Mourner went down to the cistern-postern after the second bell of the night, when the Hold was quiet enough for a name to be heard.
The postern was a low iron door set into the foot of the inner ward wall, no higher than a man’s chest, with a bar on the Hold side and a wooden wedge on the other. Someone had cut a knot into the iron, very shallow, where the bar sat. Mourner put her palm over the knot and felt the metal, which was cold and wet and remembered many hands. Then she lifted the bar and set it aside, and crouched in the opening, and listened.
Under the stone, the Choir was singing.
It had been singing every night since the Congress. The Watch had heard it and reported it, and Tallow had written it in the margin of the minutes as a sound with no clause. Mourner did not need the minutes. She had heard the Choir in the cistern’s depth the first time the siege was a week old, and she had known then what Idrin had only begun to suspect, which was that the voices were not singing for the Hold.
They were singing for themselves. They were singing names.
