Idrin was not a Hand. He had no seat, and no Mouth, and no lamp in the Lantern Hall, and when the four of them went down the square toward the tower he found that he had not been asked to follow. Nobody had told him to stay. It was only that the body had walked on, the way a tide walks on, and he had been standing on the shingle when it did, with his coat over his arm and the water at his boots.
So he stayed on the shingle. He had a great deal of practice at it. He had spent most of his life standing at the edges of rooms where the important decisions were being made by other people, and he had learned that a man who stood at the edge of a room could hear everything said in it and could be seen by no one. This was the same, except that the room was a lake, and the people deciding things were stone and weft and a bell at the top of a drowned tower, and the thing they were deciding was whether a count of the drowned could be made without anyone drowning in the process.
