unclaimed-recollection / 25 - The Map.md# 25. The Map > **Narrator:** Odran Maresh · **Setting:** Halloway, the field camp, Halloway Station · **Act 3, Part 4** > The expedition was only ever meant to draw a line. Odran counts the crew through the last three days of it.  I learned to count faces and not numbers in my second season, on a job I do not much like to tell, and I will tell it short, since it is the reason for everything else I do at a door. We had eight surveyors going into a cut above Coldharbor, and I counted eight in. At the far end one of them knelt to retie a boot, and a man from the next crew, who had been sent to find his own people and found ours instead, fell in behind her and went on with us up the cut. At the top I counted eight. It was eight. It was the right number. And one of ours was still at the bottom with her boot half laced and nobody to say her name. Nothing came of it. She was cross, and cold, and had a good deal to say about the quality of guiding in the north. But I stood on that ledge for the length of a long breath with a correct number in my mouth, and I have never since been able to say a number without a face to go with each one of it. That is the whole of the lesson. A count is not a sum. A count is eight people, one at a time, and you have to know who they are. I tell it because the last three days at Halloway were mostly about counting, in one way or another, and about what you owe the people in the number. * * * On the eighth morning Lian finished the map. She had been at it for six days, in the gaps between the sealing and the registering and the registrar's long polite interrogations, with a roll of survey paper as long as a man and a case of fine pens, and a line of river stones that she used to pin the corners down. It is not a thing one can rush. She went into the passage with the measuring chain and Marit at the other end, and she came out with figures on her cuff. She went in again. She laid the figures out at the camp trestle in the evenings, under the lamp, and said numbers to herself in a small rapid voice that I had come to find restful, as one finds a stream restful. Zahir had taken to bringing her tea and standing at her elbow in silence, which for Zahir was an act of considerable self-denial. That morning she called us all out to the trestle at first light. The frost was thick on the canvas and the larches were gold, and the sun was a long way off still behind the stones. She had the sheet pinned flat with six river stones and a tin cup, and she stood back from it with her pencil in her teeth and her arms folded and a look on her face that I knew from other people's weddings. "It is finished," she said, round the pencil. "Nobody touch it." It was a very good drawing. I am no judge, but I have stood over a great many of them, and I know the difference between one that is trying to tell you something and one that is merely accurate. This one did both. It showed the iron door in the bank, drawn from above, small and square, and the passage going away from it in a straight ruled line, a hundred and forty paces to the plate, with Marit's arrows in a dotted run along one side. It showed the chamber, a black square with the chests drawn in two ranks, six and five, each with its letter. It showed the wall with the pegs, and the bare four. And it showed, pale and faint, in a grey wash that she had put in with the flat of the brush, the line of the ground beyond. "Here," said Lian, and took the pencil out of her teeth, and touched the paper. It was the far wall. She had run a long thin line out from it, through the stone and the earth beyond, in the same straight direction as the passage, and she had carried the line on, off the edge of her own sheet, and laid a second, smaller drawing against it, a copied sheet in a different hand, brown with age. It was an old map, the Guild's own, of the known approaches to the Archive. She had a small rule across the join, and it ran true. "I did not believe it," she said. "I did it three times. The chamber's back wall is not just in the same direction as the Archive's approach. It sits square on it. The passage and the approach are one line. If one went on from where we stand, through that wall, for," and she touched the old sheet, a long way down, "about this far, one would come to what this map calls the apron." Nobody said a thing.  I had a moment, then, of the particular clarity that comes before one has decided what one thinks. It was a small and ordinary moment. I was standing with my hands in my coat, and I could hear Marit's boots shifting on the frozen grass, and the stove ticking, and the thin high note of the wire that hums somewhere out in the fog at Halloway and has never been explained. I looked at the line. It was a very straight line. I thought, with great plainness, that it is a strange thing to build a vault, and a stranger thing to build one on the way to somewhere, and I thought that whoever had done it had known precisely what they were putting where. I did not think any further than that. I am a guide. It is not my work to think past a door. I looked, once, to my left, because I always look to my left now. It is a habit that has grown on me, like a limp. Sevran was standing at the very edge of the trestle, a step behind the line of the rest of us, with his hands behind him. He was looking at the map with an expression that I can only call courteous. It is the face he wears when