The Hall of Cael Meddan

"Put me down," Dorrit said. "Put me down, you great walking icicle. I can walk. I walked over the Cloudwall. I walked from Dall to Scarrow with a pack the size of a cow and a sergeant telling me I was doing it wrong. I can walk across a bit of snow."

The Chainman walked. He did not put her down.

They had been walking since the morning. At first, if she twisted round in the chain and looked back over his arm, she could see Scarrow, a black knuckle of rock with a fire on top of it, getting smaller. Then the haze had come down and taken the crag, and there was nothing behind them but his footprints going back across the brown fields. Then the fields turned white too, and there was nothing at all.

She had screamed for the first mile, and she was not ashamed of it, because anybody would have screamed. She had screamed Wren's name, and Bracken's, and a good many other things besides. She had hit him with the one arm she had got loose until her knuckles bled from the rime on the chain, and he had not noticed. She might as well have hit a church.

Then she had stopped screaming, because it was using up her breath and she was going to need it.

Now she was talking, and she was going to keep talking, because if she stopped she would start thinking, and then she would start crying. Dorrit Fallowmere was not going to cry in front of this thing if it killed her, which it might.

"I'll make a bargain with you," she said. "Put me down, and I'll walk beside you, and I won't run off. I give you my word. You can put your chain round my wrist, if you like. Only put me down. My legs have gone to sleep. My backside's gone to sleep. I'm cramped into a shape the gods never meant a woman to be."

He walked. "Right," Dorrit said. "Right. You're not a bargaining man. Fine."

The strange thing was the cold. She had felt that chain go round her on the gate stair and thought, that's it, then. She had seen what it did to Ewan Tull, and she had waited for the terrible burning cold to come up her arms and into her chest, and it had never come.

It was cold in his arm, the cold of a January morning with the bedroom window left open, so that her breath smoked and her nose ran and froze on her lip. But she was not freezing. There was a sort of skin around her, a small bubble of ordinary winter, and outside it, very close, was something else.

She found out about the something else on the first afternoon. She wriggled one leg loose from the chain and kicked it out over the edge of his arm, and the air bit her.

It bit through her boot and her stocking and into her foot like teeth, and she shrieked and yanked the leg back in. For an hour afterward her toes burned, and when she pulled her boot off to look, the skin of her big toe had gone hard and pale as the rind on a cheese.

"You're holding it off me," she said to him. She said it slowly, working it out. "The cold. You're holding it back. On purpose." He walked. "Why?"

Nothing.

"Well, thank you, I suppose. No. I'm not thanking you. You took me off a stair in front of my cousin. I'm not thanking you for anything." She pulled her boot back on with difficulty. "But don't stop."

He never stopped. That was the next thing she learned. He did not stop at dusk, or when it got dark, but walked on through the night at the same long stride, never hurrying and never slowing. The stars came out in their thousands, and the snow shone blue under them, and his chain creaked softly with every step.

She slept in the end, without meaning to. She woke with a jolt, with her face against the rime of his arm, and for a moment did not know where she was. Then she did, and she lay there with her heart banging and the tears coming up hot behind her eyes, and made herself talk.

"Comfrey," she said. Her voice shook. She made it stop shaking. "Comfrey, for bones. Knitbone, my gran called it. Not Granna. My other gran. The one who died. You pound the root and bind it on with linen. Feverfew for headaches. Yarrow for bleeding. Willow bark for fevers and aches, and you boil it down till it's bitter as sin and you make them drink it anyway, and they curse you, and they get better." She swallowed. "Coltsfoot for coughs. Marigold for sores. Mallow for a burn."

She could have done with mallow. Her hands were still wrapped in the linen from the pitch-pots, gone stiff and dry now, and under it the blisters throbbed.

"Horehound," she said. "Horehound for a cough, too. Hyssop. Tansy. That's Granna's name. Tansy. You put it in the bedding for fleas, and it works, and it smells like a wet dog."

