Day 2 / 100
The color went out of the world a little at a time, the way warmth leaves a body.
Ione had thought she was ready for it. She had been living without color for five years, after all; she had learned to read the town by shape and shadow, to tell a ripe pear from a green one by the give of it under her thumb. She had assumed that a fog that drank color could take nothing more from her. She had assumed wrongly. What the Pall took was not color as she had lost it. It was the memory of color, the faint echo she still carried in her head when she looked at a red door and knew that it was red. Ten paces past the third marker, the door in her mind went gray along with the real one. Twenty paces, and she could no longer say what shade the sea had been.
Behind her the shore thinned to a smudge and was gone. Ahead there was only white, flat and soft and endless, and the combed sand underfoot running out into it like a road laid across milk.
Wynne stopped her at a flat stone as wide as a table. "Hold out your left arm."
"Which wrist?"
"The one you can spare." Wynne glanced up, bright-eyed. "That was a joke. Left, Miss Calder. You're right-handed. You'll want the right free for grabbing things."
Ione held out her arm. Wynne uncoiled the cord from her pack, a long supple length of braided line, dyed in the walkers' deep woad blue that Ione knew only by its reputation, and began to wind one end around Ione's wrist. She worked fast and surely, with the unfussy economy of someone who had done this a thousand times, three turns, a locking hitch, a second knot over the first. The other end she tied to her own left wrist, above the cord already wound there, so that a hand's breadth of slack hung between them.
"Eight feet of line," Wynne said. "Never less than six, never more than ten. If you feel it go tight, stop. If you feel it go slack, stop. If it goes slack and I don't answer when you call, sit down where you are and don't move until I come back."
"And if you don't come back?"
"I always come back." It was said lightly. Wynne tugged the knot to test it and, apparently satisfied, let go. Her fingers had not once touched Ione's skin, Ione noticed, though they had been working inches away. She had tied the knot through the sleeve.
"Rules," said Wynne. "The real ones. Three of them, and then you can forget the rest."
"I was told one."
"I lied. Rule one. You count your steps. Out loud when I tell you, under your breath when I don't. Don't stop counting, don't skip a number, don't let your mind wander off while your feet go on. The Pall likes a mind that wanders. It will happily keep the body for company." She held up a second finger. "Rule two. You walk on my left. Always. I'll tell you why when you've earned it. And rule three." Her grin did not falter, but it sat a fraction more carefully on her face. "If you hear someone call your name, you do not answer. Not if it's your mother. Not if it's the king. Not if it's your sister."
Ione's thumb stopped on the stain at the edge of her nails.
"Especially not," Wynne said, more gently, "if it's your sister."
"She is why I'm here."
"I know. And if she calls you, you come and tell me, and we decide together what to do about it. We do not just answer." She waited. "Rule three, Miss Calder. Say it back."
"If I hear my name, I don't answer. I tell you."
"Good." And with that, the grin swung back into place as though it had never moved. "Off we go. One, two, three."
* * *
They walked for most of the morning with nothing in the world but the line between them and the sound of their own boots.
It was a stranger thing than Ione had imagined. She had pictured the Pall as a place of dread, of shapes in the fog and dark water underfoot. It was not like that. It was merely quiet, an enormous, patient, listening quiet, in which every footfall sounded like a small insult. The sand gave way to flat gray rock and the rock to gravel. The air was cold in a way she could not quite place: not the sharp cold of the harbor, but a dull, level cold, like standing in a cellar. It seemed to lean on her.
She counted. At four hundred she lost the thread for a moment, thinking of Tamsin's laugh, and the line at her wrist went taut at once, a sharp little tug. She said "four hundred and one" very loudly, and Wynne, ahead of her, said without turning, "Well recovered."
Once an hour Ione asked a question. She could not help it. She had spent her life among vats and ledgers, where things were done in a certain order for reasons she could name, and the Pall refused to be a thing like that.
"What's the third marker for?"
"It's where the Guild's maps stop."
"And the gate?"
"A week's walk, if the weather holds. It opens on the hundredth night from midwinter, and shuts a hundred days after." A short, bright pause. "I've been told I talk too much, so I'm trying to be brief."
