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

He cut the notch that evening, after the door was barred, with his father watching and not saying anything, which was his father's way of saying a great deal.

The post was old wood, grey as the keep, cut from the top down by every keeper who had stood in a room, and the last notch was his grandmother's, and he put his below it, one cut, with the knife the watch used for nothing else, and it was the first cut in the post since before he was born. His father looked at it for a while.

"Right side," his father said. "Past the ninth."

"Past the ninth. Open. One in it, standing. I put their thing inside the door."

"Standing."

"Standing."

His father nodded, slowly, the way the watch nodded at the Castle, which was the way you nod at weather, and went to see to the wall, and that was the whole of what the keeper said about the keeper's son having decided.

Pellam's girl went in the morning on the same boat, because the calm would not hold and she had a line to carry. She stood at the gate with her bag that was mostly cloak and said the line once more so that he would have heard it twice, a door was given, on Krilzat, in Pellam's time, and he gave her the way once more so that she would have it, right side, past the ninth, standing, and that was the whole of what the two records had between them, and neither of them had a name, and the boat went.

He went down the right side that evening with the lamp, past the notches, past his grandmother, to the open door, and raised the lamp.

Standing. Where it had been. The grey case on the floor against the wall, inside the door, doing whatever the strangers' things did, which from outside was nothing. He stood in the doorway for as long as it takes to bar the gate, and it stood, and he lowered the lamp and it was gone, and he raised it and it was there, and he understood that he could do that all night and it would not change, and that this was the first thing in the Castle he had ever been able to do twice and have come out the same, and that it told him nothing at all.

Nobody has walked to the end of the Castle. He had gone one door further than anyone and had found a room with one standing in it, and the hall went on past the open door, down, in the dark, the way it always had, and he did not go on.

He went up, and barred the door, and the count was one more.