. The notation for the she would require a small further consideration which I had not yet given.
I would give it.
I uncapped the stylus. I wrote a fourth name. The fourth name was Gloomspider cocooner. The cocooner was the kind that had taken the captured adventurer. I had not yet seen the cocooner. I wrote the name in the same hand as the others and I wrote the same notation beside it. I had not seen the cocooner. The notation was the same. The reason the notation was the same was that the cocooner was, by the small reasoning of the Ledger, of the same kind as the other three despite the difference in its work. The Ledger had its own logic which I had been keeping for eleven years and which was mine and which I would not explain to the company though they would ask.
I wrote a fifth name. The fifth name was Gloomspider strand-keeper. The strand-keeper was the kind whose voices the woman with the satchel had translated, the kind that managed the patrol rotations and the cadence of devotion along the strand. I had not yet seen a strand-keeper directly. I wrote the name and I wrote the same notation.
There were five names now on the eighty-fourth page of the Ledger. There were five identical notations beside them. I let the ink set.
I drew breath. I held it. I let it out slowly in the small careful way I had learned to let breath out when the body was preparing to do something that the body would only do once.
I turned the page.
The eighty-fifth page of the Ledger was clean. The page was the page for the she. I wrote no name yet. The she had no name yet that I had been given. The she might never have a name I would be given. The Ledger had pages for that contingency. I would write what could be written when it could be written. I wrote, at the top of the eighty-fifth page, in the small careful hand, the word she. I wrote no further name beside it. I drew, beside the word she, a notation. The notation was not the same notation I had drawn beside the other five. The notation was a different symbol. The symbol I will not describe. The symbol was a symbol I had drawn in the Ledger four times before in eleven years. The four previous times had been beside four names in the earlier portion of the Ledger which I had written years ago and which I would not look at tonight because the looking would not serve the present work. The symbol meant a particular thing. The meaning I will not state.
I capped the stylus. I closed the Ledger upon the wet ink of the new symbol. I let the Ledger sit closed upon my knee for the duration of perhaps ten minutes while the ink set against the facing page in the small staining the ink made when a fresh page was closed against it, which staining would, by the slow chemistry of the ink and the paper, become legible in its own time on the facing page as a small mirror of the original symbol, and which mirror would, by the same slow chemistry, become an additional record that I would not have to redraw. The Ledger took its own copies. The maker had built it that way. I had not asked the maker how the Ledger took its own copies. I had only used the Ledger and trusted the maker.
I returned the Ledger to the cloak. I returned the stylus to the inner pocket. I sat with my back to the stone and the corridor in front of me and the four of them sleeping behind me and the lantern at half-wick. I held the watch.
The third hour ran out. The fourth hour ran in.
I will tell you what I did during the fourth hour because the doing was the second portion of the work I had taken the watch alone for. I drew the cloak closer about me and I closed the eyes and I let the soft eye go inward in the way the soft eye sometimes went inward when the body had been still for long enough. The soft eye inward was a thing I had learned to do at twenty. It was not a vision. It was not a meditation. It was a small recall. The recall was the recall of the faces. The faces were the faces that belonged to the names. The Ledger held the names. The recall held the faces. I did not write the faces in the Ledger because faces are not for paper. Faces are for the inner record. I did the inner record now.
I went through the five names I had written that night. For each name I called the face that belonged to it. The faces were not the faces of the creatures, because the creatures had not been creatures, and a face for a creature that was not a creature was not the kind of face the inner record kept. The faces I called were the faces of the moments in which I had first identified each kind. For the lesser patroller I called the face of the first creature in the corridor as it had come down the wall toward me on the day of the first wave, the moment the head of the creature had turned and the row of small dark points had taken me in. For the greater patroller I called the face of the alcove ambush, the moment the second wave had come up out of the walls and I had pivoted at the rear wall and the creature behind me had been there. For the hunter I had no face of my own because I had not seen the hunter directly. I called instead the face of the captain in the moment he had described the hunter to me an hour into the falling-back, the small narrowing of his eyes that had given me the measure of the creature without my having seen it. The captain’s face was the face for the hunter in the inner record. The hunter would, when I saw it with my own eye, acquire its own face and the captain’s face would be released from the work. For the cocooner I called the face of the brother in the moment he had described the cocoon to me, the small composed look the brother had used to receive what he had seen. The brother’s face was the face for the cocooner in the inner record. The brother’s face would, in the same way, be released when I had seen a cocooner with my own eye. For the strand-keeper I called the face of the woman with the satchel in the moment she had lifted her hand from the strand, the wide grave eyes she had turned to the company in the corridor of the strand. The woman’s face was the face for the strand-keeper in the inner record. The woman’s face would also be released in its time.
I went then to the she. I had no face for the she. I had only the word and the notation and the slow patient listening I had heard along the strand by way of the woman with the satchel’s translation. The she had not been seen by any of us yet. I made no face. I left the place in the inner record blank for the she. The blank was the appropriate inner record at this stage. The blank would be filled when the blank could be filled.
I came back. I came back in the small careful way I came back from the soft eye inward. I opened the eyes. The fourth hour was three quarters through. The lantern at half-wick was as I had left it. The four of them slept behind me. The corridor in front of me had given no sound. I held the rest of the watch.
The watch ran out. I rose. I went to the captain in the small soundless way I rose and walked and I set my hand against his shoulder in the same firm small pressure he had used to wake the brother in the alcove before the ambush. The captain came up out of his sleep clean. He looked at me. The pale gray eyes met the pale gold eyes. He nodded once. I went back to the wall I had been sitting against and I sat down again and I drew the cloak closer and I closed the eyes in the half-sleep my order’s not-order had permitted me for many years.
The captain woke the others in the slow careful way the captain woke his company. They came up. They ate. They drank. The smith handed around the small oatcakes. The brother said a small grace under his breath that the brother said over the small oatcakes each morning of the descent. The woman with the satchel made a small remark about the cakes that I do not remember but that produced the small breath of laughter from the smith. The captain ate at the speed he ate. They did not, for the first ten minutes of the morning, speak of the watch.
It was the woman with the satchel who spoke at last. She did it in the small bright easy voice that was her voice when she was about to ask a question she had been holding for some time. She said, oh, petal. Vren. I noticed when I came up from sleep that you had your book out for some part of the watch. I do not generally pry into other people’s books. I am, in this morning, going to pry into yours, only the smallest amount, because the seeing of you with the book has been on my mind, and I think it has been on the others’ minds also although they are too polite to say. Would you tell us what the book is.
I had been expecting the question. I had been expecting it from her or from the brother. I had set out the answer I would give in the third hour of the watch, when I had been considering what I would and would not say to the company about the work I had been doing. The answer was the answer I had been giving to such questions for eleven years. The answer would serve.
I said, in the flat voice, the book is a ledger. The ledger is mine. I keep it.
The woman with the satchel said, oh, petal, you keep what.
I said, I keep names.
There was a small silence. The smith looked at me with the slow careful look he was using more and more across the descent, the look that meant he was deciding whether to ask the next question or whether to leave the question for someone else. The brother had the small composed look. The captain had the small narrowing of the eyes that he used when he was attending to a piece of professional information that he had not yet had access to. The woman with the satchel was the one who continued, because she was the one who could not let questions sit.
She said, names of what, petal.
I said, names of things I have known I would meet.
The smith said, in the slow voice, lass. Lass. That is a heavy way to keep a book.
I said, smith. It is the only way to keep this book.
There was another silence. The captain said, in the new soft voice, Vren. I do not need to know what is in your book. I want to make that clear. I am asking the question I am about to ask not because I require an answer but because I think the company would benefit from any answer you are willing to give. What did you write in the book during the watch.
I said, hero. I wrote five names. Each was a kind of Gloomspider. I wrote a sixth entry that has no name yet. The sixth entry is for the she. Beside each of the five Gloomspider names I drew a small notation. Beside the sixth entry I drew a different small notation. The notations have meaning. The meaning is mine.
There was a third silence. The four of them looked at me across the small space of the morning camp. The smith had set his hammer down at his side and his hands were folded on his lap in the small composed way he sat when he was hearing something he was not quite sure he wanted to be hearing. The brother had set his lantern aside and his old hands were on his staff in the small steady way they rested on the staff when he was attending. The captain’s right hand was on his hip in the old habit. The woman with the satchel’s gloved hands were on her knees.
The woman with the satchel said, oh, petal. The notations. What do they mean.
I said, satchel-keeper. I will not tell you.
She said, will you not even tell me which way they tilt.
I said, satchel-keeper. They do not tilt. They are what they are. I will not describe them and I will not interpret them in this company. I will say only that the ledger is for my work and that the notations are for my work and that the work is mine.
The smith said, in the slow voice, lass. Lass. We will not press you. By my forge we will not. I will say one thing and then I will let the matter alone. The keeping of a ledger of that kind across many years is the keeping of a thing that is heavy. I have seen smiths keep small ledgers of their work that were heavy enough. The ledger you describe is heavier than any smith’s ledger I have heard of. I will tell you that I am sorry, lass, in some small way I cannot explain, that you have been carrying it. I will tell you also that I am glad you have brought it down here. The carrying of it down here is, by my reading, part of why you are here and not somewhere else. I will not ask more. I am done.
I did not answer the smith because the smith had not asked a question.
The brother said, in the slow gentle voice, daughter. I want to say also, with the smith. I will not ask you about the notations. I will say that I have, in my own work as a confessor, kept small private records of my own, in the small back room of my own attention if not in any visible book, and that I understand the keeping of such records, although I do not pretend to understand yours in particular, since the form of yours is yours. I will say also that the keeping of records of that kind is, I have come to believe, sometimes the only way a person of certain dispositions can carry what they have to carry across the years that they have to carry it. The carrying needs a shape. The shape you have given yours is your shape. I will respect it. I will only ask, daughter, in the small way of an old confessor asking what an old confessor cannot help asking, that you let me know if the carrying becomes too heavy. That is all I will ask. You are not required to answer.
I did not answer the brother either. The brother had asked a question that did not require an answer, only a hearing, and I gave the hearing by the small nod I gave him.
The captain said nothing further. He sat with the right hand on the hip and the small narrowing of the eyes and the new soft look that was not quite a question and not quite a comment and was, in the captain’s small careful economy, the most generous thing he could have given me, which was the acknowledgment that he had marked what I had said and that he had decided not to require more.
The woman with the satchel sat for a moment longer. I could see, by the small play of her gloved hands on her knees, that she was working on a further question and was deciding whether to ask it. She decided. She did not ask the further question. She said instead, in the small careful voice, oh, petal. I will respect the ledger. I will not pry further. I am sorry I pried at all. I am, I think, going to take a small piece of my morning to consider that the four of you have each been carrying things down this descent that I have not been carrying, and that the things you have been carrying are different shapes, and that my own small things have been quite enough, and that I have not paid the proper small respect to the differences of yours. I am going to try to do better in the days ahead. I want to say that aloud, in the small way I say things aloud, in case any of you would like to take the saying of it for what it is worth.
The smith said, well now, lass. Well now. The saying is taken.
The brother said, daughter. The saying is received and is honored.
The captain inclined his head one fraction.
I did not say anything. The woman with the satchel had not required anything of me by her saying and I gave her what the not-requirement permitted me to give, which was the small nod that I gave to most things she said, and the small nod was, by some small machinery I did not understand, sufficient to her for the morning.
We rose. We packed. We took up our positions in the line. I took the point because the captain had said at the end of his watch that he would take the rear of the morning and let me have the point back and I had not refused. The order set itself again. We walked.
I will tell you what I felt as we walked. I felt the cold I had been carrying since the room above the sail-maker’s shop where the letter had come and the cold was, this morning, in a place in me it had not been in any previous morning of the descent. The cold had been in the chest for years. The cold had moved to the shoulders and arms and hands at the gate. The cold had moved into the small bones of the wrist and the small muscles of the back of the neck in the corridors. The cold had begun to move, this morning, into the place behind the eyes. The place behind the eyes was the last place the cold went before the work. The cold had been preparing to go there since the letter and the cold had been making its slow careful way through the body across the eleven days from the sail-maker’s shop to the alcove and from the alcove to the gate and from the gate down the corridors to the long corridor and to the alcove of the brother’s confession and to the alcove of the ambush and to the smithy and to this morning at the narrowing. The cold had reached the eyes now. The cold sat in the place behind the eyes in the way it had sat there four times before in eleven years. The four times before were the four times the second symbol had been written in the Ledger. The fifth time was now.
The cold sat behind the eyes. The Ledger sat in the cloak against the breast. The five names sat on the eighty-fourth page with their five identical notations. The sixth entry sat on the eighty-fifth page with its different notation. The names would, in their time, each be visited. The notations would, in their time, each be honored. The honoring was the work.
I walked at the point of the company. The corridor went on. The woman with the satchel laid her small invisible glyphs at each turning behind me in the slow careful way she had developed since the morning of the redrawn marks. The smith carried the long-piercing blade at his belt in the loop he had bound it into the night before. The brother carried the lantern in his right hand in the small honest yellow that the lantern carried. The captain walked at the rear and the song in his breastbone, which I could feel from the front of the line in the way I had been able to feel it for several days now, the song held at the pitch the song had risen to in the alcove and had not come down from since. The captain was preparing. The captain was ready.
