Korrin planned in the Undercroft, because the Undercroft had no windows, and a Corvanne factor could not count through a wall.
He had taken the archive table under the Keystone’s niche. It was the only table in the Hold that did not wobble, and it was the only one where a lamp could be set down without the wind from the cellar stair blowing it out. He had cleared the dust from its top with his sleeve. Then he had laid out the old survey sheets from the Hold’s chest, the ones the Foundation’s surveyors had drawn when the wall was first stood up, brittle and brown at the folds. Beside them he laid the Foundation’s own map of the Caul road, which was the only map the Hold had that was drawn with a clerk’s careful lines.
The clerk who had drawn it had been very careful indeed. Every stream was inked in a different blue. Every ford had a little cross at the crossing, and every cairn had a tiny ring round it, and every road had its distances written along its edge in small upright figures, as though the clerk had walked each one himself and had not trusted the figures of anyone else. Korrin liked him for it. He did not trust the clerk’s politics, which were the Foundation’s politics, a lord’s politics, but he trusted his ink.
