The Chamber needed the Harvest’s original grain-tallies for the Ballot’s count, and the only copies of them that had not been carried off to the Lessaran fair in the spring were in the Undercroft, in the Foundation archive, under the Keystone. Tallow had known that for a month. He had put off going down for the same reason he had put off most unpleasant things in his life, which was that the going would take longer than he had allowed for, and would produce a result he would have to write down.
He went down on the late summer’s third evening, with a lamp in one hand and the Chamber’s order in his coat, and nobody to carry the second light but himself.
The stair was nine steps. He counted them from the Great Hall’s east door, where the flagstones gave way to a low arch and a plank door bound in iron, and then the steps went down into the Hold’s oldest room. He had walked them a hundred times since the spring. He had never once counted them alone. Ysra always counted for him, out loud, with her finger raised, because the Watch did not trust a clerk to find the bottom of a stair without a guide, and Tallow had never once had the heart to tell her that clerks did not need guides, only good lamps and a sense of the number.
