The Chamber met with the raid already in the body, and Tallow had the minutes to write.
He had written a great many difficult minutes since the gate went silent. He had written the bloom in four columns, and the card from Sallowmere word for word, and Brannoc’s sentence about the bell, which he had been careful to keep exactly as it was said. He had never had to write down a thing that had already happened and could not be undone, and he sat at the head of the table on the morning after the chains with his pen dry and his ink-pot cold, and he found that the difficulty was not in the writing. It was in the deciding what the thing was.
He had sent for the Foundation’s copy of the toll-law before the candle-clock. It was the only copy the Hold possessed, a thin brown book in old Ostrane script, with a clerk’s annotations in the margin in a hand he did not recognise, and it had been kept in the Undercroft archive since before the Hold had a Warden. He had the book open at his elbow. He had not yet decided whether he would read from it.
