Idrin could not sleep, and so on the thirteenth night he climbed the wall. He took a lamp from the gatehouse hook and a cloak from the peg and went out by the north door into the dark, and the wind came off the marsh and found him at once through the wool of the cloak. He had walked the wall-walk a dozen times by day. He had never walked it at night. By night it was another place altogether, long and narrow and bare, with the merlons standing up along one side like the teeth of a comb and the dark below them so complete that the lamp seemed to shine up from the stones rather than down onto them.
The stair to the north wall was a steep spiral of stone, cut into the thickness of the masonry, with a rope rail on the outer side that had long since rotted and a wall of cold rock on the inner. He went up it slowly with one hand on the rock and the lamp in the other. He counted the steps, because it seemed the thing to do, and got to twelve before he heard someone counting above him.
“Thirteen,” said a woman’s voice, quite clearly, from the top of the stair. “Fourteen. Fifteen. You’re slow, Highness.”
He came up the last few steps and stopped on the wall-walk with the lamp lifted. She was standing where the walk turned, with her back flat against a merlon, as though she had been placed there and told to stay. She was tall and narrow and wore a dark shawl over a Watch-coat of sand-coloured wool, and her hair was pulled back so tightly from her face that it looked like part of her skull. Her eyes were very pale in the lamplight. She was not looking at him. She was looking at the stair behind him, past his shoulder, as though something might still come up it.
“Sixteen,” she said. “I’m counting you, so you may as well be counted.”
“Who are you?”
“Ysra.” She did not turn her head. “I’m the Watch. The wall and the stair are mine, and the gates in the wall, and the doors, and the number of times the moon comes over the parapet in an hour. I count them. It’s what the Watch is for.” She shifted slightly against the merlon, and her shawl moved, and he saw that her hands were bare and quiet at her sides, pressed against the cold stone. “I haven’t slept, but you shouldn’t mind that. I sleep badly. I’ll tell you so before you ask. I sleep in short pieces, and every piece begins on a stair.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
“Don’t be,” said Ysra. “It’s useful. The stairs are always the first thing I know.”
Idrin came along the walk to stand beside her. The wind was stronger up here, and it smelled of wet reeds and iron. Below the parapet the dark spread out in every direction, a black sheet of marsh and river with here and there a faint pale glimmer where the water caught a little moonlight. Far to the west a single light showed on the Lessary Road, a point of yellow, and he wondered whether it was a farmhouse or a sentry’s fire, and whether anyone there was counting it.
“How many steps are there on this stair?” he asked.
“Twenty-two,” said Ysra.
“You’ve counted them.”
“I’ve counted them every night since I woke. I count them at the bottom and the top, and in the middle, going up and coming down. There’s twenty-two.” She paused. Her voice did not change, but something in it tightened, like a cord being drawn across a frame. “And one of them is wrong.”
“Wrong how?”
“Wrong in the sound.” She lifted one hand from the stone and pointed, without looking, down the spiral. “The twentieth. When you put your foot on it, it doesn’t ring. The others ring, a little, the way the stone rings when it’s been cut properly and fitted. The twentieth doesn’t. It gives. It gives like a board over water, and there’s a sort of hollow underneath it, and when I put my foot on it there’s nothing there but the hollow.”
“Perhaps it’s loose.”
“It’s not loose,” said Ysra. “I’ve had Harrow lift it. He says it’s sound. He says it’s the best-bedded step in the Hold, and there’s nothing under it at all. And I know that stair. I know it better than my own name. So I know what makes a step wrong.” She turned her head at last and looked at him, and her face in the lamplight was very calm and very serious. “It’s the sound it makes under a foot that’s not mine.”
Idrin did not speak. The wind moved along the walk, and the lamp-flame bent over and straightened. Below them, somewhere in the dark of the stair, there was a faint sound, very slight, like a footfall on a board that is barely wet, and then nothing.
“Someone’s on the stair,” said Ysra.
She said it without any change of tone, as a statement of fact. But she had lifted her chin, and her shoulders had come forward, and she had gone motionless against the merlon, as a dog stiffens at the edge of a field. Idrin looked past her, down the stair, into the black well of the spiral where the lamp did not reach.
He saw nothing.
“There’s no one there,” he said.
“No,” said Ysra. “That’s the trouble with someone. You never see them. You only hear them not being where they ought to be.” She turned back to the walk, and her hand came up and rested lightly on the top of the merlon, as if she were feeling for the stone’s temperature. “I’ll count them when they come up. They’ll come up one at a time. They always do.”
“Who are they?”
“The Watch doesn’t know,” said Ysra. “It knows the count. It knows the wall is four hundred and ten paces round and has two gaps, one at the north tower and one at the old postern, and it knows there are sixteen merlons between the north tower and the gate, and eleven of them are cracked and four have been repointed in the last week by somebody who doesn’t know how to repoint. It knows where every sentry post should stand. It knows the stair.”
“And where should the sentries stand?”
“At the top of the stair, here, where I’m standing, because that’s where the stair comes up,” said Ysra. “Then one at the north tower, where the wall turns, and one at the gate, which doesn’t need a sentry, because it doesn’t sleep, and one at the postern, which needs two. That’s five. I’ve got three, and two of the three are asleep, and I’m not going to wake them for the stair.”
“Are they asleep?”
“Pell is asleep in the kitchen with her feet on the oven door, because she told me so at supper and I believed her,” said Ysra. “Tallow is not asleep, because Tallow is never asleep, he’s writing. Harrow is at the gate. He stands there and counts the stones, and every hour he says the number aloud, and it’s always the same number, and I have never once known him to be wrong about it.” She paused. “That’s three. The fourth and fifth aren’t here yet.”
“The fourth and fifth of what?”
Ysra did not answer. She had gone quiet again, her gaze fixed on the head of the stair, and her breath had slowed so much that Idrin could hardly see it in the lamplight. He realised that she was listening, the whole of her, as a hunter listens, with her weight forward and her eyes half closed, and that she had forgotten him altogether.
He held the lamp higher. He could see the top step of the spiral now, a broad grey slab with a shallow dip worn in its middle by feet that had climbed it for two hundred years. He could see the stair-well below it, and the twentieth step, and the twenty-first, and the twenty-second, where the stair came to its final turn and flattened out onto the walk.
The twenty-second step gave a small wet sound.
It was like a foot being drawn out of water, a quiet sucking slap, and it was followed at once by a rustle of something soft pulling loose from stone. Idrin’s skin went cold from the scalp to the heels. He held the lamp steady. The light fell on the twenty-second step and on the stone beside it, and the stone there was grey and wet and perfectly ordinary, and then, as he watched, a shape came up over the edge of the step, low and dark and folded, the exact colour of the wall.
It climbed one step. It was not a man’s shape. It was not like anything he had a word for. It was a bundle of grey joints and lean, long limbs, folded in on themselves, and it moved with a slow, careful deliberation, as though it were testing each stone before it trusted it with weight. It lifted its head, or the place where a head should have been, toward the lamp. There was no face. There was only a smooth grey surface with a faint, wet sheen on it, like the skin of a stone after rain.
It stopped. It stayed there, one foot on the top of the twenty-second step, for the space of three breaths.
Then it went back down, slowly, the way it had come, and the stair was empty again, and the twenty-second step gave one more small wet sound, and was still.
Ysra let out a breath. It was long and very controlled. She did not move from the merlon, and she did not take her hand off the stone.
“Twenty-two,” she said quietly. “Exactly as I counted it.”