Tallow wanted nine. He said so at the foot of the north stair, at the first light of the morning, with his notebook open on his forearm and his pencil already poised over the margin. He had walked up from the gatehouse with his coat buttoned to the throat and his hair flattened by the wind, and he had stopped at the bottom step as though he had reached the edge of a cliff, and he had looked up the spiral to where Ysra stood at the top with her hand on the parapet.
“Nine,” said Tallow. “The Charter of the old survey says nine. I’ve read it. It’s in the Chancery’s own copy of the Hold’s measure, which some Lessary surveyor made on a visit fifty years ago and left in the gatehouse under the bench. Nine steps to the wall-walk, from the court, with the twenty-second as the landing. It’s a clean figure. It’s been written down by a clerk who had no reason to lie.”
“It’s twenty-two,” said Ysra.
“Twenty-two to the walk. Nine to the landing, if you count from the court. That’s what the survey says.”
“The survey doesn’t count from the court. It counts from the gate-foot. I’ve been up and down this stair every night since I woke, and I’ve counted from the gate, from the court, from the landing, and from the top, and it’s twenty-two every time, except for the twentieth, which gives like a board over water.” She did not raise her voice. She never did, when she was sure. “And the survey’s wrong about the landing. There isn’t one. There’s only the turn, and the turn comes at the eleventh, not the ninth, and I’ve got the scratch of the Watch’s knife on the stone to prove it.”
Tallow looked at the stone for a moment. He could not see the scratch from where he was standing. He did not ask to see it. He turned a page in his notebook instead, and ran his finger down a column of his own small square writing, and quoted, in his dry exact voice, without looking up:
“The stair of the north wall is nine steps from the court to the first landing, and two more to the walk, and it is not to be counted otherwise by any officer of the Hold, on pain of a fine of one share.”
“Who wrote that?”
“The survey.”
“Which survey?”
“The one that’s wrong,” said Tallow, and for the first time he looked up with something like a smile. It did not last. “I’d put it at nine to eleven, Ysra. I’d put my mark on nine, because it’s written, and my pencil on eleven, because you’ve been on the stair all week and I’ve seen your face at breakfast. I’d not sign for ten. I’m not a fool.”
“Ten,” said Ysra.
“You’ve said that before.”
“I’ll say it again. Ten. I counted it at dawn, and I counted it at dusk, and I counted it in the middle of the night on the wall-walk with my back to the merlons. Ten, Tallow. And I don’t want another range. I’ve had them from you every day since the minutes began, and you’re very good at them, and I’d rather have a wall that falls on me than one more range about a stair.”
Tallow’s mouth tightened. He lowered the notebook a little and looked at her with a kind of careful exasperation, the look of a man who has been asked to accept something he cannot prove.
“Come and look at the gatehouse board,” he said. “Then you’ll see why I don’t like ranges either.”
They went down the stair together. Ysra went first, counting, because she could not help it, and Tallow came behind with the notebook under his arm and his pencil in his teeth. At the bottom Ysra counted the last three steps aloud, and Tallow, behind her, counted them under his breath, and they both got three, and neither of them said anything about it.
The gatehouse was cold. The fire had been banked for the night, and the room smelled of ash and wet stone. The Register board hung on the back wall where it had always hung, with its one long line of colourless ink, and the number 0001 cut beneath, and the strokes of the words standing out clear and sharp in the grey light from the door.
Tallow went to the board and stood in front of it. He did not touch it. He looked at the first line with the particular stillness of a clerk checking a column of figures against the original ledger.
“That’s my hand,” he said.
Ysra came and stood beside him. She looked at the words, Citizen One: the Mantle, resident, non-departing, and at the neat, upright, colourless letters, which had no slant and no flourish and no mark of any pen but the one that had written them. They were very like the hand in Tallow’s notebook. She could see that. She had seen it every day since she woke.
“You’d swear to it?” she said.
“I’d be a fool to swear to it,” said Tallow. “I’d swear to a match, Ysra. Not a recognition. A match is a thing I can see. A recognition is a thing I’d have to remember, and I can’t remember writing that line, and I’ve tried, and the trying gives me a headache in the left eye.”
“What would you swear to, then?”
Tallow considered the board. He lifted his pencil and pointed it, very precisely, at the first word of the line, Citizen. He did not touch the wood.
“I’d swear to the number of strokes in that word,” he said. “There are eleven. I’ve counted them. The C has one, the i has two, the t has one, and the z has three, though I’m not sure the z is a z, and so on. Eleven, to the letter. I’d swear to eleven, and I’d sign for it.”