he is looking at something that is none of his business and is being very careful about it. It was perfectly pleasant. It was also the face of a man who is holding a door shut with his back. I do not know why I thought that. I have gone over it a good many times since. I moved. It was a half step only, to the left and forward, so that my shoulder was between his and the sheet. I have done it before and I will do it again. It is not a thing I need to explain, and he did not turn his head, but I felt him let go of a breath that he had been keeping. "Mm," I said, to nobody in particular, and nobody was fooled. "Hallow," said Vasko. It was an odd moment to be asked anything. I felt him go very still. "I have been asked," she said, and she was not looking at him, she was looking at the map, "by the registrar, and by the school, and by my own conscience, to say aloud what we are going to do about this. And I want to do it in front of all of you, because I should rather it was said than assumed. I shall say it, and any of you may tell me if I have it wrong." She laid her hand flat on the paper, beside the grey wash. "The expedition's purpose was a map. It was one purpose, a small one. We were sent to find where an entry in the bank meets a passage, and where the passage meets the old approaches to the Archive, and to draw it. That is what the school paid for. That is what the Guild put us here to do. Nobody sent us for a chamber, and nobody sent us for the rings. They were a thing that we found on the way, and I do not dismiss them, but they were not the job." She looked up. "The job is done. We have drawn the line. And we have found out that the line goes on." "Past the far wall," said Idrin. "Past the far wall." She took a breath. "It stays shut. I am saying so aloud so that it is a decision and not a silence. Nobody opens it, nobody tests it, nobody puts a tool to it. We do not know what is on the other side, and it is not for a field team to find out, and the Directorate will have a view on the line when it hears of it. We shall report where the wall is and what it points at, and then we shall walk away from it." "Seconded," said Marit. I do not think that I have heard Marit second anything in eleven years of knowing her. She said it quite flatly, to the map. Idrin gave a short nod. Lian rolled the pencil in her fingers and said, very softly, "I thought it would be that," and I realised that she had been braced for an argument, and was nearly in tears with relief. "Then it is entered," said Vasko, and sat down on the nearest crate rather suddenly, like a person whose strings have been let go. Zahir, who had been silent for a very long time, said, in a hushed voice, "It is a lovely drawing." "Thank you," said Lian. "I mean it. It is the loveliest drawing of a wall I have ever seen." "I know," said Lian, and went pink to the ears. I looked left. Sevran had taken one breath and let it out, slowly, in the manner of a man testing a step. He caught my eye. He said, very low, in the voice that he keeps for the two of us, the one that is very nearly a smile, "I did not know that I was holding it." "No," I said. "Nor does anybody, mostly." "You moved." "I was reaching for the cup." "There is no cup." "There was a stone," I said. "I thought it might need steadying." He laughed. It was a short real sound, and he was clearly surprised by it, as he is by most of the things that his body does when he has not been consulted. Two paces off, Zahir's head turned, very slightly, and turned back, in the manner of a man who has resolved not to have noticed. * * * I should say how the three days went, in the plain way, since a day is the right size for a thing. The eighth was the map. We spent the rest of it on the passage with the measuring chain, Lian and Marit and I, going back and forth between the plate and the door in the bank, with the chain between us, and Lian calling out the figures and writing them on her cuff. It was cold, slow, quiet work, and it suited me. I counted us in and out four times, and Idrin said it back four times from the ring, and at the last Lian said, "You do not need to count me, you know. I am not going anywhere," and I said, "I know," and counted her anyway. She looked at me for a moment with her bright untidy face and said, "No. I see." She did not say it unkindly. She said, "That is rather nice, actually," and went back to her figures. The ninth was the report. I had better explain, because it is the sort of thing that is not told. Halloway is in the Reach, and in the Reach the Weave is not a thing that is simply there. The station keeps a local Weave on a reckoner in its basement, good for the clerk's office, the platform leaves and the research houses, and anything that is meant to go beyond it goes by train. A message is written on a leaf and held by the basement reckoner until the next train stops, and the train carries it down the line to the next reckoner and brings back whatever that one has been keeping for us. It is store and forward, and it is nothing like the city. But Halloway is a busy stop, with the Archive behind it and a dozen research houses forever sending and being sent to, so the trains are regular and the sync is never more than a few hours stale. A thing sent in the afternoon is in the city by evening, and answered the same night if the person at the far end is quick. Vasko touched her cord to the clerk's leaf and wrote her report to the school at Lumen