The back room lay beyond the Keystone’s room, through a second door that had no lock at all, only a wooden latch shaped like a hand. Ysra had stood in front of that latch for most of a week. She had counted its fingers, five on the wood and five on the iron pin beneath, and she had counted the grooves between them, and she had decided, on the morning of the first day of the late summer, that counting was not going to open it. Lifting it was.
She lifted it. Harrow came behind her, carrying the lamp. Pim came behind Harrow, carrying nothing at all, because he had been told that if he touched the Chest before it was counted he would be sent back up the stair, and he had been listening to the Hold’s rules long enough to know which of them he was allowed to break.
The room was small and dry. It had a low ceiling of old oak beams and a floor of flags worn into shallow dishes by feet. Along one wall stood a row of barrels, sealed and stacked, and along the other wall, under a shelf that held a dozen tallow candles nobody had lit in a generation, there was the Chest.
It was an oak box as long as a man’s arm and as deep as a child’s knee, bound in iron on every edge. The iron had gone brown. The lid had a plain hasp and a plain lock, and the lock had been opened so often, or so recently, that its keyhole was bright. Gaunt had oiled the hinges the day before. He had objected to having to do it, and he had done it so well that when Ysra lifted the lid, it rose by itself, slowly, without a creak, and stopped at the perfect angle to let the lamplight fall inside.
The tokens were packed in rows.
They were small, flat discs of pale tin, each about the width of a thumb-joint, and they lay in their rows as neatly as barley seed in a sack. Each one was stamped on its upper face with a small device, a tool or a tool-mark or a simple cross, and each had a notched sign scratched into the metal beneath the stamp. Ysra stared at the first row for some time. The devices were all different. The notches were all different. But the rows were packed so tightly that the tokens seemed to lean on one another, as if each were holding up the next, and she had the odd feeling that she was looking at a crowd of people standing in a line, waiting to be called by name.
“Count them,” said Harrow, quietly.
He began at once, out loud, in the flat rhythm he used for stones. “One. Two. Three.” He had put down the lamp and knelt at the Chest’s edge, with his hands resting on his knees and his cord looped round his fingers. The cord was a grey hempen thing, knotted at intervals, which he had carried in his belt since his first stone had been set at the broken gate. He kept his eyes elsewhere. He counted with his eyes on the tokens, one row at a time, and as he came to the end of each row he reached into his pocket with his free hand, took out a loop of spare hemp, and tied a single knot into the cord.
Pim counted under his breath, beside him. Ysra heard him go along under Harrow’s voice like a second, lighter stream. Then the stream rose, and Pim was counting aloud too, and his voice was higher and clearer than Harrow’s, a child’s voice that did not need to be told the number.
Ysra counted with her finger. She did not kneel. She stood over the Chest and moved her forefinger slowly from token to token, touching each disc lightly without lifting it out, the way she had once been taught to count the bags of salt in the Lessary caravan that had come up to the Hold in the first spring, before the Hold had quite decided what it was. The tin was cold under her touch. Each disc gave a faint, dull ring when her nail brushed its rim, as if it were hollow.
Two hundred. Five hundred. Harrow tied his eighth knot and paused. Pim’s voice did not pause, and Ysra kept her finger moving, and the lamp burned steady, and the room was so still she could hear the tokens’ faint rings as her nail passed them, one after another, like a bell being tapped by someone who did not want to wake the house.
Eight hundred. Nine hundred. Nine hundred and ninety-eight.
“Nine hundred and ninety-nine,” said Harrow.
“Nine hundred and ninety-nine,” said Pim.
“Nine hundred and ninety-nine,” said Ysra, and took her finger away.
They looked at each other across the Chest’s open lid, all three of them, and none of them said anything for a moment. Then Harrow took the cord from his belt. He held it up to the lamp and let it fall open, and the knots ran down its length in a long, slightly uneven line, nine hundred and ninety-eight of them. He turned the cord over. He stripped the last inch of hemp from its end, and then, with a short grunt, he tied the final knot by hand.
“It is not a count,” Harrow said, when he had finished. “The cord is a count. It is also a way of keeping the count so that nobody needs to recount it. The count is nine hundred and ninety-nine. The cord is nine hundred and ninety-nine. The Chest is nine hundred and ninety-nine. That is three things, and they agree.”
“Do they agree in the way you think?” said Ysra.
“They agree like a wall agrees with its footings,” said Harrow. “You do not ask a footing to agree. You build on it.”
Pim had not stopped looking into the Chest. He had come round to the side of it and was staring down at the rows of tokens with his face very close to the lamplight, so that his nose nearly touched the lid’s iron rim. He was not frightened. He looked the way he looked when Sella was setting a bone and he had decided it would be all right in the end, but only if somebody said so.
“It is the oldest debt in the Hold,” Pim said. “I know it is. I can feel it. It is older than the wall and older than the stair, and it is the reason the stair is the wrong size, because the stair was counted for it, and not for us.” He stopped. He looked up at Ysra with his mouth open, as if the words had come out in the wrong order and he wanted to get them back. “It was never meant to be opened by anyone who had not counted to nine hundred and ninety-nine.”
“Then we are the wrong people,” said Ysra.
“You are the only right people,” said Pim, “because you did.”
Ysra did not answer him. She was not thinking about the Chest any more. She was thinking about the count itself. She had counted nine hundred and ninety-nine tokens with her finger in the lamplight, and she had counted every one of them, without stopping, without losing her place, which was a thing that had not happened to her in a week. She had sat on the flat stone outside the door with the bags stacked in front of her, and she had lost her count at forty, and now she had got to nine hundred and ninety-nine without a single slip. It was not possible. She knew it was not possible. And yet her finger had not faltered once.
“Nobody can count that far without losing their place,” she said, half to herself.
“You did not lose yours,” said Harrow.
“No,” said Ysra. “I did not.”
It was an answer nobody would believe, least of all herself, and she knew it. She let it stand. Then she looked into the Chest again, along the last row, to the end. She was looking for the thousandth place. She had known there would be one. A chest of a thousand tokens, built for a thousand wages, with nine hundred and ninety-nine tokens in its rows, must have one place left, and the place would be at the end, where the last row had its last seat.
The last seat was there. It was empty. The tin of its floor was bare and bright, and the iron of the Chest’s side curved in around it, as neat as a gap in a row of teeth.
Except that the tin floor was not flat. Ysra leaned closer, with the lamp at her shoulder, and saw that a shape had been pressed into the metal. It was a round dent, shallow and clean-edged, about the size of a thumb-pad. It was the exact size of the blank disc that Idrin had once paid away to Jory Fenn, in the first month of the Hold, for a wage he had been told was owed.
She did not touch it. She did not tell the others. She only sat back on her heels and looked at the empty dent in the bright tin, and she found that she was counting its edges, very slowly, one by one, and that her finger, for the first time that day, was shaking.