“That’s not a range.”
“No,” said Tallow. “It’s the only thing I’m certain of in this Hold.”
The door behind them creaked. Harrow came in from the yard with his measuring cord coiled over one shoulder and his cap pushed back on his head, and his boots left wet prints on the flags. He had been out along the north wall since first light, checking the new footings, and he had the look of a man who has been counting something for years and has not liked the answer. He saw the two of them at the board, and he stopped, and looked at the board over their heads.
“Eleven,” said Harrow.
“Eleven,” agreed Tallow, at once.
“Eleven,” said Ysra, after a moment.
Harrow turned his head, slowly, and looked from one of them to the other. Then he nodded, once, in the grave slow way he nodded at a stone that had come up level.
“That’s the first thing the Chamber’s agreed on,” he said. “Both of you wrong by one, and me wrong by the same. Eleven strokes in the word, and nine steps in the survey, and ten on the stair, and eleven in the count. We’re all wrong by one. That’s a fair agreement. I’ll put it in the minutes.”
“You’ll put nothing in the minutes,” said Tallow. “I’m the minutes.”
“Then you’ll put it in,” said Harrow, “because I’ve told you to, and the stone agrees with me.”
Ysra said nothing. She was looking at the floor, where the morning light from the door lay in a long pale bar across the flags. She was thinking about the stair, and the eleven strokes, and the eleven steps that the survey had got wrong, and the tenth that she had counted three times and the cord had not found at all.
“Here’s a proposal,” said Harrow, quietly. “Since nobody’s going to agree on the stair. We count it, the three of us, all at once. You, Tallow, from the court. You, Ysra, from the top. And me from the gate, with the cord. We go up together, and we say the number out loud at each step, and we see what comes out at the end.”
“That won’t prove anything,” said Tallow.
“It’ll prove the stair,” said Harrow. “Or it’ll prove the Watch.”
Ysra looked up. Her face had gone pale and set. “The Watch is never wrong,” she said.
“Aye,” said Harrow. “That’s the only point I’ve ever agreed with you on.”
They counted the stair together in the grey light of the morning, the three of them, going up the north tower with their voices going up in front of them like a line of stonemasons passing up the blocks. Tallow counted from the court in a dry clear voice that rose and fell with each step. Harrow counted from the gate in a deep flat unhurried drone, stone by stone, as if the steps were blocks to be set. Ysra counted from the top, but she had come down to meet them, halfway, and she counted up, step by step, in her thin hard voice, so that the three sums came together in the middle of the stair like three rivers meeting.
At the twentieth step she stopped.
She stood on it with her weight on one foot, and felt the give under her boot, the faint hollow that lay beneath the stone like the echo of a footfall in a cistern, and she waited for the other two to come up to her. They did. Tallow reached the eleventh step and stopped, his notebook open on his arm. Harrow reached the twelfth and stopped, his hand flat on the wall.
“Nine,” said Tallow, in his clear voice, from the court. “By the survey.”
“Ten,” said Ysra, from the twentieth. “By the Watch.”
“Eleven,” said Harrow, from the stone. “By the count.”
They stood in a row on the stair, the clerk and the Watch and the mason, in the cold grey light, and looked at one another. Nobody spoke for a time. Then Harrow laid his palm on the wall, very gently, and said, in his slow deep voice, “Either the stair’s growing, or somebody’s getting the sum wrong, and I’ve never once in my life seen a stone grow.”
Ysra did not meet his eye. She looked up the stair.
“The Watch is never wrong,” she said again, but her voice had dropped, and it sounded, for the first time since she had woken, like someone who was not entirely sure.
Later that morning, Harrow went out to the north wall to lay the last of the new footings, the ones that had been waiting since the rain. He dug out the bed with a pick and a shovel and a great deal of counting, and at the bottom of the trench, under a layer of grey clay, his shovel struck a stone. It was a squared block, smaller than the others, and when he levered it up and turned it over in the light, he saw a notch cut into one corner. It was a neat square bite out of the edge, precise and deliberate, the same mark that had been on the flat grey stone he had found in the gap of the parapet, and on the tally-board in the granary, and on the chain under the sacks.
He stood in the trench with the block in his hands for a while. Then he set it down very gently on the edge of the bed and looked up at the north wall, at the long grey run of masonry going away into the marsh mist, and he said quietly, to nobody, that the wall had been paid for twice.