unclaimed-recollection / 24 - Unworn.md# 24. Unworn > **Narrator:** Sevran Hallow · **Setting:** Halloway, the field camp, Halloway Station · **Act 3, Part 3** > There is a form for being present. Sevran signs it eighteen times.  There is a form for being present. I had not known that, and I should like to set it down, because it is the kind of thing that a person ought to be told before he is asked to stand in front of a table and say who he is. The table was a trestle borrowed from the camp kitchen and set out in the open between the second tent and the stove, with a grey blanket over it for the frost. On it stood Registrar Ness's leather form case, a pot of ink, a block of red wax, a small iron seal wrapped in oiled cloth, and a small grey leaf in a brass cradle, which she had set beside her elbow as one sets a cup. She sat behind it on an upturned crate with her cloth cap pulled low, and she wrote with a pen that she did not appear to look at, and from time to time she pushed her spectacles up her nose with one knuckle and looked at whoever was in front of her instead. It was the fifth morning. The larches were gold and the grass was white, and the whole of the camp had the careful, early quiet of a place that is waiting for its turn. "One at a time," she said. "Every person who has been inside, or who has stood at the door while others were inside, or who has handled anything that came out. Name, cord, role, and what you saw. Not what you think you saw. Not what you were told you saw. What was in front of your eyes." "And if what was in front of my eyes was a wall?" said Zahir. "Then you saw a wall." She did not look up. "I have a great many walls on my forms. Walls are the backbone of the Registry." Vasko went first, and was quick, and gave her answers with her cap in her hand like a person at a christening. Lian went second and gave her answers with a pencil in her teeth until Ness held out a hand for it and Lian surrendered it, and went on talking without it. Marit went third and said eleven words, and Ness wrote all eleven. Idrin gave his statement standing and I saw him count the page as she turned it. Ayuk, who had come in from the south line for it, gave his in four sentences and said that the ground was good, and Ness said, "Yes, I have seen your leaf," in a tone that was very nearly warm. I was called in the middle, after Odran and before Zahir. I had stood behind them and listened to the sound of the pen, and it is a curious thing that I was not, in the ordinary sense, afraid. It was more that I was attentive, in the way that one is attentive to the water in a ford. I knew what was coming. I had the whole of it in my head, a small plain object that I had been turning over since the platform at Halloway, and I had decided that when it came I would hold it out and let it be looked at, and not put my hand over it. I sat. I said, "Good morning, Registrar," and thanked the crate, which received the thanks without comment. "Name." "Sevran Hallow." "Cord." I put out my wrist. She took it in her left hand, as one takes a bird, and touched the beads of my cord to the leaf in its cradle, and the leaf woke under them in a pale line of small clean letters, which she read to herself, and then, since it was her duty, aloud. "Hallow, S. Pinecliff." A very small pause, the length of a pen lifting. "Registered by witness." It went out across the camp. I do not think she meant it to carry, but the morning was still and cold and the air is a good carrier of dry voices, and I saw it land. Zahir, at the next place in the line, did not move at all, which is a considerable thing for Zahir. Lian, who had been rolling a drawing, stopped rolling it. Vasko looked at the stove. Marit, who had a face for these things, looked at nothing whatever. Idrin, three paces off with his hands at the small of his back, kept his eyes on the line of the trees as though the trees had said something to him. Odran, on my left, was standing with his thumb on the strap of his satchel, and his thumb did not move. I waited. I had been expecting someone to ask. I believe I had been expecting it for some days, in the way that one expects the knock of a creditor, and I had prepared a sentence in the plain steady voice that I use for these occasions. *It is how I came to be listed. It is not interesting.