The grey lights came down off the ridge an hour after midnight.
Orrin was awake to see them. He had not tried to sleep. He sat on the mill steps with Brannoch's old spear across his knees, watching the ridge-line, and when the first light moved, he did not feel surprise. He felt the thing he had felt in the moot hall with the pilgrim beneath his arm: a slow, level calm settling over him like cold water, and under it, faint and far off, the small dismayed voice of the boy who had never wanted to be this.
They came in a long line, the way the lights had stood. Each carried a lantern of pale grey glass with a flame that gave no warmth, and each wore the undyed cord at the waist. Sixty of them, perhaps seventy. They did not shout. They did not run. They came down the terraces in perfect silence, stepping over the frozen barley stubble, and the lantern light slid across their faces and showed them to be ordinary: farmers and tinkers, a girl of no more than sixteen, an old woman with her white hair braided like a crown. The sort of people you might meet on any road. The sort of people who had found a god, once, and had never been able to let him go.
Behind Orrin, in the cellar under the mill, a rope creaked.
He turned his head. The cellar door was shut and barred. But through the boards he heard the slow, patient sound of a man working loose a wet knot with his teeth, and then a thin whistle, high and reedy, three notes falling.
"The pilgrim," Brannoch said, limping out of the dark with his own spear. "I told Lysa we should have cut his throat."
"He's awake."
"He has been awake since noon, lad. Playing dead. A man learns to spot it." Brannoch gripped the cellar bar and hauled it up. "Stay here. I'll deal with him."
He vanished into the cellar. There was a single, short, grunting sound, then silence. When Brannoch came back up, he was wiping his blade on his sleeve, and his face was grim and old. "He'd already signalled," he said. "No help for it. Here they come."
The first Keeper through the north gate was the girl.
She came at Orrin with a short curved blade in each hand, moving with a fluid, tireless grace that made his stomach turn. She was sixteen. She was smiling. The grey cord at her waist pulsed faintly, and he saw that every time her feet struck the ground, a thread of pale vapour rose from the stones and was drawn into her skin, as though the very ground were pouring something into her.
He took the first cut on the haft of his spear, and the second on his shoulder. It should have opened him to the bone. It did not. The edge slid across his collar and left a white line, and the blood welled up for a heartbeat and then stopped, thick and slow, as though the wound were thinking better of itself.
The girl's smile widened. "He's the one," she called, over her shoulder. "Look at him. Look at him."
Orrin put the butt of the spear through her guard and into her breastbone and felt her ribs go. She went down without a sound. He did not wait to see if she rose. He turned, because there were nine more behind her.
It was, afterward, hard to remember the fight in order. It came back to him in pieces: the weight of the spear in his hands, the dry crack of bone, the cold bite of a knife along his ribs that did not go in. A man with a hoe handle cracked across the throat. A woman clinging to his arm, hissing prayers, while Brannoch's spear took her in the back. The thin, high, endless whistle of the Keepers calling to one another through the dark. Lysa darting between the rows of the wounded with her satchel clutched to her chest, hands slick to the wrists. The sky, lit grey from below by seventy lanterns, hanging over Tarn's Rest like the lid of a coffin.
He fought well. That was the terrible part. He knew every step of it before it happened, and his body carried him through it with the unthinking ease of a river finding the sea. He turned a spear aside and drove his elbow into a jaw. He caught a descending axe on the shaft and twisted it from the wielder's grip. He did not feel tired. He did not feel afraid. When it was over, he thought, he would feel those things, and the feeling would be very large.
The villagers fought too. They fought with scythes and hay-forks, and they were not soldiers, and they died. Orrin saw a boy of fourteen, Harl Dunmore's youngest, fall in the doorway of the barn with a grey-cord woman's blade between his shoulder blades. He saw Harl himself roar and fling himself across the body with a flail, bringing it down again and again, long after the woman had stopped moving.
When the Keepers came over the wall, no one in the village had been told what to expect, and the first minutes were chaos. People ran for the alarm bell. People ran the wrong way. Dessa, white-faced, caught Orrin's arm as he passed and said, in a low, flat voice, "You knew they would come. You knew, and you let them sleep." He had no answer. He ran on.
It was near dawn when the woman with the white braids reached the square.
She was older than the rest, fifty or sixty, with a face like a worn coin and a cord at her waist that was not grey but silver, braided and re-braided a dozen times, so thick it seemed to move of its own accord. She walked unhurried through the broken remnants of the line, and the Keepers parted for her without a word. When she was ten paces from Orrin, she stopped, and set her lantern carefully down on the cobbles, and folded her hands.
"I am Vessa," she said. Her voice was warm and tired, a grandmother's voice. "I am called the Warden of Cords. You have done a great deal of damage tonight, young man. You have done what I expected. I thank you for it."
Orrin's spear hung low. His arms had begun, finally, to shake. "You're thanking me?"
"Of course. I needed to see." She tilted her head. Behind her, Serath had risen from the well. His face was grey as paper, and the shadow beneath him was spreading across the square, thick and heavy, reaching for the cords, for the Keepers, for the dead. "A god does not die at the hand of a child," Vessa said. "But a god can be carried by one, if the child is strong enough. You are strong enough. I have seen it. So I will tell you what I tell all who stand in my road: Serath is not yours to end. He is the only warmth left in a cold world, and we have kept him alive for three hundred years, and we will keep him alive for three hundred more."
"You are feeding on him," said Lysa, behind Orrin. Her voice was raw. "You're feeding on his pain."
"We are sharing it," Vessa said gently. "It is a mercy. You do not understand yet. You will." She lifted her lantern again. "We will see you at the Altar, boy. We always do."
She did not run. She did not need to. The Keepers melted back from the square like frost under a hand, the lanterns dimming one by one up the slope, and by the time the sun had cleared the eastern ridge there was nothing left on the terraces but the dead.