Chapter 80: The Urn of Trials

They went up to the Hall on the tenth morning of the year, in a bucket.

It was not a bucket in the strict sense. It was a brass-bound gondola the size of a barn, hung from a cable as thick as a man’s waist, and it climbed the face of the right mountain at the rate of a walking donkey, with sixty people packed into it, shoulder to shoulder and elbow to rib, and a dwarf at the front with a little bell. The people of Dun Vurrim had called it the Bucket for four hundred years. The Crown had put up a plaque calling it the Ascent of Champions in 211, and nobody had noticed.

“I would like it noted,” said Orrin, who was in the middle of the crush with his long arms clamped to his sides and his eyes shut, “that I have never wanted to be a short man so much in my life.”

“You’re not that high,” said Thara, from somewhere about his elbow. “You’re only about a thousand feet. It’s nothing. Look down! You can see our house! You can see the goat!”

“Please do not tell me where the goat is,” said Orrin.

Fel stood by the rail and looked, because he could not have done anything else. The whole city lay beneath them, under its great glass vault, a long bright carpet of roofs and lamps and smoke, with the Hundred Furnaces glowing in a string down the left mountain and the Rotunda squatting in the middle like a hen on a clutch of eggs. It was cold. It was a clear, hard, shining morning, the kind that is only possible in a city that has a roof, and from every street and stair and bridge, in long thin threads, the people were coming up. They were coming in carts and on foot and on the backs of hairy little mountain ponies. They were coming in the thousands. They were all of them going the same way.

“How many are there?” he said.

“Forty thousand in the seats,” said Torren. The old man had his back against the gondola’s wall and his hat tilted over his eyes, in an attitude of great calm. “Another twenty in the Terraces who’ll never see a thing, and another ten in the pubs with a boy on the roof, calling it out. It’s a big do, lad. It’s the biggest there is.” He paused. “The last time, I was at the north gate with my back to a door. I never saw a bit of it. I’d have paid a month’s wages for a seat.”

“You have a seat,” said Veyra.

“Aye.” The old man pushed up his hat, and looked at her, and then, rather quickly, at the cable. “So I have.”

The Bucket ground to a stop. A gate swung. And they were carried out, in a slow tide, up a flight of wide black steps and under an arch, into a long, dim, enormous passage that smelled of hot iron and oranges, and came out at the end of it, blinking, into the light.

It was a bowl. That was the first thing, and for some time the only one. It was a vast, smooth, oval bowl of pale stone, cut out of the crown of the mountain as a spoon is cut from a log, and it went down, and down, in a hundred tiers, in a great curve of benches and boxes and gilded rails, to a floor so far below that the people on it seemed to be made of seed. Every seat was full. The noise came up like heat. It was not a roar, as Fel had expected, but something thicker, a vast low rolling hum, made of forty thousand people all talking at once, and over it hung the tiny sharp clear clatter of the vendors, and the flapping of ten thousand banners, and above it all, from the roof of the world, the open, enormous, wintry blue of the sky.

“They’ve taken the glass off,” said Thara, in an awed whisper.

“Aye. For the Cup.” Torren had stopped at the top of the stair with his hand on Fel’s shoulder, and was looking down. His face, in the strange hard light, was very still. “There’s a thing they do. They slide the vault back on its rails, the whole of this one hill, so the sun can come in. They’ve done it since the first Cup. They say that a man shouldn’t fight under a roof, on a day like this, with nothing over him but the sky. I think it’s only that the dwarves can’t help showing off.”

They went down. It took a very long time, because the aisles were full, and every second person seemed to have a pie. They were shown to their seats by a small bald dwarf in a green waistcoat, who had a ledger and a most severe expression, and who looked at the Roll, and at Fel, and then at the Roll again, and said in a voice of deep melancholy that the ninety-ninth guild was always at the bottom, and he was very sorry about the draught.

It was, in fact, not at the bottom at all. It was in the Champions’ Terrace, a row of long benches under a gilded awning, on the very lip of the floor, so near the sand that Fel could have dropped an apple on it. The ninety-nine guilds sat there in their ranks, in their colors, by bracket, forty paces of benches to a guild, and it was like sitting in a flower bed. There were reds and golds and blues. There was a company in the plain brown of the Raskian hills, with their axes laid across their knees. There was a whole tier of Delvishion mages in a dazzle of cloth-of-silver, who were all of them, for some reason, eating figs. And over them all, from end to end, ran the great dim shining oval of the floor, so wide and clean and white that Fel thought at first it was a lake.

It was not a floor, as it happened. It was a Floor. Torren had been trying to tell him, for a week, and he had never understood. It was a disc of white stone, a quarter-mile across, and as he looked, a dull far thud came up through his boots, and a slow wide shiver went across it like a wind across a field of wheat.

“That’s the Wheelwrights,” said Torren, in his ear. “They’re warming her. There’s five hundred pistons under there. Every one of ‘em’s as big as a house, and every one of ‘em can lift, or drop, or turn, a plate the size of a cart. They can raise a wall. They can sink a pond. They can make a forest, with the roots and all, in a quarter-hour, or a maze, or a ruin, or a lake. The Floor does what the Trial says.” He grinned, through the beard. “That’s the best of it, lad. You never know what you’ll be standing on.”

Fel looked at the great white shivering plain, and for the first time that morning he felt, rather faintly, in the pit of his stomach, a small cold drop of the thing that he had been refusing for a month to call fear.

“There is a thing that you should know,” said Veyra, very low, at his shoulder. She had her hands folded in her lap and her chin up and her eyes fixed straight ahead on the sand. “They told me last night, at the Rotunda. They call it the Grace. It is in the stone. It was set there by the first dwarves, who did not wish to have the Cup end in a funeral, and no blow that is struck on the Floor can kill. It is turned, in the instant before it lands, into a stroke. It numbs a man. It drops him. It flings him, if it is a very bad one, to the rim, and he cannot move for the length of an hour, and then he is quite well. It is the reason that there are forty thousand people here, and not a single one of them is afraid.” She turned her head. “I wished you to know. It is the only mercy in the whole of the Cup. I do not think that we will need it. But I should like you to remember that it is there.”

“And if somebody hits me with something that’s not a blow?” said Fel.

“The Hall has thought of that,” said Veyra, rather grimly. “Drowning is a blow. Fire is a blow. A fall is a blow. It is a very large Grace. It is the best thing that the dwarves ever built, and the least thanked.”

A horn sounded.

It was a single low note, from somewhere across the bowl, and the whole forty thousand stopped. It stopped quite suddenly, like a clock, and in the silence a very thin and distant voice, as of a man calling from the far end of a well, said, quite clearly, Hush.

Fel looked down. He was holding his breath, and had not noticed.

Across the sand, on a tall golden dais in the very middle of the Floor, an old man in a robe the color of old gold was lifting a horn to his lips.

* * *

They came in by the oldest.

It was the custom, and there was nothing that could be done about it, and so they sat, the Seven Sorrows, on the last bench of the last guild, and watched the long pageant go by below them, fourteen eyes in a row. There were the Raskian Republic’s own standing guards in their scarlet, who had no part in it but had marched anyway, and the Crown’s colors, and a long bright file of children in white with flowers, and the thirty-three Marshals of the Floor, in ranks of three. And then, with a sound like the closing of a vast iron door, the doors at the western end of the bowl were thrown open, and out of them, at a slow and stately walk, to the roll of a single drum, came the Wardens of the First Furnace.

There were nine of them. They were short and wide and very dark, and they wore full plate of a dull, soft, orange-black iron, with the faces bare, and no plumes, and no devices, and they carried their arms on their shoulders as a farmer carries his tools, without any show. They did not look right or left. They did not look at the crowd, which rose, all forty thousand, as one man, and thundered out their name. They walked with the long, rolling, flat-footed stride of men who are used to the dark, and at their head, with a short iron hammer at his hip and a beard that was the color of a coal-seam, went a dwarf that Fel would have known without being told.

He was very small. He came, perhaps, to Torren’s belt. He was bent a little, as though a great weight had once been laid across his shoulders and had never been taken off, and the beard hung down to his knees in a hundred thick braids with rings of black iron in every one. His face was a shut door. It was seamed and hard and quite without expression, and he looked straight ahead, with a pair of deep, smoldering, red-rimmed eyes, as if there was something at the end of the Hall that he alone could see. And through the plate over his chest, quite faint, like the glow of a coal in a banked fire, there shone a steady dull orange light.

“The Grandwarden,” breathed Nerissa.

“Durgan Emberfast.” The old man had taken off his hat. Fel had never seen him do it for anyone. “The sixteenth Cup, the twenty-fourth, the twenty-ninth. He’s been in the Hall longer than I’ve been alive. They say he’s never missed a Cup, and he never will, until somebody carries him out.” He turned the hat in his big hands. “That’s the First Furnace, lad. That’s the thing that every Dun Vurrim boy wants to be, when he’s small. And never is.”

The Warden passed under them. For one instant, the red eyes moved. They traveled along the Terrace, slowly, along the line of the benches, past the Corsairs, past the Ember Queens, and came to a stop on the last and lowest of them, and rested there. It was a very small thing. They did not seem to see Fel. They seemed to see the whole company, as one sees a field of wheat, and to make a brief and grave and private note. Then the little dwarf looked ahead again, and walked on. And behind him, in silence, in double file, the eight Wardens followed, with the crowd roaring like the sea.

They came in, after that, one by one. It was like a procession of the whole world. There was the Sunlit Court of Orvandel, in white and gold, thirty paces of the loveliest people that Fel had ever seen, who bowed to the stands with a single motion and were met with a sigh from forty thousand throats like the sound of a great wave drawing back off the shingle. At their head, on a white mare, with a circlet of gold in her hair, rode a tall brown woman of forty in a sun-colored cloak, who raised one bare hand and smiled, and the sigh turned into a scream. There was a column of Raskian axemen, grinning, with a goat. There was the long dim line of the Delvishion colleges, who did not march so much as drift, and who were, Orrin said, in a hushed voice, the best-read people in the world and the worst-dressed. There was a procession of Tarn Belgrave, in brown and black, with a tiny cart.