She talked her way through every plant in her garden at Dall. When she ran out of herbs she did remedies, and when she ran out of remedies she did the families of Dallbridge. She told him who had married whom, and whose baby was really whose, and why Hobb Millson's cousin had left for Merrow in a hurry.

The Chainman walked on and never said a word.

Toward dawn she ran out of things to say, and cried a little after all, quietly, with her face turned into the chain so that he would not see. As if he would have cared.

On the second day they passed the first of the standing dead.

She saw it from a long way off, a dark upright shape alone on the snow, and as they came nearer she saw it was a man. He stood up to his knees in the snow with his face turned up to the sky, and snow had heaped on his shoulders and his hat. He wore a long coat of a kind she had seen once before, on a dead man on the high pasture above Dall, a lifetime ago in August.

They walked past him at twenty yards. As they came level, his head turned.

It turned slowly, with a small crackle of ice, and the clouded white eyes found her. Not the Chainman; her. The head followed her as they went by, and when she twisted round to look back, it was still turned after her, watching.

"Oh, no," Dorrit whispered. "Oh, no, no."

After that there were more. They stood on the snow in ones and twos, and then in little groups, like people waiting for a cart. There was a woman with a bundle, and two children holding hands, and a man with a dead dog on a rotted lead, the dog as white-eyed as its master. None of them moved its feet, but every one of them turned its head as she passed. The Chainman walked through the middle of them and took no notice, and every head followed Dorrit, until she stopped talking altogether and pressed her face into the chain and tried not to see.

On the third day he stopped. She was so surprised she said, "What?" out loud.

They were in a hollow among low hills, by a frozen stream, where the tops of stone walls stuck up out of the snow beside a roofless gable end, black against the white. It had been a farm. He stood by the wall of what had been the yard and looked at the snow at his feet. Then he stooped, slowly, and she felt the whole great height of him fold and the chain creak.

He put his free hand into a drift by the wall and drew something out, and straightened, and held it in front of her face.

It was a hare, frozen stiff as a board, its fur white with frost and its eyes like two glass beads. He held it by the hind legs and held it out to her.

Dorrit stared at it, and then she started to laugh. She could not help it. It came up out of her in a great helpless whoop, and she laughed until she was crying again and the tears froze on her face, and she did not care.

"I can't eat that," she gasped. "You daft article. It's frozen. It's raw. I've no knife, I've no fire, I've no pot. What do you want me to do, gnaw it like a fox?"

He held it out. "No." She wiped her face on her shoulder. "No. Thank you. Daft thing. Put it down."

He looked at the hare for a while, turning it a little in his hand. Then he put it back in the drift, carefully, just as it had lain, and straightened, and walked on.

She had a heel of bread in her apron pocket from the wall at Scarrow, and she had been saving it. That night she ate half of it a crumb at a time, and ate snow for water until her teeth ached.

"You've not eaten anything," she said to him in the dark. "I've been watching. Three days. You don't eat, you don't sleep, you don't stop. You don't talk. What are you?"

He walked.

"You talked to Wren," she said. "On the stair. You said bring it home. You said my book. So you can talk, you great lump, you just won't talk to me." The snow creaked under him for a mile. "It's not your book. It's ours. It's been ours since before anyone can remember." The chain creaked. Nothing else.

On the fourth day, at dusk, she saw the city.

They came over a long white rise, and it lay there below them. She had never seen a city. She had heard of Merrow all her life and meant to see it one day, and eat a quince there and look at the sea, but she had never pictured anything like this.

It filled the valley. A frozen river ran along the near side of it in a wide gray curve. Beyond the river the city climbed in terraces of pale stone, roofs and towers and walls all white under the snow. There were bridges and squares and spires, and the last light came long and gold from the west and shone straight down the streets. And on a hill at the heart of it, higher than everything, stood a great round building whose dome caught the last of the sun and shone.

Nothing moved there, not a bird, not a curl of smoke. The city lay under the snow and made no sound at all.

"Oh," Dorrit said.