* I had it ready. I had it ready quite as ready as I had had my plan for the platform. Nobody asked. "I have a high regard for witnesses," said Registrar Ness, and made her mark, and pushed her spectacles up with one knuckle. "Most of the oldest people in the Registry were put in by one. Role." "Explorer, in retraining. Instructor of record Orek." "Adequate," said Idrin, to the trees. "Noted." She wrote it, and it seemed to me that her pen went a little slower on that word, as though she, too, had seen the clerk's face when it was read to him. "And what did you see, Hallow, S.?" "A passage," I said. "Chalk arrows. A plate, which was open. Eleven chests, of grey stone, marked with letters. A wall, with pegs." I stopped, and then, because exactness is a habit I cannot put down, I said, "Four of the pegs were empty." "I have that already, from Sove." She turned a page. "Thank you. That is the first time in three days that two people have said the same number." I stood. I thanked the crate again, for form, and moved off to the side with my hands behind me, and Zahir went in, and said his name in the voice of a man giving a toast. It was only when I had walked a little way from the table, to the place where the grass was still stiff with white, that I understood that I was breathing quite evenly and that my hands, which I had put behind me from habit, were not clasped. They were simply there. Odran had come and stood beside me. He did it without any sign of having done it, as he does everything, so that I did not see him cross the grass. He stood a hand's breadth off, which is the distance at which one is not touching and is not apart, and he looked at the line of the trees, and I looked at the line of the trees, and we stood there like two men who have been told to wait for a coach. "Mm," he said, after a time. "Yes," I said. That was all that either of us said, and I thought it was a good deal. * * * We went in at half past nine, seven of us, and Odran counted it at the mouth of the passage, with the chalk in his left hand and his thumb on the stub. "Seven in," he said. And Idrin, a breath after, at the iron ring with the chain across his shoulder, said, "Seven in," in the flat patient voice of a man who is the second half of a sentence. The passage was as it had been, a hundred and forty paces of cold dark stone with Marit's chalk arrows running along the left wall at the height of a hip. We went single file, with the lanterns down and the registrar in the middle, with her case held to her chest, and she walked as she did everything, briskly and without remark. At the third pace the black tile gave its finger's depth under Marit's boot, and Ness paused, and looked down at it, and said, "That is a latch," and Marit said, "Yes," and Ness said, "Does it do anything else?" and Marit said, "Not that we have found," and Ness wrote it down on her cuff with a pencil stub, which I had not thought she would do. The iron plate stood open on its larch wedge. Beyond it, the chamber. I had been in it twice already, and each time it had been the same, and each time it had looked like a different room. It is a black room. It is polished, and square, and not large, and the lamps go into the walls without coming out again, so that one has the feeling of standing in the middle of a very still pool, with the surface a little above one's head. The chests stood in their two ranks, squat and grey and hingeless, six on the left and five on the right, each with its letter in chalk. And along the back wall, on their pegs, hung the eighteen. I will say what they were, because I had been looking at them for two days from the corner of my eye, in the way that one looks at a bright window when one is trying to sleep. They were rings. They were thin, and open at the back, and of a pale dull colour like bone that has been a long while in the dry, and they did not shine. They were no larger than a hand around a wrist. One might have taken them, in a poor light, for the sort of thing that is hung on a child's door to keep out the damp. I stood where I had stood the day before, by the third chest on the left, with my lamp low and turned to the floor. I had not decided to stand there. I found that I had gone there as one goes to a chair one has used. Ness set her case down on the lid of chest B and took out what she needed. She had a lidded wooden case lined with grey felt, the felt cut to a shape that I did not at first understand and then understood very well; it was a ring-shaped hollow. She had a pair of long brass tongs, the jaws of which she wrapped, one after the other, in strips of clean soft cloth, with the same small unhurried tucks that Zdena uses on a bun. She had a numbered tag on a cord, and a pot of wax, and the iron seal, which she did not yet unwrap. "I will say it once," she said, "so that it is said. These are, until the Directorate has said otherwise, items of restricted class. Nobody tries one. Nobody holds one. Nobody asks anyone else to hold one, or to tell him what holding one was like, in a joke or otherwise. This has nothing to do with your character. It is that the people who are very sure of their character are the ones I fill in the long form for." "Understood," said Vasko, for all of us. "They go in the case unworn, and the case is corded, and the cord is sealed, and the seal is signed across by two witnesses who have watched it done. Then it goes to the strongroom at the station. After that it is the Directorate's, and Solvara's, and anyone's but ours. Vasko, you will assist. You are the senior hand here and I want somebody to say aloud what I do." "I shall say it," said Vasko, who was very pale and perfectly steady. They went to the wall together, the two of them, and I watched them from the side, with my lamp down, and the black floor holding a faint reflection of the lamp at my feet like a coin at the bottom of a well.  