It was the cart that stopped the sound.

It was a very small one, drawn by two grey ponies, with a hood of black cloth, and it was drawn by nine people on foot, old men and old women, grey-headed, stooped, in worn blue coats, with their hands on the shafts, in a solemn slow shuffle that did not alter by a hair. In the cart, under the hood, upright in a high-backed chair, with a rug on her knees and her white hair in a plain knot, sat a very old woman. She did not look at anybody. She sat with her two thin hands folded in her lap and her head a little bowed, as if she were listening to something very far away, and by degrees, along the tiers, the people began, not to cheer, but to rise. They stood without a sound. In a minute the whole bowl was on its feet, quite still, forty thousand people in the sunshine with their hats in their hands, and the creak of the cart’s one wheel was the only sound in all the Hall.

“The Ninefold Road,” said Nerissa softly. She had one hand to her mouth. “Oh, Marigold said. Oh, she did not say it half.”

Nobody answered her. The cart went by.

Even Thara had stopped talking. She sat with her chin on her knees and both hands round her ankles, and her eyes, very large and dark in her small brown face, followed the little cart across the whole of the Floor. When it had gone, and the bowl had slowly settled again into its seat, with a long, soft, rustling sigh, she said, in a voice that was not at all her own: “I hope that somebody lets them win.”

“That is not how it is done,” said Veyra gently.

“I know,” said Thara. “I’m only saying.”

The Peacock Academy came in a long glittering flash of blue and gold, with trumpets, and a hundred peacock feathers waving above them, and the Master himself on a horse with its mane braided in gold wire, bowing to every box. The Corsairs came in with a tune, a rough and ribald one, on a fiddle and a hurdy-gurdy, and the whole of the Drowned Reach contingent in the Terrace stood on the benches and sang along, in bits. A great roar went up when a guild of Raskian giants strode in, each of them carrying a barrel of beer, which they were not at all permitted to bring, and which were taken off them at the arch by a very tall dwarf with a very small ledger. There were Salt Saints, in white. There was a guild of tiny fierce women with hammers, who had been, Torren said, the Hammer-Wives of Orcus for four hundred years and had once beaten the Republic’s whole standing army for a bet. There was a very fat man on a very small horse, who was loudly cheered, and nobody could say why.

And then the Black Tithe went by.

They did not make any noise. There were seven of them, in black, plain and well-cut and very clean, and they walked slowly, in a line, with their hands folded in front of them and their heads quite still. They were of all ages, men and women, one of them, at the head, an old thin silver-whiskered gentleman with a stick, and one a girl of no more than twenty, and all with a small, pleasant, civil, absent smile on their faces, like a row of notaries at a funeral. They looked at nothing. They looked, Fel thought, only at the people in the stands, one by one, with great patience, as a man looks along a shelf of books, to see which of them he has not yet read.

The cheering, as they passed, did not stop. It thinned. It went out of each section of the crowd as they came to it, and came back behind them, in a thin ragged wave, and all along the benches people looked at their boots.

“I don’t like them,” said Thara, in a very small voice.

“No,” said Fel.

He found, rather to his surprise, that he had one hand on the hilt of Falling Star. He took it away.

Then came the Nation.

It was very quiet. It had been quiet the whole of the way from the arch, as though some great invisible cloth had been drawn over the Hall, and Fel, who had been busy with the Tithe, did not at first understand why the air had gone so odd. Then he saw. There were no drums. They had stopped, a little way back, in the ranks of the Marshals, as if the drummers had forgotten what they were doing, and the great flags of the Hall had fallen limp on their poles, and in the silence, across the white sand, in a long grey file, the Nation of Sphel came on.

There were seven of them, as before, in grey wool to the heel, with the hoods up and the white ring on every breast. They walked in step. They had no weapons that could be seen. At the head, in a plain grey coat with a collar of undyed linen, her hands folded at her waist, walked a small, neat, quiet woman of forty-odd, with a smooth round placid face and a pair of mild brown eyes, who might have been a schoolmistress or a baker’s wife. She smiled a little as she came. It was a kind smile. It seemed to be for everybody.

And behind her, borne at shoulder height, on a plain grey litter between four bearers, there came a chair.

It was an ordinary one. It was a tall, high-backed, plain wooden chair, with arms, and it was draped, from the back to the floor, in a long grey cloth, on which, in thread of white, was embroidered the same blank ring. There was nobody in it. It rode empty through the sunlight above the grey hoods, quite level, quite steady, and as it passed in the great silence over the white Floor, Fel had the oddest and most unreasonable impression that the air about it was listening.

He had felt it before. It was in the place at the back of his mind where the lines were, and it was not a sight at all, but a sort of chill. He closed his eyes, in the way that Torren had taught him, and turned his attention outward, as one turns a lamp, to see what lay in the long grey file. And he found, with a small cold shock, that there was nothing. The Wardens had been a hundred threads, bright as wire, all running together into one great bonfire at the head of the column. The Tithe had been a cold thin tangle like a spider’s. But in the Nation of Sphel, where there should have been seven living lines, hot and golden and humming, there was only seven small stillnesses, like seven holes in a cloth, and in the middle of them, round the empty chair, a wide dim quiet that seemed to press very slightly on the eye.

He opened his eyes. Torren was looking at him.

“Aye,” said the old man, almost soundlessly. “I felt it too.”

The grey woman had come to a halt before the golden dais. She bowed, quite deeply, to the old Herald on his horn, and then, rather more deeply, to the empty chair. And she said, in a clear, mild, pleasant, carrying voice, with no more weight in it than a woman asking for a pint of milk:

“The Nation of Sphel is present. I am Sister Iselda, who speaks for it. Our lord regrets that he is not able, today, to attend.”

There was a very long pause.

“The Hall notes it,” said the Herald, in his great slow organ-voice. He had lowered the horn. He did not seem to be vague, just then, or amiable. “It is irregular. The Crown has judged it permitted. The chair is seated, and may stay.”

“You are very kind,” said Sister Iselda, and smiled upon the whole bowl like a lamp, and the whole bowl looked away.

She moved on. The grey file passed along the Terrace, to its place in the Ember bench, quite near the Seven Sorrows. It went by in a silence so complete that Fel could hear the hiss of the wool. One of them, a tall man at the rear, with a lean, long, handsome, tired face under the hood and a pair of very pale eyes, glanced aside as he went and let his gaze run along the Seven Sorrows’ bench, and came to rest on Veyra. He smiled at her. It was a very civil smile. It went up one side of his mouth.

Veyra did not look round. But Fel, who was sitting at her elbow, saw her hand close upon her knee.

He did not say anything. He filed it away. It was a thing that he was getting rather good at.

* * *

It was very nearly noon before the last of the ninety-eight guilds had gone by and been seated, and in all that time the Herald had never once moved from his horn. Then, in the stillness, he lowered it, and the whole of the great bowl turned its face to the arch at the western end, where there remained, in the sunlight, one door that had not been opened.

It was opened now. It swung wide, with a creak. And a single drum began, not the solemn tread of the Wardens’ but a thin, brisk, rather ridiculous rat-a-tat, as of a small boy with a biscuit tin, and out of the shadow, in a wavering, ragged, uncertain file, in no particular step, came the Seven Sorrows.

They had not been told how to march. That had been the whole of the difficulty. Torren had said that they were to walk, and Veyra had said that they were to walk together, and Thara had said that they should do it with style, and in the end they had worked out, in the hall at Lampwick Close, on the eve of the Cup, that the only fair thing was to go in order of height. This had put Brannoch in front, like a ship’s prow, with his shield on his back. After him, in a long clean line of descending importance, there came Orrin, with the staff and the long blue stride, and Torren, with Maude over his shoulder in a sack, and Fel, and Veyra, in the sea-green coat that Nerissa had made over, and Nerissa herself, with her silver hair coiled up and a lace of foam at the hem of her skirt, and last, small and brown and trotting to keep up, Thara, with a pair of daggers and a wide, bright, joyful, tooth-showing grin.

There was a pause. The crowd had not been told.

“Who’s that?” asked a voice, quite loud, in the stands above them. “Is that the last one? Who’ve they got at the back?”

“It’s the ninety-ninth,” said another voice, with a laugh. “It’s the crumbs. It’s the ones that just got in. They’ve a sign on them, I’ve heard, they went down the Pits to fifty in a year. A year! They’re children. Look at the lad in front. He’s hardly shaved.”

There was a ripple of laughter. It was not unkind. It ran along the tiers in a long, warm, amused rustle, as a crowd laughs at a puppy that has come into the ring, and Fel, walking across the white sand with his ears burning, felt it on his neck like the sun. He kept his chin up. He did not look at the stands. He looked ahead, at the Herald’s dais, a long way off, and he put one foot after another, and tried to remember how he had once walked into the Rotunda with a hole in his coat.

And behind him, in the long hot silence, Thara, who had been told by every one of the company that she was not, under any circumstances, to do anything, drew a deep breath and waved.

She did it with both arms. She did it with her whole body, over her head, in great sweeping circles, like a person flagging down a ship, and in a clear carrying shout that rang off the opposite wall of the bowl she called, in the voice of a girl who has been waiting all her life: “HELLO! We’re the Seven Sorrows! We’re VERY GLAD to be here! Is that a GOAT?”

It was a goat. It was on the Raskian bench. It had got in.

