By the third night Jory had stopped expecting the gate to behave like a gate. He had decided this in the way that a sensible man decides not to expect a horse to be pleasant in the morning, which is to say that he had given up on any hope and was now simply interested in the outcome. He had eaten his supper at the gatehouse hearth with his boots off and his feet to the fire, and when Idrin came to the door with a lantern and said that the gate was to be shut tonight, whatever the cost, Jory put his boots on again and followed him out without a word.
The arch was dark. The lantern made a small yellow room of light around them, and beyond the edges of it the cobbles of the gate-foot ran out into shadow. The chain hung from the crown of the arch as it always did, one end on the stone and the other end lying loose across the gate-foot like a rope someone had dropped and forgotten.
“Stand back,” Idrin said.
“I’m not standing anywhere. I’m holding the lantern.”
“Then hold it further back.”
Jory moved two paces and held the lantern out at arm’s length, and Idrin stepped under the arch and looked up at the chain with the air of a man addressing a tribunal. He had his coat buttoned and his chin up, and he had the Royal Forms in his mouth; Jory could see the words moving, the quick small motion of a man rehearsing a sentence he has been taught. When he spoke it was in the voice Jory had heard at the Chancery stables: clear, cold, pitched to carry down a corridor to the person who had been given the job of doing what he was told.
“The gate will be closed,” said Idrin. “The chain will lie still. The doors will be set in their place. That is an order, and I expect it to be obeyed.”
The chain did not move.
Idrin drew breath. He lowered his voice, and then lowered it further, and when he spoke again it was in a different voice altogether. It was dry and exact, the voice of a clerk reading out a column of sums he has already checked twice. “The chain,” he said, “is to be entered as lying still. Recorded. Initialled. Filed. Its position is noted. Its duty is accepted. Its weight is seven parts in twelve of a standard iron bar.”
Jory was not sure afterward that the chain had moved. He thought it had. There had been a shiver along its length, a faint quick tremor like a horse’s skin twitching at a fly, and the last links had clinked against the stone as though they were trying to lie down and had not yet decided how. Then they went still again, and Idrin lowered his arm with a frown, and said, to nobody in particular, “Well, that was a waste of breath.”
“It moved,” Jory said.
“It twitched.”
“It did what you said, though, didn’t it? Sort of.”
“It did what I said as a dog does what you say, when it has already decided to go somewhere else.” Idrin turned to face him with the air of a man who is about to make a serious mistake because he has been told, by a stranger, that a mistake is required. “I’ll try again. Give me the lantern.”
Jory did not want to give him the lantern. He was tired and cold, and there was something in the chain that he did not like. It was too still, and it was waiting, and he had the feeling he got sometimes at a harvest supper when a drunk man started to sing and everyone in the room knew he was about to fall off the bench. He held on to the lantern. Idrin reached for it, and Jory took a step forward to show him where the chain was, and then he did the thing that a farm-boy does with a rope that is slipping. He grabbed the chain to hold it still.
The metal was cold for one instant and then it was not cold at all. It was hot as a forge-bar is hot before it has begun to glow, dry and heavy and utterly indifferent, and the links closed on his fingers. He felt them go round his wrist, and then his hand, not tight, not painful at first, but settled, like a sleeve being drawn on by someone who meant it to fit. Then the pain came through, hot and sharp across the back of his hand, and he heard himself cry out, and he heard the cry come back to him in a second voice, from very far off, as if somebody else in another room had made the same sound.
The stone moved.
It was not a shudder. It was a long, deep heave that ran through the whole arch from the crown to the footings, as a horse’s back moves when it has been struck on the flank and has decided to bear it. Jory felt it through his bones. Every pulse in his hand went out into the stone and came back altered, as if the gate had taken his pain and was carrying it about somewhere in its own body, weighing it, deciding what it was worth. He saw Idrin lunge toward him and then stop, halfway, as though the air between them had thickened.