The Chainman walked down toward it and crossed the river by a great smooth span of ice, gray and old, that went from bank to bank without a sound under his feet. On the far side was a gateway in a white wall with no gate left in it, and he walked through, and they were in the streets.

The dead were everywhere, hundreds of them, standing in the snow where they had stopped. A woman with a basket on her arm stood bent a little forward at the corner of an alley, as if she had been hurrying. A man stood in a doorway with his hand on the latch. Two old men sat side by side on a bench under a heap of snow, and a little girl stood in a square with a hoop and a stick. They all wore clothes from long ago, long coats and high collars and hoods, their bright colors gone gray with frost.

And every one of them turned its head as she went by.

It made a sound. All down the street, as the Chainman carried her through, heads turned on frozen necks one after another, each with a small dry crack of ice. The cracking ran ahead of them and behind them, and a hundred white eyes followed her.

She shut her eyes and kept them shut all the way up the hill.

He put her down in a room.

He did it gently. He set her on her feet on a stone floor and the chain fell away from her. Her legs had not held her up for four days, and they folded, and she sat down hard. She looked up at him. He was so tall that his head was lost in the shadows under the ceiling.

Then he turned and stooped out through the door, and the door shut, and something heavy slid across it outside. She heard the chain go dragging away down a corridor until she could not hear it anymore.

Dorrit sat on the floor. It was a small cold room of stone with no fire. In it were a wooden bed-frame with a heap of old furs, a table, a chair, and a big iron-bound chest. High in the far wall, well above her head, was a narrow slit of a window with no glass, and through it she could see a strip of sky going dark.

She sat on the floor until her legs would work again. Then she crawled under the furs on the bed-frame and pulled them over her head, and shook.

In the morning a dead woman brought her breakfast.

She came in with a tray in her hands, a gray-faced thing in a servant's apron from another age, and Dorrit scrambled back against the wall with her fists up. The dead woman did not look at her. It set the tray on the table and turned and walked out again, stiff and slow, and the door shut.

On the tray were a cup of water, a spoon, and a bowl of steaming broth with meat in it.

Dorrit sniffed it and poked the meat with the spoon, and then she ate it all, because she was not a fool, and it was the best thing she had tasted in her life.

She had just put the spoon down when the door opened again, and an old man came in.

He was slender and not very tall, and he moved with a courtly slowness, as if every step were being watched and he wanted it to be a good one. He wore a long robe that had once been some dark color and was now gray with frost, and his white hair was brushed back from a high forehead. His eyebrows were rimed, she saw, and there was frost on his lashes too, and in the fine lines at the corners of his eyes. The hands folded in front of him were long and pale and beautiful, like a musician's.

He smiled at her. "Good morning," he said. "I hope the broth was not too dreadful. We have very little call for cooking in this house, and I am afraid the art has been somewhat lost."

His voice was soft and dry and pleasant, a kindly schoolmaster's voice, or a very good doctor's.

Dorrit stood up and put the table between them.

"Who are you?"

"Ah." He inclined his head. "Forgive me. You must call me the Surveyor. Names are dangerous things in this house, my dear girl, and I have been careful with mine for a very long time." He glanced at the chair. "May I sit? I am older than I look, and I look very old."

He sat without waiting for an answer and arranged his robe over his knees, and a faint chill hung about him, the chill of a cellar.

"You are frightened," he said. "Of course you are. You have been carried a long way by a creature you do not understand, into a city you have never heard of. You have been very brave. I watched you come in. Believe me when I say that no harm will come to you here."

"Tell that to the dead woman with the tray."

"Poor Jenet. She was a kitchen maid, you know, in this very house. She will not hurt you. None of them will, unless I let them." He smiled again. "Sit down, my dear girl. Please. I should like to tell you a story."

She did not sit. He told her anyway.

He told it beautifully. He told her of a winter that came down out of the north long ago and did not end. It was a killing cold that came into the houses and the cradles, and people died in their beds by the thousand. He told her about the Survey and its seven masters, who were wise and brave and loved their people, and how they had found a way to save them. They had written every living name in the realm on the walls of a great room in this Hall, and what the keeper's hand wrote was kept, and so the people lived.

