The wardens took the rod first. It was the most valuable thing Lune carried out of the Hold, and the captain had the look of a man who had been taught that valuable things were the first to be taken.
The rod was a length of ash bound at both ends with iron, marked along one face in paces and along the other in leagues. The Hold had drawn it from a Foundation store where it had lain unissued for two hundred years, and Lune had walked the marsh road with it until the marks were worn pale under the thumb. Now a Lessaran hand turned it over on a post table, and Lune watched the thumb press the paces the wrong way round.
“Foundation property,” said the captain. He was a thick, tidy man with a clerk’s moustache and a ledger under one arm that he did not set down. “Unlisted.”
“It is marked,” Lune said. “The marks are correct. You may check them against the table’s edge.”
“I have no need of a table.”
“Then you have no need of a rod, and it should go back to the Hold’s keeping, which has a need.” Lune held out a hand. The hand was the Survey Form’s grey, stiff at every joint from three days of marsh damp, and the captain looked at it as though it were a second rod and did not give the first one back.