For one moment, nothing at all happened. Then somebody on the Orvandel side of the Terrace gave a great whoop. Somebody beyond them roared. The Hammer-Wives of Orcus began to bang their mallets on the benches, and the Corsairs, led by a captain in a tall black hat, were up and shrieking, and the Raskian axemen, who loved a goat, joined in. In a minute it had spread. In another it had swallowed the tiers. And Fel, who had dropped his hand to his sword in a small automatic panic, stood in the middle of the great white plain with forty thousand people on their feet, shouting, and could hardly hear his own breath.

“It’s not for us,” he said, in a hoarse undertone, to nobody. “It’s the goat.”

“It is not the goat,” said Veyra. She was walking at his side, with her eyes bright and her face flushed and her mouth held very firmly shut, for fear that it would laugh. “They like her. It is not at all a thing that I understand. But they like her.”

They took their seats on the lowest bench. Orrin sank onto it and put his head between his knees. Thara, scarlet and radiant, threw herself down at the end of the row, with her feet drumming, and was kissed on both cheeks, noisily, by a fat woman in the Delvishion colors who seemed to have lost all control. And on the golden dais, across the whole width of the sand, the old man with the horn raised his hand.

It was a very small gesture. And it was enough. The roar sank, and fell, and went out, as a sea goes out under a long, long wind, and the Herald said, in a voice that carried to the last bench of the farthest tier, with perfect gentleness:

“Ninety-nine guilds. Six hundred and ninety-three names. Three brackets, and one Cup. I have blown this horn for four Cups, and I shall not, I think, blow it for a fifth. Let it be noted, for those who write it down, that the Hall of Champions is open.” He drew a breath. “The Grace is on the Floor. No blood shall be spilled in it that cannot be mended. No hand shall be raised against a guild that has not been named. And no man shall leave this Hall, on any day of the hundred and one, without first being thanked by it.”

He lifted the horn. And as he did, from the base of the dais, a great pair of bronze doors, which had been shut, swung wide.

Fel had heard of the Urn of Lots, a plain thing, a great glazed jar, that had been rolled out into the Rotunda square on New Year’s morning. But this was something different, and nobody had told him. It was bronze, and as tall as a house. It had been cast, long ago, in the shape of a pair of cupped hands, holding up, between its palms, a great bowl. And in that bowl there lay, shining and heaped to the very brim, like fruit in a basket, hundreds of small brass balls.

“The Urn of Trials,” said the Herald. “It is the Cup’s own conscience, and has never been tampered with. There is a Trial for every occasion, and they are not chosen by us.” He turned, with an old man’s slowness, to a small grey figure beside him that Fel had not noticed. It was a blind dwarf, in a plain linen robe, with a face like a walnut and a pair of milky white eyes. She stepped forward, with a rolling, shuffling stride, and put one small brown hand into the bowl. “The Trial for each combat is drawn at the sixth bell of the evening before, here, in public, before the Hall. So that the guilds may sleep upon it, and be afraid. It is the only mercy that the Hall allows. It is not a great one.”

There was a sound like a long soft sigh from forty thousand people, and the blind dwarf drew out a ball.

She held it up. The Herald took it, and cracked it with his thumbnail, and read what was inside.

“For the play-in of the Ash, on the second day. The Lamp and the Long Dark.” There was a pleased, awed rumble. “For the play-in of the Ember, on the third. The Weighing of the Hive.” He drew a third ball from the hand of the dwarf, and cracked it, and looked at it, rather longer than he had at the others, and a very faint smile moved in his beard. “And for the play-in of the Brass, on the fourth day, between the Mudlark Brigade of the Drowned Reach and the Seven Sorrows of Dun Vurrim…”

Nobody breathed. Fel was gripping the bench.

“The Painted Ring.”

Torren let out a long breath through his nose. It was, Fel thought, a little too long. Then the old man leaned across Veyra, with a wicked and satisfied glitter in the corner of his eye, and said, quite softly, in his ear:

“That’s the kind one, lad. That’s the one that they give the new guilds. They’ve done us a favor.” He sat back. “I think it’s the goat.”

* * *

It was not, as it turned out, the goat.

They found that out in the small hours of the morning of the fourth day, in the great hall at Lampwick Close, by the light of a single candle, with Torren sitting on the table in his stockinged feet, and a thick yellow tallow-stained book open in his lap that he had borrowed, without any intention of returning it, from the Cup Archive. The Ash had fought on the second, and the Ember on the third, and Fel had watched both from the Terrace with the whole of the company. He had seen the Midnight Surveyors go out onto a floor that had turned into a long dim cavern, with a single lamp, and be beaten there, in an hour, by a lot of cheerful people who appeared to live in the dark. He had seen the Dustwalkers of the Republic lose, through some deep misunderstanding, to nine small nuns and a great many bees. But he had not seen anything, so far, that frightened him. He was frightened now. It was the Painted Ring.

“It’s a kindness,” said Torren, “if you’ve the hands for it. It’s a plain Trial. It’s the plainest in the Urn. There’s a ring, a hundred paces across, and the Floor lifts it, a man’s height clear of the ground, on a pillar, and drops a pit all round it. A pit of paint.” He held up the book. There was a picture. It showed a round white island, with a number of small stick-figures running about on it, and round the island a thick black ring labeled, with great relish, Splash. “Seven a side. A guild is painted when it takes a stroke. Or when it’s thrown off the edge, into the pit, and comes up the color of the other fellows’ flag. Last man on the ring wins, or if the glass runs out, the guild with the most still stood. It’s a tidy one, lad. It’s got no ceilings and no tricks. It’s a good honest brawl.”

“You said,” said Veyra, in a flat tone, “that it was the kind one.”

“It’s the kind one.” Torren looked at his feet. “The Trial is. It’s the Mudlarks that are the trouble.”

He had been out. That was the thing that he had not mentioned. He had slipped away from the supper, in his best hat, to the long low tavern at the bottom of the Wards that the men of the Drowned Reach called the Wet Boot, and he had bought a number of people a number of pints, and he had come back at midnight smelling like a barge and in possession of a great deal of information, most of it about eels.

“They dig,” said Torren. “It’s what they do. The Reach was drowned, four hundred years back, when the sea came in over the dikes and took forty towns, and what’s left is a country of mud, with the roofs sticking out. The mudlarks go down. They’ve done it a hundred years, and a hundred years before that, with poles, and nets, and a long long patience. They come up with a doorknob, or a bell, or a coin, and they sell it back to the families. It’s a living. They’re not fighters. They’re scavengers. They’ve got the gutter in them.” He leaned forward, and the candle caught his eyes. “And they’ve got her.”

“Who?”

“The Old Mother.” Torren drew a very small, careful picture in the margin of the book, with the stub of a pencil. It was a lump. It was attached to a chain. “A lodestone. A whopper. They found her in a drowned church forty years back, under the altar, the size of a ham, and old Dolly Pike’s had her on a chain ever since. She’s pulled a ship’s anchor off the bottom of the Wash. She’ll pull a sword out of a man’s hand, if he’s holding it loosely, and a mail shirt off his back, if he’s not. And they’ve never, in a ring that I can hear of, been beaten with a knife in it.”

There was a very long silence.

“Oh,” said Thara, in a hollow voice. She was sitting on the stairs in her nightshirt with her knees under her chin, and she looked at Torren, and then at Fel, and then, with great slowness, at the pair of long thin knives that she had laid, as she did every night, on the bench beside her. “Oh. They pull the steel. They pull the steel, Torren. We’re all made of steel!”

“That is not exactly true,” said Nerissa. “I am made, I believe, of water.”

“You’ve got a silver comb!”

“I would like it noted,” said Orrin, who had been looking quite pleased with himself in a corner since midnight, with the staff across his knees, “that my staff is wood.”

“The prongs aren’t,” said Fel.

“The prongs,” said Orrin, with a sudden fall in his face, “are, I am afraid, Amolite.”

Brannoch said nothing. But there was a long grinding sound from the end of the bench, which turned out to be Brannoch very slowly lifting the great iron-faced shield that he never put down, and looking at it with an expression of great and gentle pity.

It was Veyra who solved it, in the end. She was sitting very straight on the end of the bench, with her hands round a cup of tea gone cold and her violet eyes quite far away, and she had said nothing for ten minutes. Then she put the cup down. She went upstairs, without a word, and came down a quarter of an hour later with her quiver in her hand, and a very small knife, and a paper packet of something that smelled strongly of resin. She sat down. And with every eye upon her, with a face of calm and absolute concentration, she took the first arrow out of the quiver, and snapped its steel head off at the socket with a twist of her wrist, and began, with the small knife, to whittle the shaft down to a point.

“It is a wood tip,” she said, after a long time. “It will not pierce. It does not need to. It is a stroke, that is all that is wanted, and a stroke is the same, I am informed, whether it is given with steel or an acorn.” She did not look up. “I have a hundred and forty arrows. I do not intend to be pulled out of my own quiver by a rock.”

Torren looked at her. A slow, enormous, delighted grin was breaking in the middle of the beard.

“Well, there,” he said. “Well, there. That’s the plan. We’re not going to fight her. We’re going to feed her.” He swung his legs off the table. “Everybody up. Everyone that’s got a bit of iron, we’ll put it where it’s wanted. We’ve five hours to the bell, and a boy, a good strong boy, who’s been learning to make things heavy.”

* * *

They came out onto the Floor at the tenth bell, under a sky like blue glass, in the sight of forty thousand people, and the Floor began to rise.

It went very slowly. It went with a deep, vast, grinding hum that Fel felt in his bones, and a long shudder like a great beast waking, and then, with a stately creak, the middle of the white plain began to lift. It came up under their feet in a perfect circle. It carried them with it, the Seven Sorrows and the whole bright knot of the Mudlark Brigade, up, and up, through the thin cold air, to the height of a house, and halted with a great sigh, and a ring of black pillars came up out of the sand round its rim, and a black liquid, thick and shining, with a sweet smell of linseed, came welling up, and up, between them, until the whole circle, a hundred paces wide, was an island in a lake of paint.

