Tallow had been a clerk for years, in the way that a stone has been a stone for ages: he did not remember beginning, and he could not imagine ending. He had sat at a desk. He had dipped a pen. He had copied a wage-ledger in a hand that was exact and colourless and his own, though he could not say when he had learned it, or from whom. He knew the weight of a page and the sound a pen makes on it, and the particular silence of a room in which everyone has stopped talking because a clerk has begun to write.
It was the silence he liked best. It was the only one he could be sure of.
The Chamber sat on casks in the cellar, as it had for three weeks, and there were now nine voices in it. He could count them. He had counted them every morning since the first sitting, and he had written each count in the margin of the minutes, and every count had come out the same, and the sameness was a comfort to him that he would not have admitted to anyone. Nine seats. Nine voices. Nine Hands awake and speaking, and a tenth presence at the far end of every dream, cold and patient, that had no seat and no voice in the Chamber at all.
He had the pencil in his hand. He had the margin ruled. He had written, at the top of the leaf, in capitals that he had gone over twice to make them stand straight: THE FIRST RULE OF THE CHAMBER OF HANDS.
“Rule,” said Idrin, from the head of the table. He had his left hand in a sling, and his right was flat on the oak, and he sat very upright in the chair with the short leg, which Pell had propped with a folded sack. “The Chamber requires a rule before it can be a Chamber. I’ve been told so by the clerk, and I’ve been told so by the cook, and I agree with both of them. Let us have the rule.”
Tallow looked up from the minutes.
“There’s no rule,” he said, “until it’s been agreed. The Chamber has no rule until the Hands vote, and it can’t vote until it has a rule to vote on. It’s a loop. I’ve written it down. It’s a very bad loop.” He paused, and then, because it was a rule of his own that a clerk who had found a difficulty must also offer a way out, he added: “But I can give you a clause, if you want one. I’ve been drafting it since the first morning. It’s the thing the Hands have all been doing without saying so. The Chamber only needs to write it down.”
“Read it,” said Idrin.
Tallow read it. He read it in his dry flat voice, the voice for quoting clauses, with the pencil poised and his eyes on the page and no inflection at all.
“No Hand may sign, promise, or testify for another Hand. A Hand speaks for itself, in its own trade, and in no other name. What one Hand has done, it has done. What it has not done, it may not be made to answer for, by any other.”
There was a silence. It was not a comfortable one. Tallow could feel the cellar in it, the cold stone and the damp smell of the casks and the thin grey light from the high grating, and he could feel nine pairs of eyes on the page and the pencil and his own face.
“Unfair,” said Gaunt, at last.
He had his arms folded and his scorched apron unbuttoned at the throat. He had been sitting motionless, which was unusual, and now he leaned forward and jabbed one thick finger at the minutes.
“That’s unfair to the mason,” said Gaunt. “Harrow signs everything. He signs the stones. He signs the footings and the gate-post and the bed of every flag in the yard. He’s been signing for the walls since the first morning, with the count on the end of it, and every stone he’s laid has his mark on it, in his own way. And now you’ve got a clause that says he can’t sign for anybody else.” He sat back, satisfied. “It’s a clause against him. I object.”
Harrow was sitting on his block with his hands on his knees and his eyes on the cellar floor. He kept his head bowed.
“A stone doesn’t sign,” said Harrow.
“It does. Every stone in this Hold’s got a count cut in it. That’s a signature.”
“That’s a count,” said Harrow. “A count isn’t a name. A stone doesn’t promise a thing to the Hold on another stone’s behalf, and it doesn’t stand up in the Chamber and say this one’s mine. It sits in the wall where it’s put, and it keeps the weight, and that’s its word. It’s not a promise.” He lifted his head at last, and his face had its usual dry seriousness. “A stone can’t sign for another stone, Gaunt. It doesn’t have the trade.”
Gaunt scowled. He opened his mouth. Then he shut it again, and sat back, and folded his arms, and looked at the wall with the expression of a man who has been defeated on a point he had not thought of and does not intend to forgive anyone for it.
Ysra had not moved from her place at the foot of the stair. She stood with her back to the wall and her eyes on the steps, as she always did, and she said, in her flat hard voice, “It’s the only wall the Chamber’s got.”
