unclaimed-recollection / 23 - Six In.md# 23. Six In > **Narrator:** Odran Maresh · **Setting:** Halloway, the iron door, Halloway Station · **Act 3, Part 2** > A guide counts people through a door. Over two days at Halloway, Odran keeps count.  I count people through doors. That is most of what a guide is for, if I am honest, and I have never found a better description of the work, although I have been given a number of worse ones on the form. You stand at the back. You say the number going in and you say the number coming out, and in between you keep the number in your head, in the part of it that is not for anything else. If the two numbers match, you have done your job. If they do not, nothing else you have done that day was any use. It is a small trade. It has a small tool, which is chalk. I keep a stub in my left pocket with the dried berries and the spare cord, and my thumb knows it the way it knows the satchel strap. I am going to put down what happened at Halloway on the third and fourth days, and I am going to put it down as I counted it. * * * First light, third day. Hard frost. The sky over the river the colour of the inside of a shell. Vasko had us at the mouth of the iron door before the sun was on the larches. She had her sheet in one hand and her cap in the other, and she had not slept either, I could tell, since there was a groove in her hair where a cap had been put on and taken off all night. She stood at the head of the passage and read us the order. "Lian and I first. Sove and Dasan. Hallow. Maresh last, with the count." She looked at me. "Maresh, I want the count out loud, both ways, every time. If anybody wishes to say it is excessive, I will listen to them after we are out." "Mm," I said. "It is not excessive." "No," said Vasko. "I did not think you would say it was." Idrin was already at the ring with the chain. He had tied off, and looped, and tied again, and was standing with his rule in his hand and the frost thick on his shoulders. He looked at all six of us as we went past, one at a time, and his lips moved, and I knew what he was doing. I do it too. "Six," I said, at the door. "Six," said Idrin, a breath behind me. And then, to nobody in particular, and with a certain dryness: "I shall say it second again." "It is a good place to say it from." "I have been told that." He did not smile. He did a thing with his face that in another man would have been one. The passage was as we had left it. A hundred and forty paces of grey stone with the pipe along one wall and the chalk arrows going back at us in Sevran's neat hand, one, two, three, down to the plate. The cold was no worse than yesterday. It had the quality that cold has in a place where nobody has breathed for a long time, which is a kind of attention. I walked at the back and counted heads, and the heads went on in front of me in the lamplight, five of them, with a rust-coloured vest among them that was Zahir's own, quite easy to follow. Sevran was in front of Zahir, and I will say what I noticed, since I was at the back and it is what the back is for. He had changed in two months. I had known he would, and I had not known it would be in so many small places. He had a haircut that was not mine, cut square at the nape by somebody with a steady hand and no opinions, which I suspected to be Zdena. His jacket was the same olive waxed one, but the cuff of the left sleeve had gone soft and pale at the wrist, the way a cuff does under a rope. He walked a little differently. In Pinecliff he had walked like a man crossing someone else's floor, with his hands carried a little out from his sides where anybody could see what was in them. He had stopped doing that. His hands hung where hands hang. At the first turn he said something to Zahir over his shoulder, quite dry, with his eyes front, and Zahir laughed out loud in the dark passage and said "That is not allowed," and Sevran said "It is entirely allowed," and I felt something move under my ribs that I had spent two months setting very firmly in place. I will be honest, since the ledger is the only one listening. It turns out that you cannot take apart in a morning what you have spent two months holding down. You can only take it apart one small thing at a time, and be surprised each time by how little of it is left. The plate stood open. Marit had left her wedge in the groove overnight, a thing cut from larch for the purpose, with her mark burned into the end. She knelt and looked at it and said, "Dry," and took it out and looked at it again, and put it back. I watched her do it. I have watched a good many door-hands, and they are not all alike, but the good ones all do the thing that she did, which is to trust the wedge and then go and check it. She did not use her tool. She set the wedge, and put the tool in her belt, and stood, and said to the plate, quite quietly, "Stay." I have heard that from door-hands before. I do not think it is a word. I think it is only a thing that one's mouth does at a threshold when one has been standing at them for twenty years. Nothing moved. Nothing, I should say, had been going to.  * * * The thing about the floor was this. Vasko had been right to dislike it. At the threshold the floor was the plain grey stone of the passage, rough-faced and dry. At the first pace it was grey and smooth. At the second, it went to slate. And at the third pace, exactly where the grey stone met the black, there was a single tile, a pace square and set flush, which was darker than the rest by a shade that I could not have told you in daylight and that anyone could see by lamp. She had walked up to it yesterday with her boot raised. She had not stepped. She had put down her foot behind the line and said hold, and I think that if she had been asked at that moment she would not have been able to say why. Today she had a rope. She tied it off at the plate's frame and ran it along the floor to the back wall, a chalked line with a thin hemp cord laid along it, and she stood at the third pace and looked at the black tile for the length of one slow breath. Then she put her boot on it. It gave. I want to be exact. It gave by about the depth of a finger. It gave without a sound. It gave under her boot as a good floor does under a heavy man, and it did not creak, and it did not tilt, and the black of it did not change. And as she took her weight off, it rose, slowly and silently, to the level of the stone around it, and a faint pale ring of light went out from under where her heel had been, a hand's width wide, and faded. "Ah," said Lian, very softly, from behind her. "A latch," said Marit. She had come forward and was crouched at the edge of it, with her cheek nearly on the stone and her lamp low. "A counterweight. They put them on the old doors. It holds the plate while somebody is standing on it, or it holds it while somebody has just stood. That is why it stayed open." She looked up. "That is why it did not close behind you, Lead. Not for any reason that I should put in a report." "Put it in the report," said Vasko. "I shall say that it is a latch." "Say that it is a latch," said Vasko, "and that Sove explained it." It is a kind of thing that I have noticed about ruins. A thing happens that could be explained, and somebody explains it, and then everybody is content. I do not say that it is not a good explanation. I only say that I have never once seen a crew, at the time, want to be the one to argue. We crossed it one at a time, on the line. Vasko, who had done it. Lian, who put her boot on the black as though the tile were a sleeping child and went across with her breath held, and afterward said that it was "warm," in a small voice, and was told by three people that it was the lamps. Marit. Zahir, who said "Thank you" to it, quite loudly, in the middle of a stride, and went over it with an expression of the utmost courtesy. Sevran, who said it a half-second after, with the same small bow, and who I think meant it more. And then me, last. I stood at the third pace for the space of a breath. I had said the number in the passage and I said it again. "Six in." Nobody asked me why. It was a small thing, and I had been looking at the floor, and for the length of that breath I did not look at the back wall at all. * * * I am a guide. I have been in a good many rooms that people have a reason to wish they were not in. Most of them have a shape, and the shape is the first thing I read. This one had one way in and one way out. The plate at my back, and a hundred and forty paces of grey stone behind it, and then the cut, and then the sky. It was a room that a man might be stuck in, if the plate chose to close. I put it at about a hundred and eighty breaths from the back wall to open air, at a walk, and I put it at about fifty at a run, and I did the sum twice, and I did not like it a great deal either time. That is the part of the trade that nobody sees. You do it all the way through, in the same part of the head that does the counting. And it was beautiful. I will say that, since the rest of the sheet will not. The walls went from grey to slate to black as we walked, and the black was the black of the best polished stone in the Foundries, the kind they cut for the lintels of company offices. It showed you yourself. It showed you your lamp, and the lamp beside it, and the lamp beyond that, and when I looked down the length of the chamber the whole of the black was full of small gold lights going away, like a street at night seen from a high window. The floor was the same. The air smelled of nothing, which is not an easy smell to