Chapter Eight

The River

Proof is a coin that only spends where it was minted. Moggruk had the whole walk home to work that out, the bone riding wrapped against his chest, and he was still working out what to do about it when he came in through the fallen gate well past dark, into an ordinary fire with the whole of what was left of the klan still up around it.

The hall stopped for the hat first — Brakka crossing to his corner still wearing it, with the unhurried certainty of a creature who had decided a while back that this particular hat was his in all territories and weathers — and then it stopped harder, and quieter, for the thing Moggruk laid down by the fire where everyone could see it. A bone. A long pale femur, scratched fine over every face of it, three fat drops of something dark dried glossy at its foot, stamped with a mark.

And here is the joke the world had decided to tell that night, and only one creature in the hall was placed to get it: every orruk there saw the bone exactly as it was. Honest eyes, with nothing standing in front of them — the one wealth the old country had never known it owned. The pale kingdom looked at that femur and saw a charter, a seal, a name with Lord set in front of it. The Gutscrape saw a scratched bone somebody had bled on. Both of them were right. Moggruk stood in the firelight and did with the truth what he had lately learned to do with lies — handed over the first bit, and waited for something to build the rest — and found, to his great disappointment, that nothing built anything at all.

"S'a bone," said Gnik, at last, turning it over. "Wiv scratchin's. An' someone's bled on it."

A grin sparked across Gobber's lips and a retort formed but it stalled as Brakka spoke up, "I woz dere."

The hall turned, because Brakka did not make speeches — not out of dumbness, but because he only ever spoke when a thing wanted describing, and then he was the best describer any of them had, and he was the only creature at that fire who had seen Moggruk's story.

"Went in da front," he said, slow. "Up two stair. Dere's a hall on top longer den dis one an' twice da roof — an' da roof's on nuffin. No posts down da middle. No props. Just stone leanin' on stone da 'ole way across, an' it 'olds." His hands came up without his noticing and made the shape of it in the air, the two curves meeting. "Dey done dat on purpose. Somebody worked dat out." He lowered the hands. "Da tall boss stood in it an' talked at Moggruk in our own talk. Wrote on dat bone wiv 'is own claw — I watched 'im do it, close as you are. Dripped da red on 'imself an' pressed 'is mark in." A pause. "It's a good bone."

Vragg picked it up himself, and turned it, careful even now, and set it back down, and looked across the fire with no mockery in him anywhere, which was the terrible part. "I believe ya," he said. "Dat's da trouble, runt. I believe every word. Ain't a soul at dis fire finks yer lyin'." He leaned forward, forearms on knees. "I ain't callin' ya wrong. Hear dat. I'm callin' da bet wrong. Dere's a difference, an' I learned it da 'ard way, same night you did."

He stood, and held up one fist, closed. "Mine: we go 'ome. East. Poor country — but ours. Country wot fed our lot's lot's lot, back 'fore anybody's granddad woz whelped." The fist opened; the other hand rose beside it. "'Is: we walk into da country wot et da Gutscrape in one night an' didn't burp, an' don't even fight it — we work fer it. Caper in der bowl fer der cheerin', an' bet everyfing, forever, on dem finkin' we're somefin' we ain't. Say dat ain't da bet."

"It ain't — " Moggruk started, and stopped, because it was.

"We're yer family, runt." Vragg's voice dropped, and held his blade out so the whole hall could see it, not to cut, just to be seen. "Wot's left of it. Boyz wot fed ya. You'd leave da last of dat — to go be a made-up fing, wiv a made-up name, for dem?"

"Da family's why," Moggruk said. "Bogs'll keep ya alive, boss. I believe you — every word. Alive an' fin, forever, till da next bad winter, or da next big fing wanders in. Dat's da best da old country ever paid anybody, an' you know it." He set the bone back down between them. "Dere ain't no safe. Dere's just picked yer mad, or didn't."

For one long moment the two of them stood on opposite sides of it, and Moggruk felt the ground go strange under his own feet, because he had spent his whole life on the other side of exactly this argument — the one who priced the risk and said don't, the edge of the light, the checked route — and here he stood pitching the maddest wager the old country had ever heard, against a Vragg counselling the safe and the known, and neither of them had switched a single thing about himself. Da safe road an' da right road come apart, sometime back dere, he thought, dizzy with it. Nobody told me dey could do dat.

Vragg heeled a line through the ash, east side and west side, and stepped back from it. "Nobody carries nobody."

Brakka crossed first, wordless this time, the way he crossed everything once his hands had already settled it. Gnik went next, spat in the fire, and delivered the whole of his religion without apology: "Bog don't owe ya nuffink. Never did. West don't owe me nuffink neither — but I ain't 'eard west say it yet." Gobber stood a while with her hands quiet, which for Gobber was open crisis, and said, "Somebody's gotta see it. Ain't no good it 'appenin' if nobody's dere wot can tell it after," and crossed. Mulch asked only whether the fighting was real, whether the winner got paid; told yes, he looked at his own scarred knuckles like a creature hearing its own language spoken back to it, and stepped over without another word. Which left Snag, alone on the east side, torn between two ropes the whole hall could see. "Is dat safe?" he asked, in a small voice — the question of his whole flinching life.

"No," said Moggruk.

And Snag crossed anyway, and stood by Brakka, because the bad thing had already happened once, and safe had stopped being the question that mattered.

Nibz was never part of the crossing. She was simply already on the west side, stones bagged, having audited the whole question days ago and filed the answer where she filed everything.

That was the split: nineteen east, seven west, an ash line between them the hall would outlast.

Vragg came over the line last, stepped across it like it wasn't there, and took Moggruk's hand and held it, the way you hold a tool you're returning rather than a hand you're shaking. "East don't close," he said, low, for the two of them only. "When it goes wrong — when, runt, I count too — you bring 'em back, wot's left, an' dere's a fire. Dat's da 'ole of wot I got to put against yer bone."

They went at first light, nineteen strong, and Moggruk stood at the gate with the other six and watched them go: the loads, the order, Vragg's back at the front of it, the whole shape of the only world he had ever belonged to walking east into the grey. He filed it while it was still there to file. Then — with the column still small and dark and perfectly visible on the flat, still a good long while from the horizon — he turned away first, and looked west, where the road was.

The south gate of Strömshal stood in shallow water, as it had for centuries, with the settled patience of a door that has decided the floor is somebody else's problem — and it was there, wading the last twenty yards of the only country his feet had ever trusted, that Moggruk got his first look at the mount Lord Balthus had supplied, and stopped, hip-deep, and let the whole column stop behind him, because the thing at the top of the causeway needed the entire file opened before he could even begin.

