Chapter 415: Thoonk

The western report arrived at dawn on the last day.

Surtr's crossing would be complete by the following morning.

Thor read it standing in the courtyard with her traveling cloak already fastened. She had known since midnight what it would say. Everyone had.

She handed the page to me.

“Lexander wants the giants held at the ford, not the bridge,” she said. “He's right. If they cross at the bridge, they're in the valley. If we hold the ford, they spend a day climbing the bank under our archers.”

“And you're the reason they won't simply knock the bank down.”

“One of the reasons.”

She took the page back and folded it into her belt.

For a moment, neither of us said anything.

The transit gate hummed softly behind her. Baldr's messenger waited beside it with two horses that looked as if they had not been told they would be making the journey twice in one week.

“You remember the conditions,” Thor said.

“Plain clothes. Glove on. Speak only when spoken to.”

“And?”

“Nothing else.”

She looked at me for a long time.

“I'm not going to be there to watch you,” she said. “So I'm going to tell you something instead.”

I waited.

“Avarn told me you reached him on the third attempt. The flat of the blade. Above the hip.” Her mouth moved slightly. “He hasn't been touched in practice by anyone but me for a very long time. He didn't say he was proud. He said, 'He had reason.' That's the same thing, coming from him.”

I did not know what to say.

Thor seemed to find that satisfactory.

“The shield is the carters,” she said. “Remember why you're there.”

Then she stepped through the gate, and it closed behind her because everyone who needed to cross had crossed.

We rode north at midmorning.

Eliza commanded. That had been agreed before Thor left, and no one questioned it. She had twelve scouts now, the two drovers, Rhenna, and Elyan, who would carry word between the quarry and the relay station faster than any horse.

Melody rode beside me.

Mary had allowed it.

Melody had not asked properly. She had sat on the edge of Mary's desk until Mary looked up, and then said, “I'm going,” and Mary had said, “I know,” and that, apparently, was how the two of them conducted negotiations.

Mary had given her a list.

Melody had read it, folded it, and put it inside her coat.

“What's on it?” I asked as we passed the relay station.

“Things I'm not allowed to do.”

“Is it long?”

“It has a second page.”

She did not seem troubled.

“Mary writes the list so she doesn't have to say any of it out loud,” Melody said. “Then I read it so she knows I heard. That's how we do it.”

I thought about that for the rest of the afternoon.

Perrin's barrel had come with us.

It sat in our cart beneath the oat sacks, looking exactly like every other barrel in the world. Pellen had knocked on it before we left and pronounced it satisfactory.

“Full sound,” he had said. “Thunk.”

Inside it, behind a false bottom Perrin and Aldren had spent two evenings arguing over, was Thesra's bell.

It was the size of a thimble.

When she touched it to the stone of the map-room floor, the whole room had seemed to lean toward the far wall, the way the grass beneath the arch had leaned before Vaust opened it. Everyone had stepped back without meaning to.

Even Caldris.

Especially Caldris.

“That,” Vaust had said quietly from his chair, “is what they've learned to fear.”

It was attached to nothing. It would open nothing. Thesra had checked three times, and then Caldris had checked twice more, and then Vaust had held it between his bandaged fingers for a full minute with his eyes closed and pronounced it empty.

“A knock with no door behind it,” he said.

He had sounded almost fond of it.

Dunstan was waiting at the shelter at dusk.

Maud was with him. So were four other carters I had never seen before. A pair of brothers who drove grain. A young woman with firewood. An old man named Hesketh who said nothing at all and smoked a pipe with no tobacco in it.

“They know?” Eliza asked Dunstan quietly.

“They know there's a cart going to break,” he said. “They know my sister's girl is in that room. They didn't ask the rest.”

The firewood driver, whose name was Lys, looked at Eliza without expression.

“Hesketh's grandson is a porter in the long building,” she said. “Went in for the harvest. Hasn't come out.”

Eliza looked at the old man.

He took his empty pipe from his mouth.

