Ysra went down to the Undercroft alone, because the count required it, and because nobody else in the Hold could be trusted to count the fourth stair without wanting to be told the answer first.
The stair went down from the back of the Great Hall behind a plain oak door with a black iron ring. There were nine steps to the first landing, and nine more to the second, and then a turn to the left and a short passage with a rough floor, and the fourth stair in the passage was the one that had always troubled her. It was the same height as the others. It was the same depth. It was the same grey stone with the same worn lip, and it had a chip out of its nose the size of a fingernail. But when she put her weight on it, she had always felt, for the length of one breath, that there was a step below it that the stone had not yet been told about.
She counted the fourth stair again, by the lamp she carried, from the top of the passage to its foot. Nine. Then she turned and counted the lower door, which was at the end of the passage, a heavy grey board bound with iron and set in a frame of old oak. It was the door to the Keystone’s room. Her notebook had it marked with a small square, because it was the only door in the Hold that she had not been allowed to open.
It was locked from the inside.
She knew it was locked from the inside because the bolt was on her side of the wood. She could see it, a black iron bar as thick as her thumb, shot across into its keeper, and the keeper was on the near side of the frame, where a man standing in the passage with a key could have reached it. She put her hand on the bar. It was cold. It did not move. She took her hand away and looked at her palm, and it was perfectly clean, and that was the worst thing she had seen all week.
Ysra knocked on the door. She knocked nine times, slowly, with her knuckles, and she counted the echo that came back from the passage walls. It came back ten.
She stood with her fist half raised, and she counted the echo again, to be sure, and it came back ten a second time, and the tenth knock was not one she had made.
Her heart did something she did not approve of. She sat down. She had never sat down in the Undercroft before. She sat on the top step of the passage, which was not a step at all but a flat stone where the passage met the stair, and she put her back against the Undercroft door, with the lamp on the stone beside her, and she turned her back on the stair. It was the first time in her life she had ever done that. It felt like taking off a boot with a hole in it, and then remembering that she had no other boots.
Her mind would not stop counting, so she let it. There were six doors between the Great Hall and the Keystone’s room, and she had counted all six every morning for two months. Four were wooden and opened onto cellars full of grain, and their bolts were stiff but honest. One was iron, and it opened onto a short stair that went down eight steps into a pit of standing water. Gaunt had wanted the pit filled with rubble, and Harrow had wanted it measured, and the Chamber had voted to do neither, which Tallow had minuted with a dagger mark. The sixth door was the one at the end of this passage. In two months she had never found a door she could not count from the inside, and she had never once been on the wrong side of one. It was not a comfort. It was a fact, and she held on to it the way Pim held his bucket, with both hands and no intention of setting it down.
“You are sitting on the wrong side of the stair,” said a voice behind her.
Pim came down the stair with a bucket of water in one hand and a rag over his shoulder. He came carefully, as he always did, but he did not count the steps out loud, which Ysra noticed. He reached the flat stone and sat down beside her with the bucket between his knees, and he looked at the lower door, and then at her, and then at the bolt.
“The stair is the wrong size,” he said. “I have been measuring it for a month.”
“What size should it be?”
Pim thought about it. He had a way of thinking that involved his whole face, as if the answer had to pass through each part of him before it could come out. “The size of a boy who can climb it without counting,” he said at last.
Ysra laughed. It came out of her before she could stop it, a short, dry, unkind sound that surprised the passage and surprised her more, and she clapped her hand over her mouth and looked at the bolt. Her laugh had hurt somebody, once, she thought, a long time ago, and she did not like to laugh in case the same thing happened again. But Pim was smiling at her, the way he smiled at Sella when Sella had said something worse than he had expected and he had decided it was funny.
Behind her, on the far side of the wood, something moved. It was the bolt. It slid back on its keeper, slowly and quite smoothly, with no hand on it, and then there was a click, and the lower door shifted an inch in its frame and stopped.
“There,” said Pim, very satisfied. “It likes you.”
“It does not like me,” Ysra said. “It is being opened by someone who wants me to think it likes me.”
“Then it is a very polite someone.”
She did not answer. She was staring at the gap in the door. It was a black line, no wider than a finger, and it did not show her anything except more black. She reached out and touched the wood with two fingers, and it was warm, as a stove is warm when someone has just been cooking on it.
Pim picked up the rag from his shoulder and began to wipe the step beside him, though it was dry. “I counted the stair in my sleep,” he said, not looking at her. “Last night. It had eleven steps. Eleven, not ten, and not nine. I counted them out loud and the stair let me. And then I woke up and it had nine again, and I did not know which of the numbers was the dream.”
“Eleven is wrong,” said Ysra.
“I know it is wrong.”
“Then it is not the dream,” said Ysra. “The dream is the one that has the right number. Dreams always do. It is what they are for.”
Pim looked at her with his mouth slightly open. He was nine years old, or so he said, and she had never once seen him look as if the answer had hurt him, and she did not like it when he did. “That is the least comforting thing you have ever said,” he told her.
“I know. I am not very good at being comforting. Sella says the comfort comes after the diagnosis, and I have never got to it.”
“Your diagnosis is that the stair is wrong.”
“My diagnosis,” said Ysra, “is that somebody has been in the Keystone’s room, and has come out again, and has left the door open for us to find, and has been very careful to leave nothing on the floor.”
The door moved again. It opened a little more, no more than a hand’s breadth, and in the gap there was lamplight, yellow and steady, and a shape of things she could not at first make out. Then she saw them. They were leather bags. They were stacked against the Keystone room’s inner wall from floor to ceiling, small and neat and tight, and each of them had a tally scored into its flap with a knife. Ysra stared at the bags, and at the tallies, and then, without wanting to, she began to count them.
She counted from the bottom row, the way she counted everything, one at a time, with her finger moving through the air. Ten. Twenty. The bags were all the same size. They were all tied the same way, with a single loop of cord. Thirty. Thirty-five. At forty she reached for the next bag and her finger stopped in mid-air, because she had lost her place.
She had never lost her place before. Not on the wall, not on the stair, not on the sick-list or the granary tally or the Chamber’s count of the nine voices. She had always known where she was in a number, the way she knew where her feet were in the dark. Now she sat on the flat stone with her finger still raised and felt the number slide out from under her like a loose step, and she heard Pim, beside her, say very quietly, “Count again. Start from the first one. I will hold the lamp.”
She did not start again. She put her hand down on the stone and held on to it, and the bolt on the far side of the door, very slowly, slid home.