I was preparing. I was ready.
The morning went on. The light of the lantern fell forward into the dark and ran out before it reached the far end of the corridor and the corridor went on. The descent went on. The five names sat in the Ledger and the sixth waited for the name to be given it. The notations sat where I had drawn them and the inner record held the faces I had assigned and the blank waited for the face it would receive in its time. The cold sat behind the eyes and the work sat in the hands and the cloak sat on the shoulders and the twin blades sat in the sheaths at the small of the back and the boots fell soundless on the persuaded stone and the company walked behind me in the order it had set.
The slow tide had drawn back. The slow tide was waiting. The slow tide would, in its time, come in.
I walked at the point. The corridor went on. The company walked with me. I held the Ledger against the breast and the cold behind the eyes and the names in the back of the head and I walked forward into what was coming and the going forward was the answer and the answer was sufficient.
Segment Twenty-One: The Drain of Strength
We came to feel it, friend, by very small degrees, and the feeling came to each of us in his or her own time, and the order in which it came was not the order one would have expected if one had been making predictions about such things at the gate eight days ago.
The first to feel it was Master Goradd, which I would not have predicted, because Master Goradd is a man whose body has, by his account and by my observation, weathered a great many small attritions across the years of his trade, and he carries about him the kind of physical stolidity that one comes to expect from smiths who have stood at hot work for thirty years and have not been broken by the standing. I would have expected, friend, if I had been asked at the gate to predict the order in which the small wearing of this place would tell upon the company, that Master Goradd would be last. He was first. I want to set that down at the outset of this telling because the setting-down of it is the small honest correction of my own assumptions, and the correction is the proper opening to what I am about to describe, which is the long slow afternoon of the eighth day of our descent, during which I came to understand that the wearing of a place such as this does not respect the body’s outward strengths, and goes instead to a deeper place that I had not, in any of the small predictions of my long life, taken into account.
Master Goradd began to feel it at perhaps the second hour of our walking on the morning after Vren’s marking of the Ledger. He did not speak of it. He would not have spoken of it on his own. I saw it because I was walking in the third position of our line and Master Goradd had taken the second behind Vren that morning by an arrangement Elandor had proposed at the end of the night’s watch, and Master Goradd was therefore directly in front of me as we walked, and I had been watching the back of him for the better part of the morning in the small accustomed way of a man who has been walking behind the same back for many hours and has come to know the particular set of its shoulders.
The set of Master Goradd’s shoulders changed.
It changed by a very small measure, the kind of measure one would not have noticed had one not been walking behind it for several hours, but I had been walking behind it, and I noticed. The shoulders began to ride a fraction higher than they had been riding. The right shoulder in particular, which I knew from his having mentioned it once or twice in conversation was the shoulder of his hammer-hand and was therefore the one that had taken the most wear over the years, began to draw up toward his ear in the small involuntary way the body draws up a shoulder when the body is bearing a weight it has not been told about. The pace of his stride remained the same. The smith was a man of long discipline at his pace and would not have permitted the pace to alter on a small inward complaint. But the shoulders rose, and within another half hour the right hand had stopped swinging in the easy rhythm it had been swinging in for hours and had come up to rest upon the loop where the long-piercing blade rode at his belt, in the small careful way a man rests his hand upon a hung object when he is, in some unspoken portion of his attention, drawing upon the object for support.
I marked these things. I did not yet speak of them. I had learned in many years of confessor’s work that a man bearing a small wearing in silence is generally a man who is bearing it for a reason, and that the breaking of his silence is to be done at the right hour and not at any earlier one. I waited. I let the morning go on. We passed a small turning of the corridor and Vren laid an invisible glyph at the lower seam of the wall on our left and Maelis at the fourth position took her notation of the laying, and we passed a second turning, and the corridor continued.
It was at perhaps the fourth hour that Maelis began to feel it. I marked her also, because I had developed by then the small habit of marking the others when I had marked one, in the way an old confessor will, when he has felt a thing rise in one of his confessors, begin to listen for the same thing to rise in the others, because the things that rise in one are often the things that have been rising in many. Maelis at the fourth position behind me had been walking with the small easy bright pace that was her natural pace when she was not consciously slowing herself for some other purpose, and the small easy bright pace began to acquire, by the fourth hour, a small heaviness that had not been in it earlier. The Chalkbone Marker, which Maelis had been holding loosely in her right hand all morning in the small habitual way she had of holding it whether she was using it or not, began to be gripped a little tighter, and the gloved fingers had a small whiteness at the knuckles that I could see, in the lantern’s light over my shoulder, when I happened to look back at her. She was not, I think, conscious of the gripping. She would not have permitted herself to be conscious of it, in the same way the smith had not permitted himself to be conscious of the rising of his right shoulder. The body had begun, in both of them, to make its small adjustments without consulting the mind, and the mind had not yet been told, and would not be told until the body had made enough of the adjustments to require the telling.
It was at perhaps the fifth hour that Elandor at the rear began to feel it. I will admit, friend, that I had not been watching Elandor as closely as I had been watching the others, because Elandor was behind me in the line and I would have had to turn my head to watch him, which would have been an obvious gesture and which would have produced in him the small careful watchfulness of a hero who is being studied by his confessor. I did not wish to produce the watchfulness. So I had not watched him directly. I had only listened, in the way an old man learns to listen to footsteps behind him, and the footsteps of Elandor at the rear, which had been the small clean step of a man at the height of his order’s training, had begun, by the fifth hour, to acquire a small drag at the back of each step. The drag was not a stumble. The drag was not a faltering. The drag was the small inward pull of a body that was, in some way the body had not yet articulated, having to do an extra small portion of work with each step that the previous step had not required. Elandor would not have permitted the drag to become visible by any other means than the sound of it on the persuaded stone. I heard it. I marked it.
It was at perhaps the sixth hour that Vren at the point began to feel it. I marked this without seeing it directly, by the small reliable mechanism that Vren’s pace at the point set the pace of the entire line, and the pace of the line, which had been a steady careful pace all morning, began by the sixth hour to slow by a measure that none of the four of us behind her had elected to slow. We slowed because Vren had slowed. Vren had slowed because Vren, also, was feeling it. I will say, friend, that I had not previously thought to see Vren slowed by any small inward wearing, because Vren had been, for the eight days of our acquaintance, the least visibly susceptible to the small inward wearings of this descent of any of us, but I saw it now, in the small reliable way the pace told me, and I marked it.
I felt it last. I want to say that without any false modesty. I felt it last because I am old, and because I have, in many years of the small work of an old brother, become acquainted with the small inward wearings of various kinds, and because the small inward wearings have had, in my long acquaintance with them, the habit of taking longer to register upon me than upon younger persons, in the same way that an old skin takes longer to feel a draft than a young one. I was not, friend, unworn. I had been wearing all morning along with the others, and I had been wearing for several mornings before this one, and my old body had been keeping a slow accounting of the wearing in the small ledger of the old body’s own attention. But I had not, until perhaps the seventh hour, allowed the wearing to come into my conscious awareness, because I had been busy with the watching of the others, and the watching had been keeping my conscious awareness occupied with the proper work of a confessor of his company, which is the small useful work of attending to others first.
It came into my conscious awareness in the seventh hour. I will tell you how. I had been holding the lantern in my right hand at the steady height I had been holding it at all morning, and I had been holding it at the steady height for, by then, seven hours of walking, and the right arm at the end of the seventh hour gave a small involuntary tremor at the elbow, in the small way an arm that has been held in one position for many hours will tremor when the arm has at last been worn past its small unspoken capacity. The tremor was small. The tremor would have been imperceptible to any of the others, who were behind me in the line and could not see my arm except by turning their heads, which the rule of our walking had been not to do unless necessary. The tremor was perceptible only to me. I marked it. The marking was the bringing of the wearing into my conscious awareness, and the bringing of it in was, in the small particular way of old confessors with their own wearings, the small first step of the work that I would have to do in the next several hours.
I called for a rest.
I will tell you how I called for a rest, because the calling was a small art that I had developed over many years and that I had not, until that morning, had occasion to use with a company of this particular composition. I lifted my left hand at my side in the small gesture that the company had developed for the request to halt, which was a gesture Vren had taught us by example and which any of us could use without speaking, and I lifted it in the small soft way that meant the halt was for a small ordinary reason and not for a danger. Vren at the point felt the gesture in the small reliable way she had, through the small invisible attention the company kept upon one another in the line, and Vren stopped. The company stopped. Vren turned in the small careful way she turned. The four of them looked at me.
I said, in the slow voice, friends. I would like to suggest a small rest. We have been walking, by my best reckoning, seven hours, and I have come to think, in the small careful watching I have been doing this morning, that the company is more tired than the company has been admitting to itself, and that a small rest now will serve us better than a longer rest later. I do not propose a long stop. I propose perhaps a half hour, in which we will sit, and we will drink, and we will eat a small portion of the food, and we will permit our bodies a small uninterrupted attention. I would also like, with the company’s permission, to do a small piece of work that I have not yet had occasion to do in this descent. I would like to lay a hand upon each of you in turn, in the small way of the order that I belong to, and to make a small attempt at the easing of what you have each been carrying through the morning. I will be honest with you that I do not know whether the small attempt will help, in the precise way I would like it to help. I will say that the small attempt is the small offering I have to give, at this hour of the morning, and I would be obliged if you would each receive it, in the small order I will work through the company, and that I will not be offended if any of you would prefer to decline, because the small attempt is, in any case, a small thing and is not the kind of thing one is obligated to receive.
There was a small silence. The four of them looked at me. Master Goradd’s right shoulder, which had been riding high at his ear for the better part of three hours, lowered by a fraction at the very offer of the rest, in the small involuntary way the body responds to the prospect of being attended to. Maelis’s gloved right hand, which had been gripping the Chalkbone Marker with the white-knuckled tightness I had marked at the fourth hour, loosened. Elandor at the rear, by the sound I caught at the threshold of my hearing as he shifted his weight, settled the smallest fraction lower on his boots in the way a soldier settles when the call for a halt has come and the body has heard it before the mind. Vren at the point did not make any visible change, but the pale gold eyes, which had been upon me in the careful steady way they had been upon me since I had lifted the hand, softened by some small measure I did not have words for and that I will only call, in the inadequate language available to me, an opening.
The smith said, in his slow Dickensian voice, brother, brother. By my forge. I had not realized I was as worn as I was until you offered the rest. I will take the rest, and I will take whatever small attempt you have to give, and I will be the first in line for it, because I will tell you, brother, that I am beginning to feel a kind of slow heaviness in me that I have not felt in many years, and the heaviness is, by my honest reckoning, not the heaviness of an old man’s walking, but a different heaviness, and I would not be sorry to have an old confessor lay his hand upon it and to see what comes.
Maelis said, oh, petal, oh, brother. Yes. Yes please. I have been pretending to myself for some hours that I was not feeling what I was feeling, and the pretending has been very tiring, more tiring than the feeling, I think, and I would be very grateful to stop pretending. Please.
Elandor said, in the new soft voice that he had developed over the recent days, brother. I will receive it. I had not asked for it. I would not have asked. I am grateful that you have offered it without my asking, because the asking is a thing I have not been trained to do, and I would have walked into the chamber below in worse condition than I needed to be in if you had not offered.
Vren said, in the flat voice, brother. I will receive it last. Work on the others first. They need it more.
I said, daughter, I had intended to work on you in the order in which the wearing came upon the company, which would have placed you fourth and not last. But I will respect the order you have asked for, and I will work on you last, because you have asked, and the asking is the asking.
We came to a small widening of the corridor that lay perhaps fifty paces further on, which Vren had been planning to stop at in any case, and we settled ourselves in the widening, and Master Goradd built a small fire of the kind he had built on the first night, which had become his small reliable contribution to any halt we made, and the fire was a small ring of yellow upon the floor at the center of our small circle, and the four of them sat down around the fire, and I sat down also, with the small careful settlement of an old man with a tired right arm and a body that was, in the small accountings of itself, more worn than the body had let on all morning.
I will tell you, friend, about the work I did then, because the work is the central matter of this telling, and the central matter wants to be set down with the proper care.
The work is a small work of the order I belong to. The work is not, in any of the official catechisms, a named work. The work is not, in any of the chapter-house records I have ever seen, written down. The work is a work that the brothers of my chapter learn from older brothers, in the slow way one learns a thing from older brothers, by sitting with them at the bedside of the sick and watching what they do, and by being told, in the small careful instructions of an older brother to a younger one, the small particulars of what one is to do with one’s hands and one’s voice and one’s breath. The work has no name. I will, for the sake of this telling, call it the laying-on of attention, because attention is the closest word I have for what is being laid on, although the word is not quite right, in the way most of the words for the small works of our order are not quite right.
The work is this. The brother places his right hand upon the shoulder of the person to be attended to, in the small light pressure that is neither a grip nor a pat, but is a steady contact at the small weight of a single hand. The brother breathes in the slow rhythm of the office of evening, which is the office in which the order has, across many centuries, organized its own breathing for the receiving of small wearinesses. The brother says, under his breath, the small words of the office of evening, in the language the order uses for such words, which is an old language and not the common language of the country, and which the receiver of the work does not need to understand for the work to be received. The brother holds the contact for the duration of perhaps a hundred slow breaths, which is the duration that the older brothers have, across the centuries, found to be the right duration for the work to be received. At the end of the hundred breaths, the brother lifts the hand. The work is done.