Ness opened the tongs. She reached up. The jaws came around the first ring, very lightly, and closed, and I watched the cloth take the weight, which was no weight, and the ring came away from its peg with a sound I could only describe as a very small and private click, as of a stud leaving a button hole. It swung a little in the tongs. It was extraordinarily pale against the black. "Lifted," said Vasko. "First peg from the left, top row. Ring of the common pattern, open at the back, no mark that I can see. Ness is lifting it." "Thank you," said Ness, who had not asked for it. And it was in that moment, as the first ring left the wall, that the line came. I will put it down, because I have undertaken to put such things down. It came up in the usual way, which is without any warning, as a bubble comes to the top of a pot. It was in three parts, in three voices, I should say, though they were all mine. It said, *Ce n'est pas à moi. Bukan milikku. No es mío.* It did not trouble me. I wish that to be plain. It was not a fright, and it was not a grief, and it did not carry with it any picture. It was a sentence like the sentence on the side of a crate, saying whose a thing is, and in this case saying whose it was not. I stood with my lamp low, and I let the sentence be, as one lets a train go by that one has no intention of boarding. I watched it to the end of the platform. It went. I was left with one other thing, which was more difficult to put down than the line, and which I will now put down: I did not ask what they might show. I wish it to be understood that this was not because I was not curious. I am a person who reads what is placed in front of him. I was, I think, more curious in that room than I had been in my life, or in so much of my life as I have. It was that the question had a shape. I could feel it on the far side of the sentence like a step in the dark, and I knew with a very great clearness that if I put my weight on it I should go on down, and I did not want to go down. I did not want, at that hour, in front of seven people and a pot of wax, to learn what sort of floor I was standing on. So I stood where I was, and I kept my hands where they were, and I looked at the registrar's tongs. Beside me, something moved very slightly. It was Odran's boot, shifting on the black floor, so that his shoulder, in the corner of my eye, was between the wall and me. He had not looked at me. I do not believe he knew he had done it. "Thank you," I said, very low, to nobody. "Mm," said the shoulder. Ness lowered the ring into the felt. It fitted the hollow like a hand fits a glove. She closed the lid, ran the cord twice about the case and once across, drew the knot, and melted the wax with a small flame from a thing like a pipe, and pressed the iron seal into it, and when she lifted it away there was in the wax a small clear device of a door with a line across it. She tied on the tag, wrote a number on it, and held out the pen. "Witnesses," she said. "Vasko, then Sove." They signed. Vasko wrote in her small ladder hand, and Marit made a clean cross with her tin-stained thumb beside it, which Ness accepted without comment, and then Ness looked up, past Marit, at me. "You," she said. "You have a steady hand?" "I believe so." "Then you will be my second signature for the day. It is not an honour. It is that I need somebody who will read the number before he writes it." I came to the lid. I read the number, which was one, and I wrote my name across the seal tag in the plain hand that I have been given, *Sevran Hallow*, and under it, because there was a line for it, *witness.* The ink was cold. Something in me was very quiet. I will say what it was, since this is the place for it. The tag did not say I had seen what was in the case. It said that I had seen the case closed. * * * We did the rest of it in two days, and I should like it noted that it was not dull. It was slow, and it was exact, and it had a rhythm that I came, by the middle of the morning of the sixth day, to find as steadying as a hymn. Ness lifted. Vasko spoke. The ring went into the felt. The lid went down, and the cord went round, and the wax was melted, and the iron seal came down in its small flat sigh, and then two signatures, one after another, were laid across the tag. I was asked for more of those than I had expected. Marit signed twice, Vasko three times, Lian once, with a flourish, and Idrin, who came in on the sixth day to see the work, signed a single tag and handed back the pen with the expression of a man returning something borrowed. The rest were mine. I do not think it was favouritism. I think it was, quite simply, that I read the number before I wrote. Nine on the fifth day, nine on the sixth. Ness's voice moving along the wall with her tongs, and Vasko's following after, a half-breath behind, like a person walking behind a priest in a long procession. *Seventh peg, top row. Common pattern. Lifted. Eighth.