“He's not on your list,” he said. “I checked. Maud read it to me.”

“No,” Eliza said. “He isn't.”

“Then I'm not asking you to get him.”

He put the pipe back.

“I'm asking you to remember there's more than eleven.”

I wrote the grandson's name in my notebook beneath Tavia's.

Hesketh watched me do it.

He did not say anything else that night.

The plan was simple, and it remained simple, because everyone who touched it had been told about Thor's opinion of plans with more parts.

The convoy would assemble at the shelter before dawn. Fourteen carts.

Dunstan's would be ninth. Perrin's barrel would be in it, among forty others.

Melody and I would ride with Dunstan as his hired help. Two extra hands. Counted in.

The rest of Eliza's people would wait at the quarry. Out of sight. Close enough to come running.

Close enough, I suspected, to come running before anyone told them to.

When Dunstan's cart reached the yard gate, the rear axle would fail. Perrin had prepared that too. One pin, half sawn through, that would give way on the turn.

The carters would gather. The arguments would begin.

Inside the receiving shed, Thesra's bell would be struck once, from inside its barrel, by a carter's hand reaching in to check the load.

The guards would step away from the inner doors.

Eleven people in carters' caps would walk out into the yard to look at the broken cart, the way everyone always did.

Then they would keep walking.

“And if it doesn't work?” Melody asked.

Eliza looked at her.

“Then you read the second page of Mary's list,” she said.

Melody laughed.

Then she stopped laughing, because Eliza had not been joking.

I did not sleep much.

Near midnight, I walked down to the shelter alone.

The carved lantern above the doorway was barely visible in the starlight. I put my bare hand against the stone beneath it.

The Crown warmed.

Westmere Hold had answered me, years ago, because Greykeep's masons had laid its foundations. This shelter was older. Rougher. Built by people who had never heard of Greykeep.

It answered anyway.

Not as a castle answers. Not with corridors and channels and the sense of a vast thing turning toward me.

It felt like a hand on my shoulder.

Faint. Patient.

The pipe that fed the trough ran back into the hillside, to the cistern beside the upper road. From there, other channels branched away. Old ones. Most were silted or broken.

One was not.

It ran north, toward the basin, very deep.

I did not follow it.

I took my hand away from the stone and stood in the dark, listening to the water.

“You felt it too.”

I turned.

Hesketh sat on the low wall beside the trough, his empty pipe in his hand.

“Felt what?” I asked.

“Don't do that,” he said mildly. “You're bad at it.”

I sat down beside him.

“The channel,” I said. “North.”

He nodded.

“My grandmother used to say you could whisper into the trough here and someone at the hall would hear you. Used to be how travelers sent word ahead. Room for six. Two mules lame. That sort of thing.” He turned the pipe over in his fingers. “Nobody believed her. Then the court came, and the hall changed, and I stopped wanting to try.”

“Did you ever?”

“Once. As a boy.”

“What did you say?”

He was quiet for a while.

“My name,” he said at last. “Just to see.”

“Did anyone answer?”

Hesketh put the pipe back in his mouth.

“Someone said it back,” he said around it. “Kindly. Like they were glad to know it.”

He stood, knees creaking, and went back toward the carts.

I stayed by the trough until the stars began to fade.

I did not whisper anything.

But I thought about it.

The convoy climbed at first light.

Fourteen carts on a narrow road, mules leaning into the grade, barrels knocking in their frames. Dunstan drove with his shoulders hunched and his hat pulled low. Melody sat behind him among the barrels, looking bored with an expertise I could only envy.

I sat beside Dunstan with my gloved hands on my knees.

The road passed through the narrow cut the scouts had described. Then it opened.

The basin lay below us.

The outer settlement first. Cottages. Storehouses. Two wells. A long low building at the far end of a wagon yard, its doors already open.

Above it, the Hall of Accord.

I counted three towers.

Then I blinked, and there were four.

Melody, behind me, made a small sound.

“Don't look at it,” Dunstan said without turning his head. “Look at the road. Everyone who looks at it too long starts walking funny.”

