"Who Comes Barefoot"

Tom held the steel where it was and put his voice into the dark instead.

"Name yourself. One more rung and I'll know you by your blood, not your face — so speak, and speak true."

The foot stopped. The mist kept pouring past it, slow as poured milk, but the body above the foot went still as a hung coat. Then a child's voice came down through the grey, flattened thin by fear and by something older than fear.

"Sary. My name's Sary. Don't — please — they're behind me. They made me come first."

"Who made you."

"The hunter. And the cord-man's brother — the one Tom shot is in the ground but he had a brother and the brother's worse." The words tumbled now, too fast to be rehearsed. "They found the other door. The old woman's got two and she only watches the one. They sent me down this one so she'd run here and leave the captain. So she'd leave the captain alone with the second door open."

Tom's blood went to ice water. The captain. Alone.

"Come down," he said. "Slow. Hands where the mist's thin."

She came — a slip of a girl, salt-scabbed, one eye blackened, no weapon on her but a length of the hunter's own fine cord still knotted at one wrist where she'd been led like a goat. She looked at the cutlass and did not cry. That was the worst of it. She had learned not to.

Behind him, far down the passage, the blue light wavered — as if a door he did not know had opened on it, and let a draught in.