Chapter 68

For eleven days after the light, Master Thale did not send for me.

I had never known him miss two days together. Now the days went by one after another, and the shut door at the end of the passage stayed shut, and nobody came down the passage at the hour with a guard at each elbow to bring me.

He was there. I could hear him. Through the wall of the room with the drain, at night, I heard his pen, and the soft dry turn of his pages, and once, very late, the scrape of his chair as he got up and walked to the door and stood behind it for a long time without opening it. The night guard told the brazier that the old man’s lamp burned till dawn now, every night, and that he had sent up for more oil twice in a week.

I did not know what to do with that. I put it in the ledger and left it there.

On the eleventh day, voices came down the stairs.

Two men, standing at the turn by the gate, where they must have thought the stone between us was a wall. One of them was