The tinker’s name was Abel Rusk, and Pim did not like him, which was the first thing Pim had decided about him and which he had not yet changed his mind about, though Ysra had said he should give the man a fair count. Abel had come up from Lowgate on the morning after the envoy’s train. He had a cart full of pots and pans that were mostly holes, a leather apron with a dozen pockets, and a voice that went up at the end of every sentence, as though it were asking permission to be heard. He mended pots in the Kitchen court, for a bowl of barley and a penny’s worth of tin, and he slept in the loft over the bread-oven, where the warm air came up through the boards. Nobody had given him a Writ. Nobody had put him in a ledger. He simply arrived, and stayed, and Pell fed him, and that, Pim thought, was the most irregular thing that had happened in the Hold since the Chamber had started counting things.
“It is a cellar,” Abel said, on the second morning, when Pim came through the court carrying a sack of salt-cake from the Undercroft. “That stair. It goes down to a cellar. Everybody knows a stair to a cellar.”
“It is not a cellar,” said Pim. “It is a stair. It has nine steps and a landing and a wrong one.”
“It has a cellar at the bottom,” said Abel, cheerfully, and went back to his hole-punching.
Pim did not answer. He went on past the tinker with the sack on his shoulder and the cold of the morning on his cheeks, and he did not look back, because he was a carrier and carriers did not waste their breath on men who did not know the weight of a load. But he thought about it all the same, through the rest of the morning, while the sacks went down to the Undercroft and the salt-cakes came up, and while Pell counted the mouths in the Kitchen and found, to her irritation, that there were now two more than there had been the night before.
“Ten sacks,” Pell said at noon, from the granary steps, with a tally-stick in her hand. “Ten sacks drawn for the tinker, and his board, and the envoy’s escort, who are eating the bread off their saddles and leaving the crusts for the crows. I shall not draw another sack this week, boy, not for the envoy or the tinker or the Crown. Take this one down to the Undercroft and put it on the shelf by the stair. Carefully. It is the last of the good salt-cake.”
“I will carry it,” said Pim.
“You will carry it and count it and bring it back,” said Pell, “and you will not let it fall on anybody’s head. Do you hear me? The Hold has enough bruises.”
So he carried it.
It was a barrel, not a sack, a small oak barrel with iron hoops and a bung in its head, and it was full of the grey pressed salt-cake from the marsh, and it weighed more than Pim had ever carried alone. He had got it up from the granary on his shoulder with the help of Gaunt, who had objected all the way, and now he stood at the Undercroft door with the barrel balanced on his right shoulder and his left hand on the rail, and he looked down the stair.
The stair was the wrong size. He had known that since the first week. It was steep, and the steps were uneven, and the fourth had a chip out of its nose that made it catch the foot. Ysra had counted it, nine steps and a landing, and then she had counted again and got ten, and then she had refused to say which number was right, and had said that a stair was as long as the feet on it. Pim did not agree with her. He thought a stair was as long as the person who had counted it, and he had counted it a great many times, and he had never once got the same answer twice.
He began to go down.
He went down the way Ysra had taught him, sideways, with his left hand on the rail and his right shoulder bearing the barrel, and he counted aloud as he went, because the Hold’s rule was that a carrier counted every step he took on a stair, so that the stair would know who was on it. “One,” said Pim. The barrel swayed. He leaned into it. “Two. Three.” The steps were cold under his bare feet. The rail was cold under his hand. “Four,” said Pim, and he came to the chipped step and felt it catch his heel, and he lurched, and the barrel rocked on his shoulder, and he steadied it, and went on. “Five. Six. Seven.”
At the foot of the stair, in the Undercroft’s passage, a man was coming through the door from the Kitchen end with a battered copper pan in one hand and a lamp in the other. Pim saw him over the barrel’s rim. It was Abel Rusk. He had come to find the boy who had taken his pan for the Undercroft’s shelf, because he had lost it the morning before and had been told by Pell that the stair was where all lost things went. He was looking up at the stair, with his mouth open to say something, and his face was sharp and bright and very pleased with itself.
“Eight,” said Pim.
He saw the barrel’s weight shift. He felt it. It was the strangest thing: the barrel was perfectly balanced on his shoulder, and he had only to keep it so, and it would go down the stair with him and be set on the shelf, and nobody would be hurt. He knew that. He could feel the balance in his shoulder like a hand on his neck. He could feel the stair under him, waiting. He could feel the Hold through the stone, the whole weft of it humming in the cold, every Hand in its seat, listening.
He has been waiting for the stair to be counted for a month, thought Pim, in the half-second before the barrel moved. He has been waiting for someone to count it and get the answer right.
“Nine,” said Pim, very clearly.
And he let go.
He did not throw it. He did not push. He simply opened his shoulder, the way a carrier opens his hands when a sack has been set down and the weight is no longer his to keep. The barrel slid off his shoulder and dropped onto the ninth step. It struck the stone with a hollow boom, and it bounced once, high and heavy, and it went over the edge of the step into the air, and it fell the length of the tenth, which the Warden had said did not exist, and which the stair had kept for a month, because nobody had asked it to be counted.
It came down on the Undercroft’s flags, at the foot of the stair, a yard from Abel Rusk’s feet. And then it did not stop.
It rolled. It rolled the last yard, very fast, and it struck the tinker’s shin, and the shin broke under it with a sound like a green stick, and Abel went down sideways, with the pan flying out of his hand and the lamp smashing on the flags. He hit his head on the stone of the passage wall as he fell. The sound was worse than the shin. It was a flat, short, final sound, the sound of a skull meeting a wall with nothing to give under it, and then there was nothing at all.
Pim ran down the stair.
He did not count. He did not look at the steps. He came down the last nine at a stumble, and then a run, and then he was on his knees on the Undercroft’s cold flags, beside the tinker, with the barrel lying on its side between them and the salt-cake spilled grey across the stone. Abel’s eyes were closed. There was blood in his hair, bright and wet, spreading out across the flags in a dark, slow pool. The tinker’s face was white. His lips were parted, and there was a thin red thread at the corner of his mouth, and his shin was bent at an angle that made Pim’s stomach turn over.
“Abel,” said Pim. “Abel. Abel.”
He did not answer.
And through the stone, through the floor and the walls and the dark beneath the Hold, Pim felt the bloom go out. It came like a cold stone dropped into still water. It went through every Hand in its seat: through Harrow in the court with his count in his mouth, and Ysra on the wall with her hand on her stair, and Gaunt in the forge with the hammer lifted, and Pell at her oven with the spoon going still. It went through Korrin on the wall and Sella in the bone-room and Tamsin among her goats. Each of them felt it. Each of them stopped. The weft shivered under the Hold like a horse under a whip, and every Hand in the Hold cried out, without a sound, at once.
Pim knelt on the flags with the tinker’s blood on his hands and his mouth open, and he did not cry. He had cried already, for another reason, in the gatehouse, when the girl had talked about her mother. He was not going to cry now. He was going to keep the count.
Abel’s eyes opened.
They did not open all the way. They fluttered, and steadied, and fixed on the stone ceiling above the boy’s head, and then they turned, very slowly, to Pim. The tinker’s face was a grey mask. His voice, when it came, was clear and quite calm, and it did not go up at the end of its sentence at all.
“He did it on purpose,” said Abel Rusk, to the Hold, to the stair, to the blood on the flags. “The boy did it on purpose. He has been waiting for the stair to be counted for a month. I heard him at the foot of it, every morning, going nine, nine, nine, with his mouth shut tight.” He swallowed. His eyes did not leave Pim’s face. “A boy who counts that long, Hold, will not stop at a tinker.”