Brannoc went down to the Sallow river gate at dusk, because the water had been calling him all week and he had stopped pretending he did not hear it.
The river gate was not a gate in the way the great arch was a gate. It was a wicket, a low iron-banded door in the Hold’s outer wall, set low down where the wall met the water, with a grille over it that let the river pass beneath the arch in a thin cold stream. The Foundation’s builders had made it to keep the Sallow out of the cellars when the spring floods came down from the high country, and it had been shut and bolted every winter since. Brannoc had always thought it was the gate’s small brother. It did a gate’s work without ever being asked to swing wide, and it had never once been painted.
He went down the water-stair with his new hand held close against his coat. The stair was narrow and steep and wet, and the stones were green with a slick bloom that came off on his boots. He counted them as he went, because the count was his habit, the way the stair itself had become a habit in his sleep. Nine steps to the landing. The landing was a flat stone shelf the width of a man’s arm-span, with the river sliding past its edge in a long dark hush, and a rusted iron ring set into the wall where a…