Tallow looked at her.
“The rule,” said Ysra. “It’s the only wall we have. Without it every Hand in this cellar can stand up and promise anything in anybody’s name, and then we’re nothing but a stair with nine people climbing it and each of them saying the step is theirs.” She did not turn her head. “I’ll count on it. I’ll count on it every day, the way I count the stair. And if one of you breaks it, I’ll count that too.”
“That’s a threat,” said Korrin, from his pillar.
“It’s a count,” said Ysra.
Tallow wrote it down. He wrote Ysra: the rule is the only wall the Chamber has, and she will count on it. He was pleased with the phrasing. Then he looked up, and saw that Idrin had turned his head toward the pillar, where the Lash sat with his cuffed hands in his lap and his flat dark eyes on the prince.
“Korrin,” said Idrin. “You’ve been quiet.”
“I’m never quiet,” said Korrin. “I’m listening.” He shifted his weight, and the chain rattled on the stone. “Here’s my question, Highness, since the clerk’s got his clause. Can a Hand speak for the body?”
There was a pause.
Tallow felt it at once. He had felt it before, in the first days, when the minutes had begun to write themselves in the margins and the Hands had argued about what counted. It was the quality of silence that came over the Chamber when a question was put that no Hand could answer on its own. It was not the silence of the Mantle, though it was close. It was thinner than that, and older, the silence of a room in which someone has spoken, and the walls have not yet decided whether they heard.
“The body has not spoken,” said Tallow carefully. “Not in the Chamber. Not in its own voice, since the first day it spoke through the stiffening, when it was counting us.” He lowered the pencil and looked at the page. “So the answer is that it has not been asked. And the minutes will record the silence as an entry, because a silence is a thing that can be recorded, and I’ll not write over it with a guess.”
“Then it’s an entry,” said Korrin.
“It’s an entry,” said Tallow.
Idrin had not moved. He sat in the chair with the short leg, his hand flat on the oak and his face set, and Tallow saw the silence land on him. It came down on the prince’s shoulders like a hand, a heavy, careful, familiar touch, and Idrin straightened under it, and his mouth moved very slightly, as though he were about to answer. He did not. He looked down at the table. Tallow could not tell whose hand it was. He did not think the prince could either.
“Can an unwritten rule bind?” asked Idrin, very quietly.
Tallow had been waiting for that. He had been waiting, in fact, since the first sitting, when he had first noticed that the Chamber made its decisions in the silence between sentences, and that most of its law was never written down at all. He opened his mouth to answer, and found that for once he had no range to offer.
“No,” said Tallow. “It can’t. Not in a Chamber. An unwritten rule is only a habit, and a habit can be broken by the first Hand who is tired of it.”
The Chamber agreed. It did so without a vote, by the simple method of nine voices saying nothing at all. Tallow wrote agreed, by silence, and underlined it.
Then he wrote the rule a second time.
He wrote it in the minutes, in his small square hand, in full, with the clause and the reasons and the count of the Chamber at the foot of the page. And then he stood up, and took a stub of chalk from his pocket, and went to the cellar wall beside the central pillar, where the stone was smooth and grey and had been scrubbed clean by Pell’s broom. He wrote the rule there, in large clear capitals, so that the body could read it, if the body ever chose to look. He wrote it all the way along the wall, in a neat unbroken line, the whole clause from start to finish, no Hand may sign, promise, or testify, until he came to the end of the wall and had to start a second line.
When he came back to the casks, nobody was speaking. They were all looking at the wall.
The chalk was gone by the morning. Tallow found the wall bare when he came down with the first light, the stone scrubbed clean again, without a mark on it. But the minute was still in the book, in his own hand, with the clause written out and the count of nine at the foot. He checked it twice. He always checked it twice. The minute had not gone anywhere.
He read the rule back to the Chamber at the next sitting, in the same flat clear voice, from the top of the page. He read every word. When he came to the end, he looked down at the minutes to see whether the Chamber had any objection to the clause, and under the last line of his own writing, below the count and the rule and the silence entered by the minutes, in the same colourless hand that he had been writing with for two hundred years, there was one more line.
He had not written it. He was quite certain of that. He would have sworn to it, to within one.
It said: Nine.