Chapter 266: It’s him!

"It’s him!"

The shout came from somewhere above, thin and high, and it cracked in the middle the way a child’s voice does when she runs out of breath. Encrid looked up and saw a small figure running toward the keep with her skirts gathered in one fist. It was Wren. She had grown since the Wall, or perhaps she had only become thinner.

He kept walking.

By the time he reached the first houses, the news had gone ahead of him, and he could see it moving up the ridge door by door. A woman came out with a bucket and stopped on her step. A man on a roof put down his hammer. Two boys who had been chasing a goat stood still and let it go.

Encrid had half expected noise and had been a little afraid of it, but nobody shouted. Instead, the street went quiet as he passed, the way a hall goes quiet when someone important comes in, and behind him he could hear the whispering begin.

The young lord.

It can’t be.

Look at his hair.

An old soldier with a Fourth Watch badge on his coat rose from a bench, put his heels together and saluted with a shaking hand. Encrid nodded to him, because he did not trust himself to do more, and kept going. If he stopped now, he was not sure he would be able to start again.

He was moving towards the first thing he saw on the ridge - the stone that sat at the highest point. The path to it ran above the keep, up a slope of trampled grass. Halfway up, he had to rest. His legs were trembling, and the rope had worn a raw line into his shoulder through the coat.

When he glanced back, he saw that the crowd had stopped too. There were two hundred people on the slope now, perhaps more, standing in loose rows down the hill. None of them came any closer. They waited, and when he started climbing again, they followed at the same distance.

The stone stood at the top of the ridge. And on it engraved were three thousand, four hundred and eighty-two names in neat rows, down a face of pale grey rock taller than a man. At the bottom, the masons had left an empty space, and in that space stood a small blue-glass lamp in an iron frame.

It was unlit. The glass was clean. Somebody had been wiping it every day.

Gus was sitting in the grass beside it with his back against the stone. He was on his feet before Encrid saw him move, standing very straight, with his hands at his sides and his face completely white.

Encrid untied the rope and set the strongbox down in the grass. Then, because his knees would not hold him much longer anyway, he knelt in front of the stone and picked up the lamp. It was cold, and lighter than he remembered.

On the last morning at the Span, before he walked to the north end of the bridge, he had pressed it into Gus’s hands along with a bundle of papers and told him he would want them back.

"I said I’d want it back," he said.

Gus opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He tried again, and there was only a small sound in his throat, like something catching. Then light flared around his hands. It was not the faint glow that had come and gone around his knuckles for the past weeks.

It was white and gold and bright enough that the people nearest on the slope stepped back, and it ran over his fingers like water. Gus did not seem to notice it at all. He was looking at Encrid as if blinking might make him disappear.

"You kept it clean," Encrid said.

Gus nodded. His face crumpled, and he nodded again, harder, and wiped his eyes with the back of a glowing hand.

"Every day," he managed. "Young master. Every day."

When Encrid tried to stand, Gus was there before he had finished trying, one hand under his elbow, lifting him as easily as he had once lifted sacks of grain on the Wall.

Footsteps pounded up the slope behind them.

Rael came over the crest at a dead run, his left arm still in its sling and the sling flapping against his chest. He saw them and stopped so suddenly that he nearly fell. Then he straightened his coat with his good hand and walked the last twenty paces at an ordinary pace, as if he had only happened to be passing.

"You’re alive," Rael said.

"I am."

"Good." He cleared his throat. "You owe the guild for a month’s worth of accounts."

"I know."

"Good," Rael said again, and looked away at the view for a while.

Zuri was the last to arrive. She did not slow down, and she did not stop to look at him. She crossed the final ten paces at a run, and when she reached him she drew back her hand and slapped him hard on the shoulder, exactly the way she had at the Riven.

"You idiot," she said.

Then she put both arms around him and held on. She pressed her face into his coat and did not let go, and he could feel her shoulders shaking.

He put his free arm around her carefully, because he was holding the lamp in the other, and found that he could not think of a single thing worth saying.

Over her shoulder, Encrid looked down the slope. People were crying openly now. Some were smiling, and a few were doing both, wiping their faces with their sleeves and laughing at themselves for it. The old Fourth Watch soldier had climbed up after him and stood with his hat crushed in both hands.

At the edge of the crowd, a little apart from everyone else, stood a grey-haired man in a plain black coat. A young woman beside him held a closed notebook against her chest. They were the only two people on the slope who were not smiling.

The man was simply watching, carefully and patiently, the way Encrid himself might read a ledger he had never seen before, looking for the line that did not add up.

The Reaper had told him about them on the road. Two Inquisitors from the capital, sent to find out what the Wall’s Strategist had done and where his power had come from.

’The Inquisitors,’ Encrid thought. ’Of course.’

? ? ?