It was the largest living thing he had ever seen that was not trying to be frightening, which turned out to be its own kind of frightening. A pale mountain of fleece stood in the road, slab-shouldered, built all wrong — heaped high at the front and tapering away behind, so that even standing perfectly still it seemed to be leaning into a wind that wasn't there — with a head slung low near the ground and one blunt horn on the nose, worn flat at the tip the way a tool wears, not the way a weapon does. It was eating the weeds at the causeway's edge. It went on eating them while six orruks and a hobgrot waded through the water and stood in a dripping line staring at it, which was more indifference than anything that size had ever paid any of them, and the indifference was somehow the most unnatural part. In the bog, a thing that big was the reason you had left an area. This one had opinions only about the weeds.

And it made no sound. That was the part Moggruk filed deepest, standing there with the water running off him. A creature the size of a hut, chewing, and the chewing was the whole of its noise — no breath you could hear, no shifting, no low warning note from that great chest. Every big thing in the mire announced itself; it was how you stayed ahead of the big things. This one stood in the road like weather.

Strapped to its back — and built, plainly built, joinery and lacquer and small carved flourishes at the corners, Brakka's hands already rising unbidden to measure it from thirty feet away — rode a carriage. A proper one, roofed and railed, with a folding step and a fringed canopy and a padded bench visible through its little window, the whole rig gleaming with the particular gleam of a thing finished the night before under protest. It sat on the beast's enormous shoulders the way a crown sits on a plough-handle.

Haldane Engvarings stood beside it, dressed for a journey the way the stone cup dressed for an evening, and he was already talking.

he was saying, upward, to the carriage, or the sky, or the office of lordship in general—

he turned, found his audience arriving out of the river, and redirected the sentence at Moggruk in the common tongue without dropping a syllable of it — "an Öxldýr, my lord. Do you see what my cousin has done? A plough-beast. A rented plough-beast. This animal broke furrows for turnip-farmers until the day before yesterday. It has a hire-brand on its hindquarter. I asked for a mount befitting an emissary of the realm and my beloved cousin, the great Warden of the North, has sent me agriculture with a roof on it."

Moggruk looked at the beast. The beast, reaching the end of the near weeds, took a single unhurried step along the verge — the carriage swaying above it like a boat — and resumed.

"It is called the Sauðberg at pasture," Haldane went on, bitterly, in the voice of a creature performing generosity at an audience too rustic to have heard of the thing it was looking at, "— and the Öxldýr in harness, the shoulder-beast, and the joke of the two names, my lord, is that the second one is supposed to dignify the work. It does not. Everyone on this road will know exactly what they are seeing. They will see the emissary of Strömshal riding a plough."

"Big plough," said Gnik, with genuine respect.

Gobber had gone straight past all of it — the rank, the complaint, the diplomatic catastrophe of the hire-brand — and up to the animal itself, which stood a wall of pale rusty fleece higher than her head, and did the thing every creature meeting a Sauðberg does eventually and most of them do first: she pushed both arms into the wool to the elbow. Her face went through surprise into something close to scandal. "'Ere," she said, muffled, to the fleece. "'Ere, it's soft. Softest fing I ever — Snag. Snag. Come feel of dis." And Snag, who had approached the mountain sideways, on the working assumption that anything that big was a lie, put one careful hand in it, and left the hand there, and his shoulders came down half an inch for the first time since the ash line. Gobber then took out her knife and cut some of the beast's fleece, placing it in one of her many pouches. The beast chewed. It did not appear to have noticed being robbed by one orruk any more than it noticed being loved by the other.

She named it before they'd gone a mile, of course. She walked its whole length twice, considering, while it grazed its slow way through the harnessing — took in the shoulders, the little distant eyes, the great settled indifference of it — and pronounced, with the certainty of a master at her craft: "Lumpy." And Lumpy the Öxldýr was, from that moment, to everyone in the company except Haldane, who used its correct name the way other creatures use armor, and the beast's keeper, who used no name at all — a small bent pale thing with a switch it never once employed, who walked at the beast's head all day and appeared to steer it by walking slightly to one side or the other of where it was already going.

The keeper made four with Haldane's attendants — or the attendants made four with the keeper; Moggruk never did settle which way that arithmetic was meant to run — three more pale folk, sent by Balthus to carry the emissary's dignity, which traveled in cases. They took their places around the carriage with the capering typical of their kind and the resignation of creatures who had stood around better carriages. Haldane climbed the folding step still complaining, and settled onto the bench, and the convoy — a rented mountain, a lord's cousin, four servants, six orruks, and a hobgrot — moved off southwest through the shallow water along what was once the south bank of the river the pale folk called the Silverrun and would be wounded to hear called anything else.

The bogs let them go slowly, the way a thing lets go when it has never been told it does not own you.

For the first half-day the country was simply the country: flooded margin, drowned paving, water lying flat and silver in the fields either side. Then the water began, by degrees, to lose arguments. Flooded fields became wet fields. Wet fields became dark-soiled damp ones, standing above ditches that drained them — and the ditches ran, purposefully, somewhere, downhill, which was a thing bog water never did, bog water having no opinion about where it wanted to be. The road came up out of its own reflection. By late afternoon it ran on ground that was merely rained-on, firm enough to take a print and keep it, and the river had gathered itself out of the drowned everywhere into one broad deliberate channel off their right hand.

There were barges on it. Moggruk walked level with one for the best part of an hour, a hull longer than anything he had ever seen move in one piece, and four pale figures out ahead of it on the towpath in harness, leaning into their ropes and singing something with the timing slightly wrong in it — hauling upstream, against the whole weight of the water, a rope's length at a time. In the bog you went where the water let you. That was not a rule anyone had made; it was simply the arrangement, the way wet was wet. Here they had put a rope on it.

He filed that. He could not yet have said what under.

And so six swamp orruks of the Gutscrape walked dry-footed through open country for the first time in the whole history of anyone any of them had ever been.

Their feet were delighted. There was no testing. There was no putting a foot down and waiting to learn whether it would be allowed to stay there. Just step and step and step, mile after effortless mile, and Mulch, who had taken Nibz's pack off her at midday without being asked and without appearing to notice he had done it, made better time under two loads than he had ever made under one.

Everything above the feet disagreed.

A swamp orruk's whole science of safety is written in water. Water is where you go. Water is the deep channel that hides you, the cold road nothing heavy can follow you down, the reason a small clever thing gets to keep being a thing at all — and the water was draining politely off the world on either side of them and taking every exit any of them had ever used along with it. Nobody said so for a long while. It is difficult to complain about good walking.

