Hanne Salvers
Old Keeper of the Gate
Hanne kept the gate for thirty years, one night at a time, and now she keeps the keeper. Every dusk she hands the key to the stranger the Bureau has sent, hand to hand, never laid down, and every firs...
Old Keeper of the Gate
Hanne kept the gate for thirty years, one night at a time, and now she keeps the keeper. Every dusk she hands the key to the stranger the Bureau has sent, hand to hand, never laid down, and every firs...
Caller of the Number
Jakob reads the number and calls it. At dusk he unlocks the slate room, reads what is chalked there in a hand that is not his and not anybody's, locks it again, climbs to the bell-stage and calls the ...
Chaplain of the Returned
Ambrose keeps the chapel where the objects live that came back, and he reads them. A shoe came back for the cobbler's daughter a year after she went up; a glove for the miller; spectacles for a man wh...
Landlady of the Inn of the Refused
Marisol keeps the inn where the refused sleep, and the inn lives on their staying. She knows every guest's room, every story they told the officer and every night they told it, and she keeps the commo...
Half of the Pair That May Not Both Pass
Ilka and Dario came to the gate together, and the number has never once been two. Every night they go up and each pleads for the other: he says let her through, she says let him; the officer has sent ...
Smuggler of Places
Tobiah sells places at the gate, and there are no places to sell: the officer decides, so what Tobiah sells is the officer. His ledger has forty years of them, one page each: what they were offered, w...
Half of the Pair That May Not Both Pass
Dario sold his father's boatyard for a story about a pass, and he has been at the gate nine nights with his wife beside him, pleading that she be let through and not he. He is warm, quick, anxious, ta...
Surveyor of the Pass
Greta measures the pass, and the pass does not let itself be measured. Her instruments stop two hundred paces below the saddle, her notebooks end mid-line, her maps are pinned on the Bureau house wall...
The Man Refused Nineteen Times
Evert has stood at the chair nineteen nights and been sent back nineteen times, and he comes up again every night with a new story. He has been a widower looking for his wife, a father looking for a d...
Courier with the Letter to the Other Side
Noor carries a letter to the other side. It is sealed, it is addressed to a name, it was given to her at a post three weeks away with her fee and a second fee for the chain, and she has been told she ...
The Woman Who Came Back
Mira says she went up eleven years ago and came back down four months ago, over the saddle, at first light, past the cairns and the hut and the chapel, and in at the gate as it was closing, and that t...