Harrow counted the north wall from the parapet every morning for three days, and every morning the count was different in one small way, which was the only kind of difference a Mason ever trusted. A wall that changed all at once was a wall that had been lied to. A wall that changed by a stone at a time was a wall that was being looked after by somebody who could be asked why.
He began on the first morning at the bell, before the Watch had finished their change on the parapet and before the lodgers’ smoke had lifted off the bank. He went up the north stair with his cord looped twice round his left wrist and his right hand on the cold stone of the rail, and he stood at the top of the tower and looked down the length of the wall from the gatehouse corner to the Kitchen, course by course, the way he had been taught to look down a line of stone by an old master who had died before the Hold was ever a Hold.
Two hundred and fourteen stones were broken.
He counted them aloud, quietly, so that the Watch at the parapet could not hear and shout the numbers back. He counted the chipped faces and the spalled corners and the hairline cracks that ran from one course into the next like the veins of a leaf. He counted the places where the bolts had struck the wall’s outer…