in the small hot room behind the platform, with her sheet and her cap on her knee, a report that would be read aloud in a committee room by a man who had never been within three hundred kilometres of the Reach. I did not see it. She told me afterward that it had taken her four hours to get it down to something a committee could read in one sitting, and that every one of the four hours had been a mistake. "I have never put so many things in so few words," she said. "I wrote *chamber sealed black marble eleven chests eighteen items restricted class*, and I could feel the cold coming off the page. I wrote *far wall points to apron, left shut by decision*. I wrote it twice, to be sure that it said what I meant. And then at the end I could not think how to sign it, so I put *Vasko, Lead, all well*, and the clerk read it back off his leaf and said, 'It does not say who is well,' and I said, 'No.'" "That is how one signs them," I said. "Is it?" "It is how I would." "Mm," said Vasko, and gave me a considering look, and I realised that it was the first time that she had used my own noise back at me, and that it had sounded very much like an acknowledgement. The tenth was the last. I do not know what I had thought it would be. I think, in the way of people who have been busy, that I had not thought. It came up on us, quietly, in a clean cold dawn with a hard pale light on the river, and we got up and ate and began to take the camp down. * * * The agent from Solvara arrived on the afternoon of the ninth, on the three-ten from the south, and stepped down onto the platform at Halloway as one steps onto a stage that one has often played. I should like to be fair to her. She was a woman of about forty with a long sallow face and a very upright back, in a slate-grey travelling coat with the Compact's pale sash across it, and she carried a plain black case with a good deal of care. She was called Sethe Marrin. She had a quiet, careful voice and an exact manner, and she did not at any time raise her voice or make a gesture that she did not need. She was perfectly civil. She thanked the station clerk for the use of his office. She asked Registrar Ness, with something that was nearly warmth, how long it had been since they last worked a find together, and Ness said, "Eleven years. The glass cases at Vael," and Marrin said, "Of course. I had forgotten how little paper you used," and Ness said, "That is a joke, and I shall not dignify it." And the whole crew went quiet. I do not know how else to put it. It was not a fear. It was not a thing that anyone said. It was only that when she came down the platform, five of the six of us, and Idrin, who made it seven, did the small things that people do. Marit's hand went to the hide roll on her belt, and stayed there. Lian, who had been talking, ceased. Vasko stood a little straighter than a lead needs to. Zahir, who was in the middle of a sentence about a dew cup, finished the sentence in a very small voice and put his hands in his pockets. Idrin took his hat off and held it. It was the kind of unease that one has about a thing that is entirely proper, like a clean-shaven man in a good coat standing in the doorway of a house at night. I knew exactly what it was. Solvara does not do anything wrong. It is that when Solvara comes, a thing is no longer yours. We had walked down a passage and found a chamber, and we had lifted eighteen things off a wall, and for ten days it had been the best and the strangest thing that had ever happened to any one of us. And now there was a woman in a grey coat with a very polite case, and from this moment it was an item on a schedule. That is the Compact. It is how it should be. It is why there are not rings at the bottom of every pond in the Reach. And it is a hard thing to watch walk down a platform, all the same. I looked left. He had moved. I had not seen him do it. He was standing a step behind Vasko's shoulder, in the shadow of the post, with his hands easy at his sides and his hat on. He looked like a man who had come to see a train. I do not think that anybody else would have seen a thing, and there was, as far as I could tell, nothing to see. He gave Marrin the same small formal bow that he gives to doors. I did not move into his line this time. I stood where I was, a hand's breadth off, and I looked at the agent as she came, and I let her see me look. It is not much. It is the only thing a guide has, in the end. You stand at the back, and you make it plain that there is somebody at the back. She went by us. She did not look at him. She did not look at any of us twice. "You will be Lead Vasko," she said, and took Vasko's hand. "Good. I have read your report. It was a model." "It was a mistake." "It was a very economical mistake." She smiled very slightly, a thing that came and went. "Shall we see your strongroom?" We went to the north annex in a body. Ness opened the iron door with her key, and the cold of the stone came out to meet us, and the agent stood on the threshold for some time with her case in her hand and looked at the grey shelves and the eighteen small corded cases standing on them in their rows, each with its seal and its tag. She looked at it the way a man looks at a field of wheat that he has been told is his. She went in alone. She did not touch a thing. She bent to each tag and read the numbers and the names, and when she came to the signatures she stopped, and read them, and I could see her lips move on the witness names. I think she read every one.  "Eighteen," she said. "Numbered, corded, sealed in the field, signed in two hands, unworn." "Unworn," said Ness. "It is a thing I should like to say to a good many people." Marrin straightened. She turned and looked back along the line of us in the doorway, and for the briefest moment I thought that she looked at the far end, at a man in an olive jacket with a hat on. I think that I was wrong. I think that she was looking at the lamp. "I will be quite plain. The Compact takes custody of the rings from the date and hour on this form. They will be carried to Solvara's house at Tern under guard, and from there to the Directorate for review, which will be a season. Perhaps two. Nobody at the school will be allowed to put one on. Nobody at the Directorate will be allowed to put one on until the review has said that it may be done, and by whom, and under what conditions. I mention it because it will be a great disappointment to some very eminent people, and I should like you to be the first to know that it is not your fault." There was a small soft sound. It was Vasko, letting out her breath. "The remaining ten chests," said Marrin. "Shut," said Idrin. "Sealed?" "Chalked. Not sealed. They have no seals to put on them." He turned his hat in his hands. "It was decided that they were to be left alone, Agent. It was decided aloud." "By whom?" "By all of us." She looked at him for a moment. Then she took out a small book and wrote in it. "Then I will enter that it was the unanimous decision of the field team," she said. "And I will enter that nobody has opened the far wall, because I can see from the passage that nobody has. It is a thing that the Directorate will be glad to read. You would be astonished by the number of teams that have done otherwise." She signed. Ness signed. The seal came down in the wax for the last time, and the small clear door in the red was the same as it had been on the first day. "Thank you," said Marrin, and held out her hand to each of us in turn, the whole row of us, in the cold stone doorway. She had a firm, dry, brief grip. When she came to Sevran she held out her hand, as she had to everyone. He took it and bowed, with the little formal inclination of the head, and said, "Agent Marrin," and she said, "Mr Hallow," and that was the whole of it. It was all that was said. She went on to the next. I watched her go along the line and I do not think that she looked back, and I do not think that there was a thing to look back at. And still I found, when it was over, that I had been holding my own breath, and that the hand that had been on my satchel strap had gone quite white. "Mm," said Sevran, very softly, at my shoulder. "Yes," I said. We stood for a little in the doorway, the two of us, after the others had gone out into the larch light. I did not look at him. He did not look at me. There was, I will say, a space between his sleeve and mine that a hand would have fitted into, and I watched it for about the length of a breath, and then it was not there. I cannot say who closed it. I should like to say that it was him. It was not a touch, only a fact about where we were, and the warmth of a wool sleeve through a waxed one. "You stood where she could see you," he said. "I did." "I noticed." "That was the idea." "Thank you," said Sevran, and he said it with such careful plainness, as if it were a thing that he was setting down on a table between us, that I had to turn my face into the dark of the door. * * * The announcement came that night. Vasko had held it back until she heard from the school, and the school had answered by the evening train's sync, and she came out into the camp with the clerk's copy of it on a slip of paper in her hand and her cap pushed back and stood at the stove, where we were all sitting with our tea, and tapped it on her knee until we looked at her. "I have the funding terms," she said. Nobody moved. Zahir put down his cup. "They are plain, so I shall be plain. The first is that the Guild's regular pay for this expedition, which is the agreed day rate for each of you by role, is doubled." She waited. There was a little sound from somewhere, a kind of exhale. "Doubled. For every day of the ten, and the two days of travel. It is the school's decision and the Guild has agreed it. I did not ask. I should like that to be known. I did not ask, and I should have liked to." "Doubled," said Lian, in a small voice, as if it were the name of a town. "The second is the artifacts. The things from the chest, the cups and the lights and the cells and the rest, are the find, and they will be sold, at the proper time, through the proper house, by the proper process, and the proceeds will be laid out in a split. I do not have the figures. I have the shape. The school takes the first part, because it paid. The Guild takes a part, because it staffed. The crew takes a part, shared by role, which is to say in the way that the day rate is shared. And a small part, which I am told is customary, goes to the registry that witnessed it." She glanced across at Ness, who sat on her crate at the edge of the lamplight, drinking something, looking as though she had been born on it. "That is all I know. It will be some months." "Months," said Marit, who does not use the word idly. "Months. The artifacts have to be listed and valued, and the circlets have to be reviewed, and no sale will be held until the Directorate has said