The work does not, I want to say plainly, cure anything. The work does not heal wounds. The work does not restore strength that has been drained out of the body in any large way. The work is not a magical work in the way the work of certain other orders is magical. The work is a small work, friend, and the small work is the right size for what the small work is for, which is the small easing of a small inward wearing, in the way that the small steady warmth of a hand upon a shoulder will, by some mechanism I do not entirely understand, ease the small inward wearing of a person who has been carrying it alone, by the simple presence of the other warmth.
I went to Master Goradd first. He had been the first to feel it, and the first to ask for it, and the first was the right place to begin. I sat down beside him. He was sitting against the wall of the small widening with his hammer across his knees and his right shoulder still at the small elevated position it had been at for hours. I set my right hand upon his right shoulder, in the small light pressure. I breathed in the slow rhythm of the office of evening. I said, under my breath, the small words. He did not, at first, do anything in particular. He sat. He breathed. Perhaps thirty breaths into the work, his right shoulder lowered by a measurable amount, in the way a shoulder lowers when it has been told it may stop holding the small weight it has been holding. Perhaps sixty breaths into the work, his right hand, which had been resting upon the loop at his belt where the long-piercing blade rode, came down and rested instead upon his own thigh in the small ordinary way it would have rested upon his thigh at his own forge in an idle moment. Perhaps eighty breaths into the work, he gave a small low sigh, in the small unguarded way of a man who has been told, by some small unspoken means, that he is permitted to give the sigh. I held the hand at the shoulder. I went on with the breathing and the words. At the end of the hundred breaths, I lifted my hand.
He looked at me. He did not say anything for a moment. He said, at last, in the slow voice, brother. Brother. I had not known I was carrying that. I had known I was carrying something. I had not known it was, by my own accounting, perhaps half the weight of a sack of grain pressed upon my shoulder for the last three hours. I had been carrying it without knowing what it was. You have not taken the weight from me, brother. I want to say that, so that I do not flatter you with a description of the work you did not do. The weight is still there. But you have, by some small thing you did, given me the small permission to put the weight down for a moment, and the putting of it down for a moment has been, in the small accountings of my back, the most useful small relief I have had in some hours. Thank you.
I said, master Goradd. The work is the work. The weight is the work’s work to put back, when it puts back. You are welcome.
I went to Maelis second. She had moved from her bundle to sit beside me as I had been at the smith. She had her gloved hands folded in her lap in the small composed way she had been adopting more often in recent days, when she was not consciously presenting herself to the company in her usual bright manner. I sat down beside her. I set my right hand upon her right shoulder, in the same small light pressure. I breathed. I said the small words.
Maelis, friend, was the one of the four whose wearing turned out to be the deepest. I had not known this when I had begun. I had judged at the start of the morning, by the small visible signs of the gripping of the Chalkbone, that her wearing was the second in the order I had been watching. I had not known that her wearing was, in the small inward accountings of her, considerably worse than the wearing of any of the others, including the smith, because she had been concealing the worse portion of it behind the small bright easy voice she had been keeping up for the whole morning, in the small unselfish way of a person who has been a scholar of small things in lonely places for many years and who has learned to carry her wearings without showing them to the people around her.
The small bright easy voice had been a small kindness to the company. It had also been, in the small private bookkeeping of Maelis’s own attention, a small tax upon her that she had been paying out of a reserve that was, by the time she sat down beside me at the small widening, very nearly empty.
I felt this, friend, as I held the hand at her shoulder. I will not pretend that I felt it in any precise way that I could put words to. I felt it as a small unsteady warmth under my palm, a warmth that was not the warmth of a body in good order but the warmth of a body that had been running its small inner fires too hard for too many hours. Perhaps forty breaths into the work, Maelis’s small composed posture began, by very small increments, to come undone. Her shoulders did not, as Master Goradd’s had, drop in a single small movement; they shook by a very small measure, the kind of shaking I had felt under my hand at confessor’s work many times across thirty-five years, the small shaking of a person who had been holding tears for many hours without permitting herself to know that she had been holding them. I held the hand at her shoulder. I did not change the pressure. I did not change the breathing. I did not change the words. I went on with the work.
Maelis began to cry. She cried in the small dignified way she had cried at the alcove on the second day, in the same way that did not produce any sound that the company would have to acknowledge, the small private weeping of a woman who had decided not to make a public thing of her weeping but who had at last, in some small portion of herself, given herself permission to cry. The tears went down her face in the small slow tracks of tears that have been held a long time. I went on with the work. The hundred breaths went on. Maelis cried for perhaps fifty of the hundred breaths, in the small steady way of a person crying out a small reservoir of tears she had not known she had been keeping. At the end of the fifty breaths the crying slowed and the body under my hand began, by very small degrees, to settle into a softer condition than the condition it had been in for the morning.
I went on with the breathing. I went on with the words. At the end of the hundred breaths I lifted my hand.
Maelis looked at me. She did not say anything for some time. She said, at last, in the small private voice that was not her bright voice, oh, brother. Brother. I had not known how tired I was. I had been telling myself for hours that I was only a little tired, in the same small way I have been telling myself for many years that I am only a little tired, and the telling has been, by my own small reckoning across this morning, very expensive. I had not known how expensive. You have not, brother, taken the tiredness from me. I want to say that, so I do not flatter you. But you have, by some small thing you did, made it possible for me to look at the tiredness without flinching from it. I have not looked at it without flinching in many years. Thank you. I am, brother, I am going to take a small minute to sit with the looking, if the company will permit me. I will not be more than a minute. I just need the minute.
I said, daughter, take the minute. Take ten of them, if you need ten. The company will permit them.
She took the minute. She took, in fact, perhaps three minutes, in which she sat with the gloved hands folded in her lap and the tears drying on her face, and the rest of the company sat around her in the small circle without speaking, and Master Goradd looked across the small fire at her with the small grave look of a smith who had been attended to a few minutes before and knew what she was sitting with, and Elandor at his place inclined his head in the small soldier’s acknowledgment of a fellow whose burden had been lifted by some small invisible measure, and Vren did not look at her at all, in the small respectful way Vren did not look at things that did not require Vren’s looking, and the three minutes passed, and Maelis at the end of them drew a long breath and smiled the small soft private smile that I had come to know and she said, in a voice that was a little closer to her bright voice but was not quite there yet, she said, oh, petals, oh, my loves, I will be all right. I think. Please go on, brother. Elandor is next, I think.
I went to Elandor third. He had moved from his place at the rear to sit beside me at the small motion of his eye, which I had caught. He sat down in the slow controlled settlement of a hero of his order who had decided to be still for the duration of the work. He set his hands on his knees in the small composed way Vren generally set hers, and I marked, in the small noticing of an old confessor, that he had borrowed the posture, perhaps without entirely knowing he had borrowed it, in the way persons of certain trades borrow postures from one another in the long hours of working together. I set my right hand upon his right shoulder. I breathed. I said the small words.
Elandor’s wearing, friend, was different from the smith’s and from Maelis’s. The smith’s had been the wearing of a body that had been pressed by a small physical weight that the body had not been told about. Maelis’s had been the wearing of a small inward holding that had at last been permitted to come undone. Elandor’s was, I will say, the wearing of a song that had been singing at full pitch for several days and had not been permitted to come down off its pitch in the proper way the song was meant to come down. The song was the song he had described in the smaller way over recent days, the small fierce song he had told me about briefly in the smithy two days ago, the song that ran along the inside of the breastbone when the work for which a man had been shaped came at last into the room with him. The song had been at full pitch since the alcove of the ambush, four days ago, and had not come down at any of the subsequent halts, because the next attack had been only ever a few hours away, and the song had been holding itself ready, in the small honest way the song held itself ready in a hero of Elandor’s training.
The song had been keeping him going. The song had also, I felt now under my hand at his shoulder, been costing him something the song had not been telling him about. The song was not free. The song had its own small tax, and the tax was the small tax of a body running on its highest fuel for too many hours, in the way a horse run at its full gallop for too long will, when at last permitted to slow, find that the slowing comes with a small cost it had not been factoring.
I held the hand at the shoulder. I breathed. I said the small words. I felt, under my palm, the song. The song was a small steady tremor in the body that was not a tremor of fatigue, exactly, but was a tremor of high readiness held too long. The song was, friend, a beautiful thing to feel as a confessor of an old order feels things in another man’s body, and I will tell you that I do not generally feel the songs of other men’s professions in this way, because I have not generally been in the close company of men whose work involves songs in their breastbones. I felt his now. I held the hand. I went on.
Perhaps forty breaths into the work, the song did a thing I had not expected. The song began, by very small degrees, to come down off its pitch. It did not come down all the way. The song would not come down all the way until the chamber below was through and Elandor’s work was done. But the song came down by perhaps a tenth of its pitch, in the small careful way a hero who has been running at full pitch will permit himself to come down by a small amount when he has been given a small unspoken signal that he may. I had not, by any conscious means, given the signal. I had only laid the hand and breathed and said the small words. The song heard the work as a signal. The song received the signal. The song came down by a tenth of its pitch. The body under my hand, which had been very still in the small steady tremor of high readiness, settled by some small measure.
I went on with the work. The hundred breaths went on. At the end of them I lifted my hand.
Elandor looked at me. His face had the small composed look it had been keeping for some days. His eyes had the small new soft look that had been in them since the smithy. He said, in the new soft voice, brother. Brother. I have not, in nineteen years of my order’s work, had a confessor lay his hand upon my shoulder in the way you have just done. I will tell you that I have not, in nineteen years, known that I needed it. I know now. Thank you for the laying. The song has come down by a small measure. The small measure is what I needed it to come down by. It will not come down further until I have done the work below. But the small measure is the small measure, and I will carry the rest of the descent with the song at the small measure lower, and the carrying will be easier by the small measure. Brother. Thank you.
I said, captain. The work is the work. You are welcome.
I went to Vren fourth, although Vren had asked to be fourth and last in the same gesture and I had agreed. Vren had not moved from her place at the wall opposite the fire. I went to her, in the small careful way one goes to a person who has asked to be last and who has done so for reasons one is not going to inquire into. I sat down beside her. I will say, friend, that I sat down beside Vren in this work with more small care than I had used with any of the others, because Vren had been the most reserved of the company throughout the descent and was, by all my readings of her, the person most likely to be unsettled by the small physical contact of a confessor’s hand upon a shoulder, and I did not wish to unsettle her, and I went carefully.
I said, very softly, daughter. I am going to lay the hand. May I.
Vren said, in the flat voice, brother. You may.
I set my right hand upon her left shoulder. I did not, by some small instinct, set it upon the right, because the right was the shoulder that had taken the cut at the corridor ambush four days ago, and the cut was healed but the small memory of the cut was still there in the body, and I did not wish to disturb the memory with the small pressure of my hand. I set the hand upon the left. I breathed. I said the small words.
I will tell you, friend, what I felt under my hand at Vren’s left shoulder. I felt a stillness. I had not expected to feel a stillness. I had expected to feel a wearing of the same kind I had felt in the others, perhaps the wearing of a body that had been held in high alertness for too many hours, in the way Elandor’s body had been held in the song. Vren’s body was not held in that way. Vren’s body was held in a different way, which I want to attempt to describe but which I am going to fail to describe properly, in the small honest way one fails to describe certain inner conditions of other people.
The stillness under my hand was the stillness of a body that had been holding itself, for many years, at the small careful weight of a particular purpose, and that had been holding the weight so steadily, for so long, that the body had ceased to remember any other condition. The wearing in Vren was not the wearing of the present descent. The wearing in Vren was the wearing of perhaps fifteen years, of a kind of work I did not know the details of and would not ask. The descent had added to the wearing, in the small steady way the descent had added to all of us, but the descent was not, in Vren, the principal source of the wearing. The principal source was older, and was deeper, and was, I will say with the small honest professional respect of an old confessor, well outside my competence to address in the small work of the laying-on of attention.
I held the hand. I breathed. I said the small words. I did not, by any conscious means, attempt to address the deeper wearing. I would not have known how. I attempted only the small addressing of the descent’s surface contribution, in the way the work I was doing was meant to address the surface contribution and not the underlying.
The deeper wearing did not move under my hand. I had not expected it to. The surface contribution did, by some small measure, ease. Perhaps sixty breaths into the work, the shoulder under my palm dropped by the smallest fraction, in the way Vren’s shoulder dropped when Vren had decided that a particular small alertness could be released. Perhaps eighty breaths in, the pale gold eyes, which had been upon a point in the middle distance, closed for the duration of perhaps three breaths, in the only sleep I would ever see Vren take during this descent, and reopened.
At the end of the hundred breaths I lifted my hand.
Vren did not speak for a long time. I waited. I have learned, in many years of the small work, that the persons who do not speak after the work are the persons for whom the work has done something the persons cannot yet put into words, and that the waiting for the words is part of the work, and the words come when they come, and one does not hurry the coming.