* Lian sat on the floor by the left wall with her drawings on her knees and entered each peg on her survey, and Marit stood at the plate and watched the wedge. Zahir carried the cases to the passage mouth, where they stood in a row on a clean sheet, grey and corded and numbered, like a line of small patient animals waiting for a coach. And at the end of the last row, when Ness had lifted the eighteenth ring, there were the four bare pegs in the middle of the wall. She had them entered as empty. She went along them with the tongs, one by one, and ran the cloth across the black stone behind each, and held the cloth to the lamp. "No mark," she said. "No dust line. Nothing that tells me they ever held anything, or did not." She wrote it. "I will put it as it is. Four pegs, bare." I was, of course, thinking of nothing. I mention it only so that it may be clear that I was not looking at the four pegs, either. All through those two days, the shoulder was at my left. I mean that exactly. I do not wish to make more of it than it was, and I do not wish to make less. Odran counted us in and out at the mouth of the passage, *seven in* and *seven out*, on the fifth, and again on the sixth, and in the chamber between the counts he did his work, which is the quiet work of a guide who has come in under a lead's name and is expected to do whatever is wanted. He carried the cord. He steadied the cases as they were closed. He had a way of arriving at the place where a thing was about to be needed, a half-second before it was, so that the thing was already in his hand when somebody turned for it. I noticed it on the fifth day, and I noticed it again on the sixth, and the second time I noticed that I had been looking for it. It is not a thing that I would have said I was in the habit of. I am not in the habit of looking for people. And yet each time I turned, with a number in my mouth or a pen in my hand, there was a small, dry, steady person with a stub of chalk and his thumb in his strap, a hand's breadth off, who said nothing at all, and the number was written down. I wished to tell him. I did not know what I wished to tell him. That was the difficulty. * * * On the afternoon of the sixth day they opened a chest. I had expected this to be a quarrel. In a better class of story it would have been, and there would have been a heated argument by a lamp about greed and respect and the dead, and somebody would have said a fine thing about the dignity of the dark. It was not like that. It was a practical conversation conducted at a low volume among seven people who were tired, and it began with Vasko putting down her pen. "We have to know what they are worth," she said. She said it to the room, not to anyone in it. Idrin, who had come in to stand by the plate and was looking at the chests with an expression I knew from the platform at Tern, said nothing. Marit, who had been counting something in her tin, stopped. "The rings are not ours," said Vasko. "They are going to the Directorate, and I have no quarrel with that, and I would not have it otherwise. But the find is the find. It is a sealed chamber with eleven keeping-chests and eighteen restricted items, and a school at Lumen which has paid for this season, and which is going to ask me one question. It is going to ask me what it bought. And I should like to be able to answer it with more than 'a very great deal of black stone.'" "We have eleven chests," said Lian, softly, "and no idea what is in them." "Yes. And the keeping on each one is whole. I know it is. Nobody opens them for the pleasure of it. Everyone in this room has been told the same thing on the same first day of the same course." She looked at Idrin, and Idrin looked back. "I am asking whether there is a reason. And I think that there is. I think that if there are more of those rings, they are in a chest, and I think I should rather know now, with a registrar in the room, than find out later with a Solvara agent." Nobody spoke. I have thought about that silence a great deal since, because it was a very particular silence. It was not the silence of people who do not know what to say. It was the silence of people who know exactly what the rule is and are standing very quietly at the edge of it, each waiting for somebody else to say aloud that it is a rule and not a wall. It was Idrin who said it, in his plain flat voice. "You open a keeping-chest when you have a reason," he said, "and when you have a witness, and when you are prepared to be the person who explains the reason afterward. You do not open it because you wish to see. That is the whole of the rule, and it is not a long one." He turned to the registrar. "Registrar. Is there anything in your regulation against it?" Ness, who had been standing very still with her tongs, put them down on the felt. "There is nothing in the Registry's schedules," she said, "that restricts the opening of a sealed container as such. There is a great deal that restricts what may be done with its contents. The