Harrow climbed the scaffold on the south wall before the bells, the way he had climbed it every morning since the first spring of the Hold, and he counted the stones aloud as his boots found each board. “One. Two. Three.” The boards were wet with the night’s dew and they gave a little under his weight, which was correct. A board that did not give was a board that had been set too hard, and a stone that had been set too hard would crack in its first winter, and the south wall had cracked enough winters for one wall.
At the eighth course he stopped and put his palm flat on the stone. It was cold. It was sound. He went on.
The face of the south wall, on the inside, where the Hold’s own people could see it from the Mason’s Yard, was marked with a thousand shallow cuts. They had been made by the first masons of the Foundation, who had used a chisel-point to score one line for each stone they set in the first season and had never been asked to explain why. The cuts ran in rows, from the footing to the parapet, and they were fine and pale and a little uneven, like the marks a child makes counting on a slate. Harrow had learned to read them as a man reads a ledger he did not write. Nine hundred and ninety-nine of them were matched by a knot on his cord…
