The Lessaran warden-captain came up the causeway on the twenty-sixth day with six men, a clerk on a grey mare, and a surveyor’s chain coiled on the clerk’s saddle-horn like a sleeping snake. Lune watched them come from the Survey House’s doorway, and counted their paces from the causeway post to the house, and found, when they reached the wall-foot, that they had taken four hundred and thirty-one paces where the road had given them three hundred and nine.
“The road is a poor measure,” said Lune, before the captain had dismounted. “You are a span short on your own count, Captain, and the captain’s count is the one the Crown will read.”
The captain stopped with one boot in the stirrup. He was a broad man with a narrow face and grey eyes that looked, Lune thought, as though they had been squinting into weather for twenty years and had never once been asked to say what they saw. His name was Hallis. He had written it on the warrant that had come up the causeway the night before, in a hand that tried to be a Chancery hand and failed in the tails of the letters.
“I am not here to be measured,” said Warden-Captain Hallis.