Idrin did not stop for long. He caught the chain below Jory’s hand with his right fist, the sword hand, and pulled. The links ground against each other with a sound like a mill-wheel breaking its axle, and his palm went down on the metal with his whole weight behind it. He made a sound that Jory had never heard from a Saelmar, a short high hiss through his teeth, and then the links came free of Jory’s wrist and fell away onto the cobbles with a clatter that seemed to go on for a long while.
The lantern had gone out. Jory did not remember it going out. He was on his knees on the cobbles with his hand held up in front of his face and he could not see anything at all except the red after-glow of the chain on his eyes.
The arch groaned.
It was a huge low sound, like a barn-door being dragged across a stone floor by a team of oxen, and the air shook with it. Jory felt the stone move in the dark. Somewhere above him, where the doors had once hung and now did not, something shifted on pins that had no doors to carry, and he heard a scrape like wood drawn across a frame, and then it stopped, and then it began again. The arch opened. It shut. It opened, a little wider than before, and shut again with a boom that rang off the walls of the gatehouse and came back as an echo, and then it held still.
Idrin was on his knees beside him. He had the lantern in his left hand, somehow, and it was alight again, and in its yellow light his face looked older than Jory had ever seen it, and grey about the mouth. He was holding his right hand against his chest, cupped, as a child holds a bird it has found in the grass.
“Let me see,” Jory said.
“No.”
“Let me see yours.”
“It’s nothing.” Idrin looked down at his palm. There was a blister across the heel of it, already rising, the skin lifting in a pale bubble that shone wetly in the light. He opened his fingers slightly, and winced. “It’s a burn. It’s not even a deep one. Any bonesetter in Lessary would laugh at it.”
“There isn’t one here.”
“No,” said Idrin, and then, with great care, he took Jory’s hand and turned it toward the lantern.
The back of Jory’s hand was red from the knuckles to the wrist. There were marks on it in a pattern of short bright lines, like the bars on a stave, where the links had gripped. The skin on his first two fingers had begun to lift. It hurt, and the hurt came and went in long waves, and each wave seemed to travel up his arm into his shoulder and then, very faintly, somewhere deeper, into the cold stone under his knees. He felt the stone flinch when he flinched. He could not explain it to himself. He did not try.
They got him to the well. Idrin held the lantern. Jory put his hand in the bucket of cold well-water and kept it there, and for a while he could not think about anything except the cold and the way it drew the heat out of his fingers. Then the pain eased. He sat on the wet stone edge of the well and watched the lantern-light move on the water, and found that he was shaking, and that he did not mind it very much.
“The gate doesn’t like being told,” he said.
Idrin was sitting on the stone beside him, his burned hand in his lap, staring at the arch through the dark. “It isn’t a gate.”
“Then what is it?”
Idrin did not answer for a while. When he did, his voice was flat and tired, the voice of a man who has been given a sum to do and has found that every figure in it is wrong. “I don’t know. It is the thing the gate is for. It keeps things out, and it lets them in, and it is cold. That’s what I know.”
Jory took his hand out of the water. The fingers were white and wrinkled, and when he flexed them, the skin pulled, but it did not split. He put the hand back in and shook his head, and laughed without much humour.
“The cold was the worst part,” he said. “Did you notice that? Not the burn. The cold. It came up out of the stone, out of the chain, as if the whole wall had been keeping its heat for somebody who never came back to collect it.”
Idrin said nothing. Across the gate-foot, under the arch, the chain lay on the cobbles where it had fallen, its last link twitching a little as the wind passed over it. Idrin looked at it for a while, then stood up, wincing, and held the lantern high.
“I’ll make a Writ tomorrow,” he said. “A proper one. I’ll write it out in full and read it to the gate, and it will do as it is told, or I’ll know why.”
Jory watched the chain. It did not move while Idrin spoke. But when Idrin turned his back and walked toward the gatehouse with the lantern, the slack length of the chain lifted from the stones behind him, very slowly, and ran out through the open arch into the dark beyond. It dragged over the cobbles with a long rasping sound, as if something on the far side of the wall had taken hold of the end and had decided to leave the Hold, and it did not come back for nearly a full minute. Jory sat by the well and counted the seconds, and when the chain came crawling back at last through the arch, it was wet, as though it had been out in the river.