I looked at the road.

The outer gate stood open.

Sallow was there.

He sat a gray horse beside the gatepost with a ledger in his lap. Two clerks stood beside him with slates. As each cart passed, he called out a number, the clerks wrote it, and Sallow wrote it again.

When Dunstan's cart reached him, he looked up.

Then he looked at me.

“Feed seller.”

My heart did something I did not care for.

“He needed work,” Dunstan said. “So did she. Barrels don't load themselves.”

Sallow looked at Melody, who was examining a splinter in her thumb with great interest.

Then back at me.

“You were going south.”

“Wheel,” I said.

It was the only word that came to mind.

Sallow studied me for a long moment.

His eyes went to my gloved right hand.

Then, very deliberately, he wrote in his ledger.

“Driver. Two hands. Forty barrels.” He looked at Dunstan. “Forty?”

“Forty.”

“Thirty-nine,” Sallow said. “You broke one.”

“You broke one.”

“Thirty-nine,” Sallow repeated, and waved us through.

Dunstan said nothing until we were well inside the yard.

Then he said, very quietly, “He knows.”

“Knows what?”

“Something. He wrote 'two hands.' He usually writes 'helpers.'” Dunstan's knuckles were white on the reins. “Writes everything the same way, Sallow does. Thirty years of convoys. He's never once written 'two hands.'”

I looked down at my glove.

Behind me, Melody stopped examining her splinter.

The receiving yard was larger than the sketches had suggested and noisier than I had imagined. Carts turned in a slow circle. Porters shouted. A clerk at a weighing table called out figures in a voice that cracked on every third number.

The long building's doors stood open.

Inside, in the dim interior of the receiving shed, I could see a group of people standing against the far wall.

Eleven.

I counted twice without meaning to.

Three guards stood near them. Beyond the guards, at the very end of the shed, rose a pair of tall doors made of pale wood.

Closed.

For now.

Dunstan guided his mules toward the turn into the shed.

The pin held.

He turned harder.

It held.

Dunstan swore under his breath.

“Perrin,” Melody whispered, “sawed it too little.”

“Or too well,” I said.

Dunstan's mules were already halfway through the gate. Another ten paces and we would be inside, unloading, with no broken cart and no reason for anyone to gather.

I looked at the rear axle.

I looked at my glove.

Nothing else.

Not lightning. Not frost.

Then I thought: a man who stops to help with a wheel.

I climbed down from the seat.

“Wheel,” I said loudly. “Your wheel's going.”

Dunstan stared at me.

Then understood.

“Again?” he roared. “Again? I told your people, this road is a disgrace!”

He hauled the mules to a stop in the exact middle of the gate.

I knelt beside the axle, put my gloved hand on the pin, and leaned on it.

Just leaned.

A strong man, kneeling by a cart, looking for the problem.

The pin cracked.

The wheel tilted. The cart lurched sideways. Six barrels slid across the bed and went over the side into the gateway, rolling in every direction across the cobbles.

The mules, who had been promised a great deal of hay, sat down.

Everything happened very quickly after that, and also very slowly.

Carters came from every direction. Hesketh. Lys. The grain brothers. Maud with her sleeves pushed up. Everyone shouting about wheels, about roads, about who was responsible and who would pay.

Porters came out of the shed to see.

A clerk ran toward Sallow.

Melody, among the barrels, reached into the one that went thunk.

The sound came from the shed.

It was not loud.

It did not need to be.

Every person in that building had learned what it meant. I watched it move through them like wind through grass. The porters flinched. The clerk at the weighing table dropped his pen.

The three guards stepped back from the pale doors.

Toward the yard.

Toward us.

Away from the eleven people against the wall.

Maud walked into the shed carrying an armful of lamp-oil jars.

She came out carrying none, and with three carters behind her I did not recognize, all in caps.

Lys went in with a sack of kindling.

She came out with two more.

Hesketh did not go in at all. He stood in the gateway beside the fallen barrels, arguing furiously with nobody in particular, so that anyone looking toward the shed had to look past him first.