"What happens if we miss it?"
"Then you make a very expensive tour of the nearest rocks and we come home."
"And you?"
"Oh," said Wynne, "I'd survive. I'm a hard woman to get rid of."
It was a joke, and Ione could feel the shape of it, the way you can feel the shape of a door someone has just closed. She tried again a mile later. "How long have you walked?"
"Eleven years."
"That's longer than the Guild lets most of them."
"Most of them are sensible." Wynne glanced back over her shoulder and her smile was entirely sincere. "Do try not to take after me."
Ione said no more for a while. She thought she could hear, in the silence, the sound of the question she had not asked, and she did not look at it, and she did not look at the woman ahead of her, and she walked.
* * *
By noon the gravel narrowed into a ridge.
It rose out of the white without warning: a spine of loose stone, three feet wide in places and less in others, running dead straight into the fog with nothing on either side. Ione looked down from the crest and could not see the bottom. There was only a pale, soft nothing that plunged away from the path's edge, and a wet, faintly sweet smell coming up out of it, like a cellar of old apples.
"The Gullet," Wynne said, stopping. "Don't look down, and for the love of God don't lean. It isn't the drop that matters. It's what the sea does to your hands if you fall in."
"What does it do?"
"Takes the feeling out of them." Wynne said it airily. "Then the rest follows. Single file. You walk where I walk. Left foot on my left footprints. Remember your numbers."
She set off, and Ione followed, counting.
It took her a hundred steps to understand what she was looking at, and another hundred to admit it.
Wynne was walking on the right-hand edge of the ridge.
Not the middle, where the stone was broad and steady. Not the left, where she had told Ione to walk. The right, along the very lip, where the gravel crumbled and ran off into the white with a little dry hiss at every step. Her boots left prints half over the edge. The rope at Ione's wrist was drawn out toward that side, taut and trembling, so that Ione, walking dutifully on the left, was always held back from the drop by the line and by the width of the woman's body, and she realized, slowly, with a cold clench under her ribs, that this had been planned.
She watched Wynne's boots for a hundred more steps. A stone went over the edge. It made no sound.
"Switch," Ione said.
"What?"
"Switch sides with me. You're on the edge."
"It's the guide's side." Wynne did not turn her head. "That's how it's done, Miss Calder."
"It is not how it's done. It's how you're doing it." Ione heard her own voice go hard and clipped, the voice she used on a dyer who had ruined a batch by being clever. "I walk on your left. That was rule two. You put me on the inside. You've put me on the inside for two hundred steps."
"Rule two has a reason."
"I'm sure it has. I'm sure it isn't this one."
Wynne laughed, short and bright, still not turning. "You are a terrible person to hire a guide for."
"Then I'll fire you at the end. Switch."
"No."
"Wynne."
It was the first time she had used the name, and she felt it leave her mouth like a coin she had not meant to spend. The line went slack, just a little. Ahead of her the woman's shoulders did something complicated.
"Once we're past the first marker," Wynne said, in a different voice, quiet and without any trick in it, "you do as I say. When I say it. It's the one condition. You signed it."
Ione's jaw set. She opened her mouth, and it was there, on the tip of her tongue, an argument as clean as a blade: that the contract had said nothing about being used as ballast, that a guide who fell would take her client down on the same line, that it was arithmetic and Wynne was bad at it. She looked at the line in her hand, at the long, braided, slightly shaking length of it.
She thought, with horrible clarity: she is doing this on purpose, and I am letting her.
She hated that she had noticed. She hated even more that noticing made her feel as if she had been handed something she was not equipped to carry. She had come into the Pall to find her sister. She had not come to keep count of another woman's footprints.
"The contract," she said, stiffly, "is very badly written."
"I did say." Wynne's smile was back, warm and slanted. It did not quite reach her voice. "Count your steps, Miss Calder. Two hundred and eleven."
Ione counted. She counted all the way across the Gullet, and she did not stop watching the boots ahead of her, and the whole way over she could not decide which of them she was angrier with.
