The Guildmaster of the Greywater Chartery received them in the long room over the hall, where there was a carpet.Ravel had never been above the ground floor of that building in either of his lives. He stood on the carpet in his mother's good shirt and tried not to count the ways out.Orlan Fesk was a comfortable man of fifty-five, with a soft voice and beautiful hands. He had a smile for everybody who came in. He rose for Ilse Varga. He asked after Nessa Brill's leg, and had a stool brought, and a second for the leg to rest on. He was sorry for the stairs."A sad business," he said, when they were all placed. "A very sad business. Pike was with us eleven years. We shall get to the bottom of it, I hope, without anybody saying a thing that he will regret."Stroud stood by the window with Merrit Vane and Sal Kettle. He had shaved. He looked like a man who had been told that it would go well.Down in the yard there was a sound like a slow tide on shingle. Ravel knew it. It was a great ma

It took him five weeks to be ready, and the leaves were coming down along the towpath before he was.The Writ paid a D a good deal less than it had paid an E. He took Ser Odran down to the fourth floor of the Sluiceworks three nights in every week, and came up with three levels to show for the whole of it. The dead man took four. He was insufferable about that.Under his father's table, low down where the chalk was his own, he kept another reckoning. It was a row of short strokes, one for every week between this autumn and the end of next summer, when something would come down a lane out of the trees at Brackenfell. There had been forty-eight. He rubbed out one every Restday. He had rubbed out five before he was ready, and three levels was a poor price for five.Kheshi came back to the wall in the fourth week. She walked with a stick, and without a limp."My kind mend quickly," she said. "The surgeon is annoyed. It has spoiled his prophecy." She looked Ravel over, and found him larger

He had felt it on the night of the Sump, with the captain sitting not six feet away, and he had been too spent to look.It was one of the three places. He had kept away from it for five months. A niche on the first stair. A drain mouth. The gate-pit of the Ninth Lock. He had told himself that a man should know what he meant to say before he knocked. He knew now what a Shade was. That had not made it easier.But something had been in that pit that was not a Shade. He had caught it at the edge of Grave Sense, while Rusk was reading three green tags. It had not been a dent. It had been small, and low to the ground, and lit.He went to the watch-house first."Captain. The hound that died in the pit, on the rift night. Where was he laid?"Rusk put down his pen."Where he fell. Under the flag by the wheel-housing. That's the custom with a watch-hound. He goes under his own post, so that he can go on minding it." The tired eyes were quite steady. "Why?""I'd like to pay my respects."It was

"It's poor blood," Ravel said. "I've always had cold hands."He took the hand back before she could close her own over it. She let it go. She did not look satisfied, and she was not a person who could pretend to be."I could take the burn off for you. It would be a moment's work.""I'd as soon it mended by itself, Sister.""People do say that," said Avelline Dray, puzzled. "I never know why."She laid her hands on his mother twice more. By the third time, the thin place was gone. Grave Sense showed him Edda Ashlock as it showed him anyone living, plain and whole, and he stood in the street outside the Mending House with nothing in his purse. He found that he could not see the cobbles properly.Then he went home, and boiled sheets for a month.It was not work that the craft had prepared him for. A dead hound lay across the sill and watched him do it. A dead knight came up from the gauge-house after dark, and stood in the wash-yard in a borrowed coat, and gave his opinion."In Vhal Ossa

On the first morning she tied his left hand to his belt.It was an hour before the bell, and black, and the sand of the yard had frozen into ridges. She had a lantern on the rail and a length of cord. She did it without a word, as a groom hobbles a horse."That arm is a crutch," she said. "You hang half your balance on a weight that has not been there since I do not know when. I want to see what you have without it. Guard."He had nothing without it. He found that out in the time that it takes to say so. He went down in the first exchange, and the second, and the ninth. Each time it was because some part of him had leaned out to the left, to steady a dead man who was not there."Again," said Ilse Varga. He had heard that word from two teachers now. He was beginning to think that it was the whole of teaching.She gave him a failure a week. That was how he reckoned the time afterwards.The first week was his feet. He had a porter's feet. They were always under a load, set wide and sure,