Brannoc heard the bell first, and it was not the Order’s.
It came from under the water. It was the bell that a current rang in the drowned town beneath the Caul, in the lake that had once been Tallowmere’s harbour, and it had been ringing in him since the autumn of the Seams, faint and far and never quite still. He had heard it on the causeway the day the gate was rebuilt. He had heard it in the gatehouse through every winter since. He had told the Chamber about it once, in the Roll-room, when he had been asked what the gate dreamed about, and he had said that there was a bell in him and that it was not ringing for the Hold.
Now it was ringing for the Hold.
He sat in his chair in the gatehouse, with his hands in his lap and his eyes closed. His body was there, the grey and many-jointed shape of the gatewarden, with its long fingers laid on the wood and its face turned toward the wicket. The Order had closed that body in the autumn of the siege, long before the Hold had a Roll, and the closing had been a long grey dimming, like a lamp being turned down by a hand that did not want to be seen turning it. He had not felt much of it. He had felt only the bell, going down and down into the stone, and then the sound of the…