describe, and was very dry and very cool, and my ears told me that the room was a great deal quieter than the passage. I could hear my own coat. There were eleven chests. Vasko had them labelled by the time I had finished my sum, in chalk on the floor beside each, A to K, with her own small cramped hand. They were squat grey things the size of a good strong box, no hinges, no handles, no seams, set exactly a pace apart along the two walls, six on the left and five on the right. I looked at the lid of the nearest, as one does, for the line where it would open, and could not find one, and decided that was probably the point. "Nobody touches a lid," said Vasko, at the end of the row. She said it to the air. "If one of these is what the dry smell says it is, we open it once, in front of a witness, or not at all. A keeping chest broken is a day of somebody's good fortune. We have no idea whose." "It is not necessarily a keeping chest," said Lian. "No," said Vasko. "But I prefer to be wrong in that direction." I went to the back wall. I had been avoiding it, I think. It is a thing you do, in a room like that. You walk the long walls and you look at the floor and you count the chests, because what is at the end is the thing you have a name for, and a name is a kind of weight. I had one. I had known the shape of it from the passage, from the first glint of the first lamp. I had watched Zahir count it from the threshold with his lips moving, and I had said "seventeen or eighteen, write it as that, it is honest," and I had gone back to the camp that night and not slept very well. A row of pegs. A little thicker than a finger, set a hand's breadth apart at the height of a man's shoulder, in the black wall. And hanging from them, thin and pale, the width of a head, a row of rings. I will say it, since there is nobody here but the ledger. They were recall circlets. I have briefed fifty crews on circlets. It is in the Crownward day-briefing, between the sour-object notice and the part about not drinking from a dew cup that has gone green. *Never try one on. If you insist, you do so at your own risk, and the Directorate will not lift a finger.* I say it in my flattest voice. I say it as one says a rule that is in the book. And then the crew goes out, and some of them find one, and I will tell you what I have never once said at the briefing, which is that what the book says and what the crews do are two different things, and that every guide who has been more than five years in the work knows it. I put my hand in my left pocket and took out the chalk. I will not describe them more than I need to. They were the colour of old milk, or of bone, with a dull soft gleam that did not look like the lamp's. They hung very still. Each was a band as wide as three fingers and as thin as a coin, and none of them was alike, quite, though I could not have told you how. They were all very clean. In all that dust, in a room that had been shut a great while, there was no dust on them at all. I chalked a small dot on the floor under each peg, and counted the dots. I did it twice. It is a thing I do not do for show. "Eighteen," I said aloud. "Eighteen on the wall. Four pegs bare, in the middle." "Eighteen," said Zahir, at my elbow, writing. He had come along the wall behind me without my noticing, which is a fault in me and I wrote it down. "Eighteen. Then I was right to say or. I said I should be honest and I was honest." He looked at the pale things on the wall. "Odran. Is it..." "Yes." "I only mean..." "Zahir." "I have not said what I mean." "No. Do not." He closed his mouth. It did not stay closed. * * * I should set down what happened next in the order it was said, since it will be asked about. "I have been thinking," said Zahir. This is a thing that Zahir says. I have known him a matter of weeks, if one counts the day with the dates, and I would say that I have heard him say it about forty times. It is always followed by something that he should not have been thinking. He was standing with the ledger on his arm and the pencil behind his ear, looking at the wall of pale rings with the most open, honest, friendly interest, as a boy looks at a cake. I have seen that look on the faces of men who go on to do things. "It is only that," said Zahir, "one hears. At every muster, one hears. Everyone says it, you know, in every inn on the Corridor. That that is what one does." He turned, with a little gesture of both hands, an attractive one, like a man offering a plate. "I do not mean that we should. I only mean that since it is the thing everyone says one does, I have always wished to know whether everyone is right, and if it were only for a moment, and with the greatest care, and with Vasko watching, one could at least..." "No," said Vasko. She said it from the far end of the chamber, quite flatly, without turning her head. She had a lamp in one hand and a sheet in the other and she was writing. She did not look up. "No," said Lian. It came a half-breath after. It was not flat. It had in it the whole of a scholar's life, the long cold evenings and the ink and the small hope, and she said it with her face turned a little away and her chin down, like a woman refusing a second glass of something very good. "No. Thank you, Zahir. I should give a year of ink to know what is on one of those. I would not touch it." "No," said Marit. She had not moved from the edge of the black tile. She did not raise her voice. She said it as she says everything, the way a carpenter says *plumb.