* * *
They made camp that night in the lee of a split boulder, in a hollow where the gravel had drifted up against the stone and made a bank. Wynne built the fire out of oil and a little dry kelp, and the flame it made was small and low and the color of nothing, a trembling gray tongue that seemed to be drawing in the dark rather than pushing it back.
They ate salt cod and biscuit in silence. Ione watched the fire. Across it, Wynne sat with her boots toward the flame and her hands held out, and she watched her hands.
It took Ione a while to see what was wrong. Wynne was warming them, as anyone would, palms turned to the fire and fingers spread, rubbing the knuckles gently with her thumbs. She did it for a very long time. Then she flexed her fingers, looked at them, and put them out again, and the same small crease appeared between her brows that Ione had seen over a vat that would not take the dye.
The heat was not reaching her.
Ione did not know how she knew. Perhaps it was that when Wynne laid her palm flat on the stone beside the fire, which was warm enough to make Ione's own hand sting, she did not flinch or sigh or lean in. She simply held it there, the way you press a hand to a window to feel for a draft.
"Cold?" Ione said.
Wynne looked up. In the gray light her face was bright and shadowless, and her smile went on as easily as a lamp. "Always. Occupational hazard. I run cold. Terrible for bed-warming, excellent for keeping butter fresh."
"There's a second blanket in my pack."
"You'll want it yourself."
"I have two."
"Then you'll want both." Wynne drew her coat tighter and tucked her hands into her sleeves in the same small, smooth motion Ione had seen at the Salt Lamp. "You paid for the guiding, Miss Calder. Not the babysitting. Don't go soft on me. I'd hate to have to charge extra."
Ione took the biscuit, and broke it, and ate it, and did not say anything, because to say anything would have been to put out a hand toward a door that had been so very politely closed. She was not a woman who knocked. She laid out her bedroll on the far side of the fire and lay with her back to the stone and her eyes open.
The cord at her wrist lay slack across the gravel. On the other end of it, Wynne sat awake, keeping the watch, and she was humming something under her breath, a low, broken, wandering tune, with no words in it, so quiet that Ione would not have heard it at all if the Pall had not made the silence so very large.
It was a strange thing to fall asleep to. Ione did.
* * *
She woke once in the small hours, because the line at her wrist had gone tight.
Wynne was standing at the edge of the firelight with her back to the camp, one hand lifted as if in greeting, her head cocked toward the dark. The fire had burned down to a hazy coal. Beyond it the white pressed in, pale and listening.
"Wynne?" Ione whispered.
The woman did not turn at once. When she did, her face was perfectly ordinary, and she smiled the quick smile that Ione was beginning to recognize, the one that came before a lie. "Just stretching my legs. Go back to sleep."
"Someone was calling."
"Not you, though. Not yet." A short pause. "Rule three, Miss Calder. I'll tell you when it's you."
She came back to the fire and sat down, and Ione saw that she had walked out of her own boot-prints to do it, and that the prints she had left on the way back were fainter than the ones she had left going out. Not shallower. Fainter, as if the gravel had hesitated to remember her.
Ione lay a long time with her eyes on the white, and did not sleep again.
In the morning, over the dregs of the tea, Wynne unrolled a bit of oilcloth and showed her a map: a line of black ink, a scatter of crosses, and, at the far edge, a long, curved shore marked with the single word *Slick*. "Tomorrow we reach the shingle shore," she said. "It's wet and it's steep, and it's the first place the sea has had a proper go at the rocks in a hundred years. Don't rush it. Don't trust anything that looks dry." She rolled the cloth up and knocked it against her palm. "Watch your footing."
"I always do."
"I know you do." She smiled at the cloth in her hands. "It's one of the things I'd have noticed first."
Ione did not ask what she meant by *would have*. She was looking, instead, at the hand that held the cloth. The first two fingers were a pale, translucent white from the tips to the second knuckle, with the faint blue of a vein showing through like a stray thread under linen. The tips themselves seemed to fade into the air they touched.
Wynne saw her looking, and slid the hand into her sleeve in a single, easy, practiced movement, and went to put out the fire.
