The Chainman's Guest

On her third night in the Hall, the humming stopped outside Dorrit's door. She sat bolt upright in her furs in the dark with her hands over her mouth, and thought, very clearly, mother of mercy, I've gone mad.

She took her hands away from her mouth.

"Who's there?" she said.

No answer.

"I heard you. Don't think I didn't. Who's there?"

Nothing. The room was black except for the slit of stars in the high window. Dorrit sat and listened to her heart banging, and thought about the tune. Nobody in the world knew the second half of it except Wren, and Old Senna, and a hall full of Stayers a hundred and twenty miles away, and whoever was in the corridor.

"Wren?" she whispered, though she knew it wasn't.

Then she did the bravest thing she had ever done, braver than the torch at Scarrow gate, because at Scarrow she hadn't had time to think. She hummed the first half again. Her voice came out thin and wobbling, and she was ashamed of it, and she went on anyway, right up to the high note where the tune in Dall always stopped.

The second half came back through the door.

It was slow, and whoever was humming it didn't have it right. He lost his way in the middle, where the tricky turn was, and went back and found it again, but it was the tune.

Then the bar on the outside of the door lifted with a scrape of iron, and the door opened.

The cold came in first, across the floor in white ferns, fast and crackling. It ran over the flagstones and round the legs of the bed-frame, and stopped a hand's breadth from Dorrit's feet, and came no further. Then he came in.

He had to stoop under the lintel, and then he had to stay stooped, because the ceiling was not high enough for him. The rime on him gave off a faint gray shine, like snow at night. The chain was wound round him from his shoulders to his knees in iron links as long as her hand. The end of it trailed behind him across the floor with a sound like a rake on gravel. His face was lost in the rime and the shadow under the ceiling.

Dorrit pressed her back against the wall.

"Get out," she said. Her voice was a squeak. "What do you want? Get out. You get out of my room."

He did not get out. He went to the wall beside the door and sat down on the floor with his back against it and his long knees drawn up, and the chain settled round him with a clink. He sat there all night.

He did not move and he did not speak, but now and then, very softly, he hummed a little of the tune, and lost it, and stopped. Dorrit sat against her own wall with her knees up and her fists clenched and did not sleep, and watched the white shape of him until her eyes watered.

At the first gray in the high window he stood up and went out, stooping, and the frost went out after him in a long white tongue. She heard the bar drop into place outside.

Then she put her face in her knees and shook for an hour.

"You must not mind him," said the Surveyor.

He came in the middle of the morning, as he always did. This time two of his dead servants came behind him with a brazier, a tray, and the little table that had been taken away. He wore a signet ring on one finger, and he moved his hands when he talked, as if he were conducting music.

"He's harmless to you, my dear girl," he said. "Quite harmless. He will not let the cold touch you. He carried you all this way without so much as a chilblain, did he not?"

"He sat in my room all night," Dorrit said. "Staring."

"Did he? Well. He's lonely, I expect. He has been alone a long time." The Surveyor smiled at her. "As have I. You'll forgive an old man for enjoying your company. Have you eaten?"

One of the servants was Jenet, the kitchen maid, with her hair still pinned up under the frost and her gray-blue hands on the tray. The other was a boy of about Pip's age in a baker's cap, who set the table down and stepped back against the wall. Jenet came toward the table with the tray.

She was slow, and her hands were stiff. As she passed close by Dorrit the tray tipped, and the jug slipped from it and broke on the floor at Dorrit's feet, and the water ran out across the stone and began to freeze. Two loaves rolled after it. Jenet stood looking down at them with the tilted tray in her hands and her white eyes open, as if she were trying to remember what came next.

"Oh dear," said the Surveyor.

He did not raise his voice. He said something quietly to the baker's boy, and the boy took Jenet by the arm and led her out, and the tray stayed where she had dropped it.

"She can't help it," Dorrit said. "She's dead. It's only water."

"Come to the window, my dear."

"I can't reach the window."

He looked at the boy, who had come back in, and the boy carried the little table to the wall under the window slit and set it there. The Surveyor held out his hand to help her up, and Dorrit did not take it.

"I would so much rather you saw," he said. "It saves explaining later."

She climbed onto the table because she could not think what else to do, and put her hands on the cold sill and looked down.

Below the window, forty feet down, was the courtyard she had seen from the roof. Jenet was standing in the middle of it in the snow with her hands folded in her apron, and a big faded man in a porter's coat was pouring something over her from a jar. Another stood by with a torch. None of them hurried. The porter set the jar down, and the one with the torch put it to Jenet's apron, and the fire went up her all at once, yellow and quiet.