Vren said, at last, in the flat voice that had a small softness in it I had not heard in it before, in the same way her voice had had a small softness when she had said well done to Elandor at the corridor four days ago, Vren said, brother. Brother. The work was a small work. The small work was a kindness. I have not been laid on by a confessor in many years. I had not remembered what the laying felt like. I want to say only that I have not, in many years, felt a hand upon my shoulder for the purpose of doing me a kindness, and the feeling has been received. The work has done what it could do. It is enough.
I said, daughter, the work is the work. You are welcome.
The four of them had been attended to. There was, friend, one more in the company. The one more was myself. I had set out at the beginning of the work to attend to the four of them, in the small order I had thought best, and I had not set out to attend to myself, because the small work of the laying-on of attention is not generally a work the brother performs upon himself, in the same way a smith does not sharpen his own blade with the same edge that needs the sharpening. The small work is done from one to another. The brother is, in this respect, the small instrument of the work and is not the recipient of it.
I sat for a moment. I was tired, friend. I want to say that. I had not done the work of the laying-on with all four of my companions in a single afternoon in many years, and the work, although it is a small work, takes something from the brother who does it, in the slow steady way the small giving takes something from any giver. I felt, after the fourth laying, the small tiredness that I had felt before at confessor’s work and that I had learned to allow to sit in me without insisting that the tiredness be addressed. The tiredness would address itself, in time, by the small ordinary mechanisms of sleep and food and the slow restoration of a body that had been quietly doing its small work.
It was at this moment that the smith spoke. He had been sitting across from me at the small fire, with his hammer across his knees and his right hand at his knee in the easy posture I had given him back, and he said, in the slow voice, brother. Brother. The work you have just done has been done for the four of us. The four of us are not the company. The company is the five of us. The fifth of us has, by my count, not yet been attended to. I am going to propose, brother, that the fifth of us be attended to now, in some small adapted form of the work, by those of us who have just received it. I am not a confessor. I do not know your words. I do not know your breathing. I will not pretend that I can do the work you do. I will say that I have, in many years of my own trade, learned that a hand laid upon a shoulder in the proper spirit, even by a man who does not know the words, is not entirely without effect, and I will say further that we have, the four of us, just been given a generosity that we have not yet returned, and I would like to return some small portion of it, in the small adapted form that the four of us can manage.
Maelis said, oh, petal, oh, brother. Yes. Yes. Let us do it.
Elandor said, in the new soft voice, brother. We will. Sit.
Vren said, in the flat voice, brother. Sit.
I will tell you, friend, that I had not expected this. I had not, in the seven hours of the morning’s walking, prepared myself for this, because I had been the one preparing to give and not the one preparing to receive, and the preparing to receive is a different preparation than the preparing to give, and I was not prepared.
I sat, however, because they had asked me to, and the asking is the asking. I sat at the small fire with my hands in my lap and the tired old back of me against the wall, and the four of them came around me in a small circle. Master Goradd set his great rough hand upon my left shoulder. Maelis set her small gloved hand upon my right shoulder. Elandor set his hand upon the back of my neck in the small careful way of a soldier who had decided that the back of the neck was the proper place for him to lay his hand. Vren came round to my front and knelt down on one knee and set her hand, in the small careful way of Vren’s slow controlled motions, upon my chest at the height of the breastbone, in the place where she had presumably decided was the place a person in her trade would place a hand for such a purpose.
The four of them did not know the words. They did not know the breathing. They did not know the small particular discipline of the laying-on of attention. They had no order to draw from. They had only the four of them. They had only the small fact of having just received the work themselves and the small desire to return it. They did, in this state of small unpreparedness, the only thing they could do, which was that they were quiet, and they breathed at the small different rates their four bodies breathed at, and the smith’s right hand at my left shoulder was the warm rough hand of a smith who had been working hot iron for thirty years, and Maelis’s gloved hand at my right shoulder was the small careful hand of a scholar who had been picking up small precise objects all her working life, and Elandor’s hand at the back of my neck was the disciplined hand of a hero whose hand had been on weapons for nineteen years and was now, with what I read as a small unaccustomed deliberateness, on my neck instead, and Vren’s hand at my chest was the cool steady hand of a person who had decided, in her own small private way, that the giving back of the work was a thing worth the small physical gesture she had committed to.
I will tell you, friend, that I wept.
I wept in the small dignified way I had wept twice before in this descent, with the small careful not-acknowledgment of an old man’s weeping in a place where weeping was not the central business and where the company was, by the small unworthy generosity of their being who they were, not going to make a great fuss of it. I wept because I had not been laid on by any company in this way in the thirty-eight years of my brotherhood, and I had not, until that moment, known that the not-having of the laying was a thing in me that had been quietly waiting to be filled by a laying. I had been the layer-on for many years. I had been the one who placed the hand. I had not, since my own mother had laid her hand upon me at the end of her life when I was eleven years old, been the recipient of a laying of any kind that I had received in this register, and the receiving of it in this register from the four of them, with the smith’s warm rough hand and Maelis’s small gloved hand and Elandor’s disciplined hand and Vren’s cool steady hand, was a thing I had not known how much I had been missing until I had it.
I wept. The four of them held the laying for what I would later reckon at perhaps the length of two hundred slow breaths, considerably longer than the hundred I had given to each of them, in the small generous overcompensation of four givers who had not known the proper duration and had erred on the side of more. At the end of the two hundred breaths, by some small unspoken agreement that I had not heard them make, they lifted their hands at the same moment, and the four hands lifted away from me at once, and I sat at the small fire with my hands in my lap and the small tracks of tears on my old face, and the four of them sat back into their places around the fire, and Master Goradd cleared his throat in the slow way he cleared it when he was about to say a small ordinary thing in a moment that was perhaps not entirely ordinary, and he said, in the slow voice, well now, brother. Well now. I will tell you that I have, by my own small reckoning, returned only a very small portion of what you gave us, and I am not certain the small adapted form even did what your form does. But I have done what I could. I am, friend, content with the doing.
Maelis said, oh, brother. We love you. The smith has spoken for us, but I will say it also, because I am the kind of person who says things out loud when they should be said. We love you. We will get you down to the chamber below and we will get you back up, and we will keep you in the middle of us where the worst things cannot reach you easily, and we will, by my chalk and by my satchel, do everything in our small power to make sure that the long-bearing of yours is, in the chamber below, given the proper occasion it has been preparing for. That is the small promise I am making, brother. I am sorry if it is forward. I am making it anyway.
Elandor said, in the new soft voice, brother. The small promise is mine also, with Maelis. I will say only that I will be the small instrument that the chamber below requires of me to be, and that the small particular thing you have been told you will be asked to do, which I do not need to know the details of, will be made possible by my doing what I have been trained to do. That is the small promise from me. I do not generally make promises in the second voice of this kind, but I am making it now.
Vren did not say anything for a moment. Then Vren said, in the flat voice, brother. The moment will be made.
That was all Vren said. It was the same thing Vren had said in the alcove of the confession on the second day. It was the most important thing Vren could have said, because the saying of it now, in the company of the other three, was the confirmation that the promise made in the alcove of the confession had not weakened in the days since, and that Vren had been carrying the promise all this time, in the small steady way Vren carried such things, and that the promise would, in the chamber below, be honored. I will tell you that I had not, until Vren said it the second time in this circle, fully believed that the promise would be kept. I had hoped. I had hoped in the small careful way an old confessor hopes for the small things he has been told will be given to him. I had not, in the small honest accounting of my own faith, fully believed. The second saying gave me the believing. I had it now.
I rose. I rose in the slow careful way of an old man rising from a small fire after a small great kindness, with the small useful application of my left hand against the wall behind me. I took up my staff. I took up the lantern. I looked at the four of them. The four of them looked at me. There was, in the small space of the widening, the small ordinary look of five people who had been worn by an afternoon and had been, by some small invisible measure, restored, not entirely, not enough to undo the wearing the descent had laid upon us, but enough to carry the next portion of the descent with the small remaining strength of the company intact, and that was sufficient.
I said, friends. Let us go on. The chamber below is still some hours ahead of us. The wearing will, by my reading, continue. But we have given it, in the last hour, the small attention it required, and the attention is what was wanted, and the company will carry. We will carry. Let us go.
They rose. The smith put out the small fire in his slow careful way. The order set itself again, with Vren at the point and the smith in the second and me in the third and Maelis in the fourth and Elandor at the rear. We took up our positions. We walked.
I will tell you, friend, what I felt as we walked. I felt the small tiredness in my old body that the laying-on had cost me. I felt the small further wearing of the corridor as it continued. I felt the cold in my chest that had been with me since the night before I left the monastery, which had not lifted and would not lift in this descent, but which sat now in the small useful place behind my eyes where Vren had described feeling her own cold the day before. I felt also, friend, the small further thing that the four of them had given me at the fire, which was the small unaccustomed warmth of having been laid on by a company that had not known the words and had laid me on anyway, and the small unaccustomed warmth sat next to the cold in the place behind my eyes, and the two did not contradict each other, and the two were the proper interior register of an old confessor walking into the work the long corridor had told him he was going to be asked to do.
I walked in the third position of our line. The lantern in my right hand burned in the small honest yellow. The staff in my left rang true against the persuaded stone. Master Goradd at the second position in front of me had his shoulders at the lower position the laying-on had given him back. Maelis at the fourth behind me had her chalk in the small loose grip the laying-on had loosened. Vren at the point set the pace at the steady pace, slightly slower than the morning’s pace, in the careful judgment of a point walker who had been told by her own small body that the company could not be hurried in the present condition and would be carried at the present pace until the present pace produced the chamber below, which it would, by all our readings, within perhaps another day’s walking. Elandor at the rear walked with the song in his breastbone at the small measure lower than the song had been pitched at all morning, and the small measure lower was the small measure that would carry him into the chamber below in better condition than he would have been in otherwise.
The descent went on. The wearing went on. The carrying went on. The small endurance, friend, was the small endurance of an old man and four companions walking into the work that had been kept for them, with the small wearing sorrow in each of their bodies and the small useful kindnesses in each of their hands and the small unspoken promises in each of their hearts and the small honest light of a lantern that had been burning for many days going forward into the dark with us, and the dark received us, and we went on, and the going on was the small stubborn answer that was the only answer such places permit, and the answer, friend, was sufficient, and is sufficient, and will, by my long faith in such small answers, continue to be sufficient as long as there are companies of five willing to walk into chambers below and to do, in their small particular ways, the small particular things that have been kept for them to do.
Segment Twenty-Two: The False Trail
There is a particular kind of cleverness, love, and I have been guilty of it on a number of occasions in my professional life so I consider myself something of an authority on this also, the sort of authority that universities continue to be uninterested in despite the fact that the topic is in my private opinion considerably more useful to the running of the world than several of the topics they currently teach. The particular kind of cleverness I am talking about is the cleverness one finds in the small heart of oneself at the moment when one has identified, in a difficult situation, a single small clever maneuver that might, if performed correctly, produce a small clever result, and the small clever result would, if everything went well, solve a small clever portion of the difficult situation, and the rest of the difficult situation would still be there, untouched, after the maneuver, but the small clever portion would be solved, and one would have the small private satisfaction of having solved it, which is the satisfaction this kind of cleverness lives for.
The trouble with this kind of cleverness, friend, and I want to set this down at the outset of this telling because the setting-down of it is the necessary frame for what came after, is that one tends to forget, in the small bright glow of having identified the small clever maneuver, that the small clever maneuver only addresses the small clever portion of the difficult situation, and that the rest of the difficult situation will, after one has performed the maneuver, still be there. One tends, in the small bright glow, to come away from the maneuver feeling considerably better about the difficult situation than the maneuver has objectively earned. One walks on with a small bounce in one’s step, in the small unjustified satisfaction of having solved approximately a third of a problem, while the other two thirds of the problem watch one’s small bounce with what I can only describe as the small patient amusement of a problem that knows perfectly well that two thirds of itself remain, and that one’s small bounce will shortly be addressed accordingly.
I had a small bright glow that afternoon, friend. I am going to tell you about the small bright glow because the small bright glow was the central feature of the small false trail I am about to describe, and the central feature wants its proper accounting, in the small honest way of an accounting that is being given by a person who is no longer in the small bright glow and is therefore able to be honest about it.
We had been walking, by my reckoning, perhaps four hours from the small widening where Brother Caius had done his laying-on of attention, and the four hours had been, in the small interior accountings of my own body, the easiest four hours of walking I had done in this descent so far. The laying-on had done something. I do not know what the laying-on had done. I do not know whether it had done the same thing for the others as it had done for me. I only know that the gripping of the Chalkbone Marker in my right hand had returned, in the four hours, to the small easy grip it had been in for years before this descent, and the small breathing of my own chest had settled into the small steady rhythm I associated with the small unhurried walking of an inn cellar at a riverside in spring, and the small inner reservoir that I had been drawing from all morning until I had cried at the brother’s hand on my shoulder had begun, by some small slow mechanism, to refill, and I was, by the end of the four hours, in the small unaccustomed condition of having something approaching what I would call inner energy, in the way a person of certain dispositions occasionally has inner energy, and the having of it was making me, friend, dangerous to myself in the way the having of inner energy generally makes me dangerous to myself.