There was a long moment of silence, full of sun.

And then he saw them. They were on the other side, about eighty paces off, a small clustered dark crowd on the white stone, and they looked, as Fel had been warned, like nothing in the world.

There were seven, as the rules demanded, and they were all of them wet. They were brown and lean and wiry, all in leather aprons and sealskin boots, with great round goggles pushed up on their foreheads, and they bore among them, in a sort of ragged forest, a most extraordinary collection of poles. There was a boat-hook. There was a very long rake. There was a thing like a landing-net, and a thing like a fishing-gaff, and a huge bamboo with a grappling hook at the end. They carried at their belts, in great jangling bunches, a fortune in old doorknobs. And in the middle of them, with a bucket on her arm and a cigar in her teeth, there stood a short, thick, weathered little woman of sixty, in a man’s oilskin coat with a hundred pockets, who was counting.

She was counting the crowd. She did it with a pencil, very fast, with her lips moving. Then she looked across the island, at the Seven Sorrows, with a pair of small, shrewd, black, bright eyes, and her whole face split in a grin that had nine teeth in it.

“Sixpence,” said Dolly Pike. “Sixpence each, for the seven. And a florin for the big one. Oh, you’re a lovely lot. You’re all of you worth a fair bit, if I’ve the weights right, I’d say a thousand and nine, with the brass bits.” She spat the cigar out into the paint. “I’m sorry for it, my loves. I do like the look of you. But I’ve a family to feed, and it’s only a bit of paint.”

And she swung the chain.

It was extraordinarily fast. A very big, very dull, greenish-black lump the size of a ham, bound in a net of rusted hoops, rose out of the oilskin on a ten-foot chain, and whirled once about her head with a low, droning, buzzing note, and every piece of steel in the island moved.

He felt it in his hands. It came out of the air like the pull of a wave on a swimmer’s legs, a single hard terrific tug, and Falling Star, at his hip, rang in its sheath and lunged. It stood out at right angles. It dragged. He clamped his fist on the hilt, and was pulled six feet across the slick stone, with his heels skidding. And on every side, in a single wild chorus, there rose the cries of the Seven Sorrows being disarmed. Thara’s knives went like hornets, twelve at a time, out of her belt and her boots and her sleeves and up the long bright slope of the air, and came to rest, with a long ringing clatter, in a heap about the lodestone. Brannoch’s spear leaped. Veyra’s whole quiver, with a rattle, rose in a body from her back, and then fell, as every steel head shot off the shafts, and the shafts, with their little white wooden tips, dropped clattering to the floor.

And Torren Ballast, who had come out onto the Floor with Maude, the great iron-headed maul, on his shoulder in full view of the public, was suddenly jerked off his feet, the whole broad bulk of him, by the head of the hammer, which rose into the air in a vast iron arc, with the old man hanging on beneath it like a bell-ringer on a rope, and flew away across the island with a roar.

“Not yet!” bawled Torren, as he went. “Not YET, lad!”

“I know!” said Fel.

He had been counting. It was the thing that he had practiced, in the long grey hours between three and eight, on a heap of old iron in the courtyard. He had been taught that there was a way of seeing that was not sight, a way of finding the golden thread in each thing and following it to its end. And it came to him now, in the middle of the great hard whining pull, that he had been looking at it wrong. The lodestone did not pull the steel. The lodestone pulled the weight. It took the lightest of every piece of iron in the ring and made it fall toward itself. And what a thing falls toward is only a question of where its weight is.

He drove Falling Star point down into the white stone, with both hands, and poured, down the whole length of the blade, a hundred and ten pounds.

It did not stop the pull. It stood. The sword, which had been fighting like a fish, went suddenly still, and sank in the slick to the cross-guard, and held there as if it had grown from the ground. He did the same for Krashing Fyr, with the left. He had made himself, in an instant, a pair of iron posts, and he stood between them, holding on, with his boots planted wide on the stone, and breathed.

Then he began to Draw.

He did it from the Old Mother herself. That was the whole of the plan. It was the hardest thing that he had done in a week. For forty feet away, in the middle of a ring of swinging poles, the great lump of black stone whirled on its chain at the end of the old woman’s arm, and in the middle of it, like a dark flame, lay a single line, a thick heavy dark one, the drag, the weight of the thing. He reached out along it. He took hold. And he began, a little at a time, with the greatest patience, to pull the heaviness out of it, in the way that he had pulled the black fruit’s weight out of the air, and put it, thread by thread, into the floor.

Stolen from NovelPhoenix, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

It did not take long. The note of the stone changed. It dropped, and wavered, and went suddenly high and thin and strange, as a plucked string does that has been loosened, and Dolly Pike, who had been swinging it with the whole of her weight, gave a small startled grunt, and the chain went up. Behind him, with a crash, Maude dropped out of the sky, and Torren, who had been dangling from her for half a minute, landed on his feet in a heap of knives, and said a word that the Marshals of the Floor, who had very good ears, chose to let pass.

It did not drop. It rose. It rose out of her hand, with her fist still clenched round the end, and lifted her, quite gently, to her tiptoes, and then, as the last of its weight went out of it, right off the floor. She went up. She went up five feet, with her oilskin ballooning and her pockets clinking, and her boots kicking in the empty air, swinging at the end of a stone that weighed no more than a soap-bubble, and the whole of the great bowl, which had been breathing like a single animal, gave a vast delighted howl.

“Oh, you BEAUTY!” cried Dolly Pike, upside down. “Oh, you thieving little beauty! That’s the best thing that’s ever been done to me! Boys! BOYS! Get him!”

They came all at once, with a whoop. They had a plan, too. They came across the slick white stone in a long uneven skirmish line, sealskin boots skating and poles swinging, and in front of each of them, in a thick, brown, sloshing flood from the buckets that they had carried on their backs, a tide of river-clay poured out across the ring. It was the same clay that they dug out of the drowned villages, grey and oily and cold, and when it hit the polished stone it turned it, in the space of a breath, to greased ice. The whole island was a skating-rink. Veyra, who had run for the middle and was about to nock, went down on her back with a cry. Brannoch, with a heavy crash, sat suddenly in the mud and slid, with his shield before him, the whole length of the ring, at about the speed of a bull on a frozen pond, and came to rest against a pillar with a gentle clang.

“I would like it noted,” said Orrin, who had been standing alone with the staff in his two long hands and had begun, quietly, to hum, “that I am very firmly planted.”

He was. He was standing, as Fel saw with a kind of awe, on the one square yard of the Floor that was quite dry. It was his own. He had been humming at it for a minute and a half. It was a very low tone, a long way down, in the belly, and the clay shook off it like water off a dog. It rolled away from his boots in a ring, and settled, and lay still, and the Mudlarks, as they swept across the ring with their poles, found themselves skidding to a stop in the face of a long tall blue man who was humming, with his eyes closed, and who did not seem to be looking at them.

Then the whistles began.

It was what they used. It was an old river trick, a shrill short signal-code on a tin whistle, that told the whole company, in the fog, in a Reach full of drowned roofs, where every other member was. And it came now, from every side, thin and piercing, a hundred bright darting notes, as the seven closed in. And it went on for exactly four seconds. For on the fifth, Orrin opened his eyes, and let his hum rise, just a little, and slide in under the whistles, as it had slid in under the song of the Amolite, like a hand laid flat on a ringing bell. The notes went dead. They simply were not there. A burly mudlark in the lead put the whistle to his lips, and puffed his cheeks, and nothing came out but a soft wet breath, and he looked at it in the most perfect astonishment, as at a thing that had betrayed him.

And Nerissa lifted her hands.

It was a very quiet motion. She was kneeling in the mud at the island’s edge, with her silver hair about her shoulders, and her long white fingers spread, and with them she drew up, from the black lake of paint all round the island, a thin, bright, glimmering sheet of water. It had been hidden in the paint. It was the thin clear liquor that rises when linseed settles, the water that is in every oil, and she gathered it, in a bright thin tide, from every part of the pit, and brought it up, over the rim, and let it fall across the ring like a curtain.

The clay went. It went in a single rush. It slid off the stone in a grey cloud, carrying the whole line of Mudlarks with it, their sealskin boots running from under them, their poles flying. They went down like skittles. They skated in a long ragged line, the whole seven, in a hail of doorknobs, straight into the one square yard of dry stone, where Brannoch had got up, and was waiting, with his shield at the slope, as patient as a barn.

He did not strike. He leaned. The first of them struck the shield and stopped, and the second struck the first, and the third, and in a moment there was a heap in front of the great grey man like a tangled load of timber, shouting, with its legs in the air. And out of the top of the heap, with a very small, flat, precise hiss, there came an arrow.

It had a wooden tip. It touched a mudlark gently on the breast. A little cloud of blue puffed out of it, and the man went limp, and quietly sank, and was borne sliding, like a child’s toy, to the edge of the ring, where the Grace laid him down. Veyra had her bow up from her knee. She was lying flat on her back in the middle of the ring, quite unconcerned, with a stream of grey clay running past her ear, and she loosed again, and again, and again, without once getting up, in a low rhythmic whisper of string, and each of them found a man.

“Five,” said Veyra, to the sky.

It was over, then, quite fast. Thara, who had been doing something quite mysterious near the edge of the ring, appeared suddenly in the middle of the heap with a very large and elaborate grin. She was holding a little bag. It was Dolly Pike’s purse, with the ring on it, and the pencil, and the cigar-case. She had taken it, it appeared, at the moment that the old woman went up in the air, and she was now busily and gleefully taking the doorknobs, one by one, off the belts of the last two Mudlarks, and handing them to Brannoch, who was tucking them very carefully into his shirt. The last two put their poles down. There was, in any case, nothing that they could have done. The Old Mother, drifting still on her chain, a little above their heads, at the end of Dolly Pike’s arm, was sinking slowly, slowly toward the stone, as Fel, with a long, thin, careful breath, gave her back her weight. And Dolly, upside down, with her oilskin about her ears, came down, very gently, on top of him.

