The Undercroft stair had nine steps, and Ysra had counted them every watch since the first winter. She counted them from the Keystone chamber upward, where the Foundation Stone stood in its cut channel with the tally-notches on its north face and the inscription on its first face, worn by three hundred years of breath and damp. She counted them from the bottom, one hand on the cold rope rail and her lamp held out before her, so that the light fell on each tread in turn and showed her the same chipped corner on the fourth step, and the same dark stain on the seventh, where a bucket of Lowgate ale had been spilled and never quite scrubbed away.
Nine. Nine. Nine.
On the fourth she stopped, and counted twice, because a carrier had died on it.
It had been a boy’s death, long ago, in the year the Hold’s first wall was laid. The boy had been called Tobin, and he had been nine years old, and he had carried baskets of mortar up and down these steps for a builder who never learned his name. The fourth stair had been wet that morning. The boy had slipped, and the basket had turned over him, and the bones of his ankle had broken in three places before anybody came. Ysra had read the bone-ledger’s line for it, and she had not forgotten a word.