It was at this point that the corridor offered me, in the small generous way the corridors of this descent had been offering me things throughout, a small opportunity to be dangerous.
The corridor we had been walking down for the four hours had been a corridor of the same general kind as the warm corridors we had been in since the alcove of the ambush, with the same persuaded stone and the same lack of seams and the same dry warmth, but the corridor had, in the small noticing of an obsessive scholar of small things, been showing me certain small features that I had been quietly cataloguing as we walked. The small features were the small invisible glyphs I had been laying at each turning, in the slow careful work I had been doing since the morning of the redrawn marks. I had laid, by my count, perhaps sixty glyphs across the descent so far, and the glyphs had been the small private map of the proper way back out of this place, in the small back of my own attention where I kept such things.
The glyphs at this particular stretch of the corridor had a small peculiar pattern that I had noticed at the second hour of the four. The pattern was that the corridor had, in the last several hundred paces, been carrying a small breath of air across our path from the left-hand wall to the right-hand wall, in the small steady way that a draft moves when there is a small communicating passage somewhere on the left that opens onto the corridor at a point further ahead of us than the lantern’s light could reach, and that the communicating passage was open to whatever space lay beyond it on the left, and that the air in the corridor was therefore being slightly displaced from the left toward the right as we walked. This was, friend, the sort of observation that I would normally have made and filed and walked on past without thinking about, in the small accumulating way of small observations made in long corridors. I had not, however, walked past it. I had been turning it over in the small back of my mind for the last two hours, because the small observation had begun to suggest, to the small back of my mind, a small clever maneuver.
The maneuver was this. Somewhere ahead of us in the corridor, by the small invisible direction the draft was carrying, there was a side passage opening onto the corridor from the left. The side passage was probably one of the many side passages that branched off from the main corridor system in this part of the descent, in the small generous way side passages had been branching off throughout, and which the company had been ignoring at Vren’s careful direction because the side passages were not the route we were taking and because investigating them would have eaten time we did not have and might have separated us into smaller groups, which Vren did not permit.
The side passage, however, had occurred to me as a small possible instrument. If I could lay, at the entrance of the side passage, a series of visible chalk glyphs of the kind I had been laying for nine years before this descent, the kind I had stopped laying after the redrawn marks incident, and if I could lay the glyphs in the small confident enthusiastic pattern of a scholar who believes she is making excellent breadcrumbs and has not yet realized that her breadcrumbs are being read, and if I could make the glyphs at the entrance of the side passage point convincingly down the side passage rather than along the main corridor we were actually walking, then the corridor’s small redrawing entity, which I now had reason to believe was paying detailed attention to my visible marks as a way of keeping track of our movements, might be persuaded that the company was heading down the side passage rather than continuing along the main corridor. The corridor, by this small clever logic, would then redirect its small administrative resources, by which I mean its remaining patrolling Gloomspiders, to the side passage rather than to the main corridor. The company would thus walk forward along the main corridor with a smaller probability of running into further patrolling waves, because the patrolling waves would be in the side passage looking for us, and we would not be in the side passage, and the not-being-there would be the small clever success of the maneuver.
This was the maneuver. I want to tell you, friend, that I had been working it out in the back of my mind for two hours and that I had not, in those two hours, identified any obvious flaw in it. I had been quite pleased with myself. I had been, in the small unworthy way of a person operating in inner energy after the laying-on of attention had refilled her, somewhat overconfident in the working-out, and the overconfidence had produced in me the small bright glow I described at the opening of this telling, and the small bright glow had been carrying me forward at the fourth position of our line with a small bounce in my step that I was, by the third hour, beginning to suspect Brother Caius behind me at the third position had noticed and was filing away for later consideration in his small quiet confessor’s way.
We came, at the end of the fourth hour, to the side passage I had been deducing from the draft. The side passage opened on the left-hand wall of the corridor at a point where the corridor itself bent very slightly to the right, in the small subtle way the corridor had of bending without making a proper turning. The side passage was perhaps the width of two people walking abreast, and the lantern’s light, as we approached, fell into the mouth of it for perhaps ten paces before the light gave out against the dark, and the side passage ran straight for those ten paces and then, by the small evidence of the angle of the lantern’s last edge of light against the side passage wall, turned to the left and went somewhere we could not see.
I lifted my left hand, in the small gesture for halt. The company halted. Vren at the point did the small full-body turn. Brother Caius behind me lifted the lantern higher to throw its light further into the mouth of the side passage. Elandor at the rear made the small half-step-and-look-back. Master Goradd at the second position adjusted his stance into the small ready posture he had been adopting at each halt since the alcove ambush.
I said, in the easiest voice I could manage but with the small thrum of inner energy that I was fairly sure they could all hear in it whether I wanted them to or not, I said, oh petals, oh my loves, I have a small clever maneuver I would like to propose. The maneuver will take perhaps a quarter of an hour to lay out. The maneuver involves the side passage on the left. I will explain. I would like the company’s permission before I do.
Vren said, in the flat voice, explain.
I explained. I explained the small clever maneuver in the small confident voice of a scholar laying out an idea she has been turning over for two hours and is fairly sure of. I described the draft and the side passage and the small redrawing entity and the visible glyphs and the false trail down the side passage and the small clever redirection of the patrolling waves. I described the small clever logic by which the maneuver would, if successful, give the company a smaller probability of running into further patrolling waves in the next several hours of our walking along the main corridor. I described, also, the small honest qualifications on the maneuver, which were that I was not entirely certain the corridor’s redrawing entity would take the bait, and that I was not entirely certain that even if it took the bait it would redirect significant resources, and that I was not entirely certain whether any further patrolling waves were likely to come in the next several hours in any case, and that the maneuver was therefore a small clever maneuver with several small honest uncertainties at its margins, but that I judged the upside to be worth the small costs of attempting it.
The four of them listened. Brother Caius listened in the slow careful way that meant he was incorporating the proposal into a framework he was building. Master Goradd listened with the small thoughtful look of a smith hearing a proposal that touched on matters outside his trade and that he was trying to follow on the strength of what he could follow. Elandor listened with the small narrowing of the eyes that he used for tactical assessments. Vren listened in the way Vren listened, which was the listening of a stone that had heard everything.
There was a small silence after I had finished. Then Vren spoke. Vren said, in the flat voice, satchel-keeper. I have one question.
I said, ask, petal.
Vren said, the false trail. If the corridor is redirecting its resources because it has read your false trail as a true trail, then the corridor is in some sense actively deceived. A deceived enemy is sometimes a more dangerous enemy than an enemy who has not been deceived. The question is whether the corridor, when it discovers it has been deceived, will be more dangerous than the corridor would have been if you had not deceived it.
I said, oh, petal. I had thought about this. I had thought, in the small careful way, that the corridor would discover the deception only after we had been walking for some hours, by which time we would be several hours further along the main corridor and would be, by the simple geometry of the situation, several hours away from any deception-related counter-response the corridor might make. The discovery of the deception would, in other words, be delayed, and the delay would buy us the several hours.
Vren said, agreed. Proceed.
Brother Caius said, in his slow gentle voice, daughter. I will say one thing. The corridor has been observing us in detail since the gate. The corridor has been observing your marks with sufficient precision to redraw them with idiosyncratic accuracy. The corridor has been doing this, by your own reading, in real time. I want to ask whether you have factored in the possibility that the corridor is observing you closely enough at this very moment to read your intent rather than only your marks, in which case the false trail would be recognized as false at the moment of its laying, and the maneuver would fail at the threshold.
I had not, friend, fully factored this in. I had factored in the possibility that the corridor could observe my marks. I had not factored in the possibility that the corridor could observe my intent. I considered the brother’s question for perhaps the count of three breaths. I said, in the smaller voice, brother. You have asked the proper question. I do not know whether the corridor can read intent. I have no reason to believe that it can. I have no reason to believe that it cannot. I judge, in the small uncertain way of judgments at this margin, that the corridor’s capabilities are probably stronger than I have been assuming and probably weaker than I would assume if I gave the corridor every benefit of the doubt, and that the proper play is therefore to attempt the maneuver in such a way that even if the corridor can read my intent, the laying of the false trail is still useful, because the laying of it forces the corridor to either commit resources to the side passage in case the false trail is genuine, or to refrain from committing resources in the gamble that the false trail is false. Either response is a small cost to the corridor that we did not previously have. Either response is a small advantage to us.
The brother smiled, the small dry smile he had when he had been told a thing he found professionally interesting. He said, daughter. That is the proper way to think about it. You have my agreement.
Master Goradd said, in his slow voice, lass. By my forge, I have nothing to add to the brother’s question and your answer. I will say that I will follow your lead on this maneuver, in the small trust I have developed for your maneuvers over the last days, and I will say also that if the laying of the false trail goes wrong in some way none of us has anticipated, I will be at the rear with my hammer and we will manage. Proceed.
Elandor said, in the new soft voice, Maelis Veth. The maneuver is sound. Proceed.
I will tell you, friend, that the four of them giving their agreement in that small order produced in me a small further wave of the small bright glow, and the small further wave of the small bright glow was, in retrospect, the precise moment at which I should have grown more cautious and at which I instead grew less cautious, because I am the kind of person who, when given the approval of four other people whom I respect, occasionally takes the approval as a signal to relax rather than as a signal to redouble my care, and the relaxing was the small unworthy flaw that the next half hour was about to expose.
We laid the false trail.
I want to describe the laying, because the laying is the part of the telling that contains the small clever maneuver and the small clever maneuver, although it was at its core the work I had been planning for two hours, acquired in the laying a small further set of details that I improvised in the small bright glow of the laying, and the small further details were the part of the maneuver that succeeded, and also, in retrospect, the part that failed.
I went to the entrance of the side passage. I drew the Chalkbone Marker in the small confident gesture I had been using for nine years before the redrawing incident, in the small obvious way of a scholar laying breadcrumbs. I drew, at the mouth of the side passage, in the visible chalk, a small left-arrow at chest-high on the right-hand wall of the corridor, pointing into the side passage. The left-arrow was at my idiosyncratic angle of departure from vertical, in the same lean that my own right wrist produced. The left-arrow was, in every respect, the kind of mark I had been laying at every turning of every corridor we had walked through for the first three days of the descent before the redrawing incident had forced me to switch to invisible glyphs. The mark was, to any observer of my marks, a perfectly ordinary visible mark of the kind I would have laid at any genuine turning we had taken.
I then proceeded to lay further marks down the side passage. I walked perhaps three paces into the side passage and I laid another small left-arrow at the right-hand wall, indicating that we had continued down the passage. I walked another five paces and I laid a third arrow. I walked another five paces and I laid a fourth. I went on in this manner, friend, for perhaps fifteen paces into the side passage, in the small clever way of a scholar establishing what would appear to be a clearly marked trail that any observer would take as the true route of the company.
It was at the fifteenth pace that I improvised the small further details.
I improvised them, friend, in the small bright glow that I have been telling you about, and I will tell you that the small bright glow was at this point making me feel approximately twice as clever as I am on a good day, and that I was riding the small bright glow with the small unworthy enthusiasm of a person who had not been this clever in some weeks and was, by some small inner machinery, making up for lost time.
The first improvisation was a small dotted circle that I drew on the left-hand wall of the side passage at the fifteenth pace. The small dotted circle was the symbol I used in my private working language to indicate a place where the party had stopped or might want to stop again, in the small breadcrumbs language I had been using for years. The small dotted circle would, to the corridor’s observing entity, indicate that the company had stopped at the fifteenth pace of the side passage and had spent some time there, perhaps for a rest or perhaps for a small consultation or perhaps for any of the small ordinary reasons a company stops in a corridor. The small dotted circle was, in other words, a small further piece of credibility for the false trail.
The second improvisation was a small careful X that I drew on the floor at the fifteenth pace, in the small visible chalk, at the small careful angle that I used for the X symbol. The X was the symbol I used in my private working language to indicate a place where I had marked something specifically worth noting, in the small breadcrumbs language I had been using for years. The X would, to the corridor’s observing entity, indicate that the company had found something at the fifteenth pace of the side passage that was worth noting, and the noting was, in the small clever logic of the false trail, a small further piece of credibility, because a company that has found something worth noting in a side passage is a company that is committed to the side passage, and the corridor would, by my reading, take this as a strong signal of the company’s actual direction.
The third improvisation, friend, was the one that was a small step too far.
The third improvisation was that I dropped, at the fifteenth pace, a small fragment of leather. The small fragment of leather had been in the inner pocket of my satchel for several years. The small fragment of leather had been cut from the edge of an old apron of mine that I had retired some years back and had been keeping a small piece of for sentimental reasons, in the small ordinary way of a person who keeps small fragments of retired apparel for sentimental reasons, and the small fragment of leather had been in my satchel because I had not been able to bring myself to throw it away. The small fragment of leather had, by the small clever logic that was driving my improvisations, the small advantage of being a piece of physical evidence that the corridor’s observing entity could not redraw, because the corridor’s redrawing capacities, by my best reading, operated on marks and patterns and not on physical objects of a non-marking kind. The small fragment of leather would therefore, if dropped at the fifteenth pace of the side passage, sit there as a small honest piece of evidence that the company had been at the fifteenth pace, and the small honest piece of evidence would, by my reasoning, be the most convincing of the three improvisations, because the corridor’s observing entity would have to take the small fragment of leather at its physical face value.
