Ysra read the rims. She had been meaning to since the first row, and she had put it off, because the rims were the one part of the Cradle that had been cut to be read by a living person, and reading them meant admitting that someone had meant her to come.
Each vessel had a band of inscription around its mouth. The band was cut in the same square capitals as the lintel, a finger’s width deep, and it ran round the clay in a single unbroken line, so that a reader had to turn the vessel slowly to get the whole of it. The letters were worn in places. Some of them had been filled with the grey dust of the room, and she had to rub them clear with the side of her thumb. But the words were there, one to a vessel, and they were the trade of each mould, set down in the same plain hand as the Keystone’s notches and the wall’s columns and the lintel’s sentence.
She had read the first row already, on her way down the room. She had read the rim with BUILD cut round it and felt her throat close, because Harrow’s trade and Gaunt’s were the same, and she had counted the Build seats in the Chamber every morning of her life. She went back to it now, and then forward to the second row, and she read them all again in order, slowly, so that she would…