that nothing in the chest is something other than it seems." She folded the paper. "And I should say, as a matter of pure information, that if any member of this team were interested in acquiring one of the common pieces, a dew cup, say, or a lamp, there is a form for it. It is a long form. I should have to see it signed." I saw it. I mean that I saw Zahir see it. His head came up, and his eyes went very wide, and his mouth opened, and I saw the whole of a sentence arrive in it, quite fully formed, with a bow on it. It had to do with a dew cup. It had very likely to do with his mother. It was, as far as I could judge, a very good sentence, and he had it right to the front of his teeth. He looked across the stove, and Idrin looked back. He closed his mouth. It was the most extraordinary thing that I have seen anyone do in some years. Marit made a noise into her tea. Lian turned her whole face into Vasko's shoulder. Idrin raised one eyebrow by about a quarter of a finger and lowered it again, and Zahir, with great dignity, took up his cup and drank from it, though I do not think there was anything in it. "I would, however," said Idrin, in his flat voice, when it had gone round, "ask for something." "Ask," said Vasko. "A full list of the artifact inventory, as soon as it is made. Before any of it is sold. Item by item, with the valuation set against each, so that a person who has been in the chamber may look at the paper and say that it is the same as what he lifted." He paused. "I have been in a good many finds. It is surprising how often what is on the list is not the same as what was in the room." "Yes," said Vasko. "I should want it too." "Then it is agreed." "It is agreed. You will have it. All of you will." She sat down on the log, rather heavily, and put the strip of paper in her pocket. "That is the lot. That is what I have. I shall say one more thing, and then I shall say nothing for a day. It has been a good ten days. I did not know that it would be, when we came up the platform. I have not led a team that I would have wished to lead again for a good many years. I would lead this one." "That is a kind word," said Idrin. "It is a fact," said Vasko. "It will not be in the report." Zahir had his hand over his mouth again, but it was not delight this time. His eyes were very bright. He took the hand away and said, quite quietly, "I think that I shall make some more tea," and went to the stove. I sat where I was. I looked at the fire. I felt a good deal. There was a warm weight at my shoulder, and I did not turn to see where it had come from. It was Sevran. He had sat down, at some point in the last minute, on the log beside me, in the space that had been there, and he was leaning, very slightly, with his shoulder against mine. It was not a lean. It was the sort of thing that a man does when he is thinking about something else, and does not notice that he has done it. I did not move. I did not look at him. I kept my eyes on the fire, and I let it be a thing that had happened to the log. "I had a joke," he said, after some time, very quietly. "For the occasion." "All right." "It is about the registrar. I have been working it out for two days. I shall give it a signal." "Do," I said. "This is a joke." He cleared his throat. "Registrar Ness has now filled in more forms, in the course of this expedition, than I have said words." I had not expected it to be good. It was rather good. It was dry and precise and very slightly cruel, in the way that his are, and there was a pause before it, and a small hard stress on *words*, and I found that I was laughing before I knew that I had begun. It came up out of me in a short helpless rush, and I put my hand over my mouth, and I could feel the log shaking. "That was a joke," said Sevran, with considerable satisfaction. "I know. I know it was. It was a good one." "I had better," he said, "practise." "You are doing very well." "You said that you would be a kind audience." "I am being a very honest one," I said. "That was funny, Sevran." It was the first time in months that I had said his name without any little pause in front of it. I heard it as I said it. I did not make anything of it. I am sure that he heard it too, because the shoulder against mine did not move, and the warmth of it was exactly as it had been, and a little more. At the stove, Zahir, who had been making tea very slowly and with his back to us for some time, said to nobody in the world, "I did not hear that." "Hear what?" said Idrin. "Nothing," said Zahir. "It is lovely tea." * * * On the tenth morning the whole of the crew, in a line, went to see Anka. It was a formality. It had been so on the first day and it was so now: one at a time through the small low door of the medical post at the end of the platform, to be looked at, signed, and let go. Vasko went first, and came out after four minutes with her sleeve pulled down and a look of deep suspicion, which she took to be a clean bill. Lian went in, and Marit, and Zahir, who stayed rather longer than anybody and came out with the air of a man who has been told off with great kindness. Idrin did not go in. He said that he had been looked at, and had a certificate to prove it, and that he intended to be looked at again only by a professional who was not Anka, and he went to stand at the end of the platform with his back to us. That left Sevran. He went in at ten past nine. I stayed on the platform, on the bench by the wall, where the sun was, with my satchel across my knees. I will tell it as it happened, which is that I sat and looked at a closed door. It was green. It had been painted a good many times and the paint had come up in blisters under the lamp. The lamp itself was lit, though the day was bright, because Anka lights it at dawn and puts it out at dusk and has done so for fifty years, and does not hold with exceptions. In the window, behind the glass, I could see the top of a green plant and the back of a chair. I could not see any person. I could hear nothing. It is a thick door.  