When the body slept, the Hands met in a hall, and Tallow had never once been inside it.
He had heard the others speak of it. They spoke of it in the Chamber in short, careful sentences, as though it were a room with a draught that might catch them unawares if they said too much. Harrow had called it a long hall of stone. Pell had said it smelled of bread, which Tallow did not believe. Ysra had said nothing about it at all, and had looked at the door when she was asked. He had thought it was a figure of speech, the kind the Hands used when they wanted to describe a thing that had no edges, and he had not thought about it much. He was a clerk. He did not dream of rooms.
He came into this one all the same, on the night after the bell was melted, and he stood still at the threshold for a while, with his hands at his sides and his breath coming slow and even, and he knew at once that he had been wrong about the draught.
It was a hall of pale stone. The floor was fitted without mortar, each slab set edge to edge with a joint so fine he could not see the line where one ended and the next began. The walls rose on either side into a shadow that did not quite reach the ceiling. Along the length of the hall, on…
