Gaunt objected to the chair.
He had been objecting since the commission sat down, in a low, steady mutter that rose and fell with the river like the wash against the bank, but the chair was the first thing on the platform that he had been able to put his hands on, and he could not let it go. It was too low for a Chancellor and too high for a clerk. It had been set on the soft bank, on the very lip of the planks, by a man who had never once smelt a river and did not know that the bank under the plank floor was a sponge with opinions. He said so to Harrow, who was standing beside him at the platform’s edge with his cord looped twice round one wrist. He said it again to the mud. He said it, finally, very loudly, to the Chancellor himself, who was seated on the chair with his gloves folded on his knee and his hat on the cloth table beside his elbow, and who did not appear to have heard him.
“That chair,” said Gaunt, “is sinking.”
It was. Gaunt had seen it from the first moment the commission sat down, and had been waiting, with the grim patience of a smith who knows a weld is going to fail, for the planks to give. They gave now, all at once, with a soft wet sigh. The front left leg of the Chancellor’s chair went down by…