I was thinking about an afternoon from months back. I had not meant to. It came on me as the sun came on the bench, warm and quite unannounced. I was thinking of a day not long after we had brought Sevran to Tern, in a small room of hers with the shutters half drawn and a tray of dressings between us, when I had gone in with a graze on my hand that did not need seeing to and a good deal on my mind that did. It was the week after we had brought Sevran to Tern. I had sat on the edge of the bed, and she had taken my hand and turned it over, and looked at the graze for a moment as one looks at a thing that one has already identified, and she had said, without raising her head, "You are doing it again." "Doing what?" "You are making a project of him." "I am guiding him." "You were guiding him on the Corridor. You were guiding him at Pinecliff, and very well. That is a job, and it has an end. A guide takes a man to the place and says goodbye." She had dabbed at the graze with something cold. "You have the look of a man who has made a project out of his guiding. I have seen it before. It is a dangerous look. It leads to people staying up late with a lamp and a list. Do not make a project of him, Odran. You are a guide. He is a client. Let him be a person." "I have not," I said. "Mm," said Anka, who is the only person on earth who says it better than I do. She had said it quite gently. She wound the bandage round and tied it, with a little tug. "I believe that you believe that." And I had gone out into the street with a bandage on a hand that did not need one, and told myself with some firmness that she was wrong. I had tried. I wish that to be put down. I had set it as a rule, and I had meant it, and I had gone about the Guild room and the counter and the Corridor with it fixed in front of me like a lamp on a pole, and I had kept it, for as long as it was a thing that could be kept by trying. I had a name for him that was only his rank. I called him *Hallow*. I took the bench at the back and made a point of counting him as I counted the rest. And all the time there was a list in my head, with a lamp beside it. It had the name of the bridge he had stopped on, and the temperature of his tea, and the number of times in a day that he thanked a door. It had a column for the things that I had noticed and a column for the things that I would do about it. I would have said, if I had been asked, that I had a guide's eye. I had a project. It was, in every way that Anka had meant, the most thorough project of my life. So I had tried. I had really tried. My heart, who had never been consulted, had had other plans, and had gone ahead with them without telling me, quite calmly, as a man in a good coat goes across a room. I sat on the bench in the sun and looked at the green door and was, as far as I can tell, smiling. I am quite certain that I was smiling when it opened. I do not know what she said to him. I know that it was not very long. I know that when the door came back, Sevran stepped out of it with his hat in his hand, rather pink, in the manner of a man who has been spoken to by an elder, and I know that behind him in the dark of the room, for the length of one breath, I saw a small figure in a charcoal-brown coat looking out past his shoulder. She was not looking at him. She was looking at me, on the bench, with my satchel on my knees and the sun on my face. She said nothing. I could not have said what she knew. I saw her look at the two of us, at the length of the platform between his hat and my bench, and at whatever my face was doing, and I saw her decide, with perfect clearness, that it was none of her concern. She inclined her head. It was about a quarter of an inch. Then she shut the door. "She says that I am sound," said Sevran, and put on his hat. He came over, and sat on the bench beside me, a hand's breadth away, and then, after a moment's visible consideration, not a hand's breadth. "She says that I am to sleep, and to eat, and to come to her if I feel strange. I said that I should." "You should." "I said so." "Mm." "She said one more thing." He had his eyes on the rails. "She said that you had been very good to me." "Did she." "I said that I knew." He turned his hat in his hands. "I said that I had been looking for a way to say so, and that I did not yet have it, and that she was not to tell you that I had said so." He stopped, and I watched the colour come up the side of his neck, in the sun, to the ears. "I have just told you. I am not good at this." "No," I said. I looked at the rails too. They were very straight. "You are getting better." "It is a very small improvement." "I am a very careful judge." He laughed. It was low, and brief. I felt it through the bench. * * * The last count was at the iron ring. It was early afternoon. The camp was down, the tents rolled, the stove cold, the crates stacked on the platform with their rope across, and the long quiet had come over us that comes over a place after one has taken the people out of it. There was nothing left at the door in the bank but the mouth of it, and the iron ring beside it set into the stone, and a rope's end that Idrin had not yet coiled. He had taken the chain off his shoulder at last. I do not think I had seen him without it for ten days. He stood by the ring with his hands loose, and looked at the door, and I came and stood by him.  "I should like to do it properly," I said. "There is no one inside." "There is no one inside. I should like to count the place out all the same." Idrin was quiet for a moment. Then he said, in his flat voice, "That is not a thing I have heard of." "It is not a thing. It is a habit." "Then do it." I put my hand on the cold edge of the door. It was quite cold. I said it aloud, in the voice that I use for it, which is the plain one, level and not loud. "Out," I said. "Marit Sove, door-hand, out. Lian Sarro, surveyor, out. Perrin Vasko, lead, out. Zahir Dasan, out, and talking. Sevran Hallow, out." I paused. I did not look at the platform, where he was standing with his back to me and his hat on, in the sun, looking at nothing. "Odran Maresh, last, out." "Six out," said Idrin, a breath behind me. "And the registrar," I said. "Halvey Ness. Out, and complaining." "Seven out." His mouth did something. "I do not believe that I ever heard you name them before. You say the number." "I said the number. I did not forget the names. It is only that I had not said them where anybody could hear." "It is the better way." "Is it?" "It is how I should do it, if I were a man who did that." He coiled the rope's end, loop on loop, and hung it on the ring. It was a small tidy action, and he did it with such care that I understood it was a ceremony. "I have a thing to say. I am going to say it once." "All right." "You counted well." He did not look at me. "I have been a surface hand for twenty years, and I have heard a good many guides give a count, and some of them were quick, and some of them were loud, and some of them were very sure of themselves. I have never in my life been given a count that I believed so entirely as I believed yours. I was at the ring, and I said the number second, and I never had a moment of doubt that it was right." He picked up the chain, and put it over his shoulder again, with a small settling jerk. "Adequate," he said. "That is a first," I said. "I have heard that you do not say it." "I have said it once or twice this month. I find that it does not wear out." He looked at the platform, finally, at the straight back and the hat. "He was in a bad way when you brought him to Tern. I have not said so. I have not asked what he was in a bad way from, and I shall not. I am only saying that he is standing straighter than he was. And I notice where he stands." I did not say a word. "A man has to stand somewhere," said Idrin. "Mind where." And he walked off down the track toward the platform, whistling, very low and flat, three notes and a rest, which is the Halloway song. I stood a while longer by the door. Then I turned, and went after him, and when I came out onto the long low platform with the larches dropping gold on the planks, the whole of the crew was waiting there in the light, with the crates stacked behind them and the southbound just coming in under its long grey smoke. Vasko was counting the baggage. Lian had her roll under her arm. Marit was a little apart, looking at the stones. And Zahir, in his rust vest, a pack on his chest and his eyes shining, was saying something at great length to Ayuk, who had come up to see us off and who stood with his bad hand on the rail and his braid over his shoulder, saying, from time to time, "Yes." Sevran was at the south end, on his own, with his back to the stones. He had his hat in his hand again, and he was looking up the line, and I thought as I came up the platform toward him that he looked like a man at the end of a long walk who has not yet decided to sit down. He saw me coming. He did not wave, and he did not smile. He did something very small instead, a thing I have never been able to describe to anyone, that happens at the corner of his mouth when he is glad and has no word for it. He moved his satchel from the near hand to the far one, to make room. I stood where he had left it. The southbound drew in with a long sigh and three whistles. The doors came open. Idrin was counting the platform. Vasko was counting the baggage. And I, at the back of them all, with my chalk in my left pocket and my thumb on the strap, counted the six of us up the step, one by one, with a name for each, aloud, in my head. I had not been going to count him last. I counted him second to last, ahead of myself, and I did not know why until I was on the step with the train already beginning to move, and he turned in the doorway and put out his hand. I took it. "Six in," said Idrin, from behind us, in the flat patient voice, a breath late, as he does. "Six in," I said. It was only a hand on a step. It lasted as long as a step lasts. But he did not take it away at once, and neither did I, and for the length of a long breath, as the platform began to slide away behind the glass, we stood in the door of the carriage with the cold air coming in and the gold light coming across the larches and said nothing at all. I counted it, afterward. I count everything. It was eleven seconds.