Ysra counted the tally wall from its foot to the unfinished column, and she counted it the way she had counted the Keystone’s north face in the Undercroft: once, and then again, and then a third time with the chalk marking each column so that no stroke could be missed or doubled.
She had brought the chalk from her coat, the same stub she had used in the tower. She knelt on the tiles at the foot of the wall with the lamp set on the floor beside her, its flame steady and blue, and she began at the bottom left corner of the first row, where the strokes were sharp and deep and the stone was clean. Every column was ten strokes. Every bundle was five. She did not hurry. A count was not a race. It was a discipline, and the discipline was the only thing in the room that did not seem to belong to the lake.
“One column,” she said. She laid the chalk on the bottom of the column and drew a small neat line beside it. “Two.”
The first row had fifty columns. She marked each one as she passed it and said its number aloud, and each time her voice came back to her from the cold stone a little more steadily than before. The second row was the same. It began at the same height and ran the same length, and it had fifty columns, and each column had ten strokes, and…
