The Undercroft door had a lead seal across its hasp, and Ysra would not break it.
“It’s the Crown’s,” she said, standing in the dim corner of the Great Hall with her hands folded in her sleeves and her eyes on the lead as though it might move. “It’s pressed with the lion. It says the Hold is leased. If we break it, somebody has to write down that we broke it, and I’m not going to be the watch who broke a lease seal on the first morning of the summer.”
“Then how do we open the door?” asked Idrin.
“We don’t break the seal. We open the lock under it.” She turned to Harrow, who had come up behind them with his shoulders hunched and his cap in his hand. “The hasp’s iron. The lock’s iron. And the lock’s older than the seal. The seal’s just been put on top of it, like a hat on a man who’s sleeping.”
Harrow looked at the seal for a moment without speaking. Then he lifted his right hand and laid it flat on the oak beside the hasp, and held it there, counting under his breath. Idrin could not hear the numbers. He watched the mason’s lips move, and then stop, and then move again, and then he heard the faint, dry, grinding sound of metal shifting under wood, a sound like a key turning in a lock that had not been turned in two hundred years.
“It’s ready,” said Harrow. “It’s been waiting for a count to come along, I reckon.”
Ysra took a clerk’s pen-knife from her sleeve. It was not a sharp knife. It was a thin, plain, slightly rusted thing with a horn handle, the kind a clerk uses to scrape a mistake off a page. She knelt in front of the door, placed the blade beneath the lead seal, and worked it very slowly under the edge, not lifting, only easing. The seal came away from the hasp in one clean piece, the lion stamped on it intact. She laid it on the floor beside her, face up, as carefully as if it had been a sleeping bird.
Then she tried the lock with the point of the knife. The bolt slid back with a sound like a breath let out.
“There,” said Ysra. She did not sound pleased. She sounded, if anything, relieved to have something settled. “Now somebody can write that we didn’t break it.”
The door swung in on the same silent weight that the granary door had used, and cold air came up the stair to meet them, and with it a smell that Idrin had not yet encountered in the Hold. It was sharp and clean and metallic, the smell of iron left in damp earth for years, with something under it that was not unlike the smell of the sea.
“Salt,” said Harrow, sniffing, and stepped back a pace as though the air had surprised him. “There’s salt down there. A lot of it.”
They went down in single file, Ysra first, then Idrin with a lamp, then Harrow with his hand on the rock wall, and Tallow last with the notebook under his arm, because he had insisted that the descent must be recorded. The stair was steep and narrow and worn into shallow dishes at the centre of each tread, so that the feet of two hundred years had made a path down the middle of it. Idrin counted the steps. He could not help it. He got to eight and felt a faint internal jolt, as a man does when he expects a stair to end and it goes on.
“Nine,” said Ysra, from below, without turning round. “It’s nine. Keep counting, Highness. You’ll get the same as me.” At the fourth tread from the top she paused, and looked down at it, and said that the fourth stair was the wrong height. When he asked her what the right height was, she said she would tell him when she had measured it, and that she did not yet trust her measure.
He got nine. He stepped off the last tread onto a flat floor of stone and stood in the Undercroft of Ormhold with the lamp held up.
It was a low room, cut out of the living rock beneath the Great Hall, and it was much larger than he had expected. The walls were rough and grey and wet with a faint sweat that caught the lamp-light in tiny points. The roof was low, and the air was cold and still, and there was no sound at all except the drip of water from somewhere in the dark at the far end. The floor was dry, or dry enough. In its centre, on a squat square plinth of the same grey rock, a single block of dark stone stood up out of the flags like a tree-stump left by a giant.
It was a block about the height of a man’s waist and rather wider than it was tall. It had been cut square, and its corners had been worn round by the passing of hands. Its faces were smooth but pitted, and when the lamp fell across its north side, Idrin saw that the surface was covered in marks.
They were shallow scratches, very fine, very close together, in long straight rows that ran from the base of the block almost to its top. There were hundreds of them. Perhaps thousands. They ran across the face of the stone in orderly lines, each row a little shorter than the one below it, and they had worn into the rock until they were almost invisible except when the light fell across them at a low angle. Idrin lifted the lamp higher. The marks shone like the scales of a fish.