They sat in the clay. She had landed, quite simply, in his lap, with her boots in the air, and a most extraordinary expression. She looked up at him, from about six inches off. She looked at the swords, which stood, quivering, in the floor, and the pale hand, and the long face with the clay on its cheek. Then she took off her goggles, and wiped her eyes, and began, to the whole bowl’s general delight, to laugh. It was a deep wheezing creaking laugh, like a pump, and it went on a considerable time.

“A hammer the size of a calf,” said Dolly Pike. “I saw it. I took it off a man in a ring, and I thought, oh, that’s worth a good deal, and all the while there was a lad behind it, with a line.” She wiped her face with a hand like a leather glove. “I’ll tell you what, my lovely. I’ll yield. I’ve been a mudlark forty years, and I’ve never in all my days seen a thing so well done. You’ll give me my stone back.”

“It’s yours,” said Fel.

“I know it’s mine.” She was grinning. “I said you’ll give it. It’s not the same.” She got up, with a groan, and dusted herself, and stuck out a brown hand. “Dolly Pike. The Brigade yields. You may paint us.”

They did, as it turned out, with the whole of the pit. It was the rule. A great gurgling sigh went through the Floor, and the ring tilted, very gently, and all seven of the Mudlark Brigade, with their poles and their doorknobs and their enormous good humor, were slid, one by one, with a long, slow, creamy splash, into a lake of black paint. They came up in a row, quite black from head to foot, and the Hall, which had not stopped roaring since the middle of the fight, let go the whole of its breath in one tremendous howl. Fel stood on the ring with his two swords in his hands and a smear of clay across his eyes, and felt for a moment very nearly sick.

And on the Terrace, in the front row, among the benches of the Drowned Reach, a very large Raskian with a hook for a hand stood up on his seat and started to clap in a slow and deliberate rhythm, and was joined by a woman in a tall black hat.

* * *

It was a custom, in the Cup, that the loser stood the winner a drink. Dolly Pike took it very seriously, and she took them, the whole party, in a body, in the dripping black skin that she had been given by the Floor, to the Wet Boot at the foot of the Wards, where she stood on a table in front of two hundred people and said that these were the lot that had put her on the ceiling, and that anybody who said a word against them would have her to deal with. She paid, in doorknobs. It was, Fel gathered, a perfectly good currency in the Reach.

She sat with them afterward, in the corner, black as a boot, with a pot of pickled eel in front of her and a battered brass bell, with no tongue, that she had been polishing with her sleeve. She talked. It was clear that she talked a great deal, and always to somebody, but it was also clear that she had a way of putting the real thing in the middle of the stream, quite quietly, where a person might miss it.

“There’s a ship in the harbor at Orvandel,” she said, “that I’d not go near. It’s a grey one. It’s the Candour, from the March, with a white ring on the sail. They put in, four months back. They took on a hundred men.” She rolled an eel on her fork. “Now, I’m no hand at Sphel. I don’t care for names. But I’ve a cousin on the quay at Ashmouth that sells old charts, from the drowned towns, the ones you find in a sunk chandler’s with the ink gone brown. And a grey woman came to the shop in the autumn, and bought the lot.”

“The lot?” said Veyra.

“All of them. Two hundred and twelve. She paid triple, in a bag, and she did not haggle. Not a penny.” Dolly Pike put down her fork. Her small black eyes went from one to the other of them, and they were not at all amused. “I’ve been in the trade forty years, my loves. And I’ll tell you a thing that I know. There’s two kinds of people that don’t haggle. There’s the very rich. And there’s them that don’t expect to be paying for it long.” She put a finger to the side of her nose. “She asked for one thing, mind. She asked for it, very polite. She said, did we have anything that showed the rest. The rest of what, my cousin said. And she said, the rest of the world.”

She picked up her bell. And turning it very slowly, with her thumb, as if she had said no more than a woman might say about the weather, she added, in a small and level voice:

“Mind how you go.”

* * *

After that there was nothing to do for forty-six days.

It was the strangest thing about the Cup, and nobody had warned him. A hundred and one days sounded like a war. It was, in fact, a very long, loud, golden, idle holiday, with one fight in it a day, between two guilds out of the ninety-nine, and for the other ninety-seven there was nothing at all to do but drink and gamble and watch. The Seven Sorrows had fought on the fourth day. Their next bout, in the Brass, was the last of the sixteen in the first round, and would not fall until the fiftieth. Between the two there lay a whole winter, and a city gone mad.

They filled it as best they could. Torren trained them from dawn until the second bell, in the yard behind Lampwick Close, and sent them to bed at sundown with a hot brick for each foot. Nerissa taught Fel to breathe, for the Draw, in a long slow count, with her hand flat on his ribs. Orrin sat up on the roof with the staff and the silver heart of the Amolite, humming to them until the pigeons left. And in the afternoons, as often as they could, they went up in the Bucket and sat in the Terrace to watch the others.

It was an education. He saw the Salt-Crown Corsairs flood a quarter of the Floor and take a guild of Delvishion mages off a drowned jetty in four minutes flat, with Ysolde Brine running up and down the rigging of a ship that had grown, in the space of a breath, out of the sand. He saw the Hammer-Wives of Orcus win a Trial called The Long Table by the simple expedient of eating their opponents’ dinner. He saw the Black Tithe, on the ninth day, take the field against a company of Raskian axemen in a Trial that was called, rather unhelpfully, Quiet, and win it, without a blow, and without a word, in the space of a single hour, by having every one of their seven opponents, one at a time, simply sit down. He did not ask how. Nobody would tell him.

And on the sixth day, from the Terrace, among a thousand others, he watched the Nation of Sphel go out onto the Floor.

It had been a Trial called The Weighing of the Hive. It was the same that the nuns and the bees had fought on the third. The Floor had built a vast pale hill of honeycomb, and filled the hollows of it with a great drowsy golden hum, and the Rusted Chorus, a famous company of Tarn Belgrave bell-ringers, had gone up it in a long file with their instruments swinging at their hips, seven great brass peals, each as tall as a man. They had never been beaten. It was said that their bells could crack a wall. And across the hill, quite unhurried, with their hands in their sleeves, there had walked up seven people in grey.

Fel had been looking for it. He had been looking, very carefully, the whole time, for a fight. But there was none. The bells were struck. He saw that. Seven of them rang, and the note went out across the sunlit sand like a falling tower. And where it touched the grey ranks, it simply stopped. It did not echo. It did not break. It went out, as a candle goes in a drawn breath, a clear cold hand’s breadth from Sister Iselda’s face, and she looked up at the bell-ringer with her mild brown eyes, and said, quite audibly, in the pause: Oh, my dear, you’ve no idea.

It was over in eleven minutes. The Rusted Chorus did not fall. They were not struck. They simply sat down, one at a time, in the honeycomb, and put their hands over their faces, and wept. The seven great bells lay on their sides, in the sun, as quiet as seven stones, and one of them, a very old one, had the clapper hanging from it by a thread, like a tooth.

Torren had not said a word. He had sat quite rigid for the whole of the match, with his hat in his hands, and at the end he put it on, and said, in a voice that Fel had never heard from him, a small flat dry tired voice, like an old man’s:

“That’s quenching.”

“What’s quenching?” said Fel.

“It’s a thing that’s been lost.” The old man did not turn his head. “They had it in the old days, they say, in the Ashen Hills, before the Crown. A magic that doesn’t make a thing. It stops one. It takes the mana out of the world, a yard at a time, and puts it out. It’s a thing that a man would have to study for a hundred years, and then he’d have to be a sort of…” He stopped. “They were seven,” he said. “And they’re only the lieutenants, lad. They were only the hands.”

* * *

It was Veyra who found the day.

She did it, as she did most things, without a word. It was on the twentieth evening, over a supper of cold mutton, that she looked up from her plate with her fork in the air and said, in a voice of perfect calm, to nobody in particular, that on the following day the Hall had a rest in it. It was a wonderful thing. It was the one day, in the first round, in which there was not a Trial for any bracket, owing to a feast of the Wheelwrights. She said it with her eyes upon her mutton. And then she said, still more calmly, that if anyone happened to be in the neighborhood of the front door at the second bell, with nothing in particular to do, they might care to go for a walk.

There was a short, appalling silence. Thara put both hands over her mouth. Nerissa began, rather suddenly, to pour water. Torren studied the ceiling, with a most solemn expression, and Orrin, who was a good soul, but not quick, looked from one of them to the other, and said:

“I would like it noted that I have no plans.”

“Orrin,” said Nerissa, quite gently, “eat your mutton.”

* * *

She had chosen the place with the greatest care. Fel saw it the moment that they came to it. They had gone up for an hour by a long winding stair in the side of the left mountain, past the shuttered mouths of the Furnaces, in the thin gold of a winter morning, with the whole city falling away behind them, and he had said nothing, because he had been told that he was not to ask. They came out onto a ledge. And there, set in the stone like a jewel in a ring, under a small round roof of green glass, there lay a garden.

It was not large. It was perhaps a hundred paces across, a tiny round terrace cut into the face of the mountain, with a wall of warm dark rock on three sides, and on the fourth a low parapet over a sheer drop to the city. The furnaces had warmed it. There was a pipe that ran through the stone, from the foundries below, and the heat of it had made a summer. There were pear trees, in bloom. There was a little stream that ran down over the stones, and a mossy bench, and a patch of long grass thick with small blue flowers that Fel did not know, and a single swallow, which had come in through some crack in the glass at the beginning of the winter and had decided, as far as anybody could tell, to stay.

