Wren, of Knight Pellam (Human, youngest of an Old House)

They went down the right side, because the right side was Hallin's, and Hallin went all the way to where the lamp stopped, and Wren had the chronicle's right-side names in order and Bram had the ways, and between them, she had said, they could count.

That was the idea. You count the doors on the right against the names, and where a name has a door and a way, that door is in the chronicle; and where the doors go on past the names, that is the Castle going on past the chronicle, which the chronicle says it does, in the line that every reciter says fastest because nobody likes it: and the rooms are more than the names.

Bram carried the lamp and the grey case. Wren carried the names.

The first door on the right was Hallin's morning, and the fourth was a name, and the seventh was a name, and the ninth was the last one on the right the chronicle had anything to say about, Ceres, who turned back, which Wren had always taken for a story and which Bram said was a way: a figure at the ninth door, right side, that came out and went back in, twice a day, the same. Past the ninth the notches on the post upstairs had been cut by keepers who went further than the names, and the last of those keepers was Bram's grandmother, and past her, nobody.

They went past her. Bram said so, quietly, as if the post could hear.

The hall went down. The doors went on, right side, all shut, all the same height, the old stone taking no mark. The lamp made a room of light that walked with them and the dark closed up behind, and Wren found she was counting under her breath in the chronicle's voice, ten, eleven, twelve, with no names to put to them, which was the strangest thing she had done on Krilzat, stranger than Aldous: saying a count with nothing in it.

Then a door that was not shut.

It stood open. Not ajar: open, the way a door is open when somebody has gone through it and not come back to close it. Every door in the Castle was shut; Bram had said it the first evening and every evening since, they're all shut, they're always shut, nobody has ever seen one open. This one was open onto a room, and the room was dark, and when Bram lifted the lamp the room was not dark, and someone was standing in it.