* Nobody said anything for the space of a breath. "The Registry's rule," said Vasko. She had at last looked up. She was looking at Zahir, and her face was very level, and kind in a way that I would not have expected, and entirely without room to move. "A recall circlet is restricted until the Directorate has reviewed its contents. It is not a recommendation, Dasan. It is not a guideline. It is the line between what this school does and what it does not, and this school has been doing finds properly for forty years. If anyone in this room puts one of those on, he does it alone, in the dark, as a man, and not on this crew. I would see him off the sheet and I would not be sorry." "I am only asking," said Zahir, "so that it is on the record that I did not." "It is on the record," said Vasko. "That I asked, and did not." "Dasan." "Yes, Lead." "Stop." "Yes, Lead," said Zahir. He wrote something in the ledger. I could see it from where I stood, over his arm. It said, in a very small hand, *Asked. Declined. Correctly.*  I looked at the pegs, and I thought of a man I once guided at the Marrow Halt, six years ago, a salvage hand of about thirty with a scar through his eyebrow and a cheerful, careless way with a crowbar. He had found something small, in a collapsed office under a siding, in a drawer that he should not have opened, and he had said nothing to me about it and gone off alone to the back of the hut. I found him an hour later sitting on an upturned crate in the dark with his hands between his knees. He was quite pale. He did not tell me what he had seen. He told me, much later, over a drink, that for about half a day after he had not been sure which of the two of them was supposed to be going home. He did not do it again. He said that. He never worked a crew again, either, I heard, but he was careful to say he did not do it again. I had been twenty-nine, and a bad guide. I had not stopped him, because I had not known. I had told myself that I should have, and have gone on telling myself. * * * And all that while, I was watching Sevran. I should say that I had not been doing it on purpose. It is a thing that I do. I do it as other men look at weather. I know where he is in a room as I know where the door is, and I have since the first week at Pinecliff, and I do not examine it. He was at the third pace, by the black tile, with the second lamp held low in both hands at the angle that Marit had asked for. He had been there the whole while. He had his eyes on the line where the grey met the black, and his face was perfectly composed, and he had not once, since we came in, looked at the back wall. I want that understood. I have watched him for a good many weeks. I know the look he has when he is examining a thing, which is a particular one: a slow, grave, thorough attention, as a man goes over a handwriting. I saw it on him at the plate yesterday, when he held the lantern for Marit. I saw it at the stove this morning, when he trimmed a wick. He is, I think, the most attentive man I have met. I should add that he had a new line across his right palm, a thin pale rope-burn, running from the base of the first finger to the heel of the hand. I had seen it at the stove on the first morning. I had wanted to ask about it for two days, and had asked about the lamps instead. He was not giving the wall that look. He was giving it nothing at all. He was holding the lamp with his eyes on the floor, and he was doing it very carefully and very steadily, with something just under it in the set of the shoulders that I know as I know my own coat. It is the stillness of a man who has been looking at a thing for some time without turning his head, and who has decided, and means to go on deciding, that what he has seen is only a wall. I have been in a good many rooms. I know what a man does when he does not wish to have a reaction that anyone could name. I thought it very plainly, in the part of my head that counts. *Would one of them give it back?* It was not a clear thought. It came the way that a thing does when it has been waiting, not in words but as a kind of lean. I did not know what I meant by *it.