A fortnight in the square, and a category I didn't intend to start.

2.4.863 · Why I came

For the pattern in the stones, which is the only physical record of a Deepening breach anybody has ever been able to walk up to and look at.

Everything I have written about the Deepening has been secondhand, and most of it thirdhand, and a great deal of it turned out on inspection to be a bad year or a bad person. I've been chasing accounts for four years and dissolving them. This is the one that doesn't dissolve, because the evidence is a market square and it's still there.

I didn't come here to write about what happened. What happened has been told so many times and so badly that I doubt anybody could recover it now, including the people who were in it.

I came to look at the ground.

4.4.863 · The town

It's recovered, and thoroughly, which surprised me more than it should have.

Hallow's Reach is a market town of perhaps six hundred at the eastern edge of the Boundary Lands, where Ironvale's influence thins to nothing and the district governs itself by tradition and stubbornness. It has a good Thursday market, two inns, a dispute about a mill that has been running longer than anyone can date, and no visible scar of any kind.

People here talk about it the way a district talks about a flood. It happened, it was bad, it was a while ago, and the ones who want to tell you about it will find you within a day of your arrival.

Two things they don't do. Nobody points at the square, and nobody says the word Deepening. The first I think is habit. The second may be partly superstition. The two people I asked directly both said no need, and both changed the subject without any hurry.

6.4.863 · The square

The square is where the enquiry actually is, and it took me two days to see it because I was looking for damage.

There's no damage. The buildings are sound, a market runs across it twice a week, and nobody walks around anything.

What is wrong with it is that a patch of it, roughly forty paces across and off-centre toward the north side, will not hold together.

Mortar sets there, and over a season or two it stops being mortar and becomes sand between the stones, which then sit loose. The town has rebuilt the well three times in living memory and the third time they moved it eight paces south, where it has stood since without trouble.

I've handled the stone. It's ordinary stone. Two masons have told me, in almost the same words, that there's nothing wrong with the material or the work. They just don't use lime on that corner any more and lay it dry instead, which holds fine because dry stone doesn't ask anything of the joints.

The current arrangement, which nobody planned and everybody has arrived at, is that the loose patch is where the market's heavy stalls go, because heavy stalls sit on their own weight and don't care what the joints are doing.

They call it the loose corner. The name is eight years old and nobody uses any other.

9.4.863 · The pattern

It's real, and far less dramatic than the accounts.

Set into the paving, in the middle of the loose corner, is a discolouration in the stone. Dark brown going to black, soaked well below the surface, in a shapeless spread covering perhaps twelve paces. It doesn't depict anything, and I say so plainly because three of the accounts I collected before coming here described it as a diagram.

It is a spray pattern. Whatever went into that stone went into it fast, from a point somewhere near the middle, all at once.

I spent a full day copying it and I'm not going to reproduce the copy here, because a drawing of it invites exactly the kind of interpretation the drawing cannot support. Eight years of weather and market days haven't touched it, and the stones carrying it are among the loosest in the corner. When the well was moved the masons worked round it without being told to.

A woman who has kept a stall on that side for thirty years told me she puts her table over it in winter and not in summer, and when I asked why said that in summer people notice you standing on it.

11.4.863 · What the accounts agree on

I collected eleven, of which nine are firsthand. Eight years is nothing. Most of the adults in this town were standing in it, and I arrived expecting that to make the account easier to recover. It hasn't.

They agree on very little.

Agreed. Two strangers arrived separately and within a day of each other. Neither belonged to any House and neither claimed to. The trouble in the town had been building for some weeks and had made people afraid of corners and unwilling to be out after dark. The strangers went into the square at sundown. There was a considerable noise. In the morning the trouble was over and has never returned.

Not agreed. Everything else. How many strangers there were, from two to five. Whether either of them was hurt. What was actually in the square, which ranges from shadows through animals to nothing at all. Whether anybody else was present. What the noise was.

Seven of the nine firsthand accounts include, unprompted, that they could not afterwards describe what they had seen, and that this bothered them at the time more than the fear did. One of them, a woman who was twenty-four that year and is not vague about anything else in her life, told me she has a clear memory of watching and no memory whatever of what she was watching. She has stopped raising it, because the second question is always what did you see.

13.4.863 · The word that came out of it

This is the part that's properly documented, because it's a naming, and namings survive.

The word wanderer, meaning a practitioner belonging to no House and trained by nobody, is from here, in the specific sense the dominion now uses it. The concept is as old as practice.

Somebody in this town, in the week after, called the two strangers wanderers, and it travelled. I've checked this against three separate districts on my way east and the attribution holds in all three, which is more consistency than I get for most things.

Before that the usual terms were unhoused, or self-taught, or a range of local phrasings that weren't kind. That the neutral word we all now use was coined here, about two people who walked into a bad square at sundown, is I think the single most consequential thing that has ever happened in Hallow's Reach, and nobody in the town mentioned it to me until I raised it.

When I did raise it, the response in every case was mild surprise that it had come from anywhere.

15.4.863 · A thing I have started noticing

This is the first time in four years I've caught myself starting a category, and categories are how a person like me goes wrong.

Last winter I spent ten days snowed into a village on the Chiming Snow. There is a patch of pasture there, sixty paces across, that the village does not plough because it is heavy. Objects land harder than they should. Horses go round it. The grass comes up a fortnight late because the snow packs denser. The village calls it the heavy acre, finds it entirely unremarkable, and told me every village has something.

Here there is a patch of square, forty paces across, where mortar quietly stops being mortar and the stones won't stay joined. The town calls it the loose corner and thinks nothing of it, and has arranged the market around it without anybody deciding to.

Two places. Two anomalies in the ground, both bounded and harmless, and absorbed into ordinary use by people who don't think them worth discussing. One has been there longer than anybody can say. The other has been there eight years and is already treated in the same way.

And they're opposites: one holds too well and the other won't hold at all.

I don't have an explanation, or even a hypothesis. Two isn't a pattern. The brewhouse woman in the north was almost certainly right that every village has something, and if I go looking for anomalous ground I'll find it everywhere, because that's what happens to a man who starts looking for a thing.

But I've started a list, and I'm going to keep it. I'm recording the date so that if it comes to anything I'll know how long I was carrying it before I understood what I had.

What I would want, if I were being rigorous, is a third case where I already know what happened there. Both of mine are places where something occurred that nobody can describe properly. That is either the connection or it is the reason I found them, and from inside I can't tell which.

16.4.863 · Leaving

A fortnight, and I have a copied pattern I won't publish, eleven contradictory accounts, a confirmed etymology, and a list with two entries on it.

The thing I didn't expect was how finished this town is with all of it. I arrived braced for a place living in the shadow of a bad night, and found a place that had a bad night eight years ago, dealt with it, and moved the well.

Here the strangers are just two people who turned up, did whatever they did, and left, and the town's considered position after eight years is gratitude of a fairly ordinary kind, roughly proportionate to what one would feel toward a good physician.

I think there's something in that worth more than the pattern in the stones. Whatever came through into this square was, by every account, the worst thing anybody here has ever been near, and Hallow's Reach has put a market on top of it.

Eleven accounts, nine of them firsthand. One copied pattern, unpublished. No enquiry made into the identity of either stranger, on the grounds that eight years of retelling has already put that beyond recovery.