circlets are restricted. They have been entered as restricted, and they are going into the strongroom. A chest is a chest. If you have a reason, I will witness it, and I will write down that I did." "We have a reason," said Vasko. "Then it is a decision and not a curiosity," said Idrin. "And that is the only kind we make." He looked round at the rest of us. "One chest. Not two. Marit, you choose." Marit looked at the chests for a long moment. She laid her hand on the lid of the nearest one, which was D, the second on the right, and I saw her thumb lie in the chalk of the letter. "This," she said. "It has the cleanest edge." It opened, in the end, as a jar of preserves opens: with resistance, and a little strain on the hands, and then a long slow tearing breath that went all the way round the rim. Marit and Lian lifted the lid between them and set it on the floor. The air that came up out of the chest was cold and very dry and smelt of nothing at all. Nobody breathed. I should say here, since it will be wanted, that opening a keeping-chest does what it does. Whatever has been held in the still is held no longer once the breath goes out of it. It is not that the contents decay. It is that they are given back to the day, and the day takes about a day to arrive at them. After that they are ordinary things in an ordinary air, which is the ordinary fate of everything else in the world. We should have to be quick. Ness had her pencil in her hand. "Contents," she said. "Slowly." And Lian, kneeling by the open chest with a lamp held low over the rim, began to take them out. A cup came first. It was a dew cup, pale and a little rough, no larger than my two hands, and on the outside of it, as is the way of them, the air had beaded in tiny clear drops that ran and joined and ran and came to the foot in a slow bright thread. Zahir made a very small sound, and put his hand over his mouth. A second cup. A third. There was a flat disc of grey-gold metal, which Lian turned over in her hand and said, "Old light," in a whisper, and it woke at her thumb in a low gold, and was lovely, and then, as I came a pace nearer to the table, it seemed to me to rise a little. I put it down to the lamps. I stepped back. Four cells in a twist of oiled cloth. Relic-pattern, grey and ridged, of the kind that sells by the dozen in the Exchange and keeps lamps lit in half the north. Another four beneath. Marit counted them in her tin and said, "Eleven," with an air of finality. Then the other things. They came up slowly, and by the third I understood what they were. A comb of bone, worn smooth along the back, where a thumb had rested for many years. A case of folding reading lenses, the leather gone soft as a glove. A tin of buttons, no two alike, sewn once on a piece of card and cut off. A stub of pencil, sharpened with a knife, bitten at the end. A square of blue cloth, folded in eight, with a border of small stitches in a darker thread. A little wooden bird, a child's toy, with one wing chipped. I looked at the bird for rather longer than I had meant to.  They were laid out on the grey blanket, in a row, in the lamplight, among the cold sweating dew cups, and nobody touched them at first. They were so very plain. They were the sort of things that a person puts into a pocket on a Tuesday. And I thought, quite clearly, in my own voice, that it was an odd thing to be a man who had a notebook and a spoon and the name of a town that he had chosen, standing in a room full of other people's combs. "Personal," said Lian, almost under her breath. "Somebody's, I mean. One person's. These are all from one hand." "Yes," said Vasko. She had gone down onto one knee by the blanket. She did not touch anything. She looked at the bird, and then, slowly, at the back wall, with its eighteen dark pegs. I watched the thought come into her face. It came in the way that weather comes over a hill. "They are kept together," she said. "In the same chamber. Under the same keeping. One person's things, in a chest, in a room with a wall of rings. Registrar, I am going to say a thing, and I should like it entered as a hypothesis and not as a finding." "Say it," said Ness. "I will enter it as what it is." "I think each of these chests may correspond to a ring. I think the things in the chest are the owner's, and I think the ring is, in some way, that owner's memory." She did not look at anyone. "That is why the school is going to want to see them. Not the chests. The rings. That is why it paid for the season." It was said so quietly that it took a moment to arrive. Then it arrived, and it did not make a noise, either. It made a kind of settling, like a house in the evening. I stood where I stood. I had my lamp low and my hands behind me, and I looked at the dew cups. They had begun to run in earnest. "A hypothesis," said Ness, and wrote it, "unconfirmed, entered at sixteen minutes past three, by Perrin Vasko, Lead. The circlets are restricted. Nobody is going to find out whether it is correct in this room, and nobody is going to