The Grey Pilgrims

The Grey Pilgrims are less an order than a grief that walks. They are seen alone or in small silent companies, upon the roads of Varrow, the salt paths of the League coast and the cliff tracks above drowned Ilm, always going west when any road offers the choice. They wear grey without badge or cut, carry neither staff, pack nor begging bowl, and do not speak when spoken to. The archive has no charter for them, no founder, no prayer, no list of names. What is known is narrow and strange: they harm no one who lets them pass; they have grown more numerous since the Long Winter; and sober witnesses in several lands swear, upon oath and sometimes upon relic, that they cast no shadows.

Origins and first notices

No chronicler agrees on when the first pilgrim was seen. A Verane toll-book kept by the collectors of the Westward Count places grey travellers on the western road "in the year the wells froze", which its compiler took to mean 309 AS; a Hask winter-tale calls them older than the first burning of the dead, which cannot be true if they are what they appear. The Pale Choir claims them for a sign of the Wound's regard, though even its mission ledgers admit the pilgrims give no reverence to Choir psalms. The Collegium of Ash has twice offered coin for one brought living to Saverra for examination; no factor has collected.

Their road is plainer than their beginning. From the marches they follow the old imperial stones west; from the League they take ship only as far as the Drowned Coast and then go afoot; from the high country they come down by shepherds' paths to Morwen's Landing, where fishwives leave grey cloth on the rocks and find it gone by morning. All roads end, so far as any watcher has marked, at Stairfoot and the stairhead above the sea.

Appearance, custom and conduct

They are not magnificent. Most are thin, road-worn and weather-brown under the grey; some limp, some are old, some are children whose silence frightens more than any silence of age. They keep no formation and no hour, yet companies never quarrel, never beg and never sing. Where they meet the living, the road-custom called the Three Courtesies is now observed from Harrowgate to the cliffs: give them the crown of the road, let no song be raised until they are out of hearing, and carry no new-lit fire across their path after dusk. The custom is older than its name and is enforced more by neighbours than by law.

They are drawn, if the word may be used of so mild a motion, to places already heavy with loss: plague-houses after the red lamp is quenched, burned steadings, fields where the Unquiet walked in winter. They do not fight the risen dead and the dead do not turn to them, though Lantern-Wardens report that Unquiet will stand still as cattle when a grey company passes, neither advancing nor fleeing. The Lantern-Wardens keep apart from them by practice rather than oath; Preceptor Hale's standing instruction, quoted in several lamphouse books, is only: "Do not light them a lantern. Do not ask their names."

On hindrance and harm

The saying that none who stop them profit by it is not a law but a pattern of parish records. A carter at Harrowgate who barred a bridge for toll in 311 AS was found three days later beneath his own wagon, unbruised, with the harness cut into lengths and no memory of having cut it; he walked west the following spring and did not return. A press-gang out of Low Pell took two pilgrims for rowers and put back within a week with half the crew refusing to speak above a whisper. Such tales grow in the telling, and the archive does not vouch for each detail; but no record shows a pilgrim striking a blow, and no magistrate has yet proved one guilty of theft, trespass, witchcraft or breach of peace.

Let them by. They are not ours to bury, and not theirs to bless.

What is believed, and what is not known

Belief runs ahead of evidence. Choir cantors call them the Already-Opened and say the Wound looks through them as through clear glass. The Hask leave them to the snow, holding that any soul beyond speech is beyond judgement. Among Hollowed of the League there is an uneasy courtesy: none will burn a working in a pilgrim's sight, though whether from fear, shame or professional pride the ledgers do not say. The Collegium's public position is that shadowlessness is winter light, tired eyes and credulity; its private correspondence, where fragments have escaped, is less composed. The archive records only that no pilgrim has been proved to carry a remembrance-book, a name, a coin or a wound that bled.

In 312 AS their numbers are remarked upon from the Sull to the red cliffs. The Mere Watch turns back grey companies from the Glassmere roads as it turns back all travellers, and reports that the pilgrims go without argument; at the Stair of Ilm the watchman at Stairfoot counts them down the upper treads and has never counted one climbing back. Where they go beneath the water, if they go beneath it, the sea has not returned an answer.