Idrin slept in short watches now, in the Gatehouse chair, with the lamp turned low and his coat over his knees and his left hand lying on the arm of the chair like a glove somebody had put down and forgotten to pick up. He had stopped apologising for it. Sella had told him that a Regent who apologised to a chair was a Regent who had decided to be ill, and he had found that he could not argue with the diagnosis, and so he slept, and did not apologise, and woke when the candle-clock rang, and drank whatever Pell had left on the table, and went back to his papers.
In the one watch that held, he walked the Lantern Hall.
It was not a place he had chosen. Nobody chose the Hall. It opened as a door opens in a dream, without a hand on the latch, and then he was standing at the near end of a long low room that smelled of cold stone and tallow and something sweeter underneath, like new bread left in a closed oven. The room went away from him a great distance. Along its walls, at the height of a standing man’s head, hung a row of lamps on iron brackets, one for each seat of the Hold, and each lamp had a small flame in it that burned or did not burn according to the Hand who kept it.