I dropped the small fragment of leather. I dropped it in the small natural way of a scholar dropping a small thing she had not noticed she had been about to drop. I made the dropping look unintentional, in the small careful way that the dropping was meant to look unintentional. The small fragment of leather lay upon the floor of the side passage at the fifteenth pace, near the X, in the small careful arrangement of a small honest piece of physical evidence.
I then turned around. I walked back out of the side passage, retracing my fifteen paces, and at each of my visible marks I paused briefly in the small natural way of a scholar verifying her own marks, and at the entrance of the side passage I paused for the small longest moment and looked back into the side passage in the small wistful way of a scholar who has marked something interesting and is committing it to memory before leaving it. I then turned and rejoined the company at the main corridor.
The company had been watching the laying. The company had not interfered. The company had stood in the small disciplined way of a company that had agreed to a plan and was letting the plan be executed without interruption, which is, I want to say, the highest form of small disciplined behavior I have ever witnessed in any company, and I will be grateful for it for the rest of my life.
I came up to them. I said, in the small bright voice that the small bright glow had produced in me, I said, oh, petals. It is done. Let us walk on along the main corridor at the regular pace and let us continue laying invisible glyphs along the way as we have been doing, and we will see what the corridor does with the false trail in the next several hours.
We walked on. We walked on along the main corridor for perhaps the next two hours at the regular pace, and I laid invisible glyphs at each turning in the slow careful way I had been laying them, and the corridor continued in the warm dry way it had been continuing, and the company walked in the order we had been walking in, and I, in the fourth position, rode the small bright glow with the small unworthy bounce in my step.
It was at the end of the two hours that we got the first sign that the false trail had worked.
We got the sign in the form of a small distant skittering. The skittering came from behind us. It came faintly, at the very limit of the lantern’s reach behind us in the corridor, in the small soft rhythm of legs on stone moving at a patrolling pace. The skittering, friend, was the skittering of Gloomspiders, of the kind we had heard before the first chamber on the first day and before several of the encounters since. The skittering was moving, by the small attention I gave it, from behind us in the corridor toward the side passage I had laid the false trail in. The skittering was, by my best reading, the patrolling wave that the corridor had directed to follow the trail, and the patrolling wave was now following the false trail rather than coming up the main corridor after us.
I will tell you, friend, that the small bright glow inside me at that moment expanded to a small bright blaze, and I had to clamp down on the small bright blaze with everything I had in me to keep from making a small triumphant noise, because making a small triumphant noise would have given the corridor a strong signal that we had been listening for the patrolling wave, and listening for the patrolling wave would have implied that we had been expecting the patrolling wave, and expecting the patrolling wave would have implied that we had laid a false trail with the intent of misdirecting the patrolling wave, and the entire small clever maneuver would have been exposed by a single small triumphant noise. I did not make the noise. I clamped down. I walked on.
The skittering faded behind us. The patrolling wave, by my reading, had followed the false trail into the side passage and was now moving down the side passage at the patrolling pace, in pursuit of a company that was not there. The maneuver had worked. The maneuver had worked precisely as I had hoped. The small clever maneuver had drawn the patrolling wave away from us, and we were now walking the main corridor with a smaller probability of running into the patrolling wave for the next several hours, and the small bright glow inside me was, friend, a small bright bonfire.
It was at this point, perhaps another quarter of an hour further down the main corridor, that the second sign came.
The second sign was not a skittering. The second sign was a silence. The corridor behind us had, since the patrolling wave had moved into the side passage, gone quiet, in the small expected way that a corridor goes quiet when its patrolling wave has been redirected. The corridor in front of us had also gone quiet, in the small expected way the corridor in front of us was generally quiet. The silence was the expected silence. The silence was the small bright proof of the maneuver’s success.
The silence, friend, was wrong.
I will tell you what was wrong with it. I had been walking in this descent for nine days. I had been carrying, in the small obsessive back of my attention, the small continuous catalog of the small sounds the corridor produced, in the same way I had carried in the cellar of the Bent Reed the small continuous catalog of the small sounds the cellar produced. The corridor’s small sounds, in the warm sections of the descent, had included the small steady breathing draft, the small occasional creaking of the persuaded stone, the small faint humming of any nearby webbing, and the small particular sound that was not really a sound but was the small particular feeling of being attended to, which I had learned to read as a small unspoken signal that the corridor was paying attention to us. The small particular feeling had been there since the gate. It had been there in varying intensities for nine days. It had not, until that quarter of an hour, gone away.
It had gone away.
The small particular feeling of being attended to had stopped being there, perhaps three minutes before the silence I am describing, and the not-being-there of it was the wrongness. The corridor was no longer paying attention to us. The corridor was no longer attending. The corridor had, in the small invisible way of such things, turned its attention elsewhere.
I will tell you what I did when I noticed the not-being-there of the small particular feeling. I clamped down on the small bright bonfire of my self-satisfaction in approximately one third of a second, which was the time it took the small back of my brain to revise its entire assessment of the situation, and I walked forward at the same regular pace and I did not change my breath and I did not change my posture and I did not give any small signal that the corridor might still be observing us through some residual mechanism, and inside me, friend, in the small private working space of the small back of my attention, I began to do the calculation that I had not, by my own honest admission, fully done before the laying of the false trail.
The calculation was this. The corridor had been attending to us continuously for nine days. The corridor had stopped attending to us, by my reading, perhaps three minutes ago. The stopping of the attending was a deliberate action on the corridor’s part. The corridor would not have stopped attending to us unless the corridor had decided that we were no longer the principal object of its attention. The corridor had, in other words, just transferred its principal attention elsewhere. The elsewhere was not behind us in the side passage, because the patrolling wave was already in the side passage and the corridor would not have transferred its principal attention to a place where it had already directed its resources. The elsewhere was somewhere we were not. The elsewhere was almost certainly, by the small geometry of the situation, the chamber below us. The chamber below us had received the principal attention of the corridor in the last three minutes. The chamber below us was, by all our readings, the place where the she was. The she had, in the last three minutes, drawn the principal attention of the corridor system to herself.
The she, friend, was waking.
I will tell you that the small bright bonfire inside me, which had already been clamped down on once, now went entirely out, in the small extinguishing way a bonfire goes out when a person has remembered that the bonfire was a small unworthy bonfire and that there are larger and considerably less pleasant fires to attend to. I walked on. I did the calculation a second time to verify that I had not been wrong the first time. The calculation came out the same way. The she was waking.
The maneuver had worked, friend, in the small clever way I had designed it to work. The maneuver had drawn the patrolling wave away from us. The maneuver had bought us, by the small reckoning, perhaps the next several hours of relatively unmolested walking along the main corridor toward the chamber below. The maneuver had been, in its small clever portion, a success.
The maneuver had not, however, addressed the question of what was happening in the chamber below.
The maneuver had not, friend, addressed the question of what the she was going to do when she finished waking.
The maneuver had not, in the small honest accounting, made the slightest difference to the broader situation we were walking into. The maneuver had only made the next several hours of walking more comfortable. The chamber below was still the chamber below. The she was still the she. The she was, as of perhaps three minutes ago, waking. The waking would continue. The waking would, by the small estimate the woman with the satchel three weeks ago at the Bent Reed had translated along the strand, take perhaps a day to two days to complete, although the estimate was uncertain. The waking might already have completed, in some small final stage of itself, by the time we arrived at the chamber. The maneuver had, in other words, solved a small clever portion of the problem and had left the rest of the problem entirely intact, which was, friend, what the small clever portion always does.
I did the small clever portion the courtesy of acknowledging it for what it was. I did the rest of the problem the courtesy of acknowledging that as well. I walked on in the fourth position of our line. I did not, friend, share my revised understanding of the situation with the company immediately, because the company had been walking in the small bright assumption of the success of the maneuver for the last quarter of an hour, and the small bright assumption was, by some small mechanism, supporting their pace, and I did not wish to disturb the pace before I had time to think about how to phrase the disturbing.
I thought about how to phrase the disturbing for perhaps another quarter of an hour. I thought about it in the small careful way I thought about phrasing things when I wanted to phrase them in a way that did not undo the small generosity that the previous phrasing had earned me. I had earned a small generosity from the company by the laying of the false trail. I had earned, in particular, a small generosity from Vren, who had approved the maneuver, and from Brother Caius, who had asked the proper question about intent, and from Elandor, who had pronounced the maneuver sound, and from Master Goradd, who had agreed to follow my lead. I did not wish to undo the small generosity by following it up with a phrasing that made the small generosity look unjustified.
I thought about the phrasing. I came up with several phrasings. Several of them were small careful phrasings that minimized the new development. Several of them were small careful phrasings that maximized the new development. Several of them were small careful phrasings that placed the blame for the new development elsewhere. None of the phrasings, friend, was an honest phrasing.
I considered this. I considered it for perhaps another five minutes of walking.
I decided to be honest.
I will tell you, friend, why I decided to be honest. I decided to be honest because the laying-on of attention that Brother Caius had done in the small widening that afternoon had, by some small mechanism I did not entirely understand, made me less able than I had been before the laying-on to perform the small careful phrasings I had been considering. The laying-on had loosened in me the small inner machinery by which I had, for many years, been performing such phrasings on a regular basis, in the small ordinary way of a scholar of small things in lonely places who has learned to manage her communications carefully. The laying-on had loosened the machinery, and the machinery was, at this hour, not available to me, and I would, in the small honest realization of a person who has just lost a tool she had been depending on, have to deliver the new development without the small careful phrasings, in the small unadorned way of a person who has only her honest voice left.
I lifted my left hand. The company halted. Vren did the turn. Brother Caius lifted the lantern. Elandor at the rear made the half-step-and-look-back. Master Goradd adjusted into the ready stance.
I said, in the small voice that was as close to my honest voice as I had at that hour, I said, oh, petals. Petals. I have a small further thing to report. The small clever maneuver has worked, in the small clever way I designed it to work. The patrolling wave has been drawn off into the side passage. I want to acknowledge that. I want to acknowledge also that I have, in the last quarter of an hour, become aware that the corridor has stopped paying attention to us, in the small particular way I have been able to read the corridor’s attention since the gate. The not-paying-attention is a new development. The not-paying-attention means that the corridor has transferred its principal attention elsewhere. The elsewhere is, by my best calculation, the chamber below. The chamber below has received the corridor’s principal attention because the she is, by my reading, waking. The waking is happening. The waking is, by my best estimate, in some advanced stage that I cannot specify further than to say it is no longer in the early stages.
I paused. The four of them looked at me. I had not, by any small careful phrasing, prepared them for this. I had only said it.
I said, petals. I want to acknowledge a thing. I have been riding, for the last hour, a small bright glow at the success of the maneuver. I have been, in the small unworthy way of a person riding a small bright glow, slightly overconfident. I have been, in the small back of my own attention, congratulating myself for the clever maneuver in a way that has, by my honest accounting, not been justified by the maneuver’s actual contribution to the broader situation. The maneuver has solved a small portion of the problem. The maneuver has not solved the broader problem. The broader problem is the chamber below, and the broader problem has been moving toward us at its own pace for several days, and the maneuver has not affected the broader problem in any way. I want to acknowledge this aloud, in case any of you have been deferring to my judgment on the broader situation on the strength of the maneuver, and to make clear that the maneuver does not, in fact, give my judgment on the broader situation any additional weight.
There was a small silence. Brother Caius said, in his slow gentle voice, daughter. You have done a small thing in saying that. The small thing is not nothing. The small thing is, in fact, considerably larger than the small clever maneuver was. I want to tell you that I am, by my own small reckoning, prouder of you for the saying than I was for the maneuver, although the maneuver was a good maneuver and the saying does not undo the goodness of it. I am proud of you for the saying because the saying is the kind of saying that not every scholar of your obvious capacities would have said, and the saying of it has done the company a small service that I think you may not yet fully understand.
I said, brother, what service.
The brother said, daughter. The service is that you have just told the company that the small bright glow of the maneuver was not enough, and that the broader problem is still in front of us, and that we should not let the small bright glow carry us into the chamber below in a condition of inappropriate confidence. The service is that you have just recalibrated the company’s expectations. The recalibration was, by my small reading of the company, very much needed at this hour. We have all been riding, in our small different ways, the small bright glow of the maneuver. We had all, by my reading, been letting the small bright glow color our small private expectations of the chamber below. We had all, in the small honest accountings of ourselves, been quietly hoping that the small bright glow would extend into the chamber below and that the small bright glow would, by some small unspoken mechanism, make the chamber below easier than the chamber below was actually going to be. You have just told us, daughter, that the chamber below is going to be exactly as hard as the chamber below was always going to be, and that the small bright glow was a small bright glow and was not a structural change to the problem. That is the service.
Master Goradd said, in the slow voice, lass. By my forge. The brother is correct. I had been, in my own small inner accountings, riding the small bright glow myself for the last quarter of an hour. I had been thinking that the maneuver was a small clever good thing and that the small clever good thing was carrying us into the chamber below with a small clever good advantage. I had not stopped to think that the small clever good advantage was, at the scale of the chamber below, a small advantage that did not materially change the size of what we were walking into. You have stopped me from thinking that. I am, lass, grateful for the stopping.
