They came down to the Undercroft with a lamp, all of them, because Harrow had sent word through the kitchen that the child was not going to wait for another night. He had sat up with the stair for three evenings in a row. He had not said so, but Pell had seen the marks under his eyes and had brought him bread on each of the three mornings, and on the third she had told the Chamber, in the sharp flat voice she used for things that had gone beyond a joke, that the mason was going grey from counting a stair that did not want to be counted, and that somebody had better go and fetch the boy up before he went mad.
So they went down. Idrin went first with the lamp. Ysra came after him, counting under her breath, and then Harrow, and Pell with her skirts gathered up in one fist and the bread-knife in the other, and Korrin at the back on his short chain with Gaunt at his elbow, objecting in a low steady undertone to the steps. Tallow came last, with his notebook buttoned into his coat and his pencil in his teeth, because a thing that was going to be witnessed must also be recorded, and he would not be the one to leave a child unrecorded.
The boy was sitting on the fourth step.
He had his back to the rock and his knees drawn up to his chin and a carrier’s pole across his lap. It was a long ash pole with a leather pad at one end, the kind a man uses to carry a load of stone on his shoulders, and it was worn smooth in the middle from years of hands. The boy’s fingers were wrapped round it in a tight, steady, unconscious grip. He was thin. His shirt hung off him, and his bare shins were brown and scratched, and the left one had a long bruise across the shin-bone that had gone yellow at the edges, as though it had been there for weeks. His hair was cropped short. His face was pale and freckled, and it was turned down toward the lamp with an expression of great and anxious seriousness, as if he had been waiting a long time to be told he could come up and had almost given up hoping.
“My name’s Tobin Ashe,” he said. “But I’m Pim, mostly. I’ve been Pim for so long I forget the other half.”
Nobody spoke. Idrin heard Harrow’s breath go out in a long, slow, shaking sigh. The mason had come down to the foot of the stair and was standing motionless, looking up at the boy on the fourth step with his cap clutched in his hands.
“One,” said Harrow, very quietly. “Two. Three.”
The boy looked at him. “You can count me, if you like,” he said politely. “Everybody does. I don’t mind.”
“Four,” said Harrow. “Five. Six.” His voice caught on the last. “Seven. Eight. Nine.”
“I’ve been carrying stone,” said the boy, “since before there was a Hold. I know that’s a funny thing to say, but it’s true. I carried the stone for the Undercroft and the stair, and then the wall, and then the gate-foot, and nobody ever said thank you, and then the Hold was counted and there was nothing left to carry, and I sat down on the fourth step to wait for somebody to pick up the load.” He shifted the pole on his knees, very carefully, so it did not slip. “Nobody did. So I stayed. And I counted the stair, because somebody had to, and it kept changing its mind.”
“He’s a child,” said Pell.
Her voice was thick. She had put her knife away and was standing with her hands clasped at her waist, her broad red face crumpled in a way Idrin had not seen before. Then she turned round, abruptly, and went back up the stairs with her skirts bunched in her fists, saying over her shoulder in a voice that was almost a sob that somebody had better fetch the bread, and that she would not have a child sitting on a step in the dark on an empty stomach if it was the last loaf in the Hold.
“Is he a Hand?” asked Korrin.
He had come forward, past Gaunt, to the foot of the stair, and he stood with his cuffed hands folded in front of him and his flat, interested gaze on the boy’s face. He did not sound unkind. He sounded as though he were asking a sum, and wanted the answer before she decided what the sum was for.
“He’s a Hand,” said Sella.
She had come down behind them all without any sound, and now she knelt on the stone at the foot of the stair with her leather roll open beside her and her black book on her knee. She did not look at the boy’s face at first. She looked at his hands, where they gripped the pole, and then at his shins, and then at the bruise on the left one, and she tilted her head to one side, very slowly, the way she had tilted it over Idrin’s burned palm.
“He’s got a carrier’s bones,” said Sella, “and a child’s hands. The shoulder’s been pulled out of its socket twice and set by somebody who knew nothing about bones, and the collarbone’s been broken and not properly seen to. He’s got the calluses of a man who’s carried stone since he was six. He’s got the bruise of a boy who fell on the stair and got up again, and I’d say he fell a good many times.” She looked up at the boy at last, and her face was calm and grey and perfectly steady. “The diagnosis is that he’s carried too much for too long. The comfort is that he’s stopped.”