Snag managed it at last, in the small voice he kept for the questions that mattered, looking out at low dark hills with not one gleam of standing water anywhere on them.

"Where'd ya go, den." It was not really a question; it was a foot put down on ground nobody had tested, to see whether it held. "If it went bad. Out 'ere." A pause. "Dere ain't nowhere to go down."

Nobody answered him, which was its own answer, and Gnik did not laugh, which was a newer one.

They made camp where the road bent up onto a rise, because the little bent keeper stopped the beast there, at a flat of beaten turf with a ring of old stones set in the middle of it and willow along a stream below — a place that had plainly been stopped at countless times before.

Brakka walked the ring twice and looked at the stones. "Somebody set dese," he said, to no one. "Long back." Then he sat down next to them with the expression of a maker in the presence of another maker's leavings.

The pale folk made their own arrangement forty feet off with the unhurried competence of creatures who did this on a schedule: the carriage down off the beast, the beast unharnessed and standing, the keeper going over it hoof to horn in the last of the light, the three grey attendants raising Haldane's tent — an actual tent, with poles — and Haldane inspecting the site as though selecting it, having ridden past a dozen indistinguishable ones all day.

The beast did not lie down. Moggruk watched a long while to see it happen and it did not happen. It stood where it had been left, in the dark, chewing at nothing in particular, asleep on its feet like a wading bird, and no creature in the pale camp so much as glanced at it.

Gobber was in a fine mood until she went into her pouch.

"'Ere," she said. Then, differently: "'Ere."

She'd cut the fleece off the beast that morning, a good double handful of the softest thing anyone in the klan had ever touched, and had spent the day telling Snag at intervals what she meant to line with it. What came out of the pouch had the shape of that wool and none of the rest. It was harsh. It was harsher than harsh — wire-stuff, a fistful of it, the sort of thing you would take rust off a blade with and then apologize to the blade. She turned it over twice, looking for the swap. There was no swap; there was only the same wool, gone hard as soon as it left the animal that grew it, and forty feet away the animal itself stood wearing an entire hillside of the softest thing anyone in the klan had ever touched, and would go on wearing it, and would hand over nothing.

"Dat's a cheat," Gobber said, to the pouch, with real feeling. "Dat's a cheat, dat is." She kept it anyway.

Moggruk looked at the wire in her fist, and then at the beast, and pulled a rough fiber from between his teeth.

Nibz did the count while the fire was still small.

She did it every night; she had done it every night since the Trap; it took her about as long as it takes anyone else to sigh. Mouths first, round the circle, her lips moving — six and one, and then, because the road had changed the shape of the question, four and one more, and twelve was a number that sat down comfortably enough. "All here," she said, to nobody, the way she said it. Then the packs. And the packs were where it stopped.

Moggruk saw her ears come up by a single degree and was already moving before she'd looked for him.

The orruk side of it he knew, because he had watched it get portioned out: the racks had been thin for a season and there had been nineteen mouths walking east into a poor country, and Vragg had split the meat the way Vragg split everything now, which was fairly, which meant nineteen shares went east and seven stayed, and seven shares of a thin rack is one day's honest eating and a lie you tell yourself about the second day. Moggruk had signed off on that division himself. It had been correct. He had also, at the time, been holding a bone that opened every gate on the water, and had allowed himself — he could see the exact shape of it now, laid out flat in the dark — to feel that a creature carrying a thing like that would not be walking into an ordinary problem like being hungry.

The other side of the count was the interesting one.

Twelve on the road. Days of road. And in the pale folk's baggage: cases. Cloth-shaped, most of them, stacked under the carriage's tail with the care of things worth more than the cart. Something with corners. A long flat thing two of them had carried between them and set down as though it mattered. One hamper, small, from which the attendants had produced at midday a fussy little arrangement of nothing much. Not one sack of meal. Not one crate that rang.

Nibz laid two stones down where he could see them. One for the mouths. One, much smaller, for the food. Then she looked at the gap between them, and made the small flat sound she made instead of the whimper she had trained herself out of.

"I got it," Moggruk said, quietly. "Don't put it in front of da boyz yet."

Because there were two ways to read it, and he could not make either of them lie flat. The first was that the pale folk had come onto a days-long road with no food in the wagon, which was madness — and he had learned, at some cost, that when the pale country did something that looked like madness it was generally doing something else that he had not yet found the name of. The second was worse, and simpler, and it was the one his gut kept handing him: that they had brought exactly enough, for exactly the number of creatures they counted as travelling.

He looked across at the other fire. There was no other fire. There was a lamp, and a folding step, and an attendant carrying a covered dish up it to the carriage, where the emissary of Strömshal sat with his boots off and the little window open and ate at length, alone, complaining intermittently about the quality of the road — and at no point in any of it did his eye travel the forty feet down the slope to where six orruks and a hobgrot were arranging to be hungry tomorrow. The dish went back down the step barely touched. Moggruk watched the whole of it and found nothing in the shape of the creature that suggested it had ever once in its life divided a thing.

'E ain't gonna share, an' 'e ain't gonna notice 'e ain't sharin', Moggruk thought. Moggruk reckoned the two thoughts and concluded: dat was two kinds o' wrong dat walked da same road.

So there was one day of food, and there was a road, and there was a bone in his wrappings that opened every gate on the water and had nothing at all to say about breakfast. Behind him at his own fire the crew were in good spirits, because their feet were dry and the walking was easy and there was meat tonight, and is there meat tonight is the whole of a klan's bookkeeping right up until the arithmetic runs out.

He let them have it. He sat with his back to the rise and looked west at a hard, dark, drained country with nowhere in it to go down, and did the arithmetic twice more, and got the same answer both times.

The country went up.

It did it the way it did everything on this road, which was without announcing itself. There was no climb in it — no scramble, no wall of ground, nothing a body could point at and say there, that, that's the thing I'm going up — only a long day's walking in which the road ahead was always very slightly higher than the road behind, and never once stopped being so. By midmorning Moggruk's calves had noticed. By midday the whole of him had, and none of it could be spent on anything, because there was nothing to spend it on: the road was easy, the ground was firm, and the ground was going up, and had been going up since before anyone woke, and was going to go on going up all day.

The bog was flat. That was not a fact anyone in the Gutscrape had ever had cause to know they knew. The bog went up and down the way water does, which is to say in hummocks and holes a body reads with its feet inside a single stride, and the whole country came out level at the end of it, and always had, since before anybody's granddad was whelped. A day of continuous rising was a thing their legs had no file for. It was not hard. It was simply, hour after hour, wrong, in the specific way of a floor that is not quite a floor.

