Brannoc stood at the open wicket at dusk, the way a gatewarden does at the end of a day, and listened for the bell.
He had always heard it. Even before the Hold had woken him, he had heard it in the dream of the stair going down, a long way under the water, where the steps went on past the place a man could breathe and the rope at the top of them was tied to nothing. It rang slowly, as a bell rings when the metal is very old and has been struck by a hand that did not know its own strength. He had known the bell for years. He had known it so well that for a season he had mistaken it for the Hold’s own, and had gone on ringing it, in his sleep, from the wrong side of the wall.
Tonight it was ringing from the causeway.
Not from the stone under the Hold, where it had always seemed to come from. Not from the Undercroft, or the Keystone, or the gate’s old iron. It came from the far side of the water, from the Lantern Ford road, from the long grey line of the causeway’s piled rock where the paving ran out across the brown river to the Crown’s ground. It rang as though someone there had found a new rope to pull, and had decided to pull it harder, and had not yet learned that the Hold could hear.