try. But I will say this for the avoidance of doubt." She laid the pencil across the page. "Everything else is yours. The cups, the lights, the cells, the combs, the bird. The Registry has no schedule against them, and I have nothing in my regulation which says that a find team may not do as it pleases with its finds. The other ten chests are yours to open or not to open, as you please. But if anything that I should call restricted turns up, in any of them, by any name, you stop, and you register it. You do not hold it. You do not wonder about it. You do not take it to the camp to look at in better light." "Understood," said Vasko. Zahir had taken his hand off his mouth. He was looking at the eleven relic-pattern cells in Marit's tin, and the three beaded cups, and the old light, and the whole bright pile of it all in the lamp, with the expression of a man who had just worked a sum. "Well," he said, aloud, to the room. "There must be some very good pay at the end of this." There was a silence of exactly one breath. Then Lian began to laugh, and she put the back of her hand to her mouth and laughed through it, and Marit's shoulders went, and Vasko shut her eyes and said, "Oh, Zahir," in a voice that was nearly a sob, and even the registrar's pen stopped for a moment. It was the first time in three days that I had heard the room make that sound. I think we had all of us been carrying something. I heard the sound go up into the black ceiling and not come down. Idrin waited, with his hands at the small of his back, until it had gone round once. "That," he said, "depends on whether Zahir can behave himself for the remaining days of the expedition." "I am behaving now," said Zahir. "You are holding a dew cup." Zahir looked down. He was. He put it down on the blanket with great care and some dignity and said, "It was drifting." The laugh went round again, softer, and I found that I had laughed with it. I had done it before I knew. And beside me, a hand's breadth off, there was a small dry sound that I recognised, and I did not need to turn my head. He was smiling at the floor. We left the other ten shut. There was no vote. Idrin looked down the two ranks, once, from the plate to the back wall, and said, "One was a reason. Ten would be a habit," and nobody said otherwise. Marit put the lid back on D, though it would not take now, and laid a clean cloth over it. Lian entered the contents, item by item, in her small round hand. And Ness took the pen from her, when it was done, and laid her own signature across the foot of the list, and then, after a pause, signed me as witness to the opening, because I was the only person in the room who had read every line. * * * Zahir made tea at dusk. He made it, of course, because something had frightened him, and what had frightened him, I think, was the comb. He did not say so. He lit the camp stove with the care of a man performing a rite, and set out the cups in a row, and I sat on the log beside him and watched him warm the pot. I had been wanting to ask him something for two days. It is a small matter, and I will tell it plainly. On the fifth day I had noticed that when the crew stood at the table, and I was called, and Odran was at my left, Zahir had been looking at the two of us in the manner of a person holding a lid down on something delightful. I had noticed it again on the sixth. It was not unkind. It was the opposite of unkind. But it was the look of a man who is in possession of a fact. "Zahir." "Sevran." He poured. "You are going to ask me something and I am going to be wonderful about it." "You know something." "I know several things. I know that the Tavari put the milk in first and I am right. I know that Idrin has not slept since the second day. I know the flavour of Marit's tin, which is cardamom, and which she thinks I do not know." He gave me a cup. "Which thing?" "About Odran, and me." "Ah." He sat. He did not drink. He looked at the stove for rather a long time with the cup between his hands, and his face, in the glow, was the face of a man doing a hard sum in the open. Then he said, gently, "I am not going to tell you." "Why not?" "Because it is not mine to hand over. It is yours. It is a thing you have to name and discover for yourself, and if I did it for you, you would only be holding a word that you did not make." He turned his cup. "You already feel it, Sevran. You know that you do. And sometimes that is all that anyone needs." I considered this. I considered it with some care, because it was said with such obvious kindness that to be annoyed seemed ungrateful. And yet I was, and I could feel it, a small tight thing like a knot in a cord. "It is not an answer," I said. "It is a kettle. It tells me only that something is hot." There was a pause. Zahir's mouth opened, and closed, and opened again. "Was that a joke?" "No." "It was a little one." "It was a complaint." "It was a joke and a complaint and I am putting it in my ledger," said Zahir, with the greatest joy, and clapped me on the shoulder with the hand that was not