Tobin read the last four names in the Roll.
He read them slowly, with his small hands flat on the cover and his eyes on the faded brown ink, and he read them as a carrier reads the weights on a cart when the cart is at the top of a steep ramp and the horse is blowing. He did not hurry. He was afraid, a little, that the ink would move if he looked away from it. But he had promised the Chamber he would read them, and he had promised himself, and the boy who had come up the stair past the rope was not going to break a promise made in the Undercroft by the light of a candle.
“Sennet Greave,” said Tobin. “Stair-builder.”
He stopped. The Roll gave a note beneath the name, in the old Foundation Ink, which was not Tallow’s and not Idrin’s, and which had been written by somebody who had clearly enjoyed the work. Laid the nine steps of the Undercroft, which the Register says there should be, and which he counted himself on the first morning, and found correct.
Tobin did not need to read the note aloud. He could see the steps. He had been counting them for a month. He knew the fourth was the one that had been laid wrongly, because Sennet Greave had laid the other eight true, and had come down the stair to the fourth step on the first morning of the Hold, with a…