* I thought of a man with nothing behind him, in a room with a row of other people's on a wall, and I thought, with a flatness that I did not like, that if there were anything in that room that could hand him back what he had misplaced, it would be a thing that I should have to stand between him and, and be sorry for, and do. And then I thought: that is not how a man's life is kept. It does not hang on a peg. It was a foolish thought, and a short one, and I believed it for about a breath. I stood on it, even so. I put the chalk in my pocket. I went a pace to my left, and then another half-pace, along the line of the floor, with a small studied look at the nearest chest, as a man does who wishes to see the label on the lid. I stopped there. I took out the leaf and made a note of nothing. My shoulder was between Sevran and the back wall. Nobody saw. I know that, because I looked. Vasko was writing. Lian was drawing. Marit had her cheek to the edge of the tile and Zahir was behind me, saying to his ledger what he thought of the wall. And Sevran, with the lamp held low, did not turn his head and did not alter his look. He only moved the lamp a very little, perhaps the width of a finger, to the left. It was where it would have been, I think, if I had been standing a moment before where I was.  * * * We were in the chamber for about four hours. We drew it, and measured it, and chalked it, and Lian wrote her wall-by-wall numbers in her small neat hand, and Marit made her note on the tile. We did not take one thing out. We did not move one chest. At about the third hour Vasko stood in the middle of the room with her sheet against her chest and her eyes shut, and said, in a voice that was almost conversational, "Somebody is going to ask me why I did not just look in one." Nobody answered. She opened her eyes. "Out. All of you. Count, Maresh." "Six," I said. "Going out. One. Two. Three..." They went by me one at a time in the lamplight, over the tile, along the rope, with their breath going up in small clouds. Sevran came fifth. He did not look at me. He went by with the lamp in both hands, and the frost on his shoulders where he had brushed the passage wall, and I said "Five," and he was gone down the grey stone with the others, and then it was only me, in the dark, with the pale things on the wall behind my back. I did not turn round. I will say that, and I will say that it was not easy. "Six," I said, to the plate. "Out." I heard Idrin say it at the far end of a hundred and forty paces of stone, so faintly that I might have imagined it. In the passage, with the lamps going ahead of me and the others' voices going up ahead in an argument about the tile, I came up with Sevran, who had stopped to chalk a mark that he had already chalked. He did it so slowly, and so exactly, that I stopped as well. "Thank you," he said, without turning round, "for standing there." I looked at his back. I looked at the chalk in his fingers, and at the arrow he was drawing for the second time on a place where the first was perfectly good. "I was counting," I said. "I know," said Sevran. That was all. He finished the arrow and rubbed his thumb on his trouser leg, as a man does with chalk, and we went on out to the light, one behind the other, and neither of us said anything more, and I thought it was very likely the best conversation I had had in a good many weeks. I should say that I had a second sentence ready. I noticed that I had one, which I had not had in two months, and I turned it over in my pocket with the chalk, and I did not say it. A passage with an iron plate at one end and a crew arguing at the other is not the place. But I carried it out into the daylight with me, and I will say that it did not weigh what it used to. * * * I will not set down all of the afternoon. It was a day of paper. Vasko sat on a crate at the edge of the camp with her leaf on her knee and wrote to the registrar at Halloway, and to the school at Lumen, and to I do not know whom else, in a hard fast hand with her tongue between her teeth. The answer came in an hour. It was from the station, and it said, in the brief way that the Registry's messages do, that a registrar would travel up on the afternoon train of the fourth day, and would require the site held as found, and would not thank anyone for a thing that had been moved. "Held as found," said Vasko. She read it twice. "I could have written that." "You did," said Lian. "In the first paragraph." Zahir made tea. I have said that. It would be quite true to say that I have not seen him do a thing in the last three days that was not either making tea or counting, or about to. He came round with the tray at dusk and gave me a glass with the foam on it. I drank it on a crate at the edge of the firelight and watched Sevran, who was trimming the lamps at the stove in the order that he always does, from the left, a thing I would have noticed on a dark road. I did not go and sit by him. I will say that, because I have been honest elsewhere. I stayed on my own crate until the lamps were done, and then he came and sat down, and the crate was exactly as long as it had been the night before. "You answered Marit," I said, after a while, to the fire. "This afternoon, at the stove. In the Corridor speech." "I did. She asked whether the lamp was *hers to carry or only to mind.