You've reached the end of this chapter
Day 2 / 100
The color went out of the world a little at a time, the way warmth leaves a body.
Ione had thought she was ready for it. She had been living without color for five years, after all; she had learned to read the town by shape and shadow, to tell a ripe pear from a green one by the give of it under her thumb. She had assumed that a fog that drank color could take nothing more from her. She had assumed wrongly. What the Pall took was not color as she had lost it. It was the memory of color, the faint echo she still carried in her head when she looked at a red door and knew that it was red. Ten paces past the third marker, the door in her mind went gray along with the real one. Twenty paces, and she could no longer say what shade the sea had been.
Behind her the shore thinned to a smudge and was gone. Ahead there was only white, flat and soft and endless, and the combed sand underfoot running out into it like a road laid across milk.
Wynne stopped her at a flat stone as wide as a table. "Hold out your left arm."
"Which wrist?"
"The one you can spare." Wynne glanced up, bright-eyed. "That was a joke. Left, Miss Calder. You're right-handed. You'll want the right free for grabbing things."
Ione held out her arm. Wynne uncoiled the cord from her pack, a long supple length of braided line, dyed in the walkers' deep woad blue that Ione knew only by its reputation, and began to wind one end around Ione's wrist. She worked fast and surely, with the unfussy economy of someone who had done this a thousand times, three turns, a locking hitch, a second knot over the first. The other end she tied to her own left wrist, above the cord already wound there, so that a hand's breadth of slack hung between them.
"Eight feet of line," Wynne said. "Never less than six, never more than ten. If you feel it go tight, stop. If you feel it go slack, stop. If it goes slack and I don't answer when you call, sit down where you are and don't move until I come back."
"And if you don't come back?"
"I always come back." It was said lightly. Wynne tugged the knot to test it and, apparently satisfied, let go. Her fingers had not once touched Ione's skin, Ione noticed, though they had been working inches away. She had tied the knot through the sleeve.
"Rules," said Wynne. "The real ones. Three of them, and then you can forget the rest."
"I was told one."
"I lied. Rule one. You count your steps. Out loud when I tell you, under your breath when I don't. Don't stop counting, don't skip a number, don't let your mind wander off while your feet go on. The Pall likes a mind that wanders. It will happily keep the body for company." She held up a second finger. "Rule two. You walk on my left. Always. I'll tell you why when you've earned it. And rule three." Her grin did not falter, but it sat a fraction more carefully on her face. "If you hear someone call your name, you do not answer. Not if it's your mother. Not if it's the king. Not if it's your sister."
Ione's thumb stopped on the stain at the edge of her nails.
"Especially not," Wynne said, more gently, "if it's your sister."
"She is why I'm here."
"I know. And if she calls you, you come and tell me, and we decide together what to do about it. We do not just answer." She waited. "Rule three, Miss Calder. Say it back."
"If I hear my name, I don't answer. I tell you."
"Good." And with that, the grin swung back into place as though it had never moved. "Off we go. One, two, three."
* * *
They walked for most of the morning with nothing in the world but the line between them and the sound of their own boots.
It was a stranger thing than Ione had imagined. She had pictured the Pall as a place of dread, of shapes in the fog and dark water underfoot. It was not like that. It was merely quiet, an enormous, patient, listening quiet, in which every footfall sounded like a small insult. The sand gave way to flat gray rock and the rock to gravel. The air was cold in a way she could not quite place: not the sharp cold of the harbor, but a dull, level cold, like standing in a cellar. It seemed to lean on her.
She counted. At four hundred she lost the thread for a moment, thinking of Tamsin's laugh, and the line at her wrist went taut at once, a sharp little tug. She said "four hundred and one" very loudly, and Wynne, ahead of her, said without turning, "Well recovered."
Once an hour Ione asked a question. She could not help it. She had spent her life among vats and ledgers, where things were done in a certain order for reasons she could name, and the Pall refused to be a thing like that.
"What's the third marker for?"
"It's where the Guild's maps stop."
"And the gate?"
"A week's walk, if the weather holds. It opens on the hundredth night from midwinter, and shuts a hundred days after." A short, bright pause. "I've been told I talk too much, so I'm trying to be brief."
