Idrin carried the survey rod out of the Gatehouse into the yard in the last hour of the afternoon, with the light going long and yellow across the flags and the Mason’s stones stacked in their chalked rows along the wall.
He carried it in both arms, as the Hard Hands had carried the Hollowed stake the morning before, across the warped and cedar-scented length of it, with its three-league groove turned upward toward the sky. It was lighter than it looked. It was warm, too, in the way that stone is warm when it has been lying near a thing it was cut to measure, and he could feel the warmth through his coat and into his ribs, a steady dense heat that did not fade when he walked out of the Gatehouse’s shadow into the sun.
The Survey bench stood at the far end of the yard, against the south wall, where the Mason had built it after the Crossing. Idrin had passed it every day since the spring without seeing it properly. He saw it now. It was a long low bench of dressed oak, fixed to the wall-footing with iron pins, and at its near end the Mason had set a wooden rest, a cradle of two shaped arms with a groove between them, just wide enough for a rod to lie in. The rest had been cut with a mark. It was the Foundation’s V, carved small and deep into the wood of the left…
