Bram Tollick (Human, the keeper's son, Casimor watch-post)

Standing. That was the thing Bram could not get past, and he had seen the Castle's people four thousand times.

They walked. Every one of them walked, or stood for as long as it takes to bar the gate and then went; they had ways, and the ways went somewhere. This one stood in the middle of a room past the notches, in the lamp's light, the lamp's own colour and more of it than the lamp had, no shadow under it, facing the door, and did not go anywhere. He stood in the doorway with the lamp up for as long as it would have taken Mereth to stand and go, and then as long again, and it stood.

"Lower the lamp," said Pellam's girl, behind him, very quietly.

He lowered it. The room went dark. There was nothing in the room.

He raised it. There it was, standing, exactly where it had been, as if the dark had been a door it had gone through and come back from without moving.

"It's the lamp," she said. "It's always been the lamp. Your father said: bring no lamp and see nothing. They aren't there in the dark. They're there in the light. We bring the light and they're in it." Her voice was doing the thing the court's children's voices did on the first evening, and she was fifteen and had been on Krilzat for the length of a storm, and he thought that she was managing it better than he was.

The case was under his arm. The keeper decides.

He thought about it for the length of one more Mereth. The strangers had asked for one thing in three years and the court had let it come to the gate and his father had put it in his hands and said decide, and the thing listened and kept what it heard and did nothing else, and here was a room nobody had been in, with a door nobody had seen open, and one of the Castle's people standing in it at no hour with no name.

He went in. Three steps, no more, the lamp held low so that the figure stayed in it, and set the case down on the floor just inside the door, against the wall, where it would be out of the way of anything that walked and would hear whatever there was to hear. He did not look at the figure while he did it. You do not look at them while you are doing something. It did not look at him; they never did.

Then he came out, and took the lamp with him, and the room was dark, and the door stayed open.

"Nobody closes that," he said. "It was open. We leave it open."