Chapter 2: The Man Who Doesn't Eat People

The teeth did not come.

What came instead, from up over his head, was a laugh. It was not the broker’s laugh.

Hollis opened his eyes.

The first thing in them was a corner of cloth: deep red, rolled black at the edge, worked all through with little fish in gold thread, one after another, so many of them that the cloth looked to be swimming while it hung still.

The pull had let go of him. He could not have said when. He was down on his knees and one hand, the walking stick somewhere behind him in the dark, and the whole line of them was scattered along the boards where the thing had drawn them, and not one of them was getting up. Somebody was crying in short pieces and stopping and starting again. The four little bells on the litter had not stopped, and under the bells the rain was working at the roof.

“Who’s there?” the broker said.

He had the guide-lamp up in both hands with his back to the altar, and the green of the wick came up under his chin from below and made the two hooks at the corners of his mouth look deeper than they were.

“A man who doesn’t eat people,” somebody said.

The voice had a laugh in it, laid in under the words the way color sits under paint. The broker had told them straight out, with the lamp in both hands, that this place only let out the dead. Hollis had been of the same opinion. This one had walked in anyway, and nobody in the room had an answer for it.

The broker’s mouth began to move.

Hollis knew that shape and not one word of it. Two lines, then a third, said inward, over and over: the Naming, which only the Chancery’s clerks are taught, and not one of them had ever come up this ridge. He had seen two pages of that writing once, held open across a table in a rich man’s house, and he had never forgotten the way it moved on the page. The broker said it through a second time. Then a third. On the third his jaw worked and his lips stayed open at the end of it, and nothing came.

The hangings hung. The dark behind the god-tag went back as far as it had gone back before, and nothing walked out of it.

“What kind of lamp is that you’re holding?” the man asked. He said it the way a man at a fence line asks after a neighbor’s dog.

The broker looked down at the lamp in his two hands. Hollis watched him make up his mind about something.

“Yours, then,” he said, and threw it. “Take your death-lamp.”

The lamp turned over twice in the air. Out of the pea of green wick at the middle of it, things came: long, thin, half a dozen of them, going for the man up on the altar in a way that had no walking in it and no feet.

“Hold.”

That was all he said. He had one hand out, palm flat, and the lamp stopped in the air level with his chest and rocked there like something hung on a nail. The things that had come out of the wick went to nothing in the same instant. No ash came off them, and no sound. One moment they had the middle of the room; the next, the middle of the room was empty, and there was only the one lamp left burning where nobody was holding it.

“You gave me a lamp,” he said, “on your way out. That’s a generous sort of man.”

“On my way out,” the broker said. He had got his shoulders back against the doorframe. “Who’s on his way out?”

“You’re not?”

“I have never run from anything in my life,” the broker said, and it came out of him loud and even, and while he was saying it he squared up and took one more step back into the doorway.

The man laughed again, one note of it, and stopped.

“What,” the broker said. “What is it.”

“You. Standing there.”

The guide-lamp hung where he had stopped it, and it lit the front of the room, and it lit him. He was sitting up on the altar as if it were a bench in a square. One hand held the lamp off at arm’s length. The other was closed around a fan. The fan was black, black all the way through, no ornament on it and no pattern, and where it lay against the pale of his hand it made a line that Hollis’s eye could not get over.

The broker stared at the hand, or at the fan. Hollis, up on his knees in the dust, watched his face empty out from the top down.

“Black fan and the ghost-quiet,” he said. It came out of him in one piece, the way a rhyme comes out of a child. “Black fan, and the gods get no bow. You’re Ward. You’re Judah Ward.”

Then he was in the doorway. Hollis was never able to sort out afterward which came first, the name or the running. The broker was through and half out into the rain, still saying something under his breath, some last piece of the Naming he had kept back.

There was a knock on the boards.

The head was lying inside the door with its face up. That knock was all the noise it made going down. Whoever had taken it off had done it without hurrying and without a word, and there was no mark on the neck that Hollis could find, and he looked, because he had to.

“Ward,” the head said, and its eyebrows climbed. “I never did one thing to you. Not one thing—“

A second knock, softer than the first.

The arms came off at the shoulders and dropped where he had been standing, and lay there, one of them with the fingers still curled. One of the men from the line rolled his eyes back and went down flat, and did not move, and nobody in that room went to him.

The rest of the broker, torso and both legs, was through the doorway and running. Hollis heard his feet on the wet step. The run did not slow when it came to the rain.

“Hot,” the head said. “Hot. Ward. You called it down. It’s burning me.”

The rain came down on the broker the way rain does not come down on a man. He went the way paper goes in a fire, all at once and with no flame in it that anybody could point to, and then there was nothing on the step at all, and a thin smell of something burnt came back into the room on the wet air.

The head, on the boards, was still shouting about the rain.

A hand picked it up. Hollis had not seen anybody come in. The hand belonged to a girl of fifteen or sixteen, with a sword on her hip and her hair pulled back wet off her face, and she held the head out at arm’s length, tipped away from her coat, with no more feeling in her than if somebody had handed her a fish to carry home.

“Fourth,” she said. “What do you want done with this?”

The man on the altar opened the fan out halfway and moved it at her the way a person waves off a fly at the end of summer.

“Keep it,” he said. “I’ll be along.”

A wind came through the temple. It had no business in a shut room. It took the girl up off her feet and carried her out the door, and the head with her, and the door came back and rested against the frame, and the room was quiet except for the bells and the rain leaning in where the girl had gone.

Hollis knelt where he was.

He was not sure, after, how long. There was a good deal in him that had been turned over two or three times in the last quarter of an hour, and none of it had gone back where it belonged. The fan tapped him on the shoulder, twice, light, and he came up out of it the way a man comes up out of a doze in a chair.

“Sir,” he began.

It went no further than that. He had said sir all night long, at the bottom of the ridge and at the top of it, to a man with hooks at the corners of his mouth, and there was nothing left on the word that Hollis was willing to hand to anybody.

So he said thank you instead, which was smaller and true, and lifted his head to see who he was saying it to, and the look stopped him where he knelt.

The man was younger than Hollis had been braced for. His eyes were amber, and the light in them would not hold still when he smiled. It moved. Hollis’s own eye went after it and stayed there longer than was polite. And behind the left eye, laid out in a fan, were three marks, red and small, set as neat as if somebody had put them on with a brush and then thought better of taking them off again.

Hollis had been born in the valley under this ridge and had heard every story that got told down there about what came up on it after dark. He looked at those three marks, and he could not have said whether the thing in front of him was a devil out of the wet rock or one of the holy ones.