The river helped it lie. The Silverrun ran along their right hand looking flat as a floor, and it was flat, and it was also coming to meet them, all day, without any hurry and without any pause, and a klan that had spent its whole existence in a country where water lay wherever it was put found it quietly outrageous to walk beside water that was travelling.

"'S goin' da wrong way," Gnik said, at the third rest, with the air of a creature registering an official complaint.

"S runnin' from somefin'," commented Snag and Gnik gave up his protest for laughter.

Twice that morning the overcast thinned and dragged, high and southward, and gave them something none of them had a place for.

Not cloud. The eye could tell, though it took a moment to work out how: cloud moved and this did not, and cloud had no edge like that. Grey on grey and enormous and much too far off to be that big, standing up out of the world's edge with a line of white along the top of it that was doing nothing at all — and then the overcast drew across again and closed the gap, and there was only the ordinary sky, the way there had always been only the ordinary sky. Snag saw the first one and stopped dead in the road with his mouth open. When the second came, Brakka's hands came up, and then went down again without making any shape at all, which was the first time Moggruk had ever seen them fail to find one.

"Dat's rock," Brakka said, in the flat voice he kept for facts.

Nobody argued with him. Moggruk looked at where it had been until the cloud had properly taken it back, and filed a thing he did not much enjoy filing. He had spent a season and a half learning to price the pale country's made things — the gate, the drowned city, the stone cup, the roof standing on nothing at all — and had got quite good at it, and had let himself feel, somewhere behind his teeth, that the size of the pale folk was a made size, a thing built by creatures and therefore in principle a thing a creature could get above. That had not been built. It had been standing there in the south the entire time — through the bog, through the Trap, through every count he had ever run — being that size, and had not required anybody's permission, and did not care in the slightest what he had lately been calling large.

Dere's a bigger'n dat, an' all, he thought, without any particular comfort. Dere's always a bigger'n dat. Dat's da 'ole rule.

By afternoon the arithmetic from the night before had stopped being arithmetic and become a feeling with teeth in it.

They had eaten the last of the meat at dawn, split seven ways, and been cheerful about it, because it was food and because there was road. The road, unfortunately, was excellent hunting country for nothing whatsoever. Ditches ran clean and empty. The fields were somebody's, planted with something, tended in the middle distance by bent pale figures who sang while they worked and did not look up. No standing water. No runs, no sign, nothing with a den in it — a whole green country in plain view, refusing to contain a single thing you could put a snare across.

Mulch made the suggestion the whole crew was carrying, without turning his head. "Boss. Somefin's gotta live 'ere."

"Somefin' does," Moggruk said. "It lives in dem 'ouses an' it belongs to somebody." He said it flat, and the flatness was doing work, because it was the one rule keeping six orruks and a hobgrot alive in the middle of a kingdom, and it had been settled in a burnt yard a month ago at a price nobody walking this road needed reminding of. "Dat's not a field. Dat's a larder, an' it's got a owner. We don't touch nuffin' out 'ere wot's owned."

It was not popular. It stayed the rule.

Haldane, from the swaying bench above them, had followed the exchange with visible interest — he had, Moggruk was beginning to understand, absolutely nothing else to do all day but follow things — and offered his contribution to the problem of orruk hunger with the air of a creature handing down alms.

"If you are hungry," he said, "walk faster."

And went back inside, entirely pleased with the remark. Last night he had simply never thought of it; this afternoon he had been asked, out loud, by a hungry creature, and had returned the appropriate mot and thought no more about it, which was the same country from a slightly different angle. Gnik came back down the column looking like an orruk who has been hit with something he cannot hit back, and Gobber said something about pale gentlemen and what she would do with that moustache given an hour and a bad knife, and the boyz laughed, and it helped, the way it does.

Behind Moggruk, Mulch's knuckles cracked. He did not have to look. He could hear the knuckles.

They walked faster.

The town came up on them in the late afternoon, at a place where a rushing creek came down out of the south to meet the river, and it was wrong in a way that took the whole company a long while to work out — and they worked it out in reverse, not by seeing a thing but by waiting for the thing and having it never arrive.

There was no wall.

They came up the road expecting the country to close, because a place where pale things lived closed itself; that was what a place was. And the fields simply became yards, and the yards had houses in them, and the houses stood in rows along the road with their doors on the road, doors that opened outward onto the open world, some of them standing open right now with nobody watching them. No ditch. No stakes. No gatehouse, and no rubble where a gatehouse had been. Nothing on the roof of anything, looking. The road did not enter the town; the road simply became the town for a stretch, and then went back to being the road, and things walked in and out along it in the last of the light without anybody asking them anything.

And it was not ruined. That was the second discovery and the larger one. The bridge over the creek was whole, and had statues on it, and the statues had all their arms. A board hung over the inn door on an iron bracket, painted, in colours, on purpose, and the paint was not old.

Snag said, "Dey ain't even tried," in a voice of pure bewilderment, and it was as close as anyone came to putting it properly.

Dey ain't scared of nuffin', Moggruk thought, 'cause nuffin's ever come. And then the colder thing arriving behind it, the way the second big one always arrives behind the first: Or 'cause everyfing wot come, dey et.

Six hundred-odd pale folk lived in Stonerest and a fair number of them were on the road at that hour, and Moggruk watched the whole street price the incoming column and come out the same way: a carriage, a lord's cousin in it, servants at the corners, an Öxldýr in the traces, and a foreign lord walking bare-headed at the front with a big hatted silent thing at his shoulder. Two pale folk at the smithy stopped their excited hammering to look. A small one ran alongside Lumpy for thirty yards, shrieking with delight, and was hauled off by a larger one, who curtsied at the carriage. Nobody screamed. Nobody ran for a wall, there being no wall to run for.

At the inn-row Haldane descended, straightened his cuffs, and turned to Moggruk with his hand already out.

"The letter, my lord."

Moggruk had it against his chest, wrapped, and had carried it that way every hour since Strömshal, and the hand was in front of him before there was any deciding to be done — and this was the part he would turn over later, with some care: that the correct move and the intolerable one were the same move. He put the bone in the pale hand. He watched his whole crossing walk away from him toward a doorway in somebody else's grip, and kept his face doing patient, and did not follow, because a lord does not chase a paper across a taproom.

What followed he could not understand a tenth of, and read entirely.

