Tallow wrote the minutes of the split by lamplight in the Gatehouse, and it was the hardest page he had written since the Charter of Forms.
He had written harder things. He had written the minutes of the Trial of One, when the Chamber had found that it could not judge its own member and had sent the question up to a Regent’s Judgment, and he had had to set down a finding that did not finish its own sentence. He had written the Edict of the Forms’ Lending, with its choice clause that could not be read aloud without someone in the Hall weeping. He had written the Oath, in the Ink, with the Regent’s own name in it. But those had been instruments, and an instrument had a shape. It had a preamble and a body and a Tithe, and a Seal, and a Status, and the Ink could carry it from one end of the leaf to the other without spilling. A split had no shape. It was a list of reasons, and the reasons did not add up to anything the Ink could hold.
So he did not try to add them. He ruled a column down the margin of the clean leaf with the edge of his rule, and he wrote each reason as it had been spoken, one to a line, in the order the Hall had given them. He did not summarise. He did not give a figure for any of them. He…
