The census hall of Tallowmere stood on the corner of the square, with its front door under the water and its windows above it, so that Tallow had to climb to get in. He did it as a clerk climbs anything, carefully and with the minutes-slate strapped to his back, one hand on the sill and one foot on the sunken lintel of the next window down. The stone was slimed with a fine green weed that came away on his palms. When he got his knee over the sill and rolled inside, he lay on his back for a while on a bed of silt that was colder than the lake and smelt of old paper, and he counted the ceiling beams, because counting was what he did when he did not yet know where he was.
Eleven beams. Six of them sagged.
Then he got up and looked round.
The hall was dim and green, lit from the window behind him by a grey light that came through the lake’s surface and turned the whole room the colour of a bottle. The floor was a shallow pool, perhaps a hand deep, and the shelves rose out of it in rows, floor to ceiling, like a library that had been left in the bottom of a pond. They were made of dark wood, very heavy, and their boards had bowed under the weight of what they carried. The books were swollen. Their covers had warped and split along the…