holding the cup. "Drink your tea. It is going cold. You have it exactly right, you know. You do not see it, but you do. Drink." I drank it. It was good tea, which is, I believe, the whole of Zahir's philosophy. And sitting there with my cup, in the light of the stove, with a frustration that I could not make angry and a joke that I had not meant, I thought, with some clarity, that I was no good at them. I mean at jokes. I have made, to my count, three in my life. One was *I shall admire the shirt*, and one was about a hat, and this one had been an accident. The truth is that a joke is a small promise that another person will be there to catch it, and I have not yet learned how to throw one so that it can be caught. I had better learn. It seemed to me a thing I should wish to be able to do. It seemed to me that there was a person in this camp, in particular, to whom I should like to be able to throw one. I did not follow that thought, either. I put it with the others. * * * The camp was quiet by nine. The frost came down early. The fire at the cook-tent had burned to a bed, and Idrin had taken the last watch of the chain, and the tents glowed one by one and went out. Only the little stove by the second tent was lit, with its door open a hand's width, and its pot ticking.  I sat on the log. I had the green cloth notebook on my knee and a pencil in my hand and had not written anything, and the lantern was turned low beside me, so that it threw a small gold circle on the grass. He came out of the dark with two cups. I did not hear him. I never do. He put one in my hand without a word and sat down on the log, a hand's breadth from me, with his own between his knees. "The pot's on," he said. "I know. I thanked it." "Mm." The corner of his mouth moved. "Did it take it well?" "It did not say." We sat. The stove ticked. Somewhere out in the larches a bird said one note and did not say another. "You signed nine," said Odran, after a while. "Eleven." "Eleven. Mm." He turned his cup. "You read every number. Ness noticed." "She said it was a convenience." "She said you had a steady hand. She does not say that to people." He did not look at me. "It must be a strange thing. Standing in that room." "It is," I said. And then, because it was dark, and the lantern was low, and nobody was listening but the pot, I said the thing that I had been carrying about for six days like a stone in a coat. "Odran. I should like to try to say something. It will be badly said." "All right." "I have been trying to find out what to call it." I looked at my hands. "When you are at my left, in that room, the room is a room. I can stand in it. When you are not, I notice the room. I have noticed that I look for you, in the way that one looks for the edge of a step. And I do not know the word for it. I do not know if there is one." I stopped, and began again. "I know that I want you near. I know that when you are, I feel safe, and that I feel, and I have thought about this a good deal, looked after. I have not been looked after in so far as I remember. I do not know how it is done. I only know that it is being done, and that I should like it to go on." I had not intended to say so much. I could hear it in the dark, a long plain sentence with all its joints showing. Odran did not say anything for some time. His thumb was on the rim of his cup, and it was perfectly still. "Mm," he said at last. It was very quiet. "That was plain." "It was the plainest that I had." "It was plain enough." He drew a breath, and let it out slowly, and his voice, when it came, had a slight roughness in it that I had not heard since the cottage at Pinecliff. "You do not have to find the word tonight. I am not going anywhere. I am on the chain, I am in the roster, I am a guide on a Guild sheet with my name on it. I will be at your left in the morning. That is not a promise, it is only a fact about where I will be." "It sounds like a promise." "Does it?" He glanced at me, very briefly, and away. "Then it is a promise with an excuse." "I had meant," I said, with immense caution, "to say that you are the second warmest thing in the camp. After the stove." There was a silence. Odran looked at me. Then he looked at the stove. Then he looked at me again, with the expression of a man who is waiting for a second half. "That was a joke," I said. "I know." "You did not." "I did, after about a breath." He was visibly working to keep his face straight, and it was visibly failing. "You should signal them. A little. Not a lot. Just so I know to be ready." "I am told that I must practise." "You can practise on me." He ducked his head, and a laugh came out of him, a short surprised one, quickly caught. "I will be a very kind audience." "I shall hold you to that." "Mm." He did not touch me. I did not touch him. But the log between us, which had been a hand's breadth in length, seemed to me to have become a little shorter, without either of us having moved, and we sat there, side by side in the small gold circle of the lantern, and drank our tea until it was gone. The frost made its small noise in the grass. The pot ticked. When he went in, he stopped, with the tent flap in his hand. "Sevran." "Yes?" "Thank you for telling me." He went in. I sat for a long moment with the empty cup. Then I opened the notebook, and turned to the page, and read my three lines, the first word of a sentence I could not place, and *Pinecliff*, and *Tea, three times, from a height.