She did not scream or run. She stood with her hands folded while the fire climbed her, until she bent and knelt and lay down in the snow. A thin black smoke went straight up past the window.

Dorrit got down off the table. Her knees would hardly hold her.

"To keep the house in order," the Surveyor said gently. "They forget themselves otherwise, you see. A jug is dropped, and then a door is left open, and then someone is hurt. It is a kindness to all of them, in the end." He settled himself on the end of the bed-frame, crossing his long legs and arranging his robe. "Now. The boy will bring you fresh water. Sit down, my dear girl, and tell me about your grandmother."

"No," Dorrit said.

"Then tell me about your cousin. The keeper. What does she love best? Is she brave? Is she obedient? Does she do as she's told?"

Dorrit stared at him. It was a long while before she could make her mouth work.

"Wren?" she said at last. "Gods' teeth. No."

"Ah." He looked pleased, as if she had told him something useful. "No, I thought not. The good ones never are."

She didn't tell him anything else that day. She had told him too much already, in the first days, when she was frightened and talked because she couldn't stop. She had told him about the bees, and Tansy's hip, and Fallowmere, and the Bridge Inn. He was so kind about it and listened so well, and nobody had listened to her properly in days.

When he got up to go, he stopped at the door.

"You may walk the galleries, if you like," he said. "By day. A guest shouldn't be shut up like a hen in a coop. The doors below are kept, you understand, and I've had the roof hatch nailed." He smiled. "I'm sure you understand."

"Oh, I understand," Dorrit said.

"Good girl."

When he had gone she stood where she was until the smoke outside the window thinned and stopped. Then she was sick in the corner, and after that she sat on the bed-frame with her arms round herself and did not cry, because he might come back and see.

After that the baker's boy brought the food alone. There were round loaves from the Hall bakehouse, baked the morning the cold came and frozen ever since, with cheese and shriveled apples. With them came a little pruning knife so blunt it would not have cut butter.

The Chainman came back the next night, and the next.

On the third night Dorrit had had enough of being frightened. She was tired and hungry, and her back ached from sitting against the wall, and the frost-burn on her ankle from the roof had blistered black and itched like fury. She had been scared for so long that it had worn a groove in her, and she found she could lie down in the groove and be angry instead.

"Right," she said. "If you're going to sit there, you can make yourself useful."

He didn't move. She had the bread warming on the brazier, because she had learned the trick of it. You put it on the iron grate at the edge and turned it now and then. After an hour the outside went soft and steamed, and the inside was as good as bread from Hobb's oven. Better, she thought, because they had known how to bake in the old days. She broke a piece off and held it up.

"Bread," she said.

He bent his head toward it.

"Bread," she said again, and put it in her mouth and chewed. "Bread. You eat it. Mm. Lovely. Bread."

He sat there. She swallowed, and felt stupid. Then, from the wall, in that hoarse ordinary young voice:

"Bread."

Dorrit nearly choked on her crust. "That's it," she said, when she could. "That's right. Bread." She pointed at the brazier. "Fire."

He leaned away from it, and the rime on his shoulders crackled, but his head turned toward the red coals, and she heard him breathe out a long white breath that hung in the air.

"Fire," he said.

"Fire. Good lad." She looked around the room and held up her cup. "Cup." He said it. She slapped the little table. "Table." He said it. She held up her hand and wiggled her fingers. "Hand."

He looked down at his hands, resting on his knees among the chain-links.

"Hand," he said.

She kept on until she had named everything in that room: knife and apple, door and wall, window and bed, and the stars through the high window. He said every word after her, carefully, one at a time, as if he were picking them up off the floor and putting them in his pockets. Some of them he said twice, and some he said again long after, to himself, when she had moved on to something else.

"Window," he said, to nobody, when she was on boot.

"That's right, lad."

"Window."

She ran out of things in the room, and sat there wondering what else there was, and she thought of home. She thought of the bee-yard behind Fallowmere in the morning, the white hives in two rows, and Wren going down between them bare-handed like a fool, talking to them.

"Bee," she said.

He turned his head. "Bee," she said again. "Little thing. This big." She held up her finger and thumb. "Yellow and brown. Stripes. It goes—" She made the noise, and felt a proper idiot. "Buzzz. Flies about. Flowers. Honey. Stings you if you're rude to it, and sometimes if you're not." She flapped her hands like wings, and then made one of them into a bee and flew it across the room at him, buzzing, and stung him on the knee with her finger.

She did it before she thought. Her finger touched the rime on his knee, and it was painfully cold, as cold as the well-chain at Fallowmere on a January morning, but it was only cold and did not burn. She snatched her hand back and stared at it. The skin was pink and whole.