Five.

Seven.

A heavyset man with a stiff leg came out leaning on one of the grain brothers. He wore a cap far too small for him.

Corran.

Nine.

A girl of perhaps sixteen came out holding Maud's hand so tightly her knuckles had gone white.

Dunstan, beside the axle, saw her.

He did not say her name.

He did not move.

But his face did something I would remember for a very long time.

Ten.

The eleventh did not come.

I looked toward the shed.

A thin man with ink on his fingers stood by the far wall. He was holding a cap. He was not putting it on.

He was looking at the pale doors.

Tobin Reed.

I knew him from his sevens.

The guards had begun to understand that the doors were not opening. One of them turned back toward the shed, frowning.

Tobin still did not move.

I started forward.

A hand closed around my arm.

Sallow.

He had dismounted. His ledger was under his other arm. His face was white, and his grip was not strong, and he did not look at me.

He was looking at Tobin.

“He's counting,” Sallow said quietly.

“What?”

“He's counting the people who left. Making sure. Before he goes.” Sallow's voice shook. “He always counts.”

I stared at him.

“So do you,” I said.

Sallow closed his eyes.

“I counted you in,” he said. “Driver. Two hands. Thirty-nine barrels.” He swallowed. “Nobody told me to count anyone out.”

The guard in the shed had reached the wall. He was looking at Tobin. He was opening his mouth.

Sallow let go of my arm.

He walked into the shed.

“You,” he said loudly to Tobin. “Clerk. The carter needs a recount. Thirty-nine barrels. Now.”

The guard hesitated.

Sallow turned to him with his ledger raised like a shield.

“Do you want to tell the receiving master the count was wrong? Because I don't.”

The guard did not.

Tobin Reed put on his cap.

He walked out past the guard, past Sallow, past the pale doors that were not opening, into the yard, where he knelt beside the nearest fallen barrel and began counting out loud.

“One,” he said. “Two.”

His voice was very steady.

His hands were not.

Eleven.

We left with the carts.

Dunstan's could not leave, of course. It had a broken axle and two mules who had decided the gateway was where they lived now. So he left it, the way carters left broken carts every week, and climbed onto the back of Maud's with Wenna beside him.

Nobody counted us out.

At the gate, Sallow sat on his gray horse with the ledger in his lap.

He did not look up as we passed.

But when the last cart went by, he closed the ledger, and he turned his horse, and he rode down the road behind us.

Not hurrying.

Just riding.

Eliza's people met us at the quarry.

I had been right. They had come forward earlier than planned. Rhenna was halfway up the climb when we reached her, and she had the grace to look embarrassed about it.

Eliza did not.

“Eleven?” she asked.

“Eleven.”

She closed her eyes for a moment.

Then she looked past me, up the road, at the gray horse coming down it.

Her hand went to her sword.

“Wait,” I said.

Sallow stopped his horse a careful distance away.

He did not dismount.

“They'll know by sunset,” he said. “When the inner doors open and nobody's waiting.” His voice was very tired. “They'll look at the count. They'll see my writing on it.”

“Yes,” I said.

“I have a mother in the settlement. Third cottage past the well.”

Eliza and I exchanged a glance.

“Rhenna,” Eliza said.

Rhenna was already turning her horse.

Sallow watched her go. Then he looked down at me, at my glove, at my face.

“Who are you?” he asked.

I took off the glove.

The Crown glowed against my palm, brighter than I had seen it in days.

Sallow looked at it for a long time.

Then he looked at his own right hand.

Nothing.

No mark appeared. No light.

He let out a long breath that was almost a laugh.

“Good,” he said. “I'd have felt a fool.”

He dismounted, finally, and stood holding his horse's bridle, a young man with a careful mustache and an armful of numbers that would ruin him by sunset.

“I don't know what you are,” he said. “But they took a god out of a cage last week and blamed me for the count. I've been afraid every day since.” He paused. “I was afraid before that too. I just didn't know the shape of it.”

