The third shift past eight bells began with a voice that was not his, and Harrow heard it come out of his own mouth before he knew it was his to hear.
“One door, two door, the sill of the lower store,” he said, to nobody, in a quick, flat, counting voice with a rise at the end of every line. “The step is cracked, the step is loose. Someone’s on the stair.”
He stopped. He put his trowel down on the mortar-bed’s edge and looked at it. The trowel’s handle was worn pale where his palm had gone round it for thirty years, and the blade was clean, and the grey lime on it had begun to set in the cold. He could see every fleck. He could see the faint bloom of damp at the edge of the bed, and he could see the thumbprint of a boy’s hand in the mortar where somebody had pressed it on the first day of the siege and then gone off to fetch the water. He was not sure whose thumbprint it was. He was sure that he had been counting doors, and that Ysra counted doors, and that the voice had been hers.
