The Chamber ordered the Reckoning of Forms on a wet morning in the first week of spring, and it did so, Tallow wrote in the minutes, because nobody had counted the copies in the Undercroft since the Charter of Forms, and the Hold had lately begun to suspect that a thing nobody counted was a thing that could be lost. The order was short. It named the store and the racks, the Watch on the stair, the Clerk at the table and the Mason with the lamp. It did not name a time. The Mason, when the Clerk asked him when he would begin, said that he would begin when the rain stopped, and then looked out of the Gatehouse window at the sky, which was grey from one end of the Lamentine to the other, and said nothing else.
“It is not going to stop,” said Tallow.
“It is going to stop when I have finished the first rack,” said Harrow, and went down the Undercroft stair with his lamp and his chalk and his count-cord hanging at his hip.
The store lay beneath the Gatehouse, in a long low vault that smelled of cold stone and old tallow and the faint sour tang of the salt that had once been kept there for the Chamber’s winter bread. The Forms were kept on racks along the north wall, in wooden cradles padded with sacking, and the cradles were stamped with the family marks in a Foundation hand that Harrow…