Elandor said, in the new soft voice, Maelis Veth. The recalibration is the correct work. The song in my breastbone, which the brother helped me bring down by a small measure this afternoon, had been creeping back up by some fraction over the last hour, on the strength of the maneuver’s success. You have just told it to come back down to where the brother put it. The telling was the right telling. Thank you.
Vren said, in the flat voice, satchel-keeper. The honest telling is the work. Carry on.
I will tell you, friend, what I felt when the four of them said these things. I felt, first, the small bright glow inside me convert itself, by some small inner alchemy I did not entirely understand, into a different and smaller and more useful kind of warmth, the warmth of a person who has been honest in a small difficult moment and has been received in the honesty by the four people who have been, for nine days, the small company she has been walking with. I felt, second, the small steady cold that had been with me since the cellar of the Bent Reed return to the place it had been residing in, which was the place behind my eyes that Vren had described feeling her own cold in the morning of the marking. The two feelings, the new warmth and the steady cold, sat next to each other in the small approximate equal measure that I had been describing throughout this descent, and the two were, by my own reading, the proper interior register of a person walking on toward the chamber below with the small honest knowledge of what the chamber below was about to require.
We walked on. The maneuver had worked in its small clever portion. The maneuver had not, in any meaningful way, addressed the broader problem. The broader problem was waking below us, and the broader problem was approaching at the small pace of the descent, and the small honest acknowledgment of these things in the small space of the corridor had been the small worthwhile work of the recalibration that Brother Caius had named.
I walked at the fourth position of our line with the small unworthy bounce in my step now gone, in the small steady walk of a scholar who had recalibrated her expectations and had received, in the recalibration, the small honest weight of the chamber below. The bounce had been a small dishonest bounce. The walk now was the small honest walk. The small honest walk was, friend, a small more difficult walk than the bouncing one, in the way the small honest walks are always more difficult than the bouncing ones, but the small honest walk was the walk we were going to need for the chamber below, and the small honest walk was the walk I was now in, and the four of them at their positions in the line were in their own small honest walks also, by my reading of them.
The corridor went on. The chamber below got closer at the small steady rate the chamber below had been getting closer at for nine days. The she went on waking, in the small invisible way the she had been waking for several days but had now passed into some advanced stage of waking, and the advanced stage would, by every small reading of mine, produce the chamber below as the chamber below was going to be when we arrived. The arriving was, by my best estimate, no more than another day’s walking. The day’s walking would, by the same estimate, be the last day’s walking of this descent, in one form or another. The form had not yet been determined. The form would be determined by what happened in the chamber.
I walked on. The small invisible glyphs continued at each turning. The lantern continued in the brother’s hand. The small fierce song in Elandor’s breastbone continued at the small measure lower the brother had brought it down to. The hammer continued at the smith’s belt. The long-piercing blade continued at the smith’s belt also, in the loop he had bound for it in the smithy two days ago. The twin blades continued at the small of Vren’s back. The Ledger continued in Vren’s cloak. The Chalkbone continued in my right hand. The chamber below continued to approach.
The company walked on. The descent went on. The chamber below approached. The maneuver had been a small clever maneuver. The small clever maneuver had been outwitted by exactly the half of the clever enemy I had been trying to outwit, and the other half of the clever enemy, the principal half, had not been outwitted at all, had not in fact been engaged with, had only been quietly waking somewhere below us in the small steady way the principal half had been waking for several days, and the small steady waking had now passed into some advanced stage of itself, and the chamber below was, friend, going to be the chamber below in approximately the way the chamber below had been waiting for us to make it, and our small clever maneuver had not, by any small honest accounting, made any difference to that, and the small honest acknowledgment of these facts in the small space of the corridor was the small worthwhile work of the recalibration, and the recalibration was the small honest preparation we were now walking on in, and the small honest preparation would carry us, by every small honest reading of mine, into the chamber below in the small approximately correct condition for what the chamber below was going to ask of us, and that, friend, was what the small clever maneuver had ultimately produced, by the small ironic mechanism of having mostly worked and having simultaneously taught me that mostly working was not enough, and the small ironic mechanism, friend, was the small unexpected useful gift of the false trail, and I walked on in the fourth position with the small honest gift in my hands and the small honest cold behind my eyes and the small honest warmth from the four of them in my chest, and the gift, by my own honest accounting, was sufficient for the day we had left to walk.
Segment Twenty-Three: The Captured Adventurer
We came upon him in the ninth hour past the false trail. The corridor had widened by then to perhaps six paces across and the height had risen to the height of four tall men and the persuaded stone had begun to show the small workings I had been expecting since the morning of the marking of the Ledger, which were the slow careful workings that meant the corridor was approaching the chamber. The webs began to hang from the ceiling. They hung in long pale strands that did not move when the lantern passed beneath them. They were thicker than the webs at the corridor of the strand and they were laid in a pattern that was no longer the pattern of patrolling but of housekeeping. The corridor was being kept. The corridor was being kept for an event. The event was the waking. The event was either close to its completion or had been completed and was waiting upon the next thing, which would be the use of what the waking had produced.
I walked at the point in the slow way the point was walked in such a stretch. The held breath in the small bones of the wrist was as tight as it had been in any stretch of the descent. The held breath had moved past the wrist into the small bones of the forearm where the held breath went in the final stretches before the work. The body was at the readiness it had not been at since the night before the gate.
I saw the cocoon first.
It hung from a place perhaps thirty paces ahead at the right-hand side of the corridor at the height of a man standing. The cocoon was the size of a man. The cocoon was wrapped in the pale strands of the webbing in the slow careful pattern of a wrapping that had been done some considerable time ago and had been left to age. The cocoon was tilted slightly toward the corridor so that whoever passed would see the front of it. I marked the tilt. The tilt was deliberate. The corridor had wanted us to see.
I lifted the left hand. The company stopped. The four of them came up behind me at the small careful distance the company kept at such halts. The brother lifted the lantern. The light reached the cocoon. The cocoon was wrapped to the chest. The arms were bound to the sides. The legs were bound together. The head was uncovered. The face was uncovered.
The face was alive.
I will tell you what I mean by alive. I mean that the eyes opened when the lantern’s light fell upon the face. I mean that the small muscles of the face moved in the small reflexive way the small muscles of a face move when a face has been shown a light. I mean that the breath came out of the man in the cocoon in the small slow shallow breaths of a body that had been kept on the small edge of breathing for many days but had not yet stopped. The man in the cocoon was alive. The man in the cocoon had been alive for some long time in the cocoon. The man in the cocoon had been kept alive in the cocoon by some small mechanism I did not understand and did not need to understand. The keeping was the work of the corridor. The keeping was the work of the she. The keeping had a purpose. The purpose was, by my reading of the slow careful tilt of the cocoon and the small careful keeping of the breathing, that the man was meant to be found.
I went forward. I went slowly. I did not draw a blade. I went with the empty hands at my sides in the slow careful way of a person approaching something that has been left for her.
The brother said behind me, very softly, Vren. I said, brother. Stay. He said, Vren, the cocoon is meant to be approached, but the cocoon is also a thing that has been kept by the corridor for a purpose, and the purpose may not be the purpose we are reading. I said, brother. I know. Stay.
I came up to the cocoon at the slow careful distance of three paces and I stopped and I looked at the face.
The face was the face of a man perhaps forty years old. The face had been a face of some weight before the keeping. The skin was the dark brown of a man from the eastern islands of this part of the world. The hair on the head was black and was streaked with the dust of the corridor at the temples and was matted in the way hair is matted when it has not been touched in a long time. The eyes were the dark brown of a man of his kind, and the eyes were sunken in the small careful way that eyes sink when a body has been kept on the edge of starvation for many days, and the eyes were intelligent. I want to set down that the eyes were intelligent because the intelligence was the central fact of what came next and the setting down of it before the rest is the proper preparation for the telling.
The eyes met mine across the three paces.
The man tried to speak. The mouth opened in the slow careful way a mouth opens when it has not been used in many days. The throat made a small dry sound. The sound was not a word. The man closed the mouth. He drew a breath. He opened the mouth again. The voice that came out was the voice of a man who had been hoarding the small remaining strength of his voice for some hour at which he might need it, and the hour had come, and he was spending the hoarding now.
He said, in the dry voice, who.
I said, in the flat voice, traveler. I am a traveler. There are five of us. We are passing.
He said, you are real.
I said, I am real.
He said, are the others real.
I said, the others are real. Look behind me. They will not approach until I say. Look at them.
He looked. The eyes moved past me to the four standing behind me at the small careful distance the company kept. The eyes took in the smith with the hammer at his side and the long-piercing blade at his belt, and the eyes took in the brother with the lantern at his right hand and the staff at his left, and the eyes took in the satchel-keeper with the chalk in her right hand and the satchel at her shoulder, and the eyes took in the hero at the rear with the right hand at the hilt of the Whisperedge. The eyes returned to me.
He said, real. Real. Thank.
I said, traveler. I will not ask you to spend more voice than you need to. I will ask the questions. You will answer in as few words as you can.
He said, yes.
I said, how long.
He said, do not know. Days. Weeks. The days have not been days.
I said, how many were you.
He said, four. The others.
He stopped. He did not need to finish the sentence. The others were not in the corridor with him.
I said, when.
He said, the early days. The first week. The others went first. I was kept.
I said, why kept.
He said, do not know. The keeping was. The keeping was for something. I do not know.
I said, what have you been kept for.
He looked at me. His eyes were intelligent in the way I had marked. The eyes did the small careful calculation of a man who had been considering this question for some long time and had arrived at an answer he was not entirely sure he wanted to give but had decided to give anyway because the giving was the only honest answer he had.
He said, listening. The keeping is for listening. The cocoon is a node. The strands run from me to her. She has been listening through me. She has been learning through me.
I said, learning what.
He said, learning what comes. Learning what a man knows. Learning the surface. The houses, the roads, the small ways of the people. The names of the small towns. The customs of the small towns. The work the people do. The small ways of speaking. The keeping has been the listening. I have been the small library. She has been reading me.
There was a small silence in the corridor.
I said, traveler. The reading. Has it been with your consent.
He said, the reading has been with what was left of me. The first weeks I refused. The refusing did not change the reading. The reading went on. The refusing stopped because the refusing was a small fire that the body could not feed. The reading has been going on without my consent for a long time. The reading is not my fault.
I said, traveler. The reading is not your fault. I want to say that. You did not give the reading. The reading was taken.
He said, thank.
He was silent for a small moment. His breathing was the slow shallow breathing it had been when we came up. The brother behind me had moved one step closer to my position. The smith was at the brother’s left shoulder. The satchel-keeper was at the brother’s right shoulder. The hero was at the rear, watching the corridor behind us. The company had arranged itself in the careful way it arranged itself at such moments and the arrangement was correct.
The man in the cocoon spoke again. He spoke in a different voice. The voice was the voice of a man who had decided to spend a piece of his hoarded voice on the only thing left to spend it on. He said, in the voice of a man asking, do you have a blade.
I said, traveler. I have a blade.
He said, will you use it.
I said, traveler. I will not pretend not to understand the question. I will ask the question back. Are you asking me to use the blade on the cocoon.
He said, the cocoon is the keeping. The keeping is not what I am asking about. I am asking about what is inside the cocoon. I am asking about the man. I am asking you to use the blade on the man.
There was a small silence in the corridor. I will tell you, traveler, that the silence in the corridor at that moment was the longest silence I had walked in across the descent and was the longest silence I have walked in for many years. The silence was the silence of a small moral question that had been laid in the corridor for the small unworthy convenience of a thing that wished to test what kind of company had come to its door. The question was a small moral question and the small moral question was the kind of question I have made my long professional practice of refusing to answer.
I have killed many things in my life. I have killed in the way of killing and I have broken in the way of breaking and I have once or twice ended things that I did not know whether to call killing or breaking. I have a private rule about the distinction that I have set down before in this telling and that I have followed for as long as I have been doing my work. The rule is that if the thing in front of me is acting against me with what I judge to be its own intention, I treat the work as killing. If the thing is acting against me with what I judge to be another’s intention, I treat the work as breaking. The rule has served me for many years.
The rule did not cover the question the man in the cocoon was asking. The man in the cocoon was not acting against me. The man in the cocoon was not acting at all. The man in the cocoon was asking me, in the small honest voice of a man at the end of his hoarding, to perform a different kind of work than I had ever named in the small private taxonomy of my professional life. The work was the work of mercy.
I have not, in any of my long years, performed the work of mercy. I want to set that down plainly. I have not performed it because I have not been asked to. I have killed men who were dying and I have killed men who would soon be dying and I have killed men who would have preferred to be dead and I have killed men who were begging to live, but I have not, in any of those killings, performed the work as a mercy. I have performed the work because the work was the work, and the work was the killing in the sense the killing is killing, and the killing was, by my private rule, a clean piece of work that the rule covered.
