North

The guild was not permitted.

He found that out the same morning, going through the trial's terms a sixth time looking for the part he had missed, and it was not a part he had missed. It was in the last line and he had read it four times without registering what it meant.

SOLO.

One word, underneath the bearing, in the same size as everything else.

He said it out loud at the table and the room went quiet again in the particular way it had been going quiet all morning.

* * * *

Maren argued with the panel.

That was the part he was not prepared for.

She came round the table and stood in front of it and asked it questions. Whether a party could travel with him and wait outside. Whether the solo condition applied to the approach or only to the encounter. Whether a second person on the road constituted a party at all, given that people walked roads.

She was entirely serious.

The panel did not respond, because the panel was not a thing that responded, and Alaric had known that since a guard at a gate on his first afternoon.

Maren knew it too. He was certain of that. She had been in this world considerably longer than he had and she was not a stupid woman, and she stood in front of a rendered pane in a room over a stable and put her reasonable questions to it in a flat voice.

She did it twice.

The second time was that evening, when she had presumably had some hours to think of better questions, and the better questions were better and it made no difference whatsoever.

Alaric watched both performances and did not say anything about either.

* * * *

Poppy gave him something at the gate.

She had come down to see him off, which nobody had asked her to do, and she had been talking the entire way from the stable about a contract she was going to take next week and about the state of the road and about a person she had seen at the hall.

Then at the gate she stopped talking, put something in his hand, closed his fingers over it, and said, "It's nothing."

He looked.

It was a strip of cloth, about a foot long, torn rather than cut, the colour of nothing in particular.

"It's off a coat," said Poppy. "I've had it for years. It's not lucky, it doesn't do anything, I am not a superstitious person and I would like that on the record."

"What is it for?"

"It is nothing," said Poppy, with enormous emphasis. "Put it in your pack and forget about it and give it back to me in nine days."

She had turned and gone about six paces before she said, over her shoulder, without stopping:

"Nine days."

He put it in his pack, in the space where the wrapped sword was, and did not forget about it.

* * * *

The first day was ordinary.

That was the strange part, in retrospect. He walked out of Grennet on a road he had walked often, past fields he had worked in, through country that had been the whole of his world for four months.

He passed two carts. He nodded at a man he had done a contract for in the second month, and the man said something friendly about the plate on his back and asked whether he had come into money.

He killed nothing. He did not need to.

He camped that night at a place where he had camped before, in the lee of a hedge, and slept well, and woke and went on.

* * * *

The road emptied on the second day.

He noticed the contracts first, because that was what he had trained himself to notice.

There was a board at a crossroads hamlet, of the kind every settlement had, and it had a handful of postings on it, and all of them were old. The paper had gone soft at the corners. One of them was for work that had a season attached and the season had passed.

Nobody was taking work up here.

The next hamlet, that afternoon, had a board with nothing on it at all.

* * * *

Then the travellers.

He was doing arithmetic about this by the third day, because it was the kind of thing he did.

On the road out of Grennet he had passed something every twenty minutes or so. Carts, riders, people walking, a boy with geese.

On the second day it had been every hour.

On the third day he passed a handful of people in the entire day, all of them before noon, and every one of them going south.

The last of them, an old man with a hand-barrow, looked at him properly as they passed each other, which nobody else had done.

He did not say anything. He looked at Alaric, and then at the road behind Alaric, in the direction Alaric was going, and then back at Alaric.

Then he went on south with his barrow and neither of them had said a word.

* * * *

Then the tags stopped appearing.

That was the one that got underneath him.

He noticed it in the middle of the third afternoon and could not establish when it had started, which bothered him more than the fact itself. He had been walking through a landscape reading it the way he read every landscape, the labels coming up over things at the edge of his attention and being sorted without effort.

At some point they had stopped coming up.

He tested it. He found a bird and looked at it deliberately, the way he had looked at a bird in his first week, and no label rendered. He found a rabbit-shaped thing in the scrub and looked at that, and got nothing.

He was not certain whether there was nothing to label or whether the labelling had stopped.

That was the difficulty. Those two states looked identical from where he was standing, and one of them was ordinary and the other one was not, and he had no way to tell them apart.

* * * *

A world with no labels was a world he had no instrument for.

He worked at that on the third evening, sitting with his back against a stone that had been part of a wall a long time ago.

He had spent four months building a way of moving through the world, and the whole of it rested on one thing. Look at a thing. Read the colour. Decide.

Green, manage. Yellow, think. Red, walk away.

Take that away and he was back to a man on a forest track two days old, standing in front of something in the scrub with a drawn sword and no way at all of knowing what he was looking at.

He would have preferred a red one.

He established that clearly, sitting in the dark, and found it interesting about himself. A red tag on the road ahead would have been the worst news available and he would have taken it gladly, because a red tag is information, and information can be acted on, and he would have known what he was doing.

