Tobin walked up the stair past the rope, and it was the first time in his life that he had ever gone up it.
He had come down it once, with a bucket, and it had dropped him. He had come down it again, later, on his back, with the Hall’s stretcher-men and a Hand’s voice shouting for them to be careful of the rope. He had counted it from below for a month, and he had counted it from the Keystone’s grate, and he had counted it in the dark until the number had come to the end and turned over into something else. But he had never walked up it on his own feet. He did it now. He put one bare foot on the first step, and then the second, and then the third, where Tamsin’s cup still sat empty on the stone, and then he stopped on the step below the rope and looked at the step for some time.
It was only a step. It was grey and old and worn in the middle where a hundred feet had gone up and down it, and it had a tilt to it that Ysra had once tried to measure with a plumb-line and had given up on. The Forge cord across it was tarred and black and smelled of Gaunt’s hands. It was not very high. Tobin could have stepped over it. He stood on the third step and looked at it and thought that he…