Haldane did not explain. That was the finding, and Moggruk had it inside three breaths. He went in ahead of the innkeeper's approach rather than waiting for it, and spoke over the top of the greeting, and the greeting folded itself up and got out of the way.

The bone came out and was held — not offered, held, at a height, the way you hold a thing meant to be looked at rather than read.

He stopped. His eye had gone past Haldane's shoulder to the doorway, where six orruks and a hobgrot were standing in the rain, and the question got as far as his face and no further.

said Haldane.

And that was the whole of it. Moggruk stood in the door and turned it over while it was still warm, and got to the bottom of it fast, and did not much enjoy what was down there: at no point in any of that had the creature asked for anything. Not one word of it had been a request. He had said who he was, twice, at length, and the innkeeper had built the rest himself — the room, the fire, the beds, the orruks in the doorway — and had done it eagerly, and had thanked him for the privilege.

Moggruk got the bone back without asking. Haldane handed it over the way you hand back a tool you have finished with, already looking elsewhere. "You will want to give me that at every stage, my lord. These people take an age with a stranger and no time at all with a name." And with that, Haldane went in to complain about the room.

"Da bone buys dinner," Gnik said, staring at it as Moggruk put it away. "It's a bone. Wot's it say?"

"Says I'm somebody."

"Wot's it say ya are?"

"Ain't got dere yet."

The Gutscrape stood in the doorway of the taproom and did not go through it.

It was a small thing and it took a while. There was a roof on it. There were pale folk under the roof already, at other tables, four or five of them, eating, with their backs to the door — with their backs to the door — and a fire that somebody else had built and somebody else was tending, and one way in and one way out, and every instinct the bog had ever installed in any of them stood up at once and said no. Gnik got a count of the exits before he got a count of the tables. Snag went along the wall and stayed there.

Then the food came out, and the argument was settled in about as long as it takes a hungry creature to sit down.

It came out on plates, carried by a pale girl who put each one down in front of each of them personally, one at a time, and said something short and pleasant as she did it, and went away, and came back with more. This wants saying plainly, because it explains the next several minutes: no orruk of the Gutscrape had ever in its life been served. Food in the old country was a thing you took off a rack, or off the ground, or out of another orruk's hand at some risk, and the taking was the whole social meaning of it. There was no word in any of them for a creature that brings you a board of food, sets it down where you can reach it, and then — this was the part Snag could not get past, and he watched for it three separate times to be sure — turns its back and walks away.

"It's give it me," he said, to nobody, holding very still. "It's just — give it me. An' gone."

"Eat it 'fore it comes back for it," Mulch advised, and did.

There was meat, cooked past the point Moggruk would have called necessary and considerably past the point anyone else at the table intended to complain about. There was bread, hot, which none of them had ever met. There was a jug of something pale. Pale as so much of everything in this country was pale.

And there was a bowl of small hard red things that Gobber picked up and turned over and bit into out of pure aggression, and which went crunch — a clean, cold, splitting crunch with cold sweet water inside it — and her face did something no one at that table had seen it do before.

"Wot's dis," she demanded, of the room. "Dis. Wot is it."

Nobody knew. The girl, applied to, said a word nobody caught. The whole culinary tradition of the Gutscrape was built on things that gave way slowly — eel, rat, mushroom, the long soft yielding of everything the bog grew or drowned — and here was a food that broke, cleanly, all at once, with a snap you felt in the jaw and heard in the skull, and did it again every single time you asked it to.

"S'like krumpin' somefink," Gnik said, with wonder.

The bowl was empty inside a minute, and came back full, because the girl had seen it emptied. Gnik held one up to the firelight afterward and turned it seriously, the way another orruk might examine a blade, and said, "It grows," in a tone of some accusation, having watched her point at the window when he asked. "On a tree." It was agreed to be a strange way to keep food and no way at all to defend it, and the second bowl went the way of the first. Gobber ate four and put two in the pouch with the wire-wool. Snag, who ate nervously and last and least of anyone, ate five, and put a sixth away for later, which was a thing he did with nothing else in his whole life.

Nibz ate under the table. She did this without discussion and everyone let her; she took her plate down there and put her back to the centre post and ate very fast with her eyes on the boots of the pale folk at the next table, and counted, twice, out loud, under her breath — and it was the most relaxed anyone had seen her since the ash line, because a table is a roof, and a roof is a thing over you.

Somewhere in the middle of the second bowl the taproom stopped being a trap and became a hall. Mulch had his back to the door and did not notice he had turned around. Snag came off the wall. Gobber got into a conversation with the girl consisting entirely of pointing at things and saying their names in two languages, neither of them understanding a word and both of them enjoying it enormously, and by the end of it Gobber had a name for her, which was Plates.

Moggruk ate, and watched them stop being afraid, and did not stop being afraid himself.

Haldane found him afterward, in the yard, in the dark.

The company had gone up. Moggruk had come out to look at the country and had ended standing at the rail by the stable, where the great rusty pale bulk of Lumpy stood in the straw not lying down, and he had been there long enough for the fire-heat to leave his skin when the door behind him opened and let out a bar of light and shut it off again.

"There you are." Haldane came to the rail in shirtsleeves, holding a cup, and put his elbows on it in a way he would not have done inside. He did not begin with a complaint, which was itself alarming. He stood a while, and looked at the beast, and then said, in Moggruk's own tongue, quietly, and with an entirely new warmth in it: "I have wanted to say something to you since Strömshal, my lord, and there has not been an hour without a servant in it."

Moggruk waited. It was the one skill he had never had to build.

"I know your face."

The yard went a long way away and came back. Moggruk's hands stayed exactly where they were on the rail. Somewhere behind his teeth the whole file tore itself open and dealt out the count in an instant — the snare-pole, the spinning, the torchlit ring, one small grey face at the back of a hundred faces — and what came up out of it, cold and level and useless, was the arithmetic he had run in a lamplit hall and set his weight on: 'e never looked at me. Dey don't none of 'em ever look at me.

The arithmetic had been wrong.

"That night on the Strömshal road," Haldane said. "The brigands." He turned the cup slowly in his fingers. "I hung in that net six hours, my lord. Upside down. There is nothing to do, upside down, but look at faces, and I looked at every one of them, and I have not been able to stop looking at them since, if I am honest, which I am not often. And when Balthus's herald brought you into that hall I knew you at once, and said nothing, because — well. One does not open with it."

'Ere it comes, Moggruk thought, and made his face do nothing at all, and thought, quite clearly, of where the stable door stood, and how the yard gave onto the fields, and whether the boyz upstairs would come down at a shout.

"You were one of them," said Haldane Engvarings, with enormous sympathy, "in the pen. Weren't you."

