The Charter’s Tithe was a Form, and the Form the Chamber had chosen was the Mason’s spare, and so Harrow was sent down to fetch it.
He did not want to go. He said so, to Tallow, at the foot of the Undercroft stair, with a lamp in one hand and the count-cord wound round the other wrist, and Tallow nodded and wrote it in the minutes without looking up, which was the clerk’s way of saying that the Mason’s wishes had been recorded and would be ignored. Harrow went down anyway. A mason did not leave a wall to other men’s hands, and the Undercroft form-store was the foundation of the Hold’s bodies, and somebody had to be sure that the copies were sound before they were lent.
He counted the stairs. There were nineteen from the Hall to the cellar floor, and he counted them aloud, quietly, in the steady voice he used for courses, so that the stone would know where it was. The cellar was cold and dry. The lamp made a small brown circle on the flags and left the rest of the room to the dark. He went along the north wall, past the stacked chests of the Foundation’s old wage-rolls and the shelves of broken tools that nobody had ever had the heart to throw away, to the low arched alcove at the end where the Forms were kept.