“It is the Sill Garden,” said Veyra. She did not look at him. She was standing very straight on the path with her hands behind her back, and the color had come up in her face. “It was made by the Wardens, in the third century, for the wives of the Furnace-masters, who never saw the sun. It is not on any map. I found it in the spring, when I was lost, and I have not told anyone. Not even Nerissa.” She swallowed. “I thought that if there were a place in this city in which a person might be quiet, it would be this one.”

Fel could not think of anything to say. He thought that he had never been so happy in his life. And as that was not a thing that could be said, either, he took her hand, and held it, and she let him, and they went in under the pear trees and sat down on the mossy bench in the green and golden light.

It was a perfect day. He tried afterward to remember it in order, and he could not. It came to him in small round pieces, like the stones in a brook. There was the hamper, which Veyra had packed with her own hands and which Nerissa had unpacked, in secret, at six o’clock in the morning, and repacked, with the loaf and the cheese and the cold chicken and the apples, in place of a great number of hard grey objects that were said to be scones. There was the blanket. There was a long, long, drowsy conversation, about nothing at all, in which he told her, bit by bit, the whole of his life in the village, the cow and the cart and the hole in the roof, and she listened with her chin on her fist and her violet eyes quite shining, and did not once say that it was small. There was the swallow, that came and sat on the parapet, and eyed their cheese. There was a long silence, in the middle of the afternoon, when she lay back in the grass with her braid undone and her face to the green glass, and he sat beside her with his knees drawn up, and the sun came through the leaves in great slow patches, and for a quarter of an hour nobody wanted anything at all.

“Do you know what I have thought?” said Veyra, in the end, to the glass. She did not move. “I have thought that I have never had a day. A whole one, from the beginning to the end, that was not for something. I had a great many, at home. They were all of them for a lesson, or a duty, or a promise. And then I came here, and they were for the Pits.” She turned her head in the grass, and looked at him, upside down, with her eyes very wide. “It is a very odd thing. It is quite unlike the others. I do not think that I have ever wasted a day on purpose. I find that I like it.”

“You’re not wasting it,” said Fel.

“No.” She considered. “No, I am not. I do not think that I could.”

He did not know what he was going to do. It was a thing that had been coming for a long time, in the way that weather comes, and he had never known what to call it, and he was not at all sure that he knew now. He only knew that she was lying a foot away from him in the long blue flowers with her hair in the grass, and that the light had got into her eyes, and that his heart was going like a hammer on a bell. He bent. She did not move away. Her lips parted. It was a very small movement, and a very long one, and he could feel her breath. He closed his eyes.

It was at that moment that the swallow, with an angry rattle, flew off the parapet.

Fel did not know why he opened his eyes. It was a thing that he could not afterward explain. It was a feeling. It was like the sensation in the old house at home, when he had been a child in the dark and a floorboard had creaked on the stairs, and he turned his head, and there at the head of the little path, framed in the arch of the stone, with the sun behind him and his hands in his sleeves, stood a tall man in a grey coat.

“Oh,” said the man. “I do beg your pardon.”

He said it in a voice of the most perfect and unhurried courtesy. He was young, and lean, and very handsome in a worn, fine, tired way, with a long pale face and silvery fair hair worn a little long, and a pair of very light eyes, almost without color, like water over chalk. He had a faint smile. It went up one side of his mouth. It was the man that Fel had seen in the Terrace. He had put back his hood. On the breast of the grey coat, in white thread, was the empty ring.

Veyra had sat up. She had done it in one movement. She was on her feet in the grass with her bow, which had been lying a yard off, in her hands, and an arrow on the string, and it was only afterward that Fel realized, with a kind of faint surprise, that he too was standing, and that Falling Star was bare.

“Please,” said the man. He lifted both hands, palms out, and his smile deepened. “Please. I do not intend any harm. I am a person who came to look at the pears. It is a very remarkable place. I had heard that there was a garden, you know, and I am a lover of gardens, and I thought that I might have it to myself.” He glanced, with gentle apology, at the blanket. “I see that I am the last of the persons that you wished to see. It is a pity. We have not been introduced.”

“We do not wish to be,” said Veyra.

“Of course not.” He bowed. It was a very graceful bow, and not at all sincere. “Lucan Thessaly. A servant of the Nation. And you are, I think, the lady Veyra, of the Seven Sorrows, who has the famous eyes, that I have heard so much about in the Terrace. I have been thinking, for some days, that it would be a great pleasure to know you better.” He took a step. “My lord has a very high regard for the whole of your company. For some of you, quite particularly. He has been so good as to say that he hopes to meet you. In the Hall. I thought that I might say a word, in advance, for him.”

“You can go,” said Fel.

He had said it very quietly. He was a little surprised by it himself. He was standing in front of Veyra, with the sword in his hand, and the sun in his eyes, and he found that he could see Thessaly’s face quite clearly, every line of it, as one sees a thing in a very cold light.

The man’s eyebrows rose. He looked at Fel, for the first time. It was a long look, and it took in the boots and the coat, and the hands, and the swords, and he did not smile at all.

“Ah,” said Lucan Thessaly. “You.”

There were two more of them. Fel saw them as they came in, a great heavy man with a red scar through his lip and a little woman with a bored face and a pair of knitting needles in her belt, and they came up the path, one on each side, without any hurry, and spread, among the pear trees, in the very casual and practiced way of people who have done it before. They did not draw. They kept their hands in their sleeves. And it was the little woman who spoke. She did not look at Fel at all. She looked at Veyra, from the boots to the braid, with a gaze of the most open and impertinent appraisal, as a person looks at a horse, and said, in a flat and cheerful voice:

“She’s a pretty one, Lucan. Can we keep her?”

It was a very short silence.

“Dorrit,” said Thessaly, mildly. “We are guests.”

Then he moved. It was done so fast that Fel never afterward understood it. The man had been standing five paces off, with his hands up, smiling, and in the next instant he was there, at Veyra’s shoulder, close, and his long pale hand had gone out, and taken her by the wrist. It was a light grip. It was a courteous one. It was the kind of hold that a man might take to lead a lady through a door, and he said, with the gentlest of smiles, in her ear: “I should like to talk with you, my dear. It will not take long. Perhaps over a glass…”

“Let go of her,” said Fel.

He did not remember doing it. He remembered only that it was suddenly very bright, and very cold, and very clear, and that the golden lines of the world had risen up all round him like grass, and he had put Falling Star down, on the moss, with great care, as one puts down a thing that one is going to want later. And he put out a hand, and took Thessaly by the collar, and pulled.

Or rather, he meant to. He had reached for the line. He did it by habit, by the hundred-thousand-times-practiced trick of the mind, and he found it, he knew he found it, a long bright thread that ran from the man’s boot to the stone, and he closed on it, and drew.

And it went out.

It was the strangest sensation. It was not pain. It was like a hand that has been put out for a banister in the dark and finds that the stair is gone. All round him, and in him, and through him, the golden lines of the world, which he had seen every minute of the waking day for a year, as one sees the color of the sky, dimmed. They sank. They went out, one by one, in a ring, to the walls of the garden, like the lamps of a street at dawn. He saw them go. And he saw, quite near, in the pale handsome face, the first expression that had come into it all that day. It was not triumph. It was a small, polite, curious interest, like that of a man who has dropped a pebble into a well.

“There,” said Lucan Thessaly, softly. “It is not so very hard, is it? It is only a little quiet.”

He had put a finger, with great delicacy, on Fel’s wrist.

For perhaps two seconds, Fel stood in the sun, with an arm that weighed what it weighed, and knew exactly what it was to be a boy. He was eighteen. He was a farm-hand’s son, in a borrowed coat, in a garden, with the best friend that he had in the world at his back and a stranger’s finger on his pulse, and the one thing that he had, the one great and strange thing that had been given to him in a basement in Dun Vurrim, was gone. He felt the whole of the long year go out of him, like water out of a cracked jug.

And he thought, with perfect clearness, in the dark: Well. I’ve still got hands.

He hit him.

It was not at all a technical blow. Torren would have been appalled. It was a plain, hard, straight, farm-boy right, from the shoulder, with the whole of the weight of his body behind it and no nonsense at all, and it took Lucan Thessaly in the middle of the face with a sound like a dropped melon. The man let go of Veyra. He went back. He went back across the whole of the path, in a long, surprised, backward stagger, with his silver hair flying, and sat down in the stream.

For a moment, nobody moved.

Then Fel put his left fist into the stomach of the big man with the scar, who had been coming, and was an instant too slow, and as the man folded, caught him by the hair and brought his face down against his knee. He did not think. He did not need to. There was nothing, now, in the whole garden, that was not as plain as day. The little woman, Dorrit, had her knitting needles out. They were a foot and a half long and they glinted. She came in under his arm in a darting flat run, like a bird, and he took one of them on the forearm, and felt it skid, and caught her by the wrist and twisted, and swung her, and let go. She went over the parapet. He saw that a second later, and it was an instant of cold sick horror. Then he heard the thump. The parapet was low, and under it, six feet down, was the roof of the Furnace-masters’ orangery, and the little woman, lying in the soft wet leaves of a crushed lemon tree, was staring at the sky with her mouth open and her needles scattered, saying, in a weak surprised voice, Oh.

It had taken perhaps eleven seconds.

Thessaly had got up. He was standing in the stream to his knees, in the water and the blue flowers, with one hand to his face, and his nose was bleeding down the front of his grey coat, onto the little white ring, and he was looking at the blood on his fingers with an expression of perfect and mild astonishment. He looked up. The light eyes were quite dead, now. They were a very long way off.

“That was vulgar,” said Lucan Thessaly, thickly.

“You touched her,” said Fel.