"What happens if we miss it?"
"Then you make a very expensive tour of the nearest rocks and we come home."
"And you?"
"Oh," said Wynne, "I'd survive. I'm a hard woman to get rid of."
It was a joke, and Ione could feel the shape of it, the way you can feel the shape of a door someone has just closed. She tried again a mile later. "How long have you walked?"
"Eleven years."
"That's longer than the Guild lets most of them."
"Most of them are sensible." Wynne glanced back over her shoulder and her smile was entirely sincere. "Do try not to take after me."
Ione said no more for a while. She thought she could hear, in the silence, the sound of the question she had not asked, and she did not look at it, and she did not look at the woman ahead of her, and she walked.
* * *
By noon the gravel narrowed into a ridge.
It rose out of the white without warning: a spine of loose stone, three feet wide in places and less in others, running dead straight into the fog with nothing on either side. Ione looked down from the crest and could not see the bottom. There was only a pale, soft nothing that plunged away from the path's edge, and a wet, faintly sweet smell coming up out of it, like a cellar of old apples.
"The Gullet," Wynne said, stopping. "Don't look down, and for the love of God don't lean. It isn't the drop that matters. It's what the sea does to your hands if you fall in."
"What does it do?"
"Takes the feeling out of them." Wynne said it airily. "Then the rest follows. Single file. You walk where I walk. Left foot on my left footprints. Remember your numbers."
She set off, and Ione followed, counting.
It took her a hundred steps to understand what she was looking at, and another hundred to admit it.
Wynne was walking on the right-hand edge of the ridge.
Not the middle, where the stone was broad and steady. Not the left, where she had told Ione to walk. The right, along the very lip, where the gravel crumbled and ran off into the white with a little dry hiss at every step. Her boots left prints half over the edge. The rope at Ione's wrist was drawn out toward that side, taut and trembling, so that Ione, walking dutifully on the left, was always held back from the drop by the line and by the width of the woman's body, and she realized, slowly, with a cold clench under her ribs, that this had been planned.
She watched Wynne's boots for a hundred more steps. A stone went over the edge. It made no sound.
"Switch," Ione said.
"What?"
"Switch sides with me. You're on the edge."
"It's the guide's side." Wynne did not turn her head. "That's how it's done, Miss Calder."
"It is not how it's done. It's how you're doing it." Ione heard her own voice go hard and clipped, the voice she used on a dyer who had ruined a batch by being clever. "I walk on your left. That was rule two. You put me on the inside. You've put me on the inside for two hundred steps."
"Rule two has a reason."
"I'm sure it has. I'm sure it isn't this one."
Wynne laughed, short and bright, still not turning. "You are a terrible person to hire a guide for."
"Then I'll fire you at the end. Switch."
"No."
"Wynne."
It was the first time she had used the name, and she felt it leave her mouth like a coin she had not meant to spend. The line went slack, just a little. Ahead of her the woman's shoulders did something complicated.
"Once we're past the first marker," Wynne said, in a different voice, quiet and without any trick in it, "you do as I say. When I say it. It's the one condition. You signed it."
Ione's jaw set. She opened her mouth, and it was there, on the tip of her tongue, an argument as clean as a blade: that the contract had said nothing about being used as ballast, that a guide who fell would take her client down on the same line, that it was arithmetic and Wynne was bad at it. She looked at the line in her hand, at the long, braided, slightly shaking length of it.
She thought, with horrible clarity: she is doing this on purpose, and I am letting her.
She hated that she had noticed. She hated even more that noticing made her feel as if she had been handed something she was not equipped to carry. She had come into the Pall to find her sister. She had not come to keep count of another woman's footprints.
"The contract," she said, stiffly, "is very badly written."
"I did say." Wynne's smile was back, warm and slanted. It did not quite reach her voice. "Count your steps, Miss Calder. Two hundred and eleven."
Ione counted. She counted all the way across the Gullet, and she did not stop watching the boots ahead of her, and the whole way over she could not decide which of them she was angrier with.
