At R338-B, the Patient Gate, the way in opens to anyone. The way out does not, until the Tollkeeper has been paid.
The Tollkeeper is a machine, and a large one, built in the likeness of a seated keeper with its head bowed and one hand held open. Nothing about it is hidden. Its workings stand bare to the eye, every wheel and channel and counterweight of them, and a crosser may walk the whole of it while it runs. Who built it, and how long it has stood at the gate, nobody has kept. It has simply always been the way one leaves.
To go, a crosser sets a token in the open hand. Any token serves. A coin of great worth and a button off a coat are taken alike, and a glass bead, and a pebble worn smooth, have each been logged as accepted. The hand closes. The works begin.
What follows is long, and meant to be watched. The toll runs down a channel and trips the first of many levers. Wheels turn that turn other wheels. Small carved figures cross a track in slow procession and bow as they go by. Water is let from one vessel into another, sand from a third. Bells are struck in an order no two crossers have set down the same way. The sequence takes some minutes, and at the end of it the veil stands open, and the crosser may go.
Around the gate a small trade has grown. There is a gift shop, and a few merchants selling food and drink, and very little else. A crosser may buy a token to give the machine, or a hot meal to eat while the works run, and then cross on.
This is the matter the keeping cannot account for. A veil sets a traveller wherever they would go in the space of a single step. No one needs to stop anywhere; there is nowhere a stop falls on the way. And yet here is a stop, with its shop and its merchants and its great slow machine, and crossers go out of their way to reach it, and pay a button to a keeper that keeps nothing, and call the morning well spent.
The Tollkeeper has harmed no crosser and refused no toll yet offered. It is, by every survey, exactly what it appears to be.
There the matter rests.
~ The Lectors
