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Not wanting to keep your feet idle any longer, you decide to see what lies beyond the nearer of the two unopened doors. With a single stride you are at its handle - blessedly bereft of any lock - and with another stride you are in another room - and all the more confused because of it. The room - or rather, the space - is empty and unadorned, save for a smattering of sconces on the walls. The walls on either side of you are not actually walls, rather, they are doors - barn-size, double doors. Three of them, end to end on each side - possibly more, as this space is large enough that the meek light off of your 'stick-decanter simply isn't enough for you to see to the end of this space. The breadth of the space, however, is rather shallow; in fact, you would say that it is shallow enough that there is just enough room to open the doors - as both the sets to your right and left open into this space, each pair of doors that face each other being slightly offset to accomplish this. Beyond the set of doors to your right being held fast by a substantial wooden bar, and the floor being battered flagstones with crumbling edges as opposed to wood as it has been the case with the rest of the Clerking house, you can see nothing else of note in this room. Or space, whatever it may be. You turn to your right, regarding the set of doors with the dropping-bars, then you turn to your left to regard the set of doors without. Your mind mills thoughts. Chief among them is that if the set of doors to your right have dropping-bars, then it stands to reason that they open up to the outside. That is all well and good ... but once you are without, and the door closed, you cannot replace the bar - and its absence from its hangers would raise alarums, or at least, suspicions. You dutifully and blearily think about ways you might get the bar back on from outside, but few of them seem realistic, and none seem possible with what you have on hand. With more than a touch of defeat, your mind moves on, circling back to the oddity of this space.
Clearly, this house has to have a rather substantial stockroom to necessitate these sort of accommodations - that much is plain. What is not is why. This is a municipal building ... could this be some emergency larder? No ... no, as large as the space to your left may be, you would imagine that a larder would be bigger, at least for a city the size of the Mount. Besides, what cause could their be for a Clerking house to give ... a third of itself over to the storage of food? It has to be something else, though you couldn't imagine - oh, Maker's Mercy, what are you doing? It might yet be worth your time to figure out how the bondsman managed to get out of the house - but how does standing around playing many guesses help you in the slightest? At - no, don't dwell on it. Just move. Do something, anything but nothing!
