Part 3 of the Foundations series
Part of the arc: The Houses that UG Built
The goblins, it turned out, had opinions about staircases, and none of those opinions matched UG‘s.
Their case was simple and delivered with the flat confidence of tradesmen who had built this exact argument before, for other clients, and won it every time. A narrow staircase between close walls was cheaper to cut, faster to finish, and — this was the part they kept coming back to, with what UG suspected was real relish — properly unsettling in a way his design wasn’t. Nobody felt a staircase in their bones by walking down something wide and well lit. They felt it walking down something that pressed in on both shoulders at once, straight and steep and just a little too steep for its own height, the kind of pitch that made a man grip the wall on the way down whether he needed to or not, and made looking back up from the bottom feel considerably further than the climb itself had actually been.
They had ideas, and once they started, they didn’t stop. A single candle partway down instead of proper sconces, guttering, doing exactly enough to see by and no more. A niche carved into the wall at the steepest point, empty, clearly meant for something that had never been put there. Pale roots already working their way through the mortar near the bottom, thin white threads that had no business being that far underground and every business being there anyway, given what was growing upstairs. UG asked, reasonably, whether that last one was structural. The goblins said it added character. UG decided not to press it.
He held out for the wide entrance for exactly as long as it took the lead goblin to point out that a grand doorway opening onto a staircase like the one they were describing would look less like architecture and more like a mistake, and gave up the whole gothic vision in one go rather than let that image sit in his head any longer than it already had. Wide at the top for the sake of the stonework, then straight down, steep enough to notice, narrow enough to feel it on both shoulders the whole way — exactly as the goblins had wanted from the start.
He went down it once it was finished and counted the steps on the way, for no reason he could name. He counted them again on the way back up. The two numbers didn’t match, and he decided, sensibly, not to check a third time.
More in the Foundations series
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