He had picked up Falling Star. He did not remember that either. And as he held it, in his right hand, a very small distance from the ground, the first of the lines came back. It was a single faint golden thread, in the stone at his feet, thin as a hair, and it brightened, and was followed by another, and by a hundred, and the light came up round the ring of the garden like the first rays of the sun. The man in the stream watched it. And something happened to his face that Fel did not at all like. It was not anger. It was interest. It was the look of a man who has seen, in a cupboard, a thing that he had been told was not there.

“It returns,” said Lucan Thessaly, softly. “In under half a minute. Oh. Oh, my lord will be so pleased.”

He bowed. It was a deep, formal, perfect bow, with the water running from his coat, and it was the most frightening thing that Fel had seen all day. Then he turned, and waded out of the stream, and bent, and with great care and tenderness, helped the heavy man to his feet, and led him, with his arm about his shoulders, down the little path. He did not look back. And from the lemon tree, a long way below, in a thin and fretful voice, there came a woman’s complaint, in the tone of one who has been very badly used, that she had told them that it would end this way.

* * *

They did not speak for a long time.

They sat on the bench, in the long gold of the afternoon, and the swallow came back, and perched on the parapet, and looked at the cheese. She had put the bow down. She had sat and taken his hand, in both of hers, and turned it over, and looked at the knuckles, which were skinned, and at the long scratch down the forearm, where a knitting needle had been, and she held it for a very long time between her palms, and did not say anything at all. Her face was quite white. Her hands were shaking.

“I’m sorry,” said Fel. “I wanted it to be, I wanted…”

“Do not,” said Veyra.

“It was all…”

“Do not.” She had looked up. There were tears in her eyes, and she was furious. She was not furious with him. She was furious with the entire world. “You will not apologize to me, for that, in my garden. I will not hear it. I have been looked at, and spoken to, and handled, and lectured upon my eyes, since the day I was born, by a long string of men who were all of them entirely sure that they were very charming. And I have not once, not once, had a person put down his sword to hit them.” She drew a long unsteady breath. “Your lines went out. I saw it. I saw your face. And you hit him anyway.”

“I didn’t know what else to do,” said Fel.

“That is exactly it.” She was laughing, suddenly, through the tears, and wiping them with the back of her hand, in a gesture so unlike her that he could only stare. “That is exactly the thing that I have been trying to tell you, for a year, in a hundred ways, and you have never once seen it. It is not the swords.” She laid his hand against her cheek. “It is you.”

They stayed there, a little longer. It was quiet. The heat went out of the pear trees. It was about five by the light, with a long way to go, and the whole of the day that she had given him lay about them in ruins, and it was, he thought, in spite of everything, the best present he had ever been given. But the place had been spoiled. They both knew it. The shadows had come in, and the swallow had gone, and every rustle in the leaves brought up the long pale face and the dead light eyes. At last, in silence, she got up. She began to pack the hamper.

“I wished it to be perfect,” she said, to the hamper.

“It was.”

“It was not. It was interrupted by a person in a damp coat.” She snapped the lid down. She stood there, with her hands on the wicker, for some time, and then said, very quickly, in a small rough voice, with her back to him: “They will be in the Hall. All of them. Every day, on the Terrace. It is not a place in which I can be anything. It is not a place in which anyone can. I should like, when it is finished, when the whole of it is over and there is a Cup and a door, and the people have all gone back where they belong, and the city is quiet…” She turned. Her face was scarlet. “I should like to do it properly. The whole day. From the beginning. And not, this time, be stopped.”

“After we win,” said Fel.

“After we win.” She held out her hand. It was a stiff, grave, formal little gesture, and her eyes were very bright. “It is a promise. You will not make me say it twice.”

He took it. He did not shake it. He lifted it, instead, awkwardly, and for a moment pressed his lips to the back of the fingers, quite lightly, as he had seen it done by the dancers in the Orvandel plays, and let it go. And Veyra of the Seven Sorrows, who had been born, as he sometimes thought, with a bow in her fist and a rule for everything, stood in the Sill Garden with the basket on her arm, and the color rising in her face, and said, in a high small distant voice, to nobody:

“That is quite satisfactory.”

They went down together, in the dusk, by the long stair. They did not talk. But at the third landing, in the dark, between two pillars, he felt her hand come into his, and stay there, and he thought that he would, if it came to it, go through the whole of the Cup with one arm.

* * *

Torren heard it all, the next morning, with his face in his hands.

“I didn’t draw,” said Fel, miserably.

“I know.” The old man looked up. He had been, for the last quarter of an hour, in a state that was neither quite laughter nor quite despair. “I’ve been to the Watch. They’ve had a complaint. It was lodged, I’m told, at seven this morning, by a very polite person in a grey coat with his nose in a rag. The Cup Peace is a thing, lad. It’s a rule. No steel in the street, from the first day to the last, on pain of a stripe from the roll. You’ve put your sword down. Down on the moss. I’ll thank you to remember that, if anyone asks, because it’s just about the only reason that you’re not a cautionary tale.” He rubbed his face. “He didn’t press it. That’s what bothers me. He lodged it, and he withdrew it, in the same hour. They said he wanted it on the record, that’s all. As a courtesy.”

“He wishes it known,” said Nerissa quietly, “that he has noticed.”

“Aye.” Torren got up, heavily, and went to the window. He stood there, with his thick arms crossed, looking out over the sleeping Wards, and the dim black rim of the right mountain, and said, in a voice that was quite level: “He put your lines out, lad. With one finger. I’ve been Diamond for thirty years, and I never in my life met a man that could do that. I’m not sure that it’s a thing that can be done.” He did not turn. “And that’s a lieutenant.”

Nobody said anything. In the corner, by the fire, Orrin was holding the staff. He had been very quiet. He lifted his head.

“I would like it noted,” said Orrin, in a very small voice, “that I am now quite sure I do not want to meet the master.”

* * *

They saw the Peacock on the thirty-second day.

It was the Gilded Peacock Academy against the Thornwick Irregulars, in a Trial called The Open Lists, and it was, from first to last, an exhibition. The Floor had made a tourney-field, with pavilions, and a long white barrier, and ranks of flags. The Irregulars, who were a rough honest company of Tarn Belgrave sellswords, came out in mail and fought like a hedge on fire. And the Academy, in white and teal, in a double rank, with their rapiers flashing in the sun, took them to pieces. It was neat. It was quite beautiful. It was done to a rhythm, in time, as a dance is done, with twelve duelists moving in a single bright mechanism and a pair of masters at the ends of the line, who did not seem to move at all. Lord Valentin Brightcrest stood on a pavilion, with a silk handkerchief to his lips. And on the other side, on a pavilion of her own, in a glittering cuirass, with her long dark hair bound in a gold net, stood a tall lean woman of thirty, with a long cold nose and a pair of sharp black eyes, who was, Torren said, the Academy’s Mistress of Arms, a Cassandre Vaunt, and the only living swordswoman in the Republic who had ever beaten him, in a friendly bout, at the age of nineteen.

“She’s the one,” said Torren. “The lord’s a peacock. She’s the sword. She’s as good as anything I’ve seen in the Hall. She’s two, three of her, in a good year, and she’s been bred to it, for four generations.” He glanced at Fel. “I’d not be lightly rude to her.”

Fel did not answer. He was watching the end of the match. The last of the Irregulars was standing alone on the barrier, with a broken sword, in the middle of a ring of twelve points, and the Master of the Academy called, in his brass-bright, effortless, careless voice, across the whole of the field, a single sentence. It was not meant for the crowd. It was meant, Fel thought, for the Terrace. It was a remark upon the quality of the opponents, and the state of the Cup, and the democratization of a noble art, and its last word was, Boys.

He looked up. And he found, across the whole length of the sunlit field, that Lord Valentin was looking at the Seven Sorrows’ bench. He raised, with great languor, two fingers to his brow, in a salute.

“I’d like to put a knife,” said Thara, in a low shaking voice, “in that man’s hat.”

“I would hold your coat,” said Veyra.

* * *

The Quiet Kettle came into the Hall on the fiftieth day at a walk.

There was nothing else that they could have done. There were seven of them, all of an age, and the age was about a hundred and ten between them. They were old men and women of Dun Vurrim, in thick grey cardigans, with their feet in carpet slippers, and they came out onto the white Floor in a long, slow, mild procession, with their sticks and their spectacles, and their shawls, and a great copper kettle, with a spout like a swan’s neck, borne between two of them on a pole, and a child’s wagon, in which a very small, very old lady in a bonnet was sitting, knitting. The crowd, who had been in a fine boisterous temper, quieted. It was impossible not to. It was like watching a funeral that had decided to go for a picnic.

At the head of them, on a stick, in a flowered pinafore, with her white hair in a bun and her round pink face crinkled up into a hundred happy lines, came a very short old woman of about eighty. She was smiling. She looked about at the vast roaring bowl with an expression of the most peaceable approval, as at a rather nice flower-show, and saw Fel, across a hundred paces of sand, and waved.

“That’s her,” said Fel, with a sinking heart.

“Ottoline Mossback,” said Nerissa, “of the Quiet Kettle. She is a hundred and four years old, they say, and has not been beaten since the year of the last Cup, in a bout that she afterward described, I am told, as a misunderstanding.” She bit her lip. “She told us no, in the autumn, with a cup of tea and a plate of shortbread. I have never been so kindly insulted.”

It was the first time in fifty days that Fel had been afraid of an opponent in the old simple way. He had not been afraid of Dolly Pike. He had not feared the Peacock. But there was something about the great clean, warm, easy courtesy of the little old woman in the pinafore that frightened him down to the bone, as a smooth sea does a sailor who has once been out in a storm. He did not know what it was. He only knew that, by the end of the night before, with the Trial known and the whole company awake in the great hall, no one had been able to say it.

It was a Trial called The Lamplighters’ Walk.

