The chairs came down the stair one at a time, and the Lowgate men who carried them went down by the fifth step and never by the fourth. Tallow had asked them to. He had written the instruction on a card and pinned it to the banister where anyone bringing a chair could read it. The card said only: Fifth step. Not the fourth. Thank you. He had considered adding a warning about the danger and had decided that the men would take the card more seriously without one.
Harrow stood at the foot of the stair with his hands behind his back and counted each chair as it passed him. The Register wanted nine, and nine came down. Then he turned to the ring the chairs were meant to stand in, the flagged circle set around the Keystone’s plinth, and counted its stones. Nine as well. He nodded once, as a man nods at a wall that has not disappointed him yet.
“Equal,” he said. “A ring that is not equal is a ring somebody has been careless with.”
Ysra came down behind the last chair and stopped on the bottom step, which she had counted twice already. She went up three steps and came down again, and then she said, to nobody in particular, that the Undercroft had nine steps, as the Register said it should. The fourth one had a rope across it. The rope was new, and Tallow had tied it himself, and it had not…
