Chapter 3: The Prefect in the Astronomy Tower

The staircase — a different one this time, fixed and uncomplaining — took Holmes upward through seven flights of castle that became progressively less decorated and more purposeful as he climbed. The portraits here were smaller and spaced further apart; the stone itself was a shade darker, as though the upper reaches of the structure saw less human attention and retained the cold more personally. His breath came in small clouds. The running feet had stopped somewhere above him, replaced by a concentrated silence of the kind that gathers around something that cannot be undone.

He noted, as he climbed: three sets of footprints in the frost that had settled on the stone near an open arrow-slit window. Two in soft-soled shoes, one heavier, possibly boots. A dropped length of what appeared to be rope or thick cord looped over a railing on the fourth landing — he photographed it in his memory and moved on. The rope's texture would require closer examination; it was not, he was fairly certain, ordinary cord.

On the seventh-floor landing, a doorway stood open to a circular room above, and in it stood four people arranged in the instinctive geometry of distress: two in institutional robes who had clearly run, a very small man in a pointed hat who was standing with his back to the door and very straight, and a girl who had stopped being anything at all.