Article Twenty-One said the Articles might be amended by the body’s own ballot, and Idrin read it twice before he understood why the Chamber had gone quiet around him.
It was the morning after the shares article had passed its first reading. The Great Hall was cold, and the shutters were half open, and the light that came through them lay in narrow strips across the long table, so that the nine chairs and the casks and the stacked minute-books all seemed to have been laid out on a grid, like coins on a counting board. The ballot stood at the table’s centre. It was a plain box of grey oak, the size of a loaf, with a slot cut in the lid for each Hand, and a token in a rack beside it for every seat. Idrin had seen it used a hundred times since the first winter. He had never once thought to ask what it was for.
He asked now.
“Tallow,” he said. “What does the ballot mean, when one body casts nine votes?”
The clerk looked up from the minute with the same mild surprise he always showed when a question was asked in the plain voice instead of the Forms. “It counts Hands, Warden. Each Hand puts a token in its slot. I count the tokens and enter the total in the Ink. It has been the Chamber’s custom since the first count.”
