The Chamber sat in Hunger, and the Mouth was unreliable, and for the first time since the body had been whole Tallow found himself writing the Turn down in the minute as a set of symptoms.
He looked at his own hand while he waited for the candle-clock. It was steady. It had always been steady. It was the colourless Ink hand that the Foundation’s wage-clerks had used in the old ledgers, the one he had taught himself as a boy from a book of copied clauses, and which he had been told by everybody in the Hold was simply the clerk’s hand. He had never once put it beside the hand in the Foundation’s wage-book to see whether the two strokes matched. He had told himself there was no need. He had told himself a great many things since the Cradle, and most of them had been true enough to sign.
He had the minute-book open at the Turn’s page, and the candle-clock’s third ring had just burned through, and he had the pen dipped and ready. The Great Hall was colder than it had been all summer. Somebody had let the east shutter swing open in the night and nobody had yet come to fix it, and the draught came in along the flags and lifted the edges of the minute-sheets, one after another, like a hand going through a pile of letters. Tallow weighted the corners with his inkstand and his ruler and his own two hands…