The boy stared at her. Then he looked down at his own hands, and his grip on the pole loosened, just a little.
“You know my bones,” he said.
“I’ve got a line for them,” said Sella. “I didn’t know it was you.”
The boy got up.
He did it all at once, in a single jerking movement, as a man stands up from a bench when he has heard the call to work. He came to his feet on the fourth step with the carrier’s pole across his two hands, and he stood there, swaying a little, with his head down and his thin shoulders hunched under the weight of the pole. He was looking at his own feet.
Then he lifted the pole, and set it across his shoulders, and the leather pad settled into the hollow above his collarbone.
Idrin felt it go through the body.
It came up out of the stair in a single shock, a wave of pure physical sensation that went through every Hand in the Hold at once. It was the feel of a small boy’s shoulder taking a load. It was the bite of the leather pad on bone, and the strain of thin muscle, and the slow hot ache that comes from carrying weight too long without rest. It went through the wall and the kitchen and the forge and the stair-tower and the Chapel, and Idrin heard Harrow cry out, short and sharp, as though someone had struck him across the back. He heard Korrin swear in the Lessary dialect. He heard Pell’s voice from the kitchen stair, very far off, say oh, love, in a tone of pure distress, and then a clatter as something was dropped.
Sella, kneeling at the foot of the stair, shut her eyes and said nothing at all. But her hand went flat on the stone beside her, and it stayed there.
The boy did not cry out. He stood on the fourth step with the pole across his shoulders and his breath coming hard and quick through his teeth, and then he let it out in a long shaky sigh, and his shoulders came down, very slightly, under the weight. He looked up. His face was flushed and wet, and his grey eyes were wide.
“That’s better,” said Pim. “That’s my load. I know how to carry that.”
Sella opened her eyes. She got up from her knees, slowly, and went to the boy, and looked at the bruised shin with a critical eye. Then she took out a strip of cloth from her roll. It was an old shirt, Idrin saw, a faded linen sleeve that had once been his own, cut down and washed white, and she had been keeping it in the roll for days. He had not noticed it go.
“That’s mine,” said Idrin, a little helplessly.
“It’s a bandage,” said Sella, without looking up. “You’ll not miss a sleeve. You’ve got three more.”
She knelt again and bound the boy’s bruised shin with the linen, firmly and neatly, and tied it off with a single tug. The boy looked down at it with grave interest.
“That’s a count-cloth,” said Pim.
“It’s a bandage,” said Sella.
“It’s a count-cloth,” said Pim firmly, “because it’s for my count. I’ve been counting the stair for six weeks, and I’ve been carrying the load, and nobody’s ever paid me for it. So the Hold owes me a count, and I’ll take it in linen, because the bread’s all gone to the cook’s fire, and the cook said so.”
Sella looked up at him for a moment. Her mouth twitched.
“Fair,” she said.
The Hands had all come down to the foot of the stair by then. They stood in a half-circle in the dim light of the Undercroft, the mason and the Watch and the Lash, the cook with her arms full of bread, the clerk with his notebook open and his pencil lifted, the smith with his hands on his hips and his face thunderous and bewildered, and the Bonesetter kneeling with her black book on her knee. They looked at one another. They looked at the boy with the carrier’s pole across his shoulders, and the linen bound round his shin.
Nobody said anything for some time. Then Gaunt cleared his throat, loudly, and scowled at the stair.
“I object,” said Gaunt, rather hoarsely, “to a child carrying the Hold’s load on his own. And I’ll say so to the Chamber.”
“You’ll object to anything,” said Korrin.
“Aye,” said Gaunt, with unusual mildness. “But I’ll not object to this.”
The boy had turned round on the fourth step. He was looking at Idrin, with his head on one side and his grey eyes narrowed, as a carter looks at a horse he is thinking of buying. He lifted one hand from the pole and pointed it, very precisely, at the prince’s boots.
“You’re the wrong height,” said Pim cheerfully. “For the Hold. I’ve been measuring you from this step for a month, and you’re too tall by a finger, and you stand like someone who’s afraid of the stair.”