The Ninth Road

From the top terrace of Thornwick Hold, on a clear evening, you could see the Ninth Road go south for forty miles.

You could not see the road itself. That was lost in the dark of the valley within a mile of the gate. What you could see were the stones. One every mile, each a small steady point of pale gold light, running away down the long dale and over the shoulder of the moor and on into the south, smaller and smaller, until the last ones you could make out were no bigger than sparks and the eye could not tell them from stars. Somewhere past the end of that line, three hundred miles off, was Vessary, and the Lantern Gate, and the Mother Stone that fed the whole Road. Nobody at Thornwick had seen it in twenty years.

Elias stood at the terrace wall with a basket of lampwort seed heads on one hip and counted them. It was a habit. Every Warden at the Hold had it, the way sailors look at the sky.

Thirty-one. There had been thirty-four in the spring.

The lampwort terraces fell away below the wall in narrow steps, grey-green and gone to seed, most of them; there had not been hands enough to cut them back in years. Below the terraces the Hold itself sat hunched against the fell, a long low house of dark stone with a slate roof patched in four colours, a lamp room at one end with tall windows, and a bell tower with no bell in it. The bell had been sold. Behind it the fells went up into cloud, and beyond the fells there was nothing at all that anybody knew of, only moor and rock and the end of the Wendmark.

And on every side, below and beyond and between the little lights, lay the grey.

In the evenings it lay along the valley floor like milk in a dish, very still and very soft. In the mornings it lifted and moved. It had no smell. It made no sound. When you walked into the edge of it, it was cool on your face, not cold, and pleasant, and after a few minutes you could not quite remember what you had come out for, and after an hour you could not remember the way home, and after a season you could not remember your name. That was the Dimming. It had always been there, out in the wild country, as long as the Wendmark had been a kingdom. And for three hundred years, everywhere the light of a waystone fell, it had stayed out.

Elias watched the thirty-first light, the farthest one he could still be sure of, out at the edge of seeing on the shoulder of Ashby moor.

It flickered. Then it went out.

Not with any drama. It simply was not there anymore, and the grey, which had been lying around it in a soft ring for months, closed over the place where it had been as gently as water closing over a dropped stone.

Thirty.

Elias set down the basket of seed heads on the wall very carefully, as if they might break, and stood looking at the dark gap in the line of lights for a long time.

Behind him, from the lamp room, came the sound of a stick on flagstones and a voice that had been giving orders on that terrace for fifty years.

"I saw it," said Warden-Mother Isaut Farrow. "Come inside."