Alistair did not sleep.
The bells of the council tower marked every hour of the night, long bronze notes that carried out over the sleeping rooftops of Verissan, and he heard all of them. He sat at the window with the cold of the floor coming up through his boots, the sill empty in front of him, doing the one thing he hated most, which was to wait and think.
'Silas is reading the page,' he told himself near the second bell. 'That is all this silence is. A man reads a page in silence, and the silence means the work is going right.'
By the fourth bell the thought had turned over on itself.
'Silas is reading the page and has not come back. The keeper woke early, or the hour was wrong, and now he is somewhere worse than the archive, while I sit in a chair counting bells like a man waiting on news of a birth.'
He made himself go through it cold, since the cold was the only useful thing left in the room.