Moggruk did not move.

"My poor fellow." Haldane shook his head, warmly, at the dark. "I thought so. I thought so the moment I saw you. You have that look about you — the one that does not quite leave. What were you, three days with them? Four?" He drank, and made a small disgusted sound that was not about the drink. "Vermin. They cut down my bearers in the road like dogs, and trussed me like a hog and stood about laughing at it, and a creature with a jaw like a gate-log came and spun me on the rope with one finger — spun me, my lord, like a child's toy — and the whole filthy mob of them roared. That is precisely what they are: a noise in the dark, and a smell, and a hundred of them wanting to watch a better thing than themselves turned upside down." He sighed through his nose. "Well. Balthus's Solvaghy accounted for them. Every one that stood. I made them tell me the count."

The count. Moggruk knew the count. He had made it himself from a wall in the grey of the morning, and it had names in it: a boss who had read the metal right and died anyway; a young one with a lead shield strapped to a stump; his klan who had fed him his whole life without much liking him, which was not the same as not feeding him.

And underneath that, arriving larger than the great beast in its stable, the thing he would be turning over for a week: 'E ain't misremembered it. 'E's rememberin' it fine. The soldiers had reckoned up who they killed that night, and anything still walking afterward that they had not killed could not have been one of them, and so it had to have been one of the other sort, and the pale country had built the rest of the story by itself, whole, with no gaps in it at all. Da fing wot fixes 'is eyes — it went back an' fixed da night an' all.

There was no time to look at it, because Haldane had turned from the rail.

"I am glad they did not use you as they used my household," he said, gentler now, and — this was the intolerable part — sincerely; there was no performance anywhere in it. "I have wondered. You seem sound enough. Sounder than I would be." He raised the cup an inch, an offering. "It is a poor thing to have in common, my lord, but we are two creatures who came out of the same bad night with our skins, and I find I would rather travel with someone who understands what it was than another twelve who will nod politely at the story. So. There it is. Said."

There was a pause exactly long enough for a decent creature to say something.

"Animals," Moggruk agreed.

His voice came out level. It came out easy. It even came out with a little of the right weight on it, the flat weight of a thing remembered and put away, and he heard himself do it and understood in the same moment that he had just got a great deal better at this than he had been an hour ago.

"Quite," said Haldane, satisfied, and clapped him once on the shoulder — the first time any pale thing had ever touched him on purpose without meaning to kill him — and went in, and left the door swinging, and the light went across the yard and away.

Moggruk stayed at the rail a long while.

He had thought, walking west, that the price of this thing would be the danger: the one wrong word, the gate that did not open, the five coming downhill through their own breach. That was the bill he had been budgeting for. It had not once occurred to him that there would be a different bill entirely, payable in small amounts, on demand, at any hour, for as long as the con lasted — and that it would be paid out of the only wealth he had left. Wutzgut had died over the creature that had just been kind to him. Drub had died over it. And a runt had stood in a stable yard with somebody else's supper in him and called them animals in a borrowed tongue, and been believed, and been liked for it.

The great pale beast in the straw shifted its weight, and did not lie down, and made no sound at all.

Right, den, Moggruk thought, and found that his hands had come off the rail and closed. Dat's da price. Dat's wot it costs.

He filed it in the drawer where the things that might one day kill him lived, and noted, without any comfort, that it was the first thing he had ever put in there that was already inside the wall.

They had, between the seven of them, one entire night's sleep, and Gobber had most of it.

The rooms were the trouble. Everything the Gutscrape had ever slept in had been open at the top or open at one end — a bank, a hollow, a stand of drowned trees, and lately the rotten floors of a city that had drowned before any of them were whelped — and always, always, with everybody else inside arm's reach and the dark arranged around the lot of them in a shape a body could learn. The inn at Stonerest gave each of them a small box with a door on it, and a bed in the box, and considered this a kindness. It was a kindness. That was the difficulty. Every one of them lay warm and dry and off the ground behind a door that shut, listening to six other doors that also shut, each one hiding a creature he could no longer hear breathing.

Gnik was six inches longer than his bed and dealt with the problem by lying diagonally across it, which made him three inches longer than his bed. Snag put the mattress on the floor and slept under the bedstead, and did not mention it. Brakka never got into his at all; he spent the dark going over the room's roof-beams by touch and came down to breakfast with the look of a creature who has read a difficult letter twice. Mulch slept in the corridor, across the head of the stairs, from which no one could dislodge him and about which he offered no explanation, because there wasn't one that needed saying: it was where the stairs were.

Moggruk gave the bed a fair trial and got nothing out of it but the discovery that a bed is a thing designed to prevent a creature from getting up quickly. He slept in the end sitting against the door with his back to the wood, which put the whole room in front of him and the corridor behind him where the corridor could be felt, and spent the night listening to a building.

That was the whole night's work, in the end. A klan makes noise, and the noise is bodies, and a body is a thing you can place. This made a different kind. A beam upstairs gave a single tick as it cooled. The fire settled in a room he could not see. Feet crossed a floor above him twice, going somewhere and coming back. The wind found an edge of the roof and worried at it, and left off, and came back to it an hour later. Every one of them was a sound he could not place, which meant every one of them was a sound he had to place, and he placed them all, one after another, until first light, and got up with his count complete and his eyes full of grit and the distinct sensation of having been guarded by a stranger.

Nibz was under the bed and had been since the door shut, on her side, stones squared in front of her face. She did not sleep either, but she did not stop counting, and the small dry click of it came out from under the frame all night at intervals like a slow drip, and Moggruk found — filing this with mild disgust — that he could not have managed without it.

Haldane came down late, rested, took one look at the assembled ruin of the company's faces, and arrived at the wrong reading with total confidence and enormous generosity.

"Ghastly, isn't it," he said, with feeling. "I did warn you. A waystation is a waystation, my lord; one does not come to Stonerest for the bedding." He accepted a cup from an attendant. "The ticks are chaff. The walls are thin as a promise. I told the fellow that a lord of the Greywater is accustomed to better and he assured me it was his best, which I do not doubt, and which tells you everything." He looked round at them with real fellow-feeling, one traveller of quality to another. "Gladheim will make amends. Wait until you see what the palace does with a guest. Feather. Layers of it."

"Layers," Moggruk agreed.

