The Turn came at the candle-clock the morning after the Split, and Harrow was counting the Hall’s floor when the Mouth went silent.
He had been counting it since he was a boy in the quarry, when counting was a thing a man did to keep from thinking about the drop. The Great Hall’s floor was laid in flags, nine across and twenty-two from the dais to the doors, and he knew each flag by its crack and its chip and the place where the Foundation’s old mason had set a bad corner and the Mason’s Yard had patched it. He counted the flags as he walked to his place at the bench. He counted them again as the candle-clock turned its hand. He was at the third flag from the dais, a long grey stone with a dark vein running through its middle, when the Mouth stopped passing.
It did not stop in any Hand. It stopped in the air.
The Turn was a handover, always. The voice of the body went from one seat to the next, hand to hand, like a lamp passed down a long table, and every Hand knew the words and said them and fell silent. But the lamp did not reach the next seat. It hung between the Hands, at the Mouth’s table, and nobody took it, and the whole Hall waited, as a crowd waits at a gate when the bar has come down and no one has yet decided to lift…
