The bread stopped tasting of anything on the fifth morning, and Pell took it personally.
She said so at the sitting, before the candle-clock was lit, in the Great Hall with the long oak table still set up under the high windows and the light coming down grey and thin through the dusty glass. She had brought a loaf up from the kitchen in its cloth and set it on the table in front of the Chamber, and she had broken it open with her hands and pushed one half toward Idrin and the other toward Tallow, and then she had sat down and watched them chew.
“Well?” said Pell.
Idrin chewed. It was good bread, warm and soft, with a crust that crackled faintly against his teeth. He could feel the texture of it, and the heat, and the slight give of the crumb under his tongue. He could not taste it. There was no salt in it, no sweetness, no yeast. It was like swallowing a mouthful of clean wet paper.
“It’s bread,” he said carefully.
“It’s bread,” said Pell, with a kind of grim satisfaction, “and it tastes of nothing, and I’ve been baking since before the sun for five days, and this morning there’s nothing in it at all. The salt’s gone flat. I put a pinch in my palm and tasted it, and it was like licking a stone. I checked the jar twice. The salt’s good salt. It’s the mouth that’s gone wrong.”
“Whose mouth?”
“The Hold’s,” said Pell, and looked at the ceiling, as though the stone might give her an answer if she stared hard enough.
Ysra had come up the Undercroft stair with her hand on the rock and her face pale and cross, and she was standing at the end of the table with her arms folded tight. She had been silent for some minutes. Now she said, in her flat, unhappy voice, “My stair’s shorter.”
“By how much?” asked Tallow.
“By a finger.” Ysra held up her forefinger and frowned at it. “The north stair. The one I count every night. It was twenty-two treads on the first night, and it’s still twenty-two, but the treads have got shallower. I can feel it under my boot. My foot’s landing a finger’s width short of where it ought to be, every time, and I keep catching my toe. And my eyes have started to slip on the stair. I look at the step, and the step’s not quite where I’m looking. It’s like a picture hung a little crooked on the wall.” She dropped her hand. “I don’t like it.”
“Nor do I,” said Harrow, from the end of the table, where he sat with his hands on his knees.
“What have you noticed?” asked Idrin.
“The stones are lighter,” said Harrow. He said it quietly, without any of his usual dry pride in the count. “I’ve lifted two hundred and forty since the bell this morning, and every one of them has come up easy, and every one of them has been slightly out of square when it’s set. Not much. A hair’s breadth. I can feel it in my palm when I put them down. They’re not sitting right on the bed. They’re sitting like a man on a chair he isn’t sure of.” He looked at his hands. “I’ve been a mason thirty years, Highness, one way or another. I’ve never once put a stone down and not known where it was going to sit.”
Tallow had said nothing through all of this. He sat at the far end of the table, with the notebook open, and the charcoal in his fingers, and the faint frown of a man doing a calculation in his head that he has done before and does not like. Now he laid the charcoal down, very precisely, on the page.
“I’ll measure it,” he said.
“How?” asked Idrin.
“The old way. The Lessary way.” Tallow stood up. “The Crown’s clerks used to weigh a man’s worth against the iron in his house. It was a poor method. It worked for taxes. I’ll do it for the body, because somebody has to, and nobody else in the Hold knows how to do a sum with a shadow in it.”
He went to the weigh-house, which was a squat stone shed at the end of the Great Hall, where the Hold’s old scales had been left hanging from a beam since the first Saelmar lord had come to count the grain. The scales were iron and brass, with two wide pans and a long beam marked in notches. Tallow dragged them out onto the floor of the Hall, in the grey light from the high windows, and set them square beside a chest of old tools. Then he went to the side of the room and stood motionless.
The shadow of the body lay on the flagstones. Idrin had never noticed it. It was a long grey shape that ran from the base of the north wall to the foot of the dais, a cloud of darkness with no edges to it, shifting faintly as the light changed. It was not the shadow of any person. It did not have a head. It had too many joints in its outline, and the joints moved slowly, one after another, as though the shape were breathing.
