The survey rod had been listed in the Undercroft stores as one survey rod, Foundation, unissued, and for two hundred years nobody had thought to issue it. Idrin had issued it himself, at the end of the spring, by a stores note that cost nothing. He had carried it out of the Gatehouse yard and laid it along the empty bench, and the bench had taken it without complaint. Since then the rod had lain where he put it, and he had walked past it four times a day and had not once picked it up.
He picked it up now, at midday, because Tallow had given him three figures for the bounds of the Hold and he liked none of them.
The rod was longer than his arm and lighter than he expected. It was ash, grey with age, with a brass ferrule at one end worn bright by a thumb that had not been his. Along one face somebody had cut paces in notches and leagues in a longer, deeper groove, and at the very top, in a neat hand that was not Tallow’s, a line of letters read Measure what you walk. He held it in his right hand, because the left grip was still numb from the morning and the rod was not a thing to drop on the stone.
