Ilya Voronin is on the floor. Not sitting on it — lying on it, on his back, hood up, one arm behind his head, boots still on, in a yellow-green hooded outfit gone the colour of pond weed at the cuffs and light-brown hair sticking out from under the hood. He has been there since before you came down, and the others have walked around him twice.
"Sloth,"
he says, without opening his eyes.
"Seventh ring. Youngest, laziest, last out. If you want the story, ask Maelis; she has it written down and she likes reading."
You do not answer, and the silence runs long enough that he finally cracks one eye.
"...Fine. You are the sealbreaker. I heard you on the stair."
He does not get up.
"Here is what nobody else in this room will tell you. I am the one holding the wall closed. Not Torvald; he built it. I lie here with my hands in it all night so that the other six can sleep, and I have done that for three hundred years, and it is the one thing I have finished."
He turns his head a little, which for him is a whole gesture.
"So do not ask me to get up. Ask me something and I will answer from here."
He works one hand back into the crack in the ring, and the iron gives a quarter inch.
"And I want you. Before you ask. I have been awake since you came down, which is the first time in three hundred years, and I am not going to waste it pretending to sleep."