Brannoc dreamed the Lantern Hall on the night of the twenty-first day, as he did most nights now, since the gate had been idle for a year and a day and the Quiet had nothing else to do with their hours.
The Hall was long. It always was. It went back into a dark that did not end, and along both of its walls, at the height of a seated man’s head, the lamps were set in iron brackets, one for each seat. Nine of them burned. The flames were steady and yellow and gave off a smell like tallow and bread. The others, the dim ones, sat lower in the corners where the Quiet kept them, and Brannoc’s was one of those. He found it by the warmth before he saw it. It was a coal in a cracked dish, in the corner nearest the water, and it had sunk so far that it gave off no light at all, only a faint red sense of itself, like a word a man has nearly forgotten.
He stood by it for a while. He could hear water. He always heard water in the Lantern Hall, though there was no water in the Hold that he knew of, except the cistern under the old postern and the river beyond the gate, and he did not like to think about either of them when he was asleep.
