Harrow dreamed in the Lantern Hall at the end of the season, and in the dream he counted the stones of the floor.
They were pale, and they were fitted without mortar. He had known that from the first night he had come into the hall, and he had never stopped marvelling at it, because a mason could not look at a floor like that without wanting to know how it had been laid. The joints were so fine that a blade would not slide between them. Each slab had been cut to its neighbour so exactly that the whole floor seemed to be one piece of stone, poured and set and left to cool in a single day, and when he walked across it his boots made no sound at all. He counted the slabs as he went. He did not need to. He counted them anyway, the way he counted anything that had been built properly, so that he would know that it was there.
The nine lamps burned along the stands.
He knew each of them now, the way he knew the faces of the courses on the south wall. His own was broad and still, its flame spread low and steady in the glass, and it did not flicker or leap, and he was glad of that, because it was the only flame in the hall that did not need to be watched. Gaunt’s was loud. It jumped in its glass and hissed a little, like…
