The stair under the lake was the stair in his dream, and this time it was real, and it went down.
Brannoc went first, because the gatewarden went first through every door in the Hold. It was not a rule that anyone had written down. It was the kind of thing the Hands simply knew, the way the Kitchen knew that bread went into the oven before the pies and the Forge knew that iron went into the fire before the bellows were lifted. A gatewarden went ahead. He found the stone and the bar and the hinge, and he told the others what they would meet, and he did not let anyone come through a door he had not tried first. He had been doing it for years, in the body’s own gates. He did not know how he had learned it. He thought, going down, that he might have learned it here.
He put his white hand on the rail. It was cold and smooth and very slightly greasy with the lake, and the iron of it had worn into a shallow groove where a great many hands had gripped it on the way down. He felt the groove under his fingers, and the shape of the grip that had made it, and his own hand settled into the shape without being asked. He did not glance down. He looked at the wall, which was grey and close and so regular in its courses that he could have…
