Gaunt objected to Article Nine, which read a citizen tithes to self, and he objected to it at length, because he had been objecting to it since the first draft and did not intend to stop merely because the Chamber had reached the point of reading it aloud.
He objected to tithes, which was a Lessaran word, and therefore a word for a thing taken from a man’s field by a Chancery clerk with a list. He objected to to self, which was an even worse word, because it was the sort of phrase a Lessaran used for a thing that was never given back. He objected that the Smith’s shares were paid by the Forge’s own fire, and that the fire owed the Chamber no tithe at all, having never once asked anybody for a copper. He stood at the Chamber table with his bare hands flat on the wood and his bandaged left arm held a little out from his side, and he objected to everything in the article in the order he had thought of it, which was the order he always used when he meant to win.
Then Sella, from her bench by the east window, said quietly that the Forge’s problem was not a tithe at all. It was a diagnosis.
