Ysra counted the stair up, one hundred and twelve steps, the same stair she had counted coming down. She counted it with the pride of a Watch who has been over her own ground twice and found it unchanged, and she counted it with the other feeling too, the one that sat under her breastbone like a cold stone and would not be shifted.
The steps came up under her boots in their worn bowls, all of them tilted toward the dark the way they had been on the way down. That was the strange thing. Going up, she felt the tilt against her ankles like a hand pushing her back, and she had to lean into the slope with her weight on the balls of her feet and her palm pressed hard to the wall. The builders had gone down this stair together and never come up. Ysra felt the pull of their going at every step. She did not let it turn her round.
“One,” she said. “Two. Three.”
Her voice came back to her off the curved walls as it had on the way down, flat and dry and a little late, as if the stone were giving each number back to her from a great distance. The tally-marks went past on the wall beside her in their long rows. Ones, and fives, and tens, going up into the dim light of the stair’s top in their straight columns, the same count that she had seen on…
