Ysra went down into the Undercroft with a lamp and a slate and counted everything, because the Undercroft was the one place in the Hold where counting was not a choice.
The stair began behind the Great Hall’s kitchen passage. It was a narrow spiral cut into the living rock, and it had nine steps to the Keystone chamber, and Ysra had counted them so many times in three years that she could have gone down them blind. The fourth stair was worn at its far edge, where the stone had been polished by the carrier’s boots and a hundred others since, and she took it by the near edge, as she always did. She did not enjoy the fourth stair. Nobody who had been on the Watch for longer than a year enjoyed it, and nobody who knew the story of the boy on it, which was a story the Watch told only in the dark, was ever able to forget that the stair had a voice.
The lamp threw her shadow up the rock. Her shadow was counting too, one step behind her, in the flat patient rhythm of a clerk.
The Keystone chamber opened out below the ninth step. It was round and low, and the Keystone itself sat in the middle of it on a cradle of old black timber, so big that Ysra’s lamp could not light all of its north face at once. She went to the north face and held up the lamp…
