Ysra counted the pit stairs, because the count was the only thing she had to give the others.
She went first from the antechamber’s inner door, with the lamp-light at her back and her palm on the wall to her left. The stair went down inside the stone in a spiral that was tighter than the tower’s and dryer than the lake’s, and it turned so sharply on itself at every quarter that she could see no more than three steps ahead at any time. Each step was worn to the same shallow bowl by the feet of builders, all of them tilted toward the dark, and each bowl was just deep enough to hold the ball of a boot for a moment before the foot moved on. She put her feet into them, one after another, as a sentry sets her feet in the ruts of a path she knows.
“One,” she said.
Her voice came back to her off the curved walls, flat and dry and a little hollow, as if the stone were taking each number and keeping it for a moment before it gave it back. She liked that. It made the count feel like a thing that had been received and not merely spoken. She went on.
