Harrow went out to the east curtain before the sun, because a Mason measures what he is asked to measure and the Regent had asked him, in plain words and without a Form in them, to measure the Seal against the wall. He carried a cord marked in paces, a plumb-line with a lead weight the size of a hen’s egg, a stick of red chalk, and his own count, which he had kept since he was a boy in the quarry at the foot of the Caul and had never once had to put down.
The gate-arch was on his way out, and the Hasp man was standing in it. The Regent had let him go at the lantern-hour. Idrin had said in the Gatehouse that the Hold had no Writ to keep a man who had broken nothing but a bone, and Tallow had written that down without a range. The prisoner’s arm was splinted to a clean board and bound across his chest, and two Watch-men walked him as far as the causeway’s end. He stopped in the arch and studied Harrow’s stones, as a man studies a wall he has already counted.
“Tell whoever leads them,” he said. He said it to the Mason, because Harrow was the only man at the gate with his hands full. “The tenth is a door, not a seat.”
