The door opened inward with a long sigh, as if it had been holding its breath for two hundred years and had only now been allowed to let it go. Brannoc felt the sigh before he heard it. It came against his face in a cool, still rush, and it smelt of dry clay and cold stone and a thin, clean sweetness that was like the air above a cistern when the lid has been lifted. He stood on the threshold with his white hand at his side and breathed it in, and it went into him without any shock at all, and he understood that the weft in his chest had been waiting for that air as a dry sponge waits for water.
He stepped across.
The silence hit him before anything else did. It was not the silence of the lake, which had been a pressure on the ears, or the silence of the stair, which had been a held breath. It was complete. It was a silence with no sound inside it at all, and he could hear his own pulse beating in the white wrist as clearly as if someone had pressed a fingertip against the vein. He could hear the blood move in his ears. He could hear the thin whisper of his own breath, and the scrape of his boot on the pale floor, and the faint, almost imperceptible creak of the door settling on its hinges behind him. Nothing else answered.
