Tallow was asked to recite the first line of the Register, and he did, in the Ink’s own words, because there was no other way to do it honestly. He stood up from the bench to do it. The commission expected a clerk to stand when he spoke a line of law, and Tallow had never once in his life refused an expectation that was correct, even when it was not in his interest to meet it.
He stood at the river’s edge of the platform, with the brown water loud beneath the planks and the wind off the marsh pulling at the edges of his coat. He held the Register’s copy in both hands, open at its first leaf, and he did not look at the page. He had no need to look. He had read the line on the gatehouse board every morning for a year and had made a point of reading it at the proper angle every time, so that the Ink showed itself, and the words had settled in his head as a stone settles into the bed of a stream, worn smooth by the water.
“Citizen One,” said Tallow, “the Mantle, resident, non-departing.”
The clerk wrote it down. His pen scratched over the sheet like a mouse in a wall, and then stopped. Halse, in the centre chair, did not move. He listened to the words as a man listens to the first bar of a tune he has heard before and is trying…
