Idrin found Harrow in the gatehouse the next morning, reading the board with his thumb. It was not a reading that Idrin had ever seen anyone do before. Harrow had stopped in front of the Register with his coat buttoned and his hands in his pockets, and he moved one thumb slowly along the first line, under the words, without touching the ink, as a mason runs a thumb along a joint to feel whether the mortar has set. His lips moved. He was not, Idrin thought, reading at all. He was counting.
“Eleven letters in resident,” Harrow said, without turning round. “Thirteen in non-departing. The line’s a count.”
“Good morning,” said Idrin.
“It is,” said Harrow, “if you like it.”
Beside him, at the end of the board, a second man had woken. He stood as Idrin came in, and Idrin saw him stiffen in the particular way a clerk stiffens when a superior enters the office and he has not yet decided whether to rise. He was thin and narrow-shouldered, with a long neck above the collar of a wool coat that had been brushed so often that the nap had worn to a sheen. His hair was cropped to the scalp. His fingers were stained, at the first two joints of the right hand, with a dark blue ink unlike any ink Idrin had seen in a Chancery. He had a pencil behind one ear, and in the breast pocket of the coat, a small black notebook with a cord round it and a stub of charcoal pushed through the cord.
He was not looking at Idrin. He was looking at the first line of the Register.
“Citizen One,” he said, in a dry precise voice, “the Mantle, resident, non-departing. The hand is exact. The letters are colourless. It is my hand.” He paused. “I’m not certain of that. I should say I would swear to it at about two parts in three, which is not enough for a court, but is enough for a clerk.”
“Who are you?” Idrin asked.
The man turned. He gave Idrin one look, quick and comprehensive, a clerk’s look that took in the coat and the boots and the bandage on the right palm and the slightly too-large cut of the shirt, and then he gave a small bow, precisely judged, neither too low nor too high. “Tallow,” he said. “Clerk. That is my trade and that is my name, and I’ve been told I’m to take the minutes.”
“By whom?”
“By the trade,” said Tallow. “I was awake before I knew what I was. It’s the same with a pen. You don’t know you can write until your hand has begun, and then you find you have been writing for some time, and you are not at all sure what it says.” He looked at the board again. “How many lines are on this board?”
“One,” said Idrin. “And now two. The Writ was entered this morning.”
“One line and one more line,” said Tallow. “Two lines. And the number on the first is cut into the wood, which makes it three, if you count the cut. I should say two, but I’ll give you a figure. Two to three, depending on whether the number is a line or a mark.” He turned to Idrin with the expression of a man who has been asked a question he has been waiting all his life to answer. “How long since the first line was cut?”
“I have no idea.”
“Between two hundred and two hundred and twenty years,” said Tallow promptly. “The wood’s worn to that. The ink’s not, which is a different matter. The ink shouldn’t be there at all, after two hundred years. It should have run. It hasn’t.” He sounded pleased about it, and disapproving, in the same breath. “I don’t like it. I’d like a narrower figure.”
“Two hundred to two hundred and twenty is narrow enough for me.”
“It’s not narrow enough for a ledger.”
Harrow made a low sound in his throat, which might have been a laugh, and went on running his thumb along the wood. Tallow ignored him with the air of long practice.
“I should like the minutes,” Idrin said, because it seemed a thing to do, and because he had begun to feel the room tilt slightly under him, as a boat does when a second weight comes aboard. “If there are minutes to take.”
“There are always minutes,” said Tallow. “There are minutes the moment a second person speaks. You have a Writ, I’m told. The Writ of the Gate. I’ve read it.” He touched the notebook in his breast pocket and then seemed to think better of it. “I haven’t got a pen.”
“You have a pencil.”
“That’s for lists. I need ink for minutes. A minute in pencil can be rubbed out. A minute in ink can’t.” He looked round the gatehouse with a faint, distressed frown, as if the room had been built without a proper writing shelf. Then his eye fell on the wooden box under the window, and he went to it and lifted the lid.
