The Hold cast a second mason’s Form in the Undercroft because the Hold had run out of spares. Harrow had counted the store twice before the Chamber voted it, once by the racks and once by the crates, and both times the answer had been the same. There was a Mason’s copy at Thornwick, lent and coming home. There was a Kitchen copy that had been spent at the Edict of Labour and had not come back. There was nothing else on the shelves but dust, a broken hinge, and a Form-cradle’s empty cloth, folded square by somebody who had expected to need it again.
So he went down the Undercroft steps with a lamp.
There were nine steps from the bottom of the Watch stair to the stone floor of the cellar, and Harrow counted every one of them out loud, as he always did. He did not step on the fourth. He never had. The fourth stair was the stair where the carrier had gone through the wood in the first year, and the Hold had roped it off afterwards, and though the rope had rotted and been replaced twice, Harrow still went round the place where it had been.
