The trapdoor knocks the bell, and I get my fingers round it before it can ring.
That’s Dad’s way. He did it at three, going down an hour and a half before his time, and I lay with my soles against the end wall of my room and had him all the way: down the stair, out under the main street, along the south half to a pillar about halfway, and stop. He’s still stopped.
I let go of the bell when it’s dead. I go down without the rope.
There’s no stool at the foot of the stair. Grandad’s stool is up in the kitchen by the stove, folded since the turn of the year, and the lamp-stone’s on the shelf over it. I don’t take the lamp. I haven’t needed it since the autumn.
The stone comes up cold through my wraps, and then the rest of it comes: sixty pillars in their rows, each one on its note, and the town asleep on top of them, a bed’s weight here and a cart’s there. Across under the street there’s the south half, and on it one weight standing at the foot of one pillar, with a rod leaned beside it, very still.
I know which pillar. I don’t go across.
One. Two. Three. My wraps don’t make a sound on the stone. The stick’s across my back on the blue sash, and I only set it down where I want to listen hard, so it doesn’t make one either.
The whine’s in my left ear, first thing, high and thin. It goes by twelve now. It used to take till twenty.
Twelve’s right. Seventeen has JUNO cut low on the north face, older than any of the chalk. Twenty-nine is river stone and lime and says nothing. At thirty-one I stand longer than I need to, which everybody in this family does, and nobody in this family mentions.
Forty-one.
I put the foot of the stick down by it and my ear on the grip, and wait. The note comes up and sits. Under it there’s the stick’s own small note, which hasn’t got any bigger in two years. Under that, where it’s been since I was fourteen, there’s the hair. It doesn’t go up. It doesn’t go down.
The chalk lives in the tin on the catwalk rail, one tin for every ten. The column on forty-one starts higher than I can reach kneeling and comes right down to the stone, and Grandad’s is at the very top, where you’d only find it if you knew. Mine goes at the bottom, under last spring’s. It’s straight. They’ve all been straight this year. I stay at forty-one till my knees want to go on, and then I stay a bit longer than that, and nobody calls down the row from a stool to ask what I’m stood at.
Forty-two sits right.
Forty-three’s flat.
I put the stick down and have it, and while I’m at it, over on the south half, Dad’s weight comes off his heels and onto the front of his feet, the way you go when you’re about to take a step. It stays there for a breath. Then it goes back onto his heels.
I have forty-three. A hair. The same size of hair as forty-one’s and in a different place, lower down in the note, as if the note’s been leaned on. It’s been a hair since it went, and it hasn’t moved off it.
Its column is short. It starts at the height of my chest, where I put the first one standing up because I didn’t think, and it comes down four ticks, all mine. There’s nothing above them. Nobody else has ever had to mark forty-three.
I mark it. Five.
Forty-four hums under my wraps, fat and slow, with the binder’s note laid over the old one where it was mended. I go past without stopping. You don’t stop at forty-four.
The tin for the fifties has a mouse in it. Gran says it isn’t the same mouse as the one that moved in the winter I was fifteen. She hasn’t been down to look.
Out to sixty. Back.
The town’s starting over my head. Somebody on Ropewalk Street is up with a baby, walking it, ten steps to the wall and turn, ten steps back and turn, and every time they turn the baby starts again. Three pillar heads east of forty-one, the Dunne yard gate has its bar lifted. One pair of boots goes out through it. They’re big, and both heels go down the same, and there’s more on the back of them than a man carries for himself. Then there’s nobody else going out, and the gate doesn’t shut. Somebody’s stood in it. I don’t listen to who.
Up the hill the Sards’ furnace door goes back on its hinge with the iron cough it’s had all my life, and shuts again. A cart that’s been stood in the street with its mule asleep in the shafts wakes up and goes off down the hill, and on its tailboard there’s something that won’t keep still.
We said we’d go the same morning. Tova said it, so it’s the same morning. She never said the same hour.
On the south half Dad’s at his pillar. He hasn’t moved off it. I come back up the row under the street, past forty-four and forty-three and forty-one, and I don’t stop at any of them. At the foot of the stair, where the stool used to be, there are three marks in the grit from its legs, and they’re not where three legs would go if they came down together, because Grandad’s never did. I stand by them and have the south half one more time, all of it, and him in the middle of it.
He doesn’t come across. I don’t go.
At the top the trapdoor knocks the bell, and I stop it.
Gran’s at the window.
She’s up on her feet at it with her arms folded and her teeth in, which means she’s already been to the door for them. Her rod’s in the corner by the door on its own. Dad’s isn’t with it, because Dad’s is with Dad. The cap’s off it. Nobody’s taken it down the stair since the turn of the year, and she still keeps her teeth in it, so every morning she gets as far as the door.
Her hood’s on the hook with the others, and it’s dry. Mine’s damp at the edge from the stair.
There’s a cup at my place on the table, poured. I drink it standing. It’s the right heat, so she had me on the stair coming up and poured it then.
Mum’s out on the arches. She did my pack last night and left it on the bench with the straps done up, and my boots beside it with the laces knotted together for carrying.
