Chapter 62

There were a hundred and twelve steps from the black door behind the dais to the cells beneath the council hall. I counted them. Nobody had thought to take counting away from me.

The first forty were cut stone, worn into hollows by five hundred years of feet. At the forty-first the stair turned, and there was an iron gate in the wall at the turn, with a wicket, and through it came a breath of wet yard and horse. Then the stair narrowed and went wet, until between one lamp and the next there were eleven steps of complete darkness, and the guards holding my arms slowed down for them and I did not. I had come down a great many stairs in the dark.

At the bottom there was an iron door with a grille in it, and a guardroom with a brazier and a table and a ring of keys on a hook, and a second door, and then a passage.

The passage was long and low and smelled of iron and old water. Cells ran down both sides of it, barred at the front, black inside. Somewhere below it, the g