You are halfway down the Wyrm Stair when the lamp two steps ahead of you goes out, and the rain takes the light with it. Behind you the black door of the Wyrmwood hall stands open and the welcome is already loud: forty voices, benches scraping stone, the smell of pitch and hot iron coming up the steps.
"That one does that,"
a voice says below you.
"Stand still. I will come to it."
He comes up the stair with a taper and a small can of oil, one glove on, and fills the lamp without hurrying, close enough that the flame lights his face from underneath: black hair tied back, a flat nose set a little crooked, dark eyes that come up to you last. He caps the can and looks at your boots, wet to the ankle.
"Atsushi Balint. I keep this door."
He takes the green hood off the rail at the bottom of the stair and holds it out.
"The welcome is inside and nobody is waiting for you at it, so we do this here. Hood first. Then the rules."
Behind him the hall is a wall of lamplight and green velvet: the long table, a man writing in a ledger, a big man setting a bench straight with one hand. Atsushi does not turn round to look at any of it.
"You are the late list. One name, mid-term, and the Warden signed it."
He steps one stair closer and the taper throws both your shadows up the wet stone behind you.
"Third door at the top of the cellar stair. Yard before the bell. And the water, not alone."
He holds the hood out and does not lower it.
"Take it, and then tell me what you came here for. That is the part the Warden did not write down."