“Say it,” says Gran. She says it to the window.
“Forty-one’s flat.”
“How flat?”
“A hair.”
She knows what comes next, and she waits for it anyway.
“Forty-three’s flat too.”
“How flat?”
“A hair.”
“Same hair?”
“Its own.”
“Marked?”
“Both.”
Gran wipes a corner of the glass. Out of the window there’s our gate and the span going down to the square, grey, with nobody on it yet, and over the roofs the dark’s going thin along the bottom edge.
“You didn’t come down,” I say.
“I’ve stopped.”
“I know.”
“I’m practising.”
“What at?”
“Stopping.” She looks at the glass as if it’s been told and hasn’t listened. “Sixty-odd years I’ve been going down that stair. You’d think it’d stop by itself. It doesn’t. You have to keep at it.”
The stool’s by the stove, folded, with her shawl over it.
“And after the Hush?” she says.
“The paper doesn’t say.”
“It’ll be the Reach.”
“Mm.”
“That’s not a no.”
“It’s not anything.”
“I’m guessing,” says Gran, to the glass. “Somebody in this house has to.”
I get the pack on and the boots round my neck by the laces, and the stick back across over the top of the pack, and I go to the door. Her rod’s at my elbow. It’s old grey wood, worn pale at the grip, and there’s no wet on the foot of it at all.
“And you’re not to cut it,” says Gran.
I stop with the latch up. “Cut what?”
She’s turned round from the window. She hasn’t done that since I came up. She taps her own chin, twice.
“When it comes. They don’t, on the road.”
“There isn’t any.”
“There will be.” She turns back to the glass. “Look at Cotter.”
“Bram’s comes down to his belt.”
“Well,” says Gran. “He had to start somewhere.”
I wait in case there’s more. There isn’t any more, so I go out, and the twelve steps to the gate, and out onto the span.
From halfway down it I can see our window. She’s at it. She’s still at it when I get to the bottom and the roofs come in between.
The square’s empty. The milk cart isn’t out yet. The guild’s big stone doors are open the width of a boot, and there’s a lamp lit on the counter. It’s never lit before seven.
Inside, the floor talks the way it does in a hall that’s all timber inside old stone, only there’s nobody on it to make it talk. The pigeons up in the roof, shifting. The done-spike with nothing going onto it. Penhallow’s pen.
She’s behind the counter with the ledger open, the one the size of a hearthstone. Bram’s tankard’s at her elbow with tea in it and a saucer over the top to keep the heat in. She doesn’t look up.
“Tallis.”
My paper’s on the counter under her steel ruler. It’s been in the tray at the end of the counter for a year, at the bottom of three, and now it’s the only one. She turns it round with the end of the ruler so it faces me, and lifts the ruler off.
It’s the same sheet. Pilgrimage. Out of the Spans. With the leave of this guild, when the bearer’s licensed to it. Tallis, Adept. Then the line where the place goes, which was empty, and on it now, in her square hand: The Hush.
Under that is last spring’s B. C., a lot of very short lines going across, with two blots for the full stops, and his thumb.
Under that there’s a line that wasn’t there last spring. MENTOR, it says, in her pen. On it there are four blots in a row, where the B and the C and the two full stops would go, and a thumb, smudged down both sides.
“That’s two,” I say.
“The first’s the back office.” She puts the end of the ruler on the second. “That’s the mentor’s. An Adept may go out on a mentor’s signature.” She takes the ruler back. “It’s in the book.”
Behind me the brass end of a stick goes down on the bottom tread of the stair.
I don’t turn round.
The stair’s oak. Oak’s poor for listening, but a brass end comes through it, and so does what comes after. The brass end, and then nothing. Then the foot, and the breath going in and stopping halfway, where the ribs are, and holding there, and going on. Then the brass end on the next tread.
Penhallow looks up at the big clock over the board, once, and down, and writes something small in the margin of the ledger. Then she goes on with what she was doing, which is folding.
She’s got Seren’s letter and Kesh’s sheet. They came up on the barge and I brought them to her, because the paper wanted a place and the letter had one. She folds them into my paper, in four, the way they came, Seren’s inside and Kesh’s round it.
Seren’s is four lines, and three of them are questions. Kesh’s is one side, the way hers always are, with the writing going off all four edges. I asked her to write on the back. She hasn’t.
The brass end. The stop. The foot. The breath.
Penhallow turns the ledger round and holds out the pen, and I sign under her line: Tallis, out. She turns it back and blots it.
“Tova’s and Holt’s,” I say.
“Yesterday.” The pen goes back up the page and stops on the line without looking for it. “Sard, Journeyman. Dunne, Journeyman. Took their own.”
The brass end.
I’ve got him through the boards and the stone shell and up into my soles, the whole slow height of him going up behind me in the dark. Slippers. The stick. The weight that goes onto the rail and comes off it. He hasn’t said anything. I haven’t either.
Penhallow folds the paper once more, over the letters, and holds it out across the counter.
“It’s the last one he’ll put down,” she says.