"A million souls," he said. "Farmers. Weavers. Children. Written into safety. You cannot imagine, my dear, what it was to stand in that room while the names went up on the walls, and know that each one was a life."

"And the cold?" Dorrit said. "Where did it go?"

His pale eyes rested on her. "It had to go somewhere," he said gently. "That is the nature of cold. It was housed. We housed it. It was a great sorrow. It was a necessary one." He folded his beautiful hands. "And when it was done, most of our people went east over the mountains, and the keeper went with them to keep the book. And I stayed here, to watch over what we had made. I have watched over it ever since."

"The big one," Dorrit said. "The one with the chain. That's your cold."

"That is our poor Walker."

"What does he want?"

"What we all want, in the end. To be finished." The Surveyor leaned forward a little. "Now. Tell me about your cousin."

Dorrit's stomach went cold. "What about her?"

"Everything. She is the keeper now, I think? The Walker went all the way to your valley and came home without the book, so the old woman cannot have had it. The girl has it. What is her name?"

"Ask the Walker."

"He does not know names. It is his great difficulty." The Surveyor smiled. "What is she like? Is she clever? Is she brave? Is she rash? How many times has she written in the book, and what did it cost her? What does she love? You, I think. She must love you very much. You are her sister?"

"Cousin."

"Cousin. Of course. But you were raised together. She would come a long way for you."

"She'd come a long way to kick your teeth in," Dorrit said.

He laughed, a charming laugh, light and rueful. "I am sure she would. I am sure she would try. That is what I hoped."

He stood up, slowly, and smoothed his robe.

"Rest," he said. "Eat. You will have everything you need. And when your cousin comes, we shall all sit down together, and talk sensibly, and do what is necessary." He paused at the door. "It is so very good to talk to a living person, my dear girl. You cannot imagine how I have missed it."

The door shut behind him, and the bar slid across.

Dorrit stood behind the table with her fists clenched until the shaking stopped. Then she looked up at the window.

It took her until the next afternoon.

She dragged the chest across the floor first, oak and iron and as heavy as a pony, rocking it a corner at a time with her back against the wall and her feet braced. The scrape of it on the stone was so loud that she kept stopping to listen at the door, but nobody came. When she had it under the window she set the table on top of the chest and the chair on top of the table, and stood and looked at the tower she had built.

"Rot it," she said, and climbed.

The chair wobbled and the table creaked, but she got her hands on the sill and pulled herself up and looked out, and the cold air hit her in the face. The window was very narrow. It had been made for a thin man, or a cat.

"Gods' teeth," Dorrit said. "I'm too much woman for this window."

She got down again and took off her coat, and her waistcoat, and her apron with the last crust of bread in the pocket, and climbed back up in her shirt. She put her arms through the window first and her head after them, and pushed with her feet on the chair. The chair fell over with a crash, and there she was, stuck half in and half out with her feet kicking in the air.

She swore until the air went blue. Then she breathed all the way out and wriggled, and scraped a good deal of skin off her ribs, and came through all at once onto a ledge of snow. She was on a roof, a long slope of lead under snow running up to a stone ridge, and behind her, very close, rose the dome. It was enormous, a great curve of white stone ribs and old gray glass going up and up, and in front of her, below the edge of the roof, lay the city.

She could see all of it, the streets going down the hill in every direction and the frozen river curving through. Past the bridge of ice she had crossed, the white country went away east. The dead stood in the streets, tiny and dark. The city lay in the cold afternoon light like a painting, and she was the only warm thing in it.

East. She looked east, because somewhere out across all that white was Wren. Dorrit knew it in her bones. Wren had stood on the wall at Scarrow and watched her carried off, and by now she would be packing her bag, and arguing with somebody, and coming.

"Don't," Dorrit whispered. "Don't you dare. He wants you to."