The road went on going up. West along the river, in a fine cold drizzle the country appeared to consider ordinary, and Moggruk walked the first mile turning over the one genuinely new fact he had: the bone had bought dinner. Not a gate. Dinner, and beds, and a fire, and the innkeeper's thanks for the privilege of providing them. He had come onto this road with a credential he understood as a key. It was turning out to be closer to a rack with meat on it, and every stop on this road apparently had another one standing on it. He did not trust that yet. But he had stopped, somewhere before dawn, doing the arithmetic about the second day.

The digpig happened at the middle of the morning, at a place where the road ran between a hedgerow and a copse of birch, with hamlet smoke a half-mile off across the fields.

Snag was on the hedge side, where Snag always was, because the hedge side was the side something would come out of. The hedge duly produced a sound: a low, wet, businesslike snuffling, working along the roots, coming toward them. Then the hedge itself began to move, in a shuddering line, the way a hedge moves when something inside it is not going around.

What came out of it, four feet from Snag's boot, was this.

It stood low at the front and high at the back, so that it seemed to be permanently in the act of falling forward — a lithe shaggy thing about the size of a swamp boar, black-bristled, head down and nearly in the dirt, and the head was the part. It had a snout that was not a snout: a fleshy folded thing, whorled and ridged and lying open like something turned inside out, half nose and half flower and entirely wrong, set between two enormous cupped ears that swung round to face them independently of one another. Above the ears' hinge sat two small red eyes and below them a mouth full of sharp fangs. Its feet had claws on them, long yellow-tipped digging claws, and behind it came a tail like a length of dropped rope.

It raised the head. It looked at Snag with both red eyes and both ears and all of its teeth.

Snag hit it with the spear-haft two-handed across the back of the neck, the way you break a thing's back at close quarters when there is no room to put a point anywhere, and it was a good hit, driven properly from the hips, the hit of a creature who had been taught by a hard country and had learned. The animal went down on its front and screamed — not a beast-scream, a high grating squeal that went through the middle of everyone's skull — and its claws worked in the mud, and it dragged itself sideways, and did not turn on him. That was the first thing wrong with it. It did not come back at him at all. It only tried, with its spine broken, to keep going somewhere.

Mulch stepped across Snag and finished it. One fist at the base of the skull, once, dropped from a long way up, and the squealing stopped inside the sound of the blow, and the claws went on working the mud for a while after there was nothing behind them.

It lay in the road in the rain with its blood going out into the puddle, black and a great deal of it, and the whole crew looked at what they had killed as Snag stood there with his haft still in both hands and the rain coming off his chin.

Then the hedge produced eleven more.

They came out at a trot, at intervals, from a fifty-yard stretch of it, and Moggruk's hand went to his belt and the file behind his teeth was already laying out the ditch and the copse and the order they would come in—

—and they trotted up to the orruks and began snuffling their boots.

That was the whole of it. Eleven of the things milled about in the road with their terrible faces at knee height, working the mud with those folded snouts, treading on each other, entirely unbothered by six armed orruks and one dead relation lying in the puddle among them. Two of them nosed the body, briefly, without interest, and moved on. One leaned against Gnik's leg and scratched itself. They made a low continuous contented grunting, and their ears turned constantly and independently, tracking everything and alarmed by nothing whatever, and the only creature in that road afraid of anything was one small hobgrot counting teeth.

One of them put its whole open folded face against his leg and looked up at him from two inches, and Moggruk went backward off it fast with his knife half out. It was a step and a half. It was nothing at all. It was also, from the height of a carriage bench, extremely visible.

Haldane Engvarings, who had nothing whatever to do all day but watch, saw the whole of it from the bench and put his head back and howled.

"Oh — oh, that is magnificent." He was actually holding the rail. "The lord of the Greywater. Comes across a kingdom, faces down my cousin in his own hall, and is set upon in the road — by a Grafsvin."

"Ain't been set upon," Moggruk said.

"You were routed, my lord. Utterly." He wiped an eye with a knuckle. "Do you know what you have just recoiled from? They milk them. Grafsvin. Say it."

"Graff'in."

"Grahv. Not graff, you make it sound like a spade. It is the same word as the digging — grafa, to dig — the beast is named for what it does, which is more than can be said for most of my relations." He sat back, deeply pleased. "There isn't a child in this kingdom who has not put its arms round one. And you jumped!"

And Moggruk stood in the mud with a digpig leaning on his shin, and understood two entirely separate things at once.

The first was that he had just been laughed at, in the open, by the most dangerous creature on this road, and that the laughing had not been at the wrong shape of him. It had been at a lord who jumped at a pig. Haldane had watched him drop his face for half a second and had reached, without hesitation, for the funniest available explanation, and the funniest available explanation was the true one at exactly the level Haldane could see, and there was no other level in Haldane's whole country. Dat's da armor, Moggruk thought, level and cold. Dey can't see under it 'cause dey ain't got a under. He was not certain, standing there, whether he had just been made safer or considerably less so, and he suspected the answer was both and filed it accordingly.

The second thing was the dead one in the puddle.

He got there a beat behind the crew, and his gut got there first, all the way down: we put an 'and on wot's owned. Twelve beasts do not come out of a hedge together by accident; they come out of a hedge together because something let them out and expects them back. This was the wide road again. This was a horn on a silver chain, three calls up a country that owned itself.

"Boss," said Gnik, quietly, having got there too. "Dat's somefink's."

An old pale thing was already coming across the field with a stick and a bad hip.

Moggruk did the only thing available, which was nothing, with his back straight. Haldane did not wait for the herder to reach the road. He called out across the field in the carved tongue, in the flat carrying tone of a creature settling an account he has no intention of discussing.

Six words, and not one of them about the animal. No offer. No asking. Just a name, thrown across forty feet of wet field like a coin nobody had requested — and the old one stopped, and looked at the carriage, and at the dead beast, and at six orruks standing round it, and put its stick under its arm and bowed, and said something back that went on considerably longer and had a great deal of warmth in it.

"He hopes it was no trouble," Haldane translated, bored. "It is an honour, would we take a second, and his grandmother's mother's people have kept them on this ground since before the walls at Gladheim, which I am obliged to tell you they have not. Wave, my lord. He will dine on this for a decade."

Moggruk raised a hand. The old thing beamed at him across forty feet of somebody else's field and began, with immense difficulty and no assistance whatsoever, to gather up eleven digpigs.

The attendants came away from the carriage while he was still doing it.

Nobody had called them. They came unhurried, the way they did everything, in their grey, and knelt in the wet road around the body and went to work on it, and the Gutscrape stood back and watched their own kill be taken apart by pale hands. It was fast. It was very fast. One of them had a small hooked knife and opened the beast from throat to belly in a single unhesitating draw and got the hide back off the ribs in three more, and the second worked the joints without any knife at all — found the shoulder with its thumbs, felt along the socket, and turned the whole leg out of the animal with a wet click, and then did the other one, and its hands went into the chest cavity up past the wrist and came out with things and sorted them on the grass into what was wanted and what was not.