“Don’t count them,” said Ysra, quickly.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You were. Everybody counts them. I’ve been counting them since the morning I woke, and I stopped at thirty, and I’ll not start again until I’ve got a stone that will hold still while I do it.” She stood very close to the block, not touching it, her hands at her sides and her head tilted. “The marks are the count. Somebody made them. I don’t know who. Harrow says the stone’s been counted by the men who cut it and nobody since, and that’s a figure I believe.”
“It’s a fine range,” said Harrow, from behind them, quietly.
Idrin moved round the block to the front. Here the face was smoother. There was no scratching, only a single line of letters cut deep into the stone at the height of his chest, and the letters had been worn by water and by hands until they were almost smooth. He held the lamp close. He had to tilt his head to read them, and the shadows of the cut made them difficult to see.
“Let no one be paid,” he read aloud.
He stopped. The rest of the line was gone. Where the cut should have continued, there was only a rough patch of grit and small pale scratches, as though someone had taken a file to the rock and had given up in the middle of the word.
“Twice,” said Ysra, very quietly, at his shoulder. “It says twice. Everybody knows it says twice. The last word’s worn off.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because the stone’s been trying to say it for two hundred years, and every time somebody comes down the stair, it gets a little further.” She looked at the letters, and then at him, and her pale eyes were quite steady. “It’s not worn off. It’s been scratched over. Somebody didn’t want the last word read, and they came down here with a file, and they scratched it out. Then they left, and the stone didn’t forget.”
Idrin looked at the gap where the word should have been. He thought of the three names Corran had recited on the causeway, and the ferryman’s split palms, and the boy’s cousin’s name, and he did not know what he thought.
“What is this stone called?” he asked.
“The Keystone,” said Ysra. “And it holds the Hold.”
“How does a stone hold anything?”
“It’s been holding for two hundred years,” said Ysra, with a faint, tired shrug. “That’s a better answer than yours, Highness, and you’ve had a whole Chancery to think of one.”
Idrin almost smiled. He did not. He moved back from the block and lowered the lamp, and looked round the Undercroft in the wavering light. There were other things here, he saw now, lying in the dark corners: chests with iron bands, heaped sacks that were not grain, a row of tall empty jars, and at the far end, beyond the drip of water, the shadowed mouth of another passage, low and narrow, that went deeper into the rock.
“How long have you been on the stair?” he asked Ysra.
She had turned to look at the stair they had come down, the nine dished treads rising up into the dim light. She did not answer at once. Her lips moved, very slightly, the way Harrow’s did when he counted, and Idrin realised that she was counting the steps again, in her head, from the bottom to the top and back, and that she had forgotten she was being asked a question.
“Since I woke,” said Ysra, at last. “I think. I’ve been on the stair since then.”
“And before that?”
She thought about it. Her face went slowly blank, as though she were looking for a door in a wall that she had walked past every day for years without noticing. The silence stretched.
“I’m not sure,” said Ysra quietly, “that I’ve ever been anywhere else.”
The lamp hissed. The drip went on in the far dark, tap, and tap, and tap, like a clerk ticking off a column. Idrin looked at the Keystone with its fish-scale rows, and at the gap in the cut letters where a word had been scratched out, and then he looked at Ysra’s pale unhappy face, and he thought that he had never once in his life been asked a question so simple that the answer frightened the person who gave it.
Ysra had gone back to the block. She had put one hand, very lightly, on its corner, and she had begun to run her fingers along the top row of the scratches, one at a time, counting under her breath. She got to forty. She stopped, with her finger on the stone, and did not begin again.
Then, from the foot of the stair behind them, there came a sound.
It was faint and dry, the sharp crack of a board taking weight, and it came from the fourth tread down from the top, where the dish-worn stone had always been slightly lower than the others. Ysra’s hand went still on the block. Harrow turned his head. Tallow, at the foot of the stair with his notebook open, lifted his pencil and held it in the air without writing.
The fourth stair creaked again. Somebody was standing on it. And whoever it was, Idrin realised with a cold slow certainty, was not any of the four people in the room.