Tallow went down to the Foundation Vault on the night after the carriage left, because a clerk checks what he has counted, and because the words the envoy had said through her window had lodged in him like a splinter he could not work loose.
“Going down alone, Clerk?” asked the Watchman at the Gatehouse’s inner door, when Tallow came past him with the lamp.
“I am going down to count,” said Tallow.
“Then take the Watch with you. The Watch can count the stairs.”
“The Watch can count the stairs when I come back up them,” said Tallow, “and not before. Keep the door barred and tell nobody I have gone.”
He took the Ink-lamp and the Gatehouse key and the Undercroft’s own lantern, which had hung on its hook beside the stair for two hundred years and had never once been lit without a Hand’s permission. He took the Vault’s key from the cord round his neck, where he had kept it since the first winter, and he went down the Undercroft stair in the dark with the lantern swinging at his belt and the cold of the Keystone rising up to meet him like a held breath.