The third did not use a knife either, and did not use its hands for everything.

It bent over the opened ribs with its face down inside them for the length of about four breaths, and there was a small noise, and it came up and went on working with its chin dark and did not wipe it, and none of the others so much as glanced.

Gobber said, "'Uh," in a voice with nothing in it at all.

They portioned it out on the verge, neat and quick, wrapped the good cuts in cloth off the carriage, and handed them up to six orruks who took them, because they were meat, and because they were hungry, and because there was no version of the next several minutes in which anyone refused. Then the grey ones washed their hands in the ditch, and took their places at the carriage's corners again, as if nothing whatever had happened, which to them it had not.

They walked on. There was meat that night for the first time on the road, and nobody discussed the middle part of the afternoon, and Snag ate his share and said nothing for six miles and then said one thing, to Moggruk, at the back of the column, without turning his head.

"It come out at me, boss." A long wet stretch of road. "I done it right."

"Ya did," said Moggruk, and meant it, and knew it was no use whatsoever, and there was nothing else to give him.

He spent the last mile of the day going carefully over the ruin of his best rule, which had not been wrong, exactly. It had been too small. The rule of the margins held: you did not put a hand on what the country owned. But the country had watched a hand go on one of its own beasts in broad daylight, and had bowed, and offered a second, and would be telling the story for ten years, and would be sincerely glad of it.

Dey don't take nuffin from ya, he thought, turning up the old file, the one from the writing-board. Dey give ya somefin, an' den yer deirs. And underneath it, new, and colder, and much larger: an' if yer da right shape — you can take, an' dey'll fank ya, an' dey'll mean it.

He looked back once, at the carriage. The three grey attendants walked at its corners, pleasant and idle, and the near one had never wiped its chin, and Moggruk noted it and filed it with the rest of the day's strangeness, under their ways, and walked on thinking about the other thing, which was larger, and which was his.

Behind him Gobber had already named the dead one Snouty, and was working, without much success, on a name for what its face reminded her of.

The days had been getting shorter since before they left the bog, which in the old country meant nothing at all, a day being a thing you had less of and the dark being where most of the living got done anyway. Out here it meant they walked into the evening and kept walking, because the road went on being a road after the light stopped — firm, drained, level, entirely usable in the pitch black by creatures who had spent their whole lives not moving after dusk on principle. The keeper hung a lantern on Lumpy's harness at the first grey of it and the great pale shoulders went along under a small swinging yellow patch with the carriage rocking above, and the company arranged itself inside the light, and the road unrolled ahead of them in a wet gleam, and they walked.

Other lanterns came the other way. One or two an hour, a cart-lamp or a hand-lamp swinging along with pale folk under it going somewhere at an hour when the world was shut, and something pleasant said in passing, and one of Haldane's attendants saying something pleasant back. Snag had stopped flinching at these about four nights ago, which Moggruk had marked at the time and had gone on turning over since, because it was the first thing about this country Snag had ever consented to get used to.

It was Snag who saw the far one, which was fitting, because Snag looked at the places nothing ever came from.

"Dere's a fire out dere," he said, and stopped in the road, and there was.

Low ahead and a little right of where the road was pointing, an orange smudge sitting on the underside of the overcast, the size of a thumbnail held out at arm's length, throbbing very slightly the way a fire throbs. It was the most familiar thing that had happened to any of them in a month. Every creature there had walked toward a fire in the dark at some point in its life; it was the oldest good sign in the world, and the whole column loosened by a degree without anybody deciding to.

"Big one," Gnik said, with approval.

They walked at it for an hour, and Moggruk ran the test the bog had taught him before he could count, which is that things you walk toward get closer. It had not got closer. It had got bigger — and it went on getting bigger, hour on hour, out of a thumbnail into a coal and out of a coal into a low banked heap on the world's edge, the glow you get off a camp of some size seen across a flat. That, at least, they knew. Every one of them had read that glow a hundred times: a number of fires, which is a number of things sitting round them. Mulch moved up to the front of the column without being asked. Gobber began, in a low happy voice, working out what she would call a camp that size. Gnik revised his estimate twice and settled, out loud, on more of the pale fings than had come to end Wutzgut, which nobody argued with, and which was wrong by a factor nobody on that road had a word for.

They were still wrong when the road bent, and the country opened, and the river did the last strange thing it had left in it: it came apart. One broad channel divided round some black mass sitting in the middle of the valley and closed again on the far side, and the fires were standing on the thing the water had gone around — hung up in the dark at every height there was, small and separate and unmoving, layered in tiers going up, up off the flat of the world and onto something black behind the world that had no edge he could find.

Lampflies, Moggruk thought, reaching for the nearest true thing he owned — the ones that come off the reed-water in the warm month in their thousands. Lampflies wot don't go nowhere.

Moggruk stood at the back of his own company and did the thing he was for, and it did not work. He got a fair way up the near side, stacking his tens the way Nibz had taught him, and lost the place, and knew he was doing exactly what he had done in a broken gate a lifetime ago with the fog coming off the water — and that not one single part of it was the same. He was not counting ways to die. He had not once thought about ways to die. He was counting fires, and a fire is a hearth, and a hearth is a mouth, and every one of those small steady lights was somebody who had never in his life been hungry and had a hand with something in it that could be spent. He wanted the hands. That was true, and he let it be true. But underneath it, quieter and much worse, he wanted to be one of the lights — to be up there somewhere, dry, under a roof, with a door that shut, and never once be hungry again. The number ran off the end of his fingers and kept going, and what stood up in him was not the cold thing. It was appetite, which he recognized perfectly well, having watched it arrive on a tall pale face in a lamplit hall — and he held very still in the dark of somebody else's road and let it stand there and did not much care for what it said about the creature he was becoming.

"Is dat safe?" said Snag, at his shoulder, in the small voice.

"I don't know," said Moggruk, honestly, and they made camp where the keeper stopped the beast, well short of it, and Gobber looked at all that hanging fire and gave it a name, which was da lampfly nest, and which was wrong, and which the Gutscrape would go on calling it for the rest of their lives. The crew slept. Nibz counted them and said all here and went under an old cart. And Moggruk sat with his back to the wheel and watched the lights not go out — not one of them, not all night, not even toward the grey end of it — and understood that whatever was up there did not stop, had not stopped, and had no intention of stopping on his account.