She had to get down. She crawled along the edge of the roof on her hands and knees, looking for a way, past a gutter of carved stone and a drop of forty feet into a courtyard, toward a buttress. If she could only get along to the buttress—

Something moved on the roof behind her.

She looked round. A hatch had opened in the lead up near the ridge, and a gray head was coming out of it, and then shoulders, and then another head beside it.

There were three of them. They came out onto the roof slowly, stiff in the cold, and then they turned their white eyes on her and did not move slowly anymore.

Dorrit ran along the edge of the roof in the snow, slipping, with the drop on her left and the long slope of lead on her right. The first of them came down the slope at her. She put her shoulder into it as she would have shouldered a gate, and it slid sideways over the edge, and she heard it hit the courtyard below.

The second one caught her ankle. The cold went into her deep and sharp, to the bone. She screamed and kicked, and her other boot hit it in the face, and it let go. She got up. The third one was in front of her with its gray hands out.

"Enough."

The voice came from the hatch, and it was not loud. The dead stopped as a dog stops at its master's whistle, with their hands still out.

The Surveyor stood in the hatchway, holding his robe up out of the snow in one elegant hand.

"My dear girl," he said reproachfully. "You will catch your death."

They brought her down through the Hall.

Two of the dead held her by her shirt-sleeves, carefully, not touching her skin, and the Surveyor walked ahead with a lamp. Her ankle burned where the thing had gripped it. Above the boot was a white band of frost-burn, hard as wax and already darkening at the edges.

The Hall was vast. They went down stairs and along galleries and through rooms so big and dim that the lamp could not find their walls, and everything was stone and everything was cold. There was frost on the pillars and the floors, and in the corners stood more of the dead in the robes of clerks and servants, turning their heads as she passed.

They came along a gallery with a stone rail, and the Surveyor paused.

"Look," he said. "Since you are here. It is worth seeing."

Below the rail was a round room, very high, going up into shadow, and its walls were covered with writing. From the floor to as high as she could see, the stone was written over in small close lines of silver-black script that shone faintly in the lamplight. They were names; she knew it without being able to read one. There were thousands upon thousands of them going round and round the walls and up into the dark, more names than there could be people in the world. A black stone lectern stood alone at its center.

Across from the door, against the far wall, stood a tall arch of stone, and the names covered that too, every stone of it, up both sides and round the curve.

All but one. At the very top, in the keystone of the arch, was a smooth panel of pale stone with nothing written on it at all.

Dorrit looked at the blank, and without knowing why, she felt the hair stand up on her arms.

"The Roll," the Surveyor said softly, beside her. "Every one of them saved." He lifted the lamp away. "Come. You must have that ankle seen to."

They put her back in her room. They took away the chest and the table and the chair, and left her the bed-frame and the furs and her coat, and a pot of grease for the burn that smelled of mutton. The bar slid across the door.

It was dark, and the window was a slit of stars.

Dorrit lay under the furs with her ankle throbbing and her ribs scraped raw, and she did not cry, because she had done enough crying on the way here to last her. She lay and looked at the dark, more frightened than she had been in all her life.

She began to hum, and the tune came by itself: the Old Reel, the one every child in Dall learned before its letters. She hummed it into the furs, bright and quick, as Wren played it at the Bridge Inn at harvest. It made her think of the heat, and Hobb's red face, and the floor shaking under the dancers. She hummed it through the turn in the middle and up to the high note where it always stopped, and she stopped there.

The room was quiet. Then, through the door, from the corridor outside, somebody began to hum.

It was a low voice, hoarse and a little cracked, as if it had not been used in a long time. It took up the tune where she had stopped and went on into the second half. It was the dark, stamping, turning half that Old Senna had played in the moot hall at Scarrow, which no one in Dall had ever heard. It hummed it all the way through, slowly, feeling for each note.

Dorrit lay under the furs and did not breathe.

The humming reached the end of the tune, and stopped.

Outside the door, iron shifted on stone.