* I wrote the fourth beneath them, in the plain hand, slowly, so that it should be clear. *Signed as witness. Seen, not taken.* I held the pencil above the next line for a good while. It stayed white. I did not mind. A page is allowed to be white. It is merely waiting to be told something by somebody who has not, yet, found the word. * * * On the seventh day we carried them down. The eighteen cases went on a station handcart, in padded trays, with a green blanket over them, and it took the six of us and the registrar to push it the two kilometres from the camp road to Halloway Station on the plank track. Idrin walked ahead with the chain over his shoulder and counted the sleepers. Ayuk came up from the south line and walked beside the cart, and every time it crossed a joint in the planking he put his bad hand lightly on the blanket and took it away. The larches had begun to drop their needles. They came down in a slow gold rain, and lay on the cart, and on the blanket, and in the registrar's cap, and she did not brush them off. Odran counted at the camp gate. "Eighteen out," he said. And Idrin, ahead of us, in the flat voice, a breath after: "Eighteen out." He counted them again at the halfway post, and at the culvert, and at the foot of the platform steps, and each time Idrin said it back, and each time I felt something in me settle by the width of a thread. It was the kind of ritual that is not supposed to mean anything. I have come to think that it is among the most important things people do for each other. The strongroom was at the north end of the station, in the stone annex behind the clerk's office, where the leaf cables run down to the station reckoner in the basement. It had an iron door a hand thick and a Registry lock the size of a loaf, and Ness opened it with a key that she took from a cord round her neck. Inside was a bare cold room with a shelf of grey slate along three walls, and a lamp, and a stool. It was the sort of place that one is shown at the end of a long job and is relieved to find so plain.  They went in one by one. Marit and Lian handed them in, and Vasko took them, and Ness, at the door, with her form in one hand and her pen in the other, read each number aloud and made her tick. Odran stood at my left, with the chalk in his hand, and counted them in. "One in. Two in. Three." I took up the last one myself. It was heavier than the others, or seemed so. It was a plain grey case, corded and sealed, with a tag at the knot on which my own name was written in a plain hand across the red wax. I held it for a moment against my coat, the way that one holds a loaf. I did not look at the lid. I did not wonder, with a single part of myself, what was in the felt. I looked at the man beside me, who had his thumb on the stub of chalk and his eyes on the case, and who looked up, as I looked at him, and was caught. "Mm?" he said. "Eighteen," I said, and put the case into Ness's hand. "Eighteen in," said Odran. "Eighteen in," said Idrin from the passage, a breath after. Ness took the case. She set it on the shelf in its place, which was the last, and straightened, and pushed her spectacles up with one knuckle. She wrote a single line on the foot of her form, and signed it, and sealed it with the iron seal, and I watched the small device of a door with a line across it come up out of the wax, clear and complete. "That is the paper," she said, "for the day. There is more. Solvara will have it on tonight's train. There are a number of people who will be extremely interested and a smaller number who will be extremely careful, and I find the two groups are rarely the same." She closed the case. "You did a clean job, all of you. I have not said that in a while." The iron door swung to. It closed with a deep soft sound, like a very large book. Ness turned the lock, and the key sang once in the wards, and she drew it out, and that was all. They had gone in unworn, all eighteen. Nobody had asked what they might show, and nobody had been shown. I stood on the cold stone of the annex floor with my hands at my sides, and I found that I was holding them quite easily. I had come in with two hands, and a notebook, and a hat that I had finally put on. I had come out with the same. There was one more line in the book. And there was, a hand's breadth to my left, a person with a stub of chalk and an excuse, who was not going anywhere. I did not examine it. I said, to the door, "Thank you," as I do. The door, which had held eighteen small pale things in the dark and had no further use for me, made no reply, which I have always thought is the most courteous thing a door can do.