The ledger lay inside, bound in calf, as it had been on the first afternoon. The disc was gone; Idrin had it in his coat. Tallow lifted the ledger out and turned it over, and tapped the blank first leaf with two fingers, and from the gutter of the book he drew out, with the neat plucking motion of a man who knows exactly where a thing is kept, a stub of charcoal as long as his little finger.
“There,” he said, quite pleased. “That’s the gutter. Every Hold keeps a stub in the gutter for the minutes. My trade has always kept one. It’s the first thing a clerk is taught.” He flipped to the margin of the first leaf and began to write.
The charcoal made a dry scratching sound. Tallow wrote quickly and neatly, in small square letters, and Idrin, who had been schooled to read a clerk’s hand upside down across a desk, read the margin over his shoulder without being asked.
Minutes of the Hold of Ormhold. First sitting, the gatehouse. Present: Idrin Saelmar, Pretender. Harrow, Mason. Tallow, Clerk. Absent: all others, the number of whom is not known. Matter: the Writ of the Gate.
“Read me the Writ,” said Tallow, without looking up.
Idrin read it. He read it in the clear dry voice he had used under the arch, every word laid down like a coin. We find the gate of Ormhold unfit to stand open. Let the gate be shut. This Writ is for the gate and for no other site. It stands until the gate is opened by a voice of the Hold’s Warden.
Tallow repeated it back, word for word, in the same cadence. He did not stumble once. Then he wrote, underneath, in the minute: Site: one, the gate. Duty: shut. Term: until opened by the Warden’s voice. One site, in order.
“In order,” said Idrin, irritated and not sure why.
“It names one site. That’s correct. It has a duty and a term, and both are in the right place, and the speaker has the right to speak it.” Tallow tapped the charcoal on the margin. “And the cost.”
“The cost is not written.”
“No,” said Tallow. “The cost is not written, because the Register has not written it. I can see the blank where it should be. It’s there, in the entry. The line’s been left empty, as though the clerk who entered the Writ meant to come back and fill it when the speaker told him what it was for.” He looked up at Idrin for the first time since the minute began. His pale eyes were perfectly steady. “The cost is written on your face, Your Highness.”
Idrin did not like that at all. “What is written on my face?”
“A missing word,” said Tallow, and for a moment there was something very like sympathy in his voice. “I don’t know which. But the Register will keep it. And you’ll go on looking as though you are waiting for someone to say it.”
He wrote the cost into the margin, after all. He wrote it as a blank, a small neat empty square, with a question mark beside it in a clerk’s hand. Cost: ?
“I’ll fill it in,” said Tallow, closing the notebook on the charcoal, “when the body tells me what the blank is for.”
Idrin had the impression, then, of being given a small gift of respect that he had not earned and did not know how to take. He nodded, and Tallow nodded back, and the two of them stood in the cold gatehouse looking at the square of blank margin, while Harrow, at the board, finished running his thumb along the first line and said, to nobody, that the number of letters was right.
Tallow’s first act as a Hand, as he later told the Chamber, was to correct the spelling of the gatehouse’s own name. It was carved in the stone over the door, a long shallow inscription that had weathered until it was barely legible. Idrin had walked under it a dozen times. He had never read it. Tallow went out to the lintel with his coat collar up and his head tilted back, and read it aloud in a flat voice, and then he said, quite calmly, that the carver had left out the letter H in the middle of the name.
“The Hold is called Ormhold,” said Tallow, “and the carver wrote Ormold. It’s the same word. It’s not the same name. Somebody should put the H back.”
Harrow had come out behind him. He stood on the cobbles, counting the courtyard flags, and when he heard the name read out he stopped counting and looked up at the lintel. He said the name aloud, carefully, with the H in its place, a low rolling sound like a stone settling in a bed of sand.
“That sounds right,” said Harrow, to nobody in particular. He sounded surprised by it. “I’ve not heard it sound right before.”