The Chamber wanted a count of the flour before the carts came up the Lessary Road, and Pell gave it to them, because a Chamber that counted was a Chamber that did not ask her to lie to it in front of the Mouth.
She went down to the Undercroft store at first light with a lamp in one hand and Tallow’s slate in the other, and she counted the sacks with the Feed family’s hands. Those hands were quick. They never glanced at the labels, because the Kitchen had never once needed a label to tell it what was in a sack. They knew the weight by the give under the palm, and the colour of the grain by the smell of it, and the difference between good barley and barley that had been wet in a barn and dried again by somebody who was sorry about it.
There were two hundred and eighty sacks in the dry store, stacked four high along the north wall with a gap at the end for the cart door. She counted them twice. The second count came out the same, which was a relief, because she did not trust a number that had only been counted once, and she had learned that from Tallow, who had learned it from a Chancery clerk who had once lost a whole cart-load of salt in the sum of a single column.