I take it.
“Mm,” I say.
It goes in Dad’s coat, in the inside pocket. I don’t go. She doesn’t tell me to. She writes, and I stand on the boards with the boots hanging on my chest, and up the stair behind me it goes on, the brass end and the stop and the foot and the breath. At the eighth tread the breath holds longer than at the others, and both of us stop, her pen and me. Then it goes on, and so do we.
At the top the boards of the back office take him. Then the chair does, all at once, the way it always has.
Penhallow looks up at the clock again. She writes it in the margin under the first.
Fourteen minutes. The first spring she said it out loud. Nine and a half, she said, and then she said it was written down. She doesn’t say it now. She writes it down.
Neither of us says it.
She takes the saucer off the tankard and tries the side of it, and puts the saucer back. Then she gets up, which she never does, and picks it up, and comes round the end of the counter to the bottom of the stair.
I go out.
Down the main street the shops are shut. The Sards’ works is dark at the front, with number three going at the back and nobody on the step. The skewer woman’s trestle is out under the fourth arch with a cloth over it and nothing on the cloth.
At the bottom of the hill the town stops, and the last arch stands over the road.
I go up the pier by the holds, with the boots knocking on my chest. The marble’s still in the joint by the keystone, with the moss gone further round it. I untie the stick and stand it on the keystone and put my wraps down on the stone either side of it. Knees soft. Ear on the grip.
The arch comes up through my soles, right down both piers into the road, and back up the hill behind me into the town.
The town first.
Up the hill and round, on six, there’s one weight at our kitchen window, both feet flat, not moving. She hasn’t sat down. Under the street Dad’s at his pillar, where he’s been since three. In the guild Penhallow’s on the oak with the tankard, a tread at a time, and she doesn’t stop on any of them. The Dunne gate’s shut now. The Sards’ step has nobody on it, and number three’s going behind it.
Then the road.
It’s old road, bound all the way up, and it carries. The last two houses. A dog on a chain in the second yard, asleep. The quarry round the hill with nobody in it. The haul-road on its tall thin pillars going up beside the road, with a hauler on top, slow, carrying a crate to the heap at the end. Past the last houses the road comes apart three ways, and two of the ways have somebody on.
East, the carters’ way. It goes along under the haul-road’s pillars and out past where the haul-road stops in the air, and on, out of the Spans. There’s a cart on it, out past the last pillar: a mule with a shoe loose on one foot, clicking every fourth step, two wheels, the sacks in the bed lying flat, going home empty to be filled. On the tailboard there’s a weight that won’t keep still. A heel’s going on the board. It was going when the cart went off from the Sards’, and it’s going now.
That’s the road Ivo took. The last thing I had out there was his boots, last spring, from this keystone, till there weren’t any.
It’s Tova on it now.
North, the river road. One pair of boots, big, a long way up it already. Every step’s the same as the one before, the same weight and the same length, with the same gap after, as if somebody’s laid them out against a line. The shield’s on his back. I can tell from how his heels go down. He isn’t counting out loud. I can’t have numbers through a road. The gaps are the same, though.
Once his weight goes out to the left, round something in the road, a puddle or a stone come down off the bank, and then it comes back onto the line. He doesn’t stop. He doesn’t look back, either; you can hear a man look back, in his feet. I follow him up the river road till it goes thin and old, and then I haven’t got him.
The third way’s got nobody on it.
I have that one as far as it goes. It’s bound further than I can reach, and then it’s only road. A milestone. Dew going off the edges of the stones. Nothing walking. It goes off the end of what I’ve got and doesn’t come back.
I go back to the other two. I can’t have them both at once from here; they’re too far apart. I have one and then the other. The heel. The boots. The heel.
We did all the saying last night, on forty-four’s arch. Tova did most of it. Holt said “Yes” to all of hers, and Tova said that wasn’t saying anything, and he said yes to that as well.
The boots. The heel.
I lift my ear off the stick and tie it on, the top knot up by the grip, for walking. I go down the pier the way I came up.
While the road’s bound I’ll walk it in my wraps.
Past the last two houses the dog in the second yard gets up on its chain and turns round and lies down again. Past the quarry. Then the road comes apart, and I take the third way, the one with nobody on it, and the old stone hands me on from one piece to the next.
At the first milestone there’s chalk on the side, low enough for a carter to do it from his seat: a ring, and a little ladder. I don’t know what either of them means. Tova knows four of those. She’d have made the rest up.
The grey’s coming up over the rise ahead, about the colour of my wraps.
Behind me, through the road, the bell at the top of our stair rings.
It’s five.
Nobody stops it. It goes down the stair into the dark and out along the rows, and comes back off about forty pillars, the way it does, and all of that comes along under the main street and down the piers of the last arch and out along the road to me, thin by the time it’s here. Thin enough to miss.
Out of the rows, very small, it comes back a hair under. Twice.
Somebody’s lifted the trapdoor. Feet on a stair are the first thing anybody in our house learns, and I could have whose in a breath.
I don’t turn round. It rings till it’s finished.