* * *
They made camp that night in the lee of a split boulder, in a hollow where the gravel had drifted up against the stone and made a bank. Wynne built the fire out of oil and a little dry kelp, and the flame it made was small and low and the color of nothing, a trembling gray tongue that seemed to be drawing in the dark rather than pushing it back.
They ate salt cod and biscuit in silence. Ione watched the fire. Across it, Wynne sat with her boots toward the flame and her hands held out, and she watched her hands.
It took Ione a while to see what was wrong. Wynne was warming them, as anyone would, palms turned to the fire and fingers spread, rubbing the knuckles gently with her thumbs. She did it for a very long time. Then she flexed her fingers, looked at them, and put them out again, and the same small crease appeared between her brows that Ione had seen over a vat that would not take the dye.
The heat was not reaching her.
Ione did not know how she knew. Perhaps it was that when Wynne laid her palm flat on the stone beside the fire, which was warm enough to make Ione's own hand sting, she did not flinch or sigh or lean in. She simply held it there, the way you press a hand to a window to feel for a draft.
"Cold?" Ione said.
Wynne looked up. In the gray light her face was bright and shadowless, and her smile went on as easily as a lamp. "Always. Occupational hazard. I run cold. Terrible for bed-warming, excellent for keeping butter fresh."
"There's a second blanket in my pack."
"You'll want it yourself."
"I have two."
"Then you'll want both." Wynne drew her coat tighter and tucked her hands into her sleeves in the same small, smooth motion Ione had seen at the Salt Lamp. "You paid for the guiding, Miss Calder. Not the babysitting. Don't go soft on me. I'd hate to have to charge extra."
Ione took the biscuit, and broke it, and ate it, and did not say anything, because to say anything would have been to put out a hand toward a door that had been so very politely closed. She was not a woman who knocked. She laid out her bedroll on the far side of the fire and lay with her back to the stone and her eyes open.
The cord at her wrist lay slack across the gravel. On the other end of it, Wynne sat awake, keeping the watch, and she was humming something under her breath, a low, broken, wandering tune, with no words in it, so quiet that Ione would not have heard it at all if the Pall had not made the silence so very large.
It was a strange thing to fall asleep to. Ione did.
* * *
She woke once in the small hours, because the line at her wrist had gone tight.
Wynne was standing at the edge of the firelight with her back to the camp, one hand lifted as if in greeting, her head cocked toward the dark. The fire had burned down to a hazy coal. Beyond it the white pressed in, pale and listening.
"Wynne?" Ione whispered.
The woman did not turn at once. When she did, her face was perfectly ordinary, and she smiled the quick smile that Ione was beginning to recognize, the one that came before a lie. "Just stretching my legs. Go back to sleep."
"Someone was calling."
"Not you, though. Not yet." A short pause. "Rule three, Miss Calder. I'll tell you when it's you."
She came back to the fire and sat down, and Ione saw that she had walked out of her own boot-prints to do it, and that the prints she had left on the way back were fainter than the ones she had left going out. Not shallower. Fainter, as if the gravel had hesitated to remember her.
Ione lay a long time with her eyes on the white, and did not sleep again.
In the morning, over the dregs of the tea, Wynne unrolled a bit of oilcloth and showed her a map: a line of black ink, a scatter of crosses, and, at the far edge, a long, curved shore marked with the single word *Slick*. "Tomorrow we reach the shingle shore," she said. "It's wet and it's steep, and it's the first place the sea has had a proper go at the rocks in a hundred years. Don't rush it. Don't trust anything that looks dry." She rolled the cloth up and knocked it against her palm. "Watch your footing."
"I always do."
"I know you do." She smiled at the cloth in her hands. "It's one of the things I'd have noticed first."
Ione did not ask what she meant by *would have*. She was looking, instead, at the hand that held the cloth. The first two fingers were a pale, translucent white from the tips to the second knuckle, with the faint blue of a vein showing through like a stray thread under linen. The tips themselves seemed to fade into the air they touched.
Wynne saw her looking, and slid the hand into her sleeve in a single, easy, practiced movement, and went to put out the fire.
You've reached the end of this chapter