At first light the clause woke.
Tallow felt it in the Register before he read a word of it. He had been sitting at the Gatehouse table since the candle-clock with the back leaves open and his pencil in his hand, and he had not slept, and he was not sure afterwards whether he had dozed. The book was there under his fingers, as it always was. Then, between one breath and the next, it grew heavier, as a ledger does when a new column has been ruled across its pages and the paper has to stretch to take the ink.
He looked down. The old Register lay open at the Tollgate’s page. The brown Lessaran print had not changed. But the margin beneath it had, and in the margin, in the Ink, a line had appeared that had not been written by any hand in the room.
Day one.
He stared at it for the length of a breath. Then he took up his pen, because the Ink did not wait for a clerk to finish being astonished, and he wrote the day-line himself, in the Register’s formal shape, so that it would stand beside the clause’s own text.