He was looking down at his knee, where she had touched him.

"Bee," he said.

He never said anything but the words she gave him, and a few of his own that he had kept from somewhere. Mine, he said sometimes, and where, and once, when she asked him how far it was to the river, "Forty rods. Chain." He said it without thinking, and it made her skin crawl.

But on the fifth night he asked her a question.

She had been humming, as she did a lot now to fill up the quiet, and she had come round to the Old Reel without meaning to. She hummed the first half and he hummed the second softly from his wall, and this time he got the turn right. When it was done he said, "Name."

She looked across at him. "Name," he said again, and lifted one white hand and moved it a little in the air, up and down, drawing a bow.

"The tune? You want the name of the tune?"

"Name."

"It's the Old Reel," Dorrit said. "That's what we call it at home. The Old Reel."

He shook his head slowly, and the rime crackled on his neck.

"Not," he said.

"Well, the Stayers call it something else, but that's only their—"

"Not." He put both his hands up and pressed them hard against the sides of his head, and the chain rattled. "Not. Not. Gone."

"All right," Dorrit said. "All right. Hush. It's all right."

"Gone."

She wanted to go over and put her arm round his shoulders, as she would round anybody's, round Pip's, round a child's who had lost his mother at the fair. She sat on her hands instead, because she didn't know what the cold would do if she held on, and because she was still a little afraid of him. She was always going to be a little afraid of him.

"Hush now. Never mind the name. Never mind it. I'm sorry, lad. I'm sorry I said anything."

He took his hands down slowly and sat with them in his lap.

In the red light of the brazier she looked at them. They were long hands with long fingers, and under the rime the skin was gray-white and fine-grained, with smooth knuckles and no brown spots or knotted veins. They weren't an old man's hands. And the tips of the four fingers on his left hand were hard and flat and shiny under the frost.

Dorrit knew fingers like that. Wren had fingers like that, from the strings.

"You play," she said.

He sat with his hands in his lap and gave no answer. "You're young," Dorrit said, out loud, mostly to herself. "Oh, lad. You're just a lad."

After that she talked to him about everything.

She told him Wren was small and stubborn with no more sense than a hen. She told him Wren could play so that the whole Bridge Inn got up and danced, and old Garret the drummer cried. She told him about Tansy, and Tansy's stick, and Tansy's tongue. She told him about Dall, the barley in August and the river under the bridge, and the smell of the orchards in autumn when the windfalls went soft in the grass. She told him about the honey harvest, and Hobb crying because they wanted paying in coin.

She didn't tell him about Bracken, though she thought about it. She thought about that great bald lump with his broken nose, and how he said Mistress Fallowmere just to make her spit. She thought of him running across Scarrow's gate-court after her with his bare hands. She thought about it more than she wanted to, at night, with the brazier going down. But she didn't tell anybody about that, not even a monster.

He listened. He never moved while she talked, and he never turned his head away from her, and when she stopped he sometimes said one of the words back. Wren, he said. Bee. Honey. Dall.

"Dall," she said. "That's right. That's home."

"Home," he said.

On the sixth day she went up to the high gallery, and she heard the old man lie.

She went up there most days now, because keeping moving was the only way to stay warm, and because there was nothing else to do. A stair in the thickness of the wall outside her corridor went up to a narrow walk round the inside of the great dome. From there she could look down into the Roll Chamber.

She had seen it once before, on the night they caught her on the roof, and from up here it was worse. The far side was dim, and the names went down into the dark on every wall.

Below her, the Surveyor was at work with a dozen of his dead. They were scraping the ice off the floor under the arch with iron bars, slow and steady, with a noise that set her teeth on edge. The old man walked among them with his hands behind his back and talked to them in the same warm reasonable voice he used on her.

"Gently there, gently. Mind the lettering. Yes, that's it. And you, sir, the ring, if you please."

One of the faded knelt and set something into a hole in the floor at the foot of the arch: an iron ring on a thick staple, the size of a man's hand. A second one hammered it in with a mallet, and the blows came up into the dome, sharp and hollow.

Then the frost ran in across the floor from the great door, and the Chainman came into the Roll Chamber.

The faded stopped and stood back against the walls. The Surveyor turned to him with his arms open.

"My friend," he said. "There you are."

The Chainman walked past him straight across the room to the arch, and stood under it, and reached up. He was tall enough that his fingers touched the blank panel at the keystone, and he moved them across it slowly, left to right, and then back.