* * *

The Floor made a maze. It did it in the space of a quarter-hour, with a groan and a clatter that went on and on, and when it had done it left a great grey labyrinth of stone, twenty feet high, a quarter-mile square, without a roof, and without a single wall that went straight. There was a gate at one end. There was a second gate at the other. And between them, in the dusk of a sky that the Wheelwrights had let fall to a long pale evening, there blew a wind.

It was not a gale. It was a thin steady cold soft wind, a wind like a breath, that came and went in the turnings of the maze and put out any flame. They were given lamps. There were seven of them, one for each of the company, small brass hand-lamps with a single flame, and a rule, which the Herald read out in a tired voice from the dais. Each guild was to carry its lamps from its gate to the opposite one. The first to arrive with four of seven alight had the Walk. And anyone could, in the course of the labyrinth, with a gentle hand, blow out another’s.

“It’s the oldest,” whispered Torren, at Fel’s ear, as they stood with their lamps in the dark. “It was the first Trial that they put in. It’s meant to be slow. It’s to see a guild that can go at the pace of the weakest, and no faster. There’s no killing in it. There’s no need. It’s patience.” He swallowed. “And it’s hers.”

A thin, clear, bell-like note came from the far end of the maze. It was a kettle’s whistle. And Fel, who had been looking at the walls of the labyrinth with all the care he could, with the inner eye that Torren had taught him, saw, to his deep dismay, that the great grey twisting maze was alive.

He could see the wind. It was a thing that he had never been able to do before. It ran through the stone passages like water in a drain, in a thousand thin bright threads, each of them a faint fine gold line of weight, of draught and drag and dip, and they tangled and twined through the whole of the maze in a vast quiet living web. And in the middle of it, near the far gate, quite still, like a spider in the center of a wheel, was a single bright knot. It was not a person. It was the kettle. It sat, with its spout up, over a tiny fire. And the steam from it, a long white soft plume, went out across the labyrinth, in the wind, in a thousand fine twists, and wherever the steam went, the threads bent.

“She’s steering it,” said Fel. His voice was hoarse. “It’s the kettle. It’s the steam. She’s got the whole wind in her hand.”

“Is that possible?” said Veyra.

“I don’t know. She’s doing it.”

It was, in the end, a simple thing, and a very old one. Ottoline Mossback had spent eighty years, in the little house on Kettle Lane, in making tea. She had made it in the same pot for all of them. And in that time she had learned, as a person learns the grain of a particular piece of wood, the way that heat goes up, and steam goes sideways, and a draught comes under a door, and she had made of it a thing that could not be called magic, and could not be called anything else. She did not fight. She breathed. And the whole of the Hall’s vast wintry wind answered her, as a flock of sheep answers an old, slow, tired dog. It leaned on the lamps of the Seven Sorrows, one by one, in a hundred soft invisible places. It took the flame of Thara’s, round the first corner, in a breath, so gently that she had not time to cry out. It took Brannoch’s. It took Orrin’s, and Orrin, who had been holding his lamp in both hands with the greatest care, made a faint noise like a dying kitten.

“I would like it noted,” said Orrin, in the dark, “that I have just lost, in under a minute, to a draft.”

“Hold still,” said Fel. “Everyone, hold still. Give me a moment.”

They stood in a knot at a corner of the labyrinth, with three lamps, and the soft wind sighing, and the thin silver sound of the whistle floating through the maze, high and clear and comfortable, like a woman humming in her kitchen. He shut his eyes. He thought about what Torren had said, about the lines, and what Nerissa said, about breath, and the little dome of water on the table, and the spoon. And he thought, in a quiet corner of his mind, that he had spent a year learning how to make a thing heavy.

He had not once tried to make a thing still.

It came quite easily, in the end. He did not do it to the wind. The wind was too big. He did it, one at a time, to the threads, in the way that a man might put out a hand to a swinging bell. He chose the nearest. It was a thin cold current, in the passage, running toward the lamps. He laid on it his attention, like a palm, and he hung it, as he hung a sword, in the great stone shoulder of the wall. He gave it, in a word, a weight. It sank. It lay along the floor of the passage like a sleeping cat, and the next one, behind it, ran up against it and piled, and the next, until, in the space of a minute, round the little knot of the Seven Sorrows, a calm had spread. It was a hollow of dead air, quite round, perhaps ten paces across, in which a candle would have stood as straight as a spear.

“Light them,” he said, through his teeth.

Veyra’s tinder-box clicked. Three lamps blossomed, and then four, and Thara, with a small triumphant crow, had her own again. They were moving. They moved in a ball, in the middle of a pocket of still air, as a bubble moves up a stream, and Fel in the front, with his eyes shut and his hands out, led them forward through the labyrinth, by the long grey walls, by the bright cold threads of the draught, in a slow, wary, shuffling walk. It was, he thought, the hardest thing that he had ever done. It was not strength. It was carrying. He was holding, at one time, in a bright maze of lines, perhaps three hundred separate currents, and every one of them was a tired child in his arms, and he could not put any of them down.

“Fel,” said Nerissa, quietly, at his elbow. She had put a hand between his shoulder-blades. It was cool, and wet, and steadying, and it took, in some way that he never understood, a little of the weight. “Breathe. In for four. Out for eight. That is all.”

He breathed. They went round the corner.

Ottoline Mossback was waiting at the next.

She was standing in the middle of the passage in her pinafore, with her stick, and a kind small crinkled smile, and in her free hand, tied to her wrist by a ribbon, a very small lamp. The flame stood straight and bright. She had three of her company behind her, three white-haired old men with their lamps lit, and the great copper kettle, which had been dragged along on its pole, was sitting on the stone, with the steam from its spout going up in a long steady line.

“Well, now,” said Ottoline Mossback. She said it with real pleasure. “I did think that it would be you. I said to Gerda, last night, I said, that boy’s going to do something clever, you mark me. You’ll have been told that the Kettle is all in the steam, I expect, my dear. It’s not. It’s the waiting.” She tapped her stick on the stone. “I’ve waited longer than you’ve been alive, young man, for a lad that could put his hand on a wind. You’re the first. I’d be very sorry to see you lose to a draught.”

“I’d be sorry too,” said Fel.

“Then we’ll be quick,” said Ottoline Mossback, and smiled, and tipped the kettle.

It was not boiling water that came out. It was a sound. It rose from the great copper belly in a long, low, single, rushing note, and the passage filled in an instant with a white scalding fog, and in the fog, as it went by, he felt the old woman’s will as one feels a hand on the back of the neck. She did not strike at him. She did not even move. She laid the whole weight of her eighty years on the steam, and the steam, which had been a plume, became a hand, and the hand closed, softly, gently, kindly, round the pocket of calm that he had made. It squeezed. He felt it go. The little round hollow of dead air shivered, and buckled, and began to fold, and the lamps in the middle of it, one by one, began to gutter. He had three hundred currents in his arms. And every one of them, at once, with a sigh, was beginning to wake up.

“I can’t hold it,” he said, thinly.

“Then do not hold it,” said Veyra.

She had stepped in front of him. She had her bow up, with an arrow on it, and the arrow was alight. She had put the point to her own lamp, and it blazed, a small fierce white star in the fog, and she drew it to the ear, and her violet eyes were quite steady.

“Torren,” she said. “The wall.”

“Aye!” roared Torren.

He had been waiting for it. He was already at the wall of the labyrinth, on the left, with Maude drawn back in both great fists, and his feet apart, and the whole broad bulk of him swelled like a bellows, and he struck. It was not a blow at a person. It was a blow at twenty feet of old gray stone. And at the same instant, Fel, with the very last of his strength, took the weight out of the wall and gave it to the hammer, and the wall, which weighed a hundred tons, weighed a feather, and Maude, which weighed forty pounds, weighed a mountain, and the whole of the great grey barrier went over, in one piece, like a door, and fell outward, and let in the open sky.

The wind went. It poured through the gap like a flood through a sluice. It left the labyrinth, with a roar, and ran away across the empty Floor in a thousand directions, all at once, and the steam, with nothing to push against, went soft and shapeless, and fell. The fog thinned. Fel opened his eyes. In the clean cold air, on the broken stone, Ottoline Mossback was standing with her stick in her hand and her small flame still burning, and she was delighted.

“Oh, you wicked boy,” said Ottoline Mossback. “You’ve cheated. You’ve gone and let the wind out!”

“It’s a wall,” said Fel. “It was in the way.”

“It was a very good wall.” She sighed. She looked at the gap, and at the sky, and at her whole company, with their small bright lamps, all burning, and she said, with great serenity, to the Marshal in the distance, who was running up, with a small flag: “The Rules say the Walk, from gate to gate. They don’t say where. I’ll not argue it. I’m not a young woman, and it’s a long way, and I’d as soon have my tea.” She patted the kettle. “You’ve a long road yet, my dears. Mind the Eyebrow. He’s a tedious man, but he’s very thorough.”

They went across the open Floor, in the long evening, in the sight of forty thousand people, with seven lit lamps. Veyra took the last gate at a run. And behind them, as they went, in the middle of the broken maze, the Quiet Kettle sat down in a circle round the copper pot, in the dusk, with their sticks across their knees, and began, with a great deal of ceremony, and in perfect good order, to make the tea.

Torren looked back. He was grinning. He was very tired. He had one hand on Fel’s shoulder, and he leaned on it, heavily, as the Marshals’ horn began to sound.

“One,” said the old man. “That’s the thirty-two done, lad. We’re in the last sixteen. We’re in the Hall.” He looked up at the pale evening sky. “Thirty-three years. Thirty-three years I’ve waited to be in that place, and I’d not have missed it for the world.”

He did not say anything else for a very long time. And in the stands, from somewhere very high and far off, in the thick golden dusk, a small neat figure in a silk coat, who had been watching the whole of the match with a handkerchief to his lips, rose, and very slowly, very thoughtfully, began to clap.