When there's no stone, what will you listen through?
Elder Seren, at the gate of the Hush
The story
Wren Tallis takes the road with nobody on it, as an Adept on his mentor’s last signature, in blots. At the Hush, Elder Seren sends him off with a question: when there’s no stone, what will you listen through? In the Reach, Kesh Varro’s country of broken bridges, the only way across the gorge is rope, and through rope he can’t hear a thing. The walkers call him Cold Feet.
Tova Sard takes her Journeyman’s cord and four throws to Dagny Furlow’s kilns, and is handed a rake. Holt Dunne goes north to the Weirs, to help hold the oldest dam on the water through her spring flood.
Ivo Dray went east on his own. He turns up wherever a town is coming down, mends whoever he can, and goes on in the morning with the lamps lower behind him. Then, at a waystation by a failing bridge, an old man who keeps his hands in his sleeves orders him soup, knows his name, and says: “Forty years I looked for something that would choose me. It chose you. So you will do.”
What the old man asks of him is exactly what Ivo already believes. That’s the trouble.
Pilgrim is Book Three of The Long Dim: a coming-of-age progression fantasy where magic keeps its own rules and every power is paid for.
Two thousand years ago, the Abundance stood a hall of pillars in a valley and bound them, and the town of Harrowmouth was built on top. Their haulers still carry crates up and down the haul-road, day and night. The binding is still in the stone. Here and there, it is starting to slide.
The Long Dim follows four friends from Harrowmouth, Wren Tallis, Tova Sard, Holt Dunne and Ivo Dray, through one long story, told in turn by each of them. It begins the day they leave school, unlicensed, with a mentor who has never taken anyone. Magic here has limits: everyone can hold only so much and push only so hard, and when it’s spent, it’s spent.
The books are read in order. Pilgrim is Book Three.
Content note
This novel contains danger and serious injury, deaths in a flood and in a collapse, fire, hard cold, grief and loss. There is no sexual content and no strong language.