“Iron,” said Tallow, to nobody, and went to fetch the chest.
He weighed the iron in the pans. He took out the tools one at a time, a hammer and a chisel and a long bar of rusted metal, and laid them on the scales, and he adjusted the weights with an ivory-handled pointer and read the beam with his nose six inches from the notches. Then he took the same amount of iron and laid it on the flagstones beside the shadow, very carefully, in a straight line from the end of the scale-pan to the grey shape’s outline. He measured the length of the shadow with a cord. He measured its width. He wrote the figures in the minutes with his small square hand, one below the other, and then he drew a line under them, and then he stood back with the pencil in his fingers and his face quite expressionless.
“Nine hundred and forty to nine hundred and seventy weights,” he said.
“What does that mean?” asked Idrin.
“It means the body is somewhere between nine hundred and forty and nine hundred and seventy weights of mass,” said Tallow. “The Measure is twelve hundred. That’s the most it can be. We’re short by two hundred and thirty, at the most generous reading, and nearly three hundred at the other. I’d say the reading is good to within thirty. The scales are poor, and the shadow is worse.”
“And the floor?”
Tallow’s face tightened. “The floor is six hundred. Below six hundred the weave thins. The dexterity goes first. Your fingers stop knowing where they are. Then the faces go. A Hand’s face begins to drift, the mouth goes out of true, the eyes slide, and you don’t know whether the person in front of you is the Hand you spoke to yesterday. And then the voices go quiet.” He put the pencil down. “The Hands will become strangers to themselves, Highness. That’s the sum. It comes out the same however I do it.”
Korrin, from his pillar at the foot of the dais, where Harrow had set his chain down among the pillar-bases, gave a short hard laugh that had nothing amused in it at all.
“You can add it up,” he said, “but you can’t stop it. The body’s thinning. It’s eating its own mass to keep the trades going, and the trades are working harder than the body’s got weight to pay for. You don’t need a clerk for that.” He tilted his head toward the grey shadow on the floor. “It’s hungry. It always was.”
Idrin looked at the shadow. It moved very slightly, the joints shifting, the long outline lengthening as the light moved across the flags. He had the strangest feeling that it was listening to Korrin, and that it did not agree with him, and that it would have liked him to be quiet.
“What does it need?” he asked.
“Iron,” said Tallow. “And salt. The old Foundation records say so in the margins. Iron and salt. The body is made of weft, and weft regrows from iron and salt, and it can’t regrow without them.” He tapped the minutes. “There’s no iron in the Hold worth the name. The bridge rails are in the marsh. The gate’s chain is the gate’s. The nail Gaunt made is in the flags. And the salt in the granary is no use to anybody, because the salt’s gone flat in Pell’s mouth.”
“Then we’ll find iron,” said Idrin.
“We’ll find it,” said Tallow. “That’s the difficulty. A finding is a trade. A trade needs a Writ, and a Writ costs a memory, and the Register will not say which memory it takes.” He looked up. “I’d put it to you that you can’t afford another one, Highness, not this month. I’d put it at the same range I’d put on your face.”
Pell had got up from the table. She stood with her arms folded and her face set in lines of concern that she was trying hard to hide.
“The body wants what it’s always wanted,” she said quietly. “I’ve known that since I woke. You feed it, and it takes what it needs, and when it’s not fed it takes what it finds. And if there’s no iron in the Hold, then the Hold will have to go and get some.” She looked at Idrin. “And I’m not going to sell you the bread for it. You’ll have to steal it yourself.”
Idrin sat without moving, looking at the grey shadow on the floor of the Hall. He felt the Writ-cost in his mind like a blank square in a margin, waiting for a question to fill it.
“Can I find iron,” he said slowly, “without making a Writ?”
“Yes,” said Tallow. “If you’re willing to go out and steal it.”
From his pillar at the foot of the dais, Korrin lifted his chained wrists and let them fall, with a loud and triumphant clink against the stone.
“I’ve been waiting a month,” he said, “for someone to say that.”