Ysra was on the north stair for the twenty-second night of her penance, which was the thirty-night sentence the Chamber had given her in the first week of the Hunger, and in twenty-two nights she had learned to count the stair without looking at it.
It was a discipline. She had invented it herself, lying awake in the Watch-room with the Mound’s singing coming through the wall like a draught, and it went like this. You stood at the foot of the stair with your back to the yard and your face to the wall, and you did not turn your head. You counted the risers under your breath. You counted the doors you could hear, and the doors you could not see, and the number of breaths the Hold took in the time it took you to climb. The Watch had taught her to do it when she was a girl in the outer barracks, and the Watch had been right, because a sentry who looked at a stair would always find something on it that was not there.
She counted up from the yard. Fourteen. Fifteen.
At fifteen the shape was there.
It was a long grey thing, too tall for a man and too thin for the Mound’s stone. It stood on the landing with its back to the outer wall and its arms folded, and its body had been made from something left over, as a loaf is made from spare dough. It had no face…
