The four of them went out at the new moon, with no light and no talk, and the dark took them as a marsh takes a dropped stone.
Korrin led. He led on the map he had memorised, and he did not glance at it. He had carried the Foundation’s clerk’s lines in his head since the Undercroft, the blue streams and the red crosses and the little rings round the cairns, and he could see them now in the black as clearly as if the lantern had been lit. The Hold’s gate closed behind them with a long low sigh of iron. The yard fell away. The road ran down off the Hold’s rise in a pale thread, and then it dipped into the reeds of the first ford, and the reeds closed over the road and hid it.
He did not speak except in short words. He had learned that on the marsh. A man who talked on a night road gave himself to the dark, and the dark took its payment in ears.
“Low,” he said, at the ford.
They went low. Harrow went first after him, with his count-cord wound round his left wrist so that it would not rattle, and his lips moving under his breath with every stone of the causeway. Gaunt came behind, limping on the stiff leg, with his hammer-hand swinging and his face set against the cold. Ysra came last. She walked with her eyes half shut and her head tilted…