* I said it was the second, and that I should be glad to mind it." He considered. "Was it correct?" "It was better than correct. It was how a man from the Corridor would say it. She did not even look up." I turned my glass. "Two months ago you would have said *thank you* in the high form and I would have had to tell her that it meant yes." "I remember. You made a small noise in your throat." "I did not make a noise." "It was very small." He said it gravely, and the corner of his mouth did something that he had not authorised. "I have been told that my Aurevian is improving. Zdena says that it has become a hazard. I now misuse the idioms with confidence." "Mm." I looked at the embers. I was aware of the strap of my satchel against my knee, and of a thing I had not said in two months, and of the exact width of the crate. And I said, quite lightly, in the voice I use for the price of dates: "You will not need me to translate for you at all, soon. I shall be out of work." I had meant it as a joke. I heard it land otherwise. He did not answer at once. I have known him to take a long time over a sentence, as a man takes a long time over a good letter, but this was not that. This was a pause with the whole of him in it. He had been looking at the fire, and he looked at it a little longer, and then he turned his head and looked at me, directly, for about as long as it takes to count three. "I think," said Sevran, "that I should still need you." "For what?" "I do not know." He said it quite plainly, without any hurry and without any embarrassment, in his clear low voice, as one states the number of lamps. "I have not worked out what for. I only know that it is not the translating." And then, as though that were the whole of it, and a perfectly ordinary thing to have said, he looked back at the fire. I sat. I could feel the colour in my ears, and was glad of the dark. I did not have a pocket for that. I have a pocket for most things, the left one for the chalk and the berries and the spare cord, the right for the leaf, and I put my hand into the left one, from habit, and found nothing there that was any use. "Mm," I said. It was all that I had. "Yes," said Sevran, gravely, as if I had said a good deal more. "I thought that might be the case." "The pot," I said, after a while, "is on." I had not meant to say it. It is a thing that Resa says. I do not know what I meant by it, except that I had thought of her stove, at Pinecliff, with the kettle on the back of it and the loaf on the board and the window dark, and had felt, for the first time in a good many weeks, that it was a place which a man might go home to. I have never said it aloud before. It was a plain thing to say. "Yes," said Sevran. He was looking at the fire. "I imagine it is." "She has been keeping it on for a month." "I know. I thanked it." He considered. "In my head, at about four in the morning. I thought that it was better done in the dark." "Mm," I said. We sat. At some point Idrin came by on his way to the mouth with the lantern and the chain, and stopped, and stood looking at the two of us for the length of a breath, and said nothing, and went on. I have been looked at by Idrin Orek a number of times and I believe I am beginning to read it. It was not disapproval. It was the look of a man who has been counting a crew for a long time and has just noticed that the number has come out right. * * * On the fourth day we went in again, to do the thing that Vasko called *the sheet*, which is a numbered inventory of everything in a room, done on the floor in chalk, with no hands. It took the whole of the morning. I will not say anything about it, except that I counted the six in and the six out, and that it went by the book. We did not touch a peg. We did not touch a lid. Lian made a drawing of the back wall that took her two hours and that was, I think, the finest thing I have seen her do, and she wept a little at the end of it, quite quietly, into her grey scarf. I do not know what for. Nobody asked. Zahir said nothing for an entire hour, which I believe is a record. At about noon Marit lit the stove in the passage and boiled water in a small tin pot for her own tea and for the