“And now?”

Sallow looked back up the road.

“Now I've done the thing I was afraid of being blamed for,” he said. “It's strange. It's less frightening.”

We were most of the way back to the relay station before I thought to ask Corran about the drain.

He was riding in the cart with the others, his stiff leg propped on a sack of oats. Wenna slept against Dunstan's shoulder. Tobin had finally stopped counting.

Corran did not want to talk about it.

Then, after a mile, he did.

“It's old,” he said. “Older than the hall. I've worked on a lot of old drains. This one was different. Smoother. Like it had been made to carry something besides water.”

“Voices,” I said.

He looked at me sharply.

“You've seen one before.”

“In Westmere.”

He nodded slowly.

“Then you know. Most of what comes through is just noise. Doors. Feet. The hum.” He shifted his leg. “But there's a place beneath the inner wall where the channel goes down. Not toward any building I know. Just down. And from there, at night, someone sings.”

“What do they sing?”

Corran was quiet for a while.

Then he hummed it.

Badly. A mason's humming, rough and uncertain, missing half the notes.

But Hesketh, riding beside the cart on one of our spare horses, took his empty pipe out of his mouth.

“That's the traveler's hymn,” he said. “My grandmother sang that.”

“To the Keeper of Roads?” I asked.

Hesketh nodded.

“Asking her to keep the lamp lit for whoever's still walking.”

He put the pipe back.

No one said anything else for a long time.

Thor's message was waiting at the relay station.

Elyan had carried it himself. He was sitting on the station steps with mud on both boots and his eyes closed, which I had learned meant he had flown farther that day than he wanted to admit.

The ford had held.

The giants had tried the bank twice and been driven back twice. Surtr's crossing was still complete, but it led nowhere useful now. Lexander estimated weeks before the enemy found another route.

Thor had added one line at the bottom, in her own hand.

Eleven?

I borrowed a pen from the station clerk and wrote beneath it.

Eleven. And one more who counted us out.

I gave it back to Elyan.

He opened one eye.

“Now?”

“Tomorrow,” I said. “Rest first.”

He closed the eye again.

“You're learning,” he murmured.

We reached Havenreach after midnight.

Adeline was waiting in the receiving yard.

She did not run. Her arm was still in its sling, and she had been told sternly not to run anywhere for at least another week.

She walked very fast instead.

Tobin climbed down from the cart and stood looking at her, ink still on his fingers, cap still on his head.

“Your sevens are backward,” Adeline said.

“I know.”

“They've always been backward.”

“I know.”

She put her good arm around his neck and held on.

Over her shoulder, Tobin looked at me.

“Eleven,” he said, as if it were the only word he trusted. “I checked.”

Vaust was awake when I came to his room.

Of course he was.

He listened to everything. The cart. The bell. Sallow. He laughed when I described the mules sitting down, and it did not seem to hurt him as much as it had a week before.

Then I told him about the drain.

About Hesketh and the trough.

About the hymn.

Vaust's face went very still.

“Hum it,” he said.

“I'm worse than Corran.”

“Hum it anyway.”

I did, badly.

He closed his eyes and listened. When I stopped, he did not open them for a long time.

“That isn't the traveler's hymn,” he said at last.

“Hesketh said—”

“Hesketh is right. It's the tune.” Vaust opened his eyes. “But the traveler's hymn is sung by travelers. It asks the Keeper to keep the lamp lit.”

He looked at me.

“That verse is the answer. The Keeper's verse. Sung back to whoever's still walking.” His bandaged hands had tightened on the blanket. “Only one voice ever sang that part.”

I felt the cold gathering in my fingers.

“She was never on the list,” I said slowly. “The green ledger. Fenrir, Nemeia, Odran, Talven. Never the Keeper of Roads.”

“No,” Vaust said. “Because he never caught her.”

He turned his face toward the dark window, toward the north.

“He built his hall on top of her house,” he said quietly, “and he has been trying to find a door to her ever since.”