"Yes," said the old man, coming to stand beside him. "Yes. That's where it goes. Your name. That's where it will be written." His voice was very gentle. "The keeper is coming, my friend. She is bringing your book. When she comes, she will write your name there, and you will be free. You'll have your name back, and then you may rest. I promise you."

"Name," said the Chainman.

"Your name."

"Mine."

"Yours. I promise it." The Surveyor laid a hand on the white chain across the Chainman's arm, and took it away again quickly. "Soon."

The Chainman stood a while longer with his fingers on the empty stone. Then he turned and went out, stooping through the great door, and the white trailed out after him.

The old man watched him go. He sighed, and shook his head, and smiled to himself.

"Poor creature," he said to the faded. "He does believe it. Well. He's owed a little comfort, I suppose." He turned back to the arch and nudged the iron ring in the floor with his toe. "That'll do very well for her. She's a strong girl. She'll carry it a long time, longer than he did, I shouldn't wonder. And the keeper will write whatever I put in front of her, with her cousin standing there under the arch. It is so much tidier when they love each other." He sighed again, fondly. "And nobody, you know, will ever make songs about a herbwife."

Up on the gallery Dorrit had her fist jammed in her mouth, and she bit down on her knuckles until she tasted blood.

She didn't know all the words for it, or what a keystone was, not properly. But at Scarrow Wren had told her what Iyene had said in the dark: bind him again, the old way. And the old man had told her himself about the Great Roll and the Frost that had to go somewhere. And she had seen the Chainman's hands, and she had seen Jenet burn.

She'll carry it a long time.

She got down on her knees and crawled along the gallery, away from the edge, all the way round to the stair, and then she ran.

That night when he came she was waiting for him.

"He's lying to you," she said, before he had even sat down. "The old man. The Surveyor. He's lying."

He sat down against his wall. The chain clinked.

"Listen to me. Listen. Lying. It's when you say a thing that's not true. He says he'll give you your name." She leaned forward, as close as she dared to the white edge of the frost on the floor. "He won't. He'll not give you anything. He wants to put you in the dark again, and put me in there after you, and—oh, you don't understand a word I'm saying, do you?"

"Name," he said. "Keeper. Bring."

"No. Listen to me."

"Keeper. Bring. Mine."

"He's a liar, lad. He's a lovely polite lying old snake, and I'd not trust him to tell me it was raining if I was stood in a flood. He burned that poor girl for dropping a jug." Her voice cracked. She was crying and she didn't care. "Please. Please understand me."

He was turned toward her in the dark, and after a while he said, "Dorrit."

It was the first time he had said it. She had told him her name on the second night, and he had never said it back.

"Yes," she said. "Yes. That's me."

"Dorrit. Wren. Bee." He was going through them one by one, turning each one over. "Bread. Fire. Home."

"That's right."

"Name," he said. "Mine."

She wiped her face with the heel of her hand.

"Wren's coming," she said. "My cousin. She's coming, I know she is. She'll have come after me the minute she could stand up. She's stubborn as a mule's backside and she's never once in her life done what she's told." She took a breath. "If anybody can find your name for you, it's her. Not him. Her. Do you hear me? Not him."

He hummed a bar of the tune, and stopped.

"Wren," he said.

On the morning of the second of October the great doors of the Hall opened.

Dorrit heard them from her room, a long deep grinding boom she had never heard in all her days there, which came up through the stone floor into the soles of her feet. Then came voices, or one voice, the Surveyor's, raised in greeting and glad.

She was out of her door and up the wall-stair before she had thought about it. Lower than the dome walk there was a second gallery that ran along the top of the long entrance hall, under the windows. She had found it on her fourth day, and she had never seen anything from it but the faded standing in the hall below like pieces left on a board after a game.

She crept to the rail and looked down.

The great doors stood open at the bottom of the hall. White daylight came in through them and lay across the floor, and snow blew in on the wind. Someone had just come in out of the snow and stood in the doorway, lean and straight, in a long riding coat with frost on the shoulders. She wore a sabre at her hip, and her iron-gray hair was cropped close.

Under her arm, held tight against her side, was a book. Dorrit knew it. She had seen it every day of her life on the dresser in its box, and she had seen Wren sleep with it.

The Surveyor was walking down the hall to meet the woman in the doorway, holding out both hands.

"Cartographer-Royal," he said, and his voice rang up into the roof, warm and glad and full of relief. "At last. Someone sensible."

Iyene Sath looked at him for a moment. Then she stepped forward and took his hand.

Up on the gallery, on her knees behind the rail, Dorrit Fallowmere felt her whole face go hot.

"Oh, you cow," she breathed.