lamps. She sat down on the black tile's edge, on the grey side, quite deliberately, and took out a heel of bread. She ate it in the lamplight with her back against the wall. She said, to nobody, through a mouthful, that she had been a door-hand for twenty-two years and had never before eaten her lunch at one that opened by itself. I thought that was about the right thing to say about it. I looked at the clock in my head, at a quarter to three, and said "Out," and counted them out, and went out last, as I do. * * * The afternoon train from Tern comes into Halloway at ten past four, in the long low light, when the larches have gone the colour of brass again and the stones throw their shadows halfway across the platform. I was there at four. I had asked to be. Vasko had looked at me over her sheet and said, "Yes, go on, Maresh, you are the only one of us who knows how to meet a train," which was very nearly true. The platform at Halloway is long and low and built of the same dark timber as everything on the Corridor, with the roof coming down over it in the Kandren manner. Anka's post stood at the near end with its door shut and its lamp lit in the window. I passed it as I passed it on the day we came in, at an even pace, and I raised my hand, a very little, to the lamp, and went on. I did not think it needed more. The train came in on time. It was a short one, a local with two carriages and a freight car, and it stopped with a long sigh of brakes, and four people got down. A porter. A woman with a basket of eggs, which I watched with some concern. A Guild courier. And a woman in a station-issue coat. She was about fifty-five, thin and upright, with iron-grey hair pinned flat under a cloth cap, a long dry face, and spectacles that she wore low on her nose and looked over. She carried a leather form case, very old and very well kept, under one arm, and she stepped down from the carriage like a woman who has stepped down a good many times and does not need a hand. She looked up the platform and down it. She saw me. I do not know what she saw. She came toward me at a steady pace, without hurry, and stopped at about two paces. "You are the guide," she said. "Odran Maresh." "Halvey Ness. Station registrar." She did not offer a hand, but she nodded, a small economical thing. "I am told that the school has a find. I am told that nobody has touched it. I am told, by the Lead, in a message of some length, that it is a good deal more orderly than a find ordinarily is, and I should like to see whether that is true." "It is true," I said. "I counted it." "Did you." She looked at me over the spectacles. It was a considering look, and quite without hostility. "I generally find that the person who counted is the person whose answer I trust. It is a pleasant change. Is there a cart?" "We walk. It is two kilometres." "Then we walk," said Registrar Ness, and shifted her case to the other arm, and set off along the platform in the long light, and I fell in beside her, and carried her bag. We went up the larch path in the last of the sun. She did not talk. She walked as I have seen very good surveyors walk, eyes everywhere, saying nothing, taking it all in. At the cut Idrin stood at the ring with the chain over his shoulder, and I saw her look at him, and at the knot, and at the rule in his hand, and I saw her form an opinion of it that was favourable. "Six," I said, at the door of the passage. I had the crew behind me. They had come up from the camp in a line, in the order on Vasko's sheet. They stood in the dusk with their lamps unlit, as a company stands who has been waiting, with their faces turned to the bank. "Six," said Idrin. "And the registrar." "Seven," said Halvey Ness. "I am obliged." She said it with a kind of dry, entire satisfaction, as one says it of a bill that comes out right. We went in by the lamps. I counted her through the plate myself, last, with my hand lifted. She did not step on the black tile. She had been told about it, I suppose, in Vasko's message, and she stopped at the line and looked at it with her head a little on one side, and then took a pencil out of her coat. "Latch," she said, to nobody. "That is what Sove said," said Vasko. "Yes. I thought it might be." She wrote something. She did not say what. And then she stood at the edge of the black stone with her form case on her arm and her pencil in her hand, and looked down the length of the chamber, and the lamps, five of them, went out along the polished walls and came back doubled, and the black went back and back and there was the long row of pale things on the wall at the end, very still. She looked at them for some time. She did not say anything at all.  "Well," said Halvey Ness, at last. "That is going to be a great deal of paper." She took out the first form.