Ysra did the night round by the same counts every night, because a number that changed was a door that had been moved, and she had learned, long before the Hold had any doors worth counting, that moved doors were how people got killed. She counted the gatehouse stairs and the wall-stair and the forty-one paces from the chapel porch to the top of the Keystone’s stair. She counted the lanterns on their hooks, the bolts on the Watch-room door, and the number of heartbeats it took her to walk from the north tower to the bread-hall with her hand on the wall. Nine hundred and twelve beats, the last time she had walked it, on a night she had not slept at all.
Tonight she had got as far as the Undercroft door before the child began to count.
The voice came up through the stone. It was small and clear and very patient, the voice of somebody putting one bare foot down on each step of a stair and saying the number aloud as the foot landed. One. A pause. Two. A pause, and the sound of a small breath being taken and let out. Three. Ysra stopped where she stood, with the lantern in her right hand and her left hand flat against the cold door, and she did not breathe at all.
Four. Five.
The Undercroft stair had nine steps. She knew that the way she knew her own name, which she did not say often. The Hold had been built on nine steps down to the Keystone, and the builders had cut them out of the living rock with a wedge and a patient hand, and every Watch since the first had been told the number on their first night. Ysra had counted them every night for a year. She had counted them in the dark and in the light and once, under the influence of a fever, backwards, and she had never once come to a different number.
Six. Seven.
The voice did not hurry. It did not sound afraid, which made it worse. It sounded like a child who had been told to count to nine and had decided to do it very properly, one step at a time, in a clean and steady voice that belonged to nobody in the Hold.
Eight.
Ysra’s hand tightened on the lantern’s handle. Her breath came out through her teeth. Nine, said the voice, and then nothing. The silence after it had the particular weight of a door that has been closed very gently by someone who does not want to wake the house.
She opened the Undercroft door and went down.
The stair was empty. She lit the lantern fully, so that the flame stood up straight and bright, and held it out ahead of her, and went down one step at a time with her back to the wall. The steps were dry. The stone was dry. The air had the old dead cleanliness of the Undercroft, the smell of rock that had never once seen the sky, and the faint, sweetish reek of the iron the Hold kept down there in its bins. At the bottom the Keystone stood in the lantern light, the great cut capstone with its inscription running across the north face, and its tally-notches catching the light in a long grey row. Nobody was sitting on it. Nobody stood near it. Nobody was counting.
She went round the stone to the fourth stair.
She had never trusted the fourth stair. It was worn at the lip more than the others, a shallow dip in the stone where a great many feet had gone up and down over a great many years, and whenever she came down the Undercroft steps her eye went to it before her feet did. It was the only step in the Hold that Ysra had ever heard make a sound by itself. She knelt beside it now, and put the lantern down, and looked at the worn lip with the close attention she gave to a crack in a wall. There was nothing on it. Only dust, and the faint grey shine of old wear.
From the dark beyond the Token-Chest, very quietly, a voice said, “Four.”
It said the word as if it were correcting a sum somebody else had done badly. It said it with the particular exasperation of a child who has been asked the same question twice by a clerk who ought to know better.
Ysra did not answer the dark. She had been taught on the wall that the dark did not answer back, and that a Watch who spoke to it had given the dark something to listen for. She stood up, very slowly, and picked up the lantern, and walked backward up the nine steps with her eyes on the Keystone and her heart going in her throat like a hammer on a bad nail. At the top she pulled the door shut behind her and leaned against it. Then she went along the passage to the gatehouse stair, and up, and into the room where the Warden sat with his ink and his papers.
He looked up. He had not been asleep. She had not expected him to be.
“Someone’s on the stair,” said Ysra.
It was the warning. It was the one thing she had said in the Hold’s hearing that every Hand understood without an explanation, and she had not used it in front of the prince since the autumn, because she had not wanted to see what his face did when he heard it.
It did something she had not expected. It went quiet all at once. Then he stood, pushing back his chair, and reached for the lamp on the table.
“Who?” he said.
“I don’t know. I didn’t see.” She was aware that her voice was not steady, and she made it steady, because it was her job. “I counted nine on the stair. There were nine when the Hold was built, and there have been nine every night for a year. Somebody counted them with me tonight, and they didn’t stop where I stopped. They went on to nine and then they waited, as a child waits for an answer.”
“Show me,” he said.
They went down together with two lamps, the Warden in front. He did not hurry, and he did not speak until they were on the bottom step, and then he spoke quietly, as a man speaks in a church. “Where?”
“There. Beyond the chest, in the dark.”
He lifted the lamp and held it up. The light went over the Token-Chest, a squat black box with iron hasps, and beyond it into the rock, where there was nothing but more rock and the faint glitter of damp in the cracks. They walked round it together. They checked the corners. Ysra counted the cracks, which numbered thirty-three, the same as yesterday. The Keystone’s face sat in the lamplight with its cut letters, Let no one be paid twice, and its long grey notches, and it did not move, and it did not say anything at all.
“There is no one here,” said Idrin.
“No,” said Ysra. “There never is. That’s the trouble with it.”
“Why do you come down here at all, Warden?” Ysra asked him, while the lamp-light lay across the Keystone’s notches like a row of teeth. “The stone does not need a prince. It does not need a Watch either.”
“It needs somebody to count it,” said Idrin. “The Chamber has never once counted it. It has been told that it holds what the Hold holds, and nobody has ever put it on a scale.”
“It holds the Hold. Everybody knows that. It’s why the reach is three leagues and not four.” She looked at the great cut face as if it had said something rude to her. “I don’t count the Keystone. I count the stair. The stair is the only thing down here that does what it is told.”
“Then tell it to stop.”
“It has never once started, Warden. The child started.” She drew a breath. “I want a Watch on this door tonight. Two of them, one at the top and one at the bottom, with the lantern lit and their mouths shut, and I want them to count every step they climb.”
“A Watch cannot count what is already in the stone.”
“Then let them count it anyway,” said Ysra. “It is the only thing a Watch has ever been any good for.”
He agreed to it. He agreed to it at once, which surprised her, and she had the sense to say nothing about the surprise.
He went back to the fourth stair. She followed him, reluctantly, because it was the one place in the Undercroft she had ever wanted to keep at arm’s length. He knelt by the worn lip, as she had done, and looked at it for some time. Then he said, in a voice so quiet she barely heard it, “Show me what you mean.”
“Put your hand on the stone.”
He did. He laid his scarred hand flat on the worn edge of the fourth stair, and he took it away again quickly, as if he had touched a stove.
“It’s warm,” he said.
Ysra looked at his face in the lamplight, and then at the step, and then at the empty dark beyond the chest, and she did not say anything at all. Somebody who had been sitting on the stair a moment before had stood up and walked away, and the stone still remembered them. In the Undercroft, that was the only kind of company the Hold had ever been able to count on.