The gate-book had been Tallow’s since the first morning of the clause, and he had come to think of it as the only honest ledger in the Hold. It was not a Register. It was not a Chancery abstract or a Roll of the Named or a box of minutes. It was a plain book of grey board, bound in twine, with a page for each day and a line for each traveller, and every line had a name in it, and a bale or a load or a basket beside the name, and a day beside the load. Nothing in it was asleep. Nothing in it waited for a trigger. It was only counted.
He had never once in two centuries been able to say that of any other book.
So he was nervous, on the morning the count came to a hundred, as a clerk is nervous when he knows that somebody is about to ask him for the total and that the total is going to be wrong.
He had asked Harrow and Ysra to witness it. He had not said why. He had only come up the Gatehouse stair at the first bell with the gate-book under his arm and his pencil behind his ear and knocked on the Mason’s door, and then on the Watch’s, and said that the book had reached its hundredth line and he would be obliged if two Hands could be spared to count it with him. Harrow had put down…