He had nothing.

He went on in the morning.

* * * *

The country got older as he went north.

He did not have a better word for it and worried at it for some hours before accepting that older was correct.

The trees changed. The ones down south had been managed at some point, in some generation, and it showed in the spacing. These had not. They stood where they had come up, at whatever distance seeds had happened to land, and some of them were enormous and lying down and had been lying down for a very long time.

The stone changed. The walls, where there were walls, had been built by somebody who had used what was to hand rather than what was suitable.

And the roads stopped being maintained.

That was gradual and then it was not. There was a stretch on the fourth morning where the surface was simply gone, and there was a track, and the track was where feet had gone rather than where anybody had decided.

Then that stopped too.

By the middle of the fourth day he was walking on a line that existed only because he was following a bearing.

* * * *

He passed the skull-posts late on the fourth afternoon.

They were set in mud at the edge of a stand of old trees, in a line running east and west, and they went out of sight in both directions.

Wolf, mostly. Some boar. And a few long pieces that were neither, and that he looked at for a while and could not identify and did not want to.

They were old. The mud had taken most of them at an angle and nobody had straightened them in a long time, and some had come down entirely and were lying in the wet.

He stood in front of the line for a moment.

He could see no reason for it. There was nothing behind it that was different from what was in front of it. It was not a wall and it did not keep anything out and it did not mark a boundary that any map of his had an opinion about.

Somebody had put them there. That was all he could establish. Somebody had put a great many of them there, over what must have been years, and had meant something by it, and the meaning had not survived.

He crossed the line.

* * * *

Something happened in his chest.

He stopped a few paces past it and stood entirely still.

It was not fear. He checked for that immediately and specifically, because fear was a thing he knew the shape of by then and had felt at a mile and a half in a valley and had felt in a chamber at the eighth minute.

This was not that.

It was low, and it was central, and it was in the same place the red tag had closed on him, and it had arrived at the same speed, which was to say before he had finished doing anything.

It had no name attached.

He turned round and looked back at the posts. Nothing. He walked back and crossed the line again in the other direction, which took about eight seconds and was, he was aware, an extremely strange thing to be doing alone in the north with nobody watching.

It happened again, fainter.

He crossed a third time, forward, and stood in the wet with his hand somewhere near his collar and understood that he had run out of tests.

* * * *

It was the same shape as the others.

He knew that immediately and it was the only classification he had.

The arm on the forest track, going for the sword before any part of him decided. The hand on the axe, knowing what to do with weight. The fingers on VITALITY in a shed in bad light. The feet on the left flank before the left flank collapsed. The chest closing at a mile and a half.

And now this.

Six instances. All of them arriving from underneath. All of them faster than his thinking and none of them explaining themselves afterward.

He had stopped adding to that collection deliberately, months ago, and had stopped looking at it, and had found that the days went better that way.

The collection had just added to itself.

* * * *

He counted the rest of the way.

It started somewhere in the first mile past the posts and he did not notice it starting, and when he noticed it he did not stop it.

One count. Two count.

The ground rose. The trees got closer together and then thinned out again into scrub and rock. The bearing took him up a long slope with the country falling away behind him and nothing at all ahead of him but a hillside.

Three count. Four.

It was heavy going and the plate did not help. He had been carrying it for four days and had got used to the weight in the way you get used to a weight, which is to say incompletely.

Five count. Six count. Seven count.

It cut the slope into pieces the size of one step, and a piece the size of one step was always survivable, and if every piece was survivable then the slope could look after itself.

Eight count. Nine count.

It had never once failed to help. Four months of it, from a woodpile in Ashfield to a flooded quarry to a road going north out of everything he knew, and it had never once failed.

Ten.

It turned over and started again.

He came round the shoulder of the hill and stopped counting.

There was a town below him.

It sat in the bowl of the ground under a mountain, and it was made of stone. Not the old stone of the posts, set crooked and forgotten in the mud. New stone, grey and squared, laid flat in rings that went out from the mountain's foot as evenly as ripples go out from a dropped pebble. Roofs. Walls. Doorways cut clean. A paved open space at the middle with things stacked on it in rows.

Nothing about it matched the road that had brought him here. He had walked four days through country that nobody kept, past boards with nothing on them and walls built from whatever was to hand, and at the end of all of it somebody had built a town as though they had been given the stone for free.

At the town's centre the mountain opened.

It was a black mouth in the rock face, and it was framed by something he took at first for a pair of fallen trees and then understood was bone. Ribs, curved and blackened, each one as thick through as a man, standing up out of the paving on either side of the opening the way ribs stand up out of a carcass the crows have finished with.

The arrow at the corner of his sight pointed at the mouth.

He stood on the shoulder of the hill at the end of the fourth day, with the light going and the country empty behind him for days in every direction, and looked at a town that should not have been there, and at the bones around its door.