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fiercely pledged to the Pilgrimage: anyone who might weaken and drop out had already done so, and anyone clumsy or careless enough to be killed or injured in the course of the training was long gone from our midst. We who had lasted this long meant to stay the course. A powerful kind of comradeship had developed among us. But there were still too many of us; and so we eyed our dearly loved comrades with unashamed ferocity, privately thinking, May the gods blight you tomorrow, may your soul drain out of your body like a trickle of cold water, may you fall from the cliff and shatter both your legs, may your courage desert you entirely. Anything, so long as you cease to stand in my way. And then we would smile, because everyone knew that everyone else was thinking the same things about him that he was thinking about them.
    Seventy was a critical number: it brought on the Final Winnowing, the Silent Winnowing, when the actual Forty would be chosen. So once again we stood in the field, just a handful of us where more than four thousand had been three years earlier, and the Masters moved among us. The curious thing about this last Winnowing was that there was no tap: thirty were to be eliminated, but they would not be told. That is why this was called the Silent Winnowing. We were to be left in the dark another six months, not knowing whether we had been dismissed or not, but still undergoing all the trials and hardships of the training.
    "Why do you think it's done this way?" I asked Traiben.
    And he said, "Because there's always the chance that some of the chosen Forty will die during the final months of the training, and then they can be replaced from among the Thirty. But the replacements, if they should be needed, won't ever know that they were replacements: everyone who goes up on the Wall must think that he was one of the elect."
    "So you and I might be among the Thirty ourselves, then?"
    "We are of the Forty," said Traiben calmly. "Our task now is simply to survive until the Closing of the Doors."
    Indeed he was right. The day of reckoning came, the tenth of Slit, which is exactly half a year prior to the day of the start of the new year's Pilgrimage. And at dawn of that day the Masters came to us where we slept and woke some of us, including Traiben and me, and took us to Pilgrim Lodge, and thereby we knew that we had been chosen. I felt none of the ecstatic joy that my boyhood self would have expected, only a mild flicker of satisfaction. I had worked too long and too hard for this to be capable of reacting with any great emotion now. One phase of my life had ended, the next was beginning, that was all. Once those great wickerwork doors had closed behind us, we would not go out into the sunlight again nor see any living person other than ourselves until the tenth of Elgamoir, when we would begin our ascent.
    I was not surprised to see that Kilarion the Builder had been chosen. He was the biggest of us by far, and the strongest: a little slow-witted except when it came to his own trade, but a good man to have with you in a difficult spot. The selection of Jaif the Singer pleased me also, for he was calm-natured, steadfast, and reliable. But why had the Masters given us sly, slippery little Kath, of the House of Advocates? Kath was good at talking, yes, but what use would a glib tongue be on the slopes of the Wall? Or someone as hot-blooded and impulsive as Stapp of Judges, in such a dangerous environment? Naxa the Scribe too: why had they picked him? He was clever, nearly as clever as Traiben, but he was pedantic and obnoxious and there was no one who liked him. And then there were a few others—Thuiman of the Metalworkers, Dorn of the House of Clowns, Narril the Butcher—who were decent enough sorts but of no particular distinction or merit, and they would not have been among my first choices if I had been a Master. And Muurmut of the Vintners, a tall, stubborn, red-faced man, tough-willed and full of strong opinions but