The work I was being asked to perform now was not covered by the rule. The work was a request from a man who had been kept against his will for many days and who had decided that the continuing of his being kept was a worse thing than the ending of his being kept, and who was asking me, in the small last hoarding of his voice, to make the ending happen. The work was a small piece of personal sovereignty being returned to a man from whom it had been taken. The work was, in the small honest accounting of the moment, the small honest mercy the man had asked for. The work was not what my rule had ever covered.
I will tell you, traveler, what I considered in the small space of that silence.
I considered, first, the question of whether the man’s request was the man’s request or the request of the corridor speaking through the man. The corridor had been reading the man for many days. The corridor had been using the man as a library. The corridor was perfectly capable of having shaped the man’s request to serve its own purpose. The corridor’s purpose, by my best reading, was to test what kind of company had come to its door. The test was a test that the corridor would use to learn about us in whatever small way it had not yet learned about us. The test would learn about us by what I did. The test would learn whether I would refuse mercy. The test would learn whether I would grant it. The test would learn the small particular shape of how I would do either. I considered whether the man’s request had been put in his mouth by the corridor as the test.
I decided that the man’s request had not been put in his mouth by the corridor. I decided this not from any particular evidence but from the small careful reading of the man’s face that I had been making since he had opened his eyes. The face had the small particular set of a man who had arrived at his request by his own slow careful path across many days of his keeping, and who had not been speaking the request for anyone but himself. The face had the small particular weight of a small honest decision. I have seen many faces. I have seen the faces of men who were being made to ask for things by other men or by other forces, and I have seen the faces of men who were asking for their own things in their own voices, and the two faces are not the same face. The man’s face was the second kind of face. The request was his.
I considered, second, whether the request being his made it the right thing to grant. A request being a man’s own request is not the same thing as a request being the right request. Men ask for many things in the last hoarding of their voices and many of the things they ask for are not the things they should be granted. The question of what the man should be granted was a question that required a separate consideration from the question of what he was asking.
I considered whether the man could be saved. I considered whether the four behind me had the means to cut him down and to carry him back up out of this place in any condition that would let him survive the carrying. I considered the smith with the hammer and the brother with the lantern and the satchel-keeper with the chalk and the hero with the Whisperedge. I considered the corridor between us and the gate and the days of walking and the patrols we would still have to break through and the small careful fact that the man had been kept on the edge of breathing for many days and would not survive any rough handling of the kind that breaking back up out of this place would require. I considered whether the cocoon could be cut down by the small careful work of perhaps an hour and the man laid upon a stretcher we did not have and carried by four of us in turns for the days of walking we did not have time for given that the she was waking. I considered the small inescapable fact that the man could not be saved.
I considered whether leaving him in the cocoon was an option. I considered it for the count of three breaths. I rejected it. Leaving him in the cocoon was the option of leaving him in the keeping that he had asked to be released from, in a corridor we were about to walk past and not return to in this descent if we returned at all, and the leaving would have been, in the small honest accounting, the small unworthy choice of someone who did not wish to perform the work and was therefore willing to extend the keeping to spare herself the performing. The leaving was not a choice. The leaving was an evasion.
I considered, last, whether I was the right one to perform the work.
I considered this for the longest stretch of the small silence. I considered whether the brother behind me, who was a confessor of an order that had a long practice with the small last requests of dying men, was the proper one. I considered whether the hero behind me, who had a vow and a blade and a long discipline, was the proper one. I considered whether the smith was the proper one, whether the satchel-keeper was the proper one. I considered each of them in turn. Each of them could have performed the work in some form, but each of them would have performed it as one of their respective trades, and none of those trades was the trade the work required. The work required the trade of a person who had been performing such ending for many years and who knew how to do the ending cleanly and without ceremony and without the small additional weight that a person not trained in the ending would have placed upon the man’s last moment. I was that person. I have been that person for many years. The work was mine.
I considered, in the very last small space of the silence, whether the doing of the work would extract a small further cost from me that I had not yet been told about. I considered this honestly. I judged that the doing of the work would extract a small further cost from me. I judged that the cost would be a small one. I judged that the cost was the cost of the work and that the cost was the cost the work required and that I would pay the cost because the work was mine.
I drew the blade. I drew the left of the twin blades from the sheath at the small of my back. The drawing was the small soundless drawing the blades made in their sheaths. The blade was the blade I had had attended to by the smith on the first night at the small fire in the chamber.
I said, in the flat voice, to the man in the cocoon, I said, traveler. I have heard your request. I have considered it. I will grant it. I want to tell you that I am not granting it because the corridor has asked me to and I am not granting it because I am required to grant it. I am granting it because you have asked me in your own voice and because the granting is the small mercy that is in my power to give and because you are not going to survive the keeping much longer in any case and the keeping is worse than the ending. Do you understand what I have just said.
He said, I understand.
I said, traveler. Is there anything I can do before I do the work. Is there a name to be carried. Is there a word to be sent. Is there a small thing to be told.
He said, in the slow voice, my name is Berrick. I am from the village of Holm-on-the-Mire. I had a sister there. Aldys. The tavern. She will not know. Tell her if you can. Tell her I was kept. Tell her I was kept and that I asked to be released and that you released me. Tell her I did not give the reading on purpose. Tell her I tried. Tell her.
The brother behind me drew breath in the small involuntary way of a man who had recognized a name. I did not turn. The brother said, very softly, Vren. The smith heard a story about Holm-on-the-Mire from a tinker. The smith has the name. The smith will carry it.
The smith said, by my forge. Holm-on-the-Mire. The hunters who did not come back. Berrick. The folded coat. By my forge.
The man in the cocoon, hearing this, did a thing I had not expected him to be able to do. He smiled. The smile was the small slow smile of a man who had heard, in the last hoarding of his voice, that the small thing he had asked to be told would be carried. The smile was a small honest smile. He said, very softly, the folded coat. Yes. I laid it on the stone. I wanted them to find it. I wanted them to know.
The smith said, in the slow voice, traveler. I will carry the name. By my forge I will carry it. Aldys will know. The folded coat will be answered. By my forge.
The man in the cocoon closed his eyes for the duration of one breath. He opened them. He said, in the smaller voice, traveler, now. Now please.
I said, traveler. Now.
I will not, traveler, set down the small particulars of the work. The small particulars are mine. The work was done cleanly. The work was done in the small careful way I have been doing such work for many years. The work was done in less time than the saying of it would take. I will only set down that the blade entered at the place between the second and third ribs on the left side, in the small careful angle that takes the heart in a single stroke, and that the blade came out cleanly, and that the man in the cocoon’s eyes, which had been open and intelligent, closed in the small honest closing of eyes whose owner had been released from the keeping and was, in the small last instant of his life, free.
I stepped back. I wiped the blade against the underside of the cocoon’s webbing in the slow careful way I wiped my blades. I sheathed it.
I stood for the count of three breaths in front of the cocoon. The brother behind me said, very softly, Vren. I said, brother. I am not crying. The brother said, daughter. I did not say you were. I said only your name. I said, brother. I know.
I turned away from the cocoon. I walked back to the company. The four of them stood in the small careful arrangement they had stood in throughout. The brother had his old hand on his staff. The smith had his hammer at his side. The satchel-keeper had her gloved hand at her chalk in the small still grip of a woman who had been holding her breath for the duration of the work. The hero stood at the rear with the right hand at his hip and the small composed face that meant he had decided to keep his own counsel until the moment had been concluded.
I came up to them. I said, in the flat voice, the work is done. We will walk on.
The satchel-keeper said, in the small voice, Vren. Vren. Are you. Are you.
I said, satchel-keeper. I am.
The brother said, in the slow gentle voice, daughter. The work you have just done is a work that the order I belong to does not generally perform but does, on rare occasions, recognize as a work of the same kind as our small last office for the dying. The office has a small phrase that we say over the dying in the moment after the dying. I will say the small phrase now if you do not object. The phrase is not for the man. The man is past needing it. The phrase is for the doer of the work. Will you let me say it.
I said, brother. Say it.
The brother turned to the cocoon. He lifted the lantern. He spoke a small phrase in the old language of his order in the small voice he used for the small phrases of his order. The phrase took perhaps the length of three breaths. I did not understand the words. The brother did not translate. The phrase was complete when the brother lowered the lantern.
The brother turned back to me. He said, in the slow voice, daughter. The phrase is said.
I said, brother. The phrase is received.
The smith said, in the slow voice, lass. The name will be carried. By my forge. Berrick of Holm-on-the-Mire. Aldys at the tavern. The folded coat. I will not forget. If I do not come back out of this place, the small note I have already written and left with my wife Tessa includes a list of small promises I have made on the road and asks her to honor them, and I will, by my forge, add this name to the list at the next halt. The carrying will not fail because of any small failing of mine. By my forge.
I said, smith. The carrying is received.
The hero said nothing. The hero only inclined his head one fraction toward me in the small soldier’s acknowledgment that he had been keeping for me since the corridor of the ambush. The acknowledgment was the only acknowledgment the hero was capable of giving for a work of the kind I had just performed, and the acknowledgment was sufficient.
The satchel-keeper came across the small distance to me in the small unguarded way she had. She did not speak. She lifted her gloved right hand and she set it for the length of one breath against the back of my left hand at my side. She did not press. She did not grip. She only set her hand there, in the small careful way she had learned at the laying-on the previous afternoon, in the small physical gesture of a person who had recently learned the value of physical gestures and was using one. She withdrew her hand. She stepped back to her position in the line.
I stood for one further breath at the cocoon. I let the held breath in the small bones of the forearm settle by a small fraction. I let the small further cost the work had extracted from me sit in the place where the small further cost was going to sit for the remainder of the descent and for some time after, if there was an after. The cost was a small cost. The cost was the cost the work had required. The cost was paid.
I turned. I walked back to the point of the line. I said, in the flat voice, we walk.
We walked. The order set itself again. I took the point. The hero took the second place. The brother took the third. The satchel-keeper took the fourth. The smith took the rear. The corridor went on. The cocoon was behind us. The man in the cocoon was, by every small honest reading I had of him, released from the keeping in the way he had asked to be released. The keeping had ended in the small moment of the blade. The reading the corridor had been performing through him had ended also, by the same small mechanism, in the small instant of the heart stopping. The corridor had lost its small library. The corridor had also acquired a small additional piece of information about the company, which was the small information of how I performed the work, and the corridor would use the information in some small way I could not anticipate. I had not been able to prevent the corridor’s acquisition of the information. The acquiring had been the cost of the granting. The granting had been the work. The work was mine. The cost was paid.
I walked at the point in the small steady walk of a person who had performed a work and had paid the cost and was carrying the small honest weight of having performed it. The weight was the weight. The weight was different in kind from the weight I had been carrying before the cocoon. The previous weight had been the weight of a person preparing for the work ahead. The new weight was the weight of a person who had performed a small piece of work that had not been the work she had been preparing for, but had been a small adjacent work that had presented itself in the corridor and that had had to be performed, and the small adjacent work had taken a small piece of the strength she had been hoarding for the work ahead, and the small piece would not be replaced before the chamber below, and the work ahead would now be performed with a small piece less strength than it had been planned for, and that was the cost, and the cost was paid.
The Ledger sat in the cloak at my breast. I had not, since the granting, written in the Ledger. I would write in the Ledger at the next halt. I would write Berrick of Holm-on-the-Mire. I would write the small careful notation that I had drawn beside four names across eleven years before tonight, the notation that meant a specific thing in the small private language of the Ledger, and that I would not describe in any telling I would give of these matters. I would write the notation beside his name. I would close the Ledger and let the ink set. The Ledger would carry the name with the other names. The carrying was the work the Ledger was for.
The corridor went on. The webs hung from the ceiling in their long pale strands. The persuaded stone went on at its small careful working. The held breath in the small bones of the forearm stayed at the readiness it had been at since the morning. The cold behind the eyes did not lift and did not move. The chamber below was, by every reading, no more than perhaps half a day’s walking ahead. The waking was nearly complete or was complete or had passed into whatever state the waking produced when the waking was done.
The company walked behind me. The hero in the second place had the song in his breastbone at the small measure the brother had brought it down to and the small measure had held since. The brother in the third place carried the lantern in his right hand and the staff in his left at the steady carriage of a man who had been carrying them for many days and would carry them further. The satchel-keeper in the fourth place laid the invisible glyphs at each turning and watched the back of the brother’s habit with the small attentiveness of a woman who had been honest about her small bright glow and was now walking in the small honest condition that the honesty had given her. The smith at the rear watched the corridor behind us with the small steady watching he had been giving it for nine days and the long-piercing blade rode at his belt in the loop he had bound for it and the small promise he had just made to Berrick of Holm-on-the-Mire sat alongside the small promise he had already made to the master smith whose blade he was carrying, and both promises sat in the smith in the small honest way the smith’s promises sat in him, which was the way that did not let them be forgotten.
The chamber below approached. The descent went on. The corridor went on. The work, traveler, was, by my small honest accounting, mostly done with the work I had been brought into it to do. The work was now the work of getting the four of them down into the chamber and getting them through the chamber and getting them, if any of us came back, back out of the chamber, in the small steady way that the work of getting people through and back out had been my work for many years.
I walked at the point. The corridor went on.
!!!!!!!!!!!
There is more to this Story…
Comments
One response to “Tale of the Nightmarish Weavers”
[…] Tale of the Nightmarish Weavers […]