The ironstone under the Keystone’s base was the last iron in the Hold that nobody had counted, and Korrin wanted it dug out before the winter closed the Undercroft’s dry passages behind the wet.
He did not say that aloud. He said dig. He had said it to Ysra in the archive, in the flat voice that carried so well, with his arms folded and his jaw set, and he had said it to Gaunt, who had objected to the spare picks, and to Harrow, who had objected to the cellar floor on the grounds that it would crack, and he had said it again to the coal-boy Ned, who had been sent down with a lantern and a bucket and had looked at the Keystone’s niche as if it might bite him. Dig. So they dug.
Ysra took the first shift because she was the only one who did not mind the dark.
The Undercroft’s lower passage ran behind the Keystone’s niche, a narrow channel of wet stone that the Foundation’s builders had cut to take the water off the foundations when the first flood came down from the Caul. It was low and cold and smelled of iron and mud. The rubble lay in its floor in a heap as deep as a man’s knee, grey and wet and full of broken blocks that had been dropped there when the Keystone was set and never cleared away. Ysra knelt in it with a spare pick in her hands…
