On the thirty-fifth day the Chamber sat in the afternoon, and Piers heard the vote through the bar’s iron.
He had been counting since the bell. He had counted his twenty-fourth line at first light, a day early by the clerk’s reckoning and exactly on time by his own, because he had gone to the bar at dusk on the tenth day and counted the bar as the first. He had come to the end of his bales in the grey hour before the sun. There were no more bales in the cart. There was nothing left for the Form to lift at the Lamentine bar but the cart’s own canvas and the Lessaran’s wool, which had gone through the gate on the twelfth day and was no longer his to count. The clause had its last line. It had nothing left to take.
Still, he was in the Form.
He could feel it. He had known that all morning, from the moment the first light came through the grey window of the copy’s face. The clause had said one day for each bale, and he had paid for each bale, and yet the Form had not let him out. It had only waited. He had come to understand the waiting over the last few days, as a man who has been carried for a long way understands the shape of his bearers’ shoulders. The Form did not want him. It was not cruel about it, and it was not…
