Chapter 105: The Lamp That Lit Nothing

Theo stood in the road and looked at eight inches of pine.

’Ten feet in one night.’

He did the sum standing there. Two miles of valley between the line and Harrowgate. Ten feet a night gave the building a little over a thousand nights and a man could grow old waiting for that.

Then he drove a second stake at the new edge and went down and cooked breakfast, and came back at noon.

The second stake had four inches of daylight on it.

He put in nine stakes that day.

By the fourth he had stopped pretending it was ten feet a night and started writing times on his forearm beside the numbers. By the seventh the quill had gone through the last dry corner of his skin and he was writing on the back of his hand.

By the ninth, with the light going and his fingers past feeling, he stood at the edge of a black wall that had eaten four hundred yards of a mountain road since the morning and did the last piece of arithmetic he was going to enjoy for some time.

’Four hundred yesterday. Ten feet between midnight and dawn... It’s accelerating.’

He walked back down the road faster than he had walked up it.

Ordis was in the store with the lamp when he came through the north door, and she took one look at him and set the lamp down on the salt barrel.

He put both hands flat on the barrel head and got the words in the right order first.

"Six days."

"..."

"Give or take half a day, and the half day is on the wrong side, because it’s speeding up and I don’t know what it’s speeding up toward."

Theo turned his hand over and showed her the numbers on it as if that would help.

"Six days and that thing is standing where you’re standing."

Ordis looked at the ink on the back of a stranger’s hand for a while.

Then she picked the lamp back up, and spoke with caution.

"What am I..."

"That’s how much time we have left until whatever it is blocking the Pass reaches here."

Ordis went dead silent.

Neither of them told the room that night. They told the room the next morning, all at once, with the fire built up and everybody fed first.

Berrin took it standing up at the back with his arms crossed and got to the point ahead of everybody.

"So are we gonna go?"

"That’s one of the two options."

"What’s the other one?"

Theo had the map of the post on the table, which was a carter’s map and showed the road and nothing else.

Tapping the stone square at the centre of it, he answered:

"We shut every door, build the fire up, and find out if a stone wall means anything to it. Ordis has been on this road thirty-eight years and these walls have held all of it."

He put the quill down on the map.

"I’ve got no idea what’s in that dark. Neither have you. So don’t let me tell you the other one’s the clever choice, because I don’t know that either."

The room made a noise.

Wick, of all people, was the one who put a hand up.

He had spent the previous evening on something and he brought it out of the toolroll and set it on the table, and it was a storm lantern with the glass out of it and a fresh wick and a reservoir of good oil, and he lit it in front of everybody.

Then he carried it out the north door.

They followed him. All forty-one of them stood in the snow in front of the post early in the morning and watched the tinker walk sixty yards up the road to the edge of the black and hold his arm out.

The flame stayed lit.

Nothing at all came out of it. Not a glow, not even a smear, or a ring on the snow. There was a lit lamp inside the line and Theo could see the fire on the wick, small and yellow and perfectly healthy, and it lit nothing whatsoever, and eight inches from the flame the world was gone.

Wick brought his arm back. The lamp came out into the morning and threw a weak little circle on the snow like any lamp.

He put it down carefully on the road, and then he sat down beside it in the snow, because his legs had stopped agreeing with him.

That settled the vote, though nobody called it a vote.

Theo went into the black himself at noon, on a rope, against Ordis telling him not to and Berrin telling him he would go instead.

The rope was a carter’s line off Yesh’s wagon, forty yards of it, jerked round the boulder and round Theo’s chest, and the arrangement was that he would go in walking and come out being dragged and there would be no discussion about which.

He stepped over the line.

His eyes went on working. They worked perfectly, and they reported to him with complete confidence that there was nothing in front of them to report.

Cold came through his coat in one push. Not the cold outside. Something nearer the cold of a cellar wall.

’Sound’s wrong.’

He scuffed his boot deliberately and the scuff arrived too quickly and stopped too soon, with no room round it at all, and he was standing in the open on a mountain road and the road sounded like a corridor.

Theo counted thirteen steps.

On the fourteenth he stopped. Thirty feet to his left, out in the middle of a snowfield where nothing should be able to stand, something took a breath.

One intake, unhurried, the sort of breath a man takes before he says something.

Then the rope came tight round his chest and Harrowgate pulled him out of there at a speed that removed most of the skin from his left palm.

He lay on his back in the snow in the daylight with four people shouting at him and looked straight up at a white sky.

’That wasn’t a hunting sound...’

He sat up and spat and got his hand under him.

"We go tonight."

Berrin, hauling him up by the good arm, argued into his face:

"You just said you couldn’t see!"

"I couldn’t."

"Then how—"

Theo pressed the skinned palm flat against his coat and said it again.

"I couldn’t see, and I was in there almost fifteen steps and whatever is there let me back out... I think it doesn’t like visitors."

Berrin continued to stare at Theo, dismayed.