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lurch. My heart and stomach gave a lurch, too, in the opposite direction, and I stopped thinking about anything except how nervous I was. This is it , I thought. I’m really on my way now. I don’t remember seeing the shops, or the houses, or the suburbs we went past. I only began to notice things when we reached the first of the foothills, among the woods, and the cogs underneath the tram engaged with the cogs in the roadway, clunk , and we went steeply up in jerks, croink, croink, croink .
    This woke me up a bit. I stared out at the sunlight splashing on rocks and green trees and thought, in a distracted way, that it was probably quite beautiful. Then it dawned on me that there was none of the chattering and laughing and fooling about on the tram that there usually is on a school outing. All the other kids sat staring quietly out at the woods, just as I was doing.
    They can’t all be going to Stallery to be interviewed! I thought. They can’t ! But there didn’t seem to be any teachers with them. I clutched at the slightly sticky cork in my pocket and wondered if I would ever get to use it to call a Walker, whatever that was. But I had to call one, or I would be dead. And I realized that if any of these kids got the job instead of me, it would be like a death sentence.
    I was really scared. I kept thinking of the way Uncle Alfred had told me not to be too obvious about taking clothes and then to call myself Grant, as if he wasn’t too sure that his spell on me would work, and I was more frightened than I had ever been before. When the tram came out on the next level part, I stared down at the view of Stallchester nestled below, and the blue peaks where the glacier was, and at Stall Crag, and the whole lot went fuzzy with my terror.
    It takes the tram well over an hour to get as high as Stallery, cogging up the steep bits, rumbling through rocky cuttings, and stopping at lonely inns and solitary pairs of houses on the heights. One or two people got on or off at every stop, but they were all adults. The other children just sat there, like me. Let them all be going to Stallstead! I thought. But I noticed that none of the ones with bags of lunch tried to eat any of it, as if they might be too nervous for food, just as I was. Though they could be saving it to eat in Stallstead, I thought. I hoped they were.
    At last we were running on an almost level part, where there were clumps of trees and meadowlands and even a farm on one side. It looked almost like a lowland valley here. But on the other side of the road there was a high dark wall with spikes on top. I knew this was the wall around Stallery and that we were now really high up. I could even feel the magics here, like a very faint fizzing. My heart began banging so hard it almost hurt.
    That wall seemed to run for miles , with the road curving alongside it. There was no kind of break in its dark surface, until the tram swung around an even bigger curve and began slowing down. There was a high turreted gateway ahead in the wall, which seemed to be some kind of a house as well—anyway, I saw windows in it—and across the road from this gateway, along the verge by the hedge, I was surprised to see some gypsies camping. I noticed a couple of tumbledown-looking caravans, an old gray horse trying to eat the hedge, and a white dog running up and down the verge. I wondered vaguely why they hadn’t been moved on. It seemed unlike Stallery to allow gypsies outside their gates. But I was too nervous to wonder much.
    Clang, clang , went the tram, announcing it was stopping.
    A man in a brown uniform came to the gate and stood waiting. He was carrying two weird-shaped brown paper parcels. Barometers? I wondered. Clocks? He came over as the tram stopped and handed the parcels to the driver.
    â€œFor the clock mender in Stallstead,” he said. Then, as the driver unfolded